The night beneath the wall wood canopy was darker than the varin sands as the trio marched between the massive needle-leaved trees. Bushes and ferns rubbed against Sora’s legs, leaving long lines of burning irritation in their wake. Despite the noise of Jotaranell’s passage through the foliage, they sighted several large game animals and dozens of smaller birds and rodents. Insects crawled under and over rocks and plants alike, some organized into long columns of workers, others individual wanderers, and yet more solitary hunters.

Occasionally Sora glimpsed the night sky between the branches of the canopy, using the brief windows to gauge the time and their direction. Twice already, they’d wandered off course, walking more towards the west or the east rather than the north.

As the morning light began to peak between the treetops, Leahan stopped them for the day, giving everyone assignments to collect food, build shelter, and keep watch. The jah annan were well accustomed to surviving with little to no supplies, and they had a small camp built up in under an hour, two small rodents, and several mushrooms roasting under a low, nearly smokeless fire.

Leahan took the first watch while Botaran rested, leaving Sora and Jotaranell alone beside the last embers of the campfire. Sora prodded the flames with a damp stick, nearly everything in this forest was unnaturally damp, and glanced towards the stargazer.

An almost unnerving emptiness had consumed the man over the last several hours, leaving him silent and sallow. Sora opened her mouth to say something, shut it, prodded the coals again, then said, “When I asked you what you’d done to me, you said you’d failed. You said that he was supposed to be bound to you. What did that mean?”

The stargazer was silent for a time, staring sightlessly at the pale flames, stone-bound hands hanging between his legs. His skin was an angry red where the stone fit tight against his wrists, a combination of burns and chaffing, Sora was sure. After a moment, he said, “Nothing. I meant nothing by that. It was just a slip of the tongue made in a moment of blind hate and rage.”

“Right,” Sora said dryly. “Now try the truth.”

Jotaranell shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now, girl. Just let it go. There’s nothing either of us can do.”

A stick popped in the fire as Sora set her prodding branch aside and leaned back, resting her hands behind her. She sat on her cloak, the black fabric warming with the fire and the increasing sunlight. She was finding the sun here to be surprisingly pleasant, nothing like the scorching nightmare that was the varin day.

“How old are you?” She asked, switching tactics. “You said that ‘lifetimes of work’ were ruined.”

Jotaranell sighed, closing his eyes. “I might be older than the average man, but generations have worked towards my goal. You read too much into words spoken in the heat of emotion, Sora. Let them go. I meant nothing more than to express my rage.”

Looking up at the sky above, Sora returned his sigh. It was clear she wouldn’t get anywhere with the man tonight. “Do I need to tie you up?” She asked, the exhaustion in her voice making the question more of a threat.

A snort escaped Jotaranell. “Where would I go, girl. Don’t worry. I will try nothing but to sleep.”

She nodded and laid down on her cloak, the rough ground digging into her back. She closed her eyes, doing her best to relax her whole body. She’d slept on worse before. Her exhaustion washed over her in a heavy wave, her muscles and joints popping with released tension as sleep slowly overtook her.

Darkness engulfed Sora as she drifted through her mind, her thoughts passing her by like birds overhead, splashes of color in the abyss. Faces, names, and voices flashed around her, Lawthe and Leahan, Botaran and Jotaranell. Kaeto appeared alongside a hazed-over and unfamiliar face, a thin golden-white thread bridging the distance between the three of them.

She groped towards the prince, tugging on the thread, trying to bring herself closer to him, but the fuzzy figure barred her path. Flickers of images and sensations passed along the bond, a pain in her arms, the twist of hunger, the pain of sore muscles. Her mind was swarmed with the panic of Kaeto’s thoughts, images of soldiers in blue tabards, burning buildings, the clash of steel on steel, the haphazard rhythm of explosions, all consumed by a deafening scream from the man between the prince and her.

Sora pulled back, her heart racing, mind spinning with confusion as she tried to organize her own thoughts. A reverberating thud thud thud echoed through her head, swarming her with pain. She cried out, and the screaming figure reached one blurred hand towards her.

His hand pried Sora’s away from the side of her head, and like that, her mind was silent again. She stared at the figure, all but his smile hidden behind a distorted veil of hazy colors.

“Who are you?” She asked softly, voice hoarse from her own screaming.

He was silent, bringing her hand up to the side of his face. She caressed his cheek with his gentle urging, feeling the rough curve of his skin, the sharp bumps of stubble, the high tilt of his jawbone.

“Who are you?” She asked again, and again he was silent, But as she stared into the haze of his features, a strange warmth suffused her. It was like calmness or contentness, but liquid, flowing through her like strong octli from the prince’s brewery.

The figure released her hand, and Sora let it fall away from his face. She found herself drifting away from him, falling into the regular motions of sleep, her dreams rising from the depths of her consciousness to consume her.

“Sora,” somebody said, shaking her out of sleep. She jerked away from the other person’s touch, opening her eyes to find Botaran crouched over her. The sun was high in the sky above, blinding in its brilliance, stinging tears to her eyes.

“Is it my turn for my watch?” She asked sleepily. Through narrowed eyes, she saw Botaran shake his head.

“No,” he said, an alarming tightness to his words. Sora

sat up as he continued, “Leahan found something.”

Slowly, Sora got to her feet, Botaran moving back to give her space. She wrapped her cloak back around her shoulders and glanced around. “Where’s Jotaranell?” She asked, a slight panic rising in her chest.

“He’s with Leahan,” Botaran said. “Come on, you need to see this.”

The jah annan turned away and started forward, away from camp. Sora followed without hesitation. Botaran led her between the trees away until she couldn’t even smell their campfire anymore. Why was Leahan even out this far?

They rounded a vast trunk. The thing was wider than some of the gerin cottages in Jael and found Leahan and Jotarranell crouched over something in the foliage. Leahan glanced up at their approach, but the stargazer just continued to stare down, a heavy frown on his face.

“What is it?” Sora said, matching Jotaranell's frown. Leahan just gestured down at whatever they were looking at. Sora stepped forward, parting the ferns to look down at whatever it was.

It was a corpse. Two actually, Sora saw as she looked closer. A woman and a child, her son most likely. They were both garbed in heavy woolen clothes, her, a dress and blouse, him a thick tunic and trousers.

The fact of their deaths wasn’t all that alarming or surprising. Sora imagined many people got lost in these woods to eventually die. No, it was the fact that their heads were turned back on their necks, that their skin was shriveled as dry parchment, that there was not a drop of blood to be seen around them. A basket lay beside them, foraged food, berries, mushrooms, and whatnot, spilling from its upturned opening. None of the foodstuffs were so much as ripened with age.

“What is this?” Sora asked, a cold that had nothing to do with the chill air running down her arms.

“Morantai,” Jotaranell said quietly.

“How?” Sora asked. “Do they really suck out the soul like the legends say?”

Jotaranell shook his head. “No. Some morantai use morakar to drain their victims of life. It’s how they sustain themselves and heal.”

“Some?” Leahan asked.

The stargazer nodded. “The average morantai feed like any other creature. Only the higher forms can feed like this.”

They were all quiet for a moment, then Sora asked, “what exactly does ‘higher forms’ entail?”

Shaking his head, Jotaranell said, “Bad. The varieties of morantai are complex and ever-changing, but anything that can do this is at least the match of any one of you three, at worst, well….” He trailed off, clearly unwilling to say more.

“We should bury them,” Leahan said suddenly.

Sora gave him an incredulous stare. “And how will we do that? Pretty sure none of us brought any shovels.”

“Well, we can’t just leave them here for Mito to claim. It isn’t right,” Leahan said with a scowl.

Again, Jotaranell shook his head. “Mitokar cannot touch these two anymore. Mito can only touch those with the memory of life. These things no longer have even that left to them.”

His words left them all silent again. Sora stared down into the hollowed-out sockets of the woman’s skull, the withered skin flaking away like ash. She wondered what it must have been like to have everything stolen from you like that. It made her shiver. She sighed, resigning herself to something that she needed to do. Slowly, she reached towards the corpse. Leahan grabbed her hand before she could touch the woman.

“Let go,” she said flatly.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She scowled at him. “Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a bit light on clothes at the moment, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be needing hers. Besides, they might have other useful things on them.”

Leahan practically growled at her. “You’d rob the dead like some sort of street slasher? You’re jah annan, not a common slave.”

The words cut Sora, but before she could throw a retort in his face, Botaran pulled them apart. “She's right, Leahan. We need whatever we can find to survive. We were trained to do that.”

Leahan shook his head in disgust. “Fine, do as you wish, but I will have no part in this.” He rose and walked away back towards their makeshift camp.

Sora and Botaran shared a glance with the stargazer before the three of them began picking over the shriveled corpses. The stargazer’s stone cuffs limited the searching he could do, so Sora had him search through the boy’s pockets and basket while she and Botaran pulled the clothing free of the woman’s body.

The corpse collapsed as they worked the wool from her, skin, dried flesh, and bone crumbling away without much effort. By the time they’d freed the clothes, the body was little more than a pile of dust and bone. The boy’s clothes came off with less trouble, but he was left worse than the woman, only a scattering of skeletal remains by the end.

Shaking the clothes out and folding them over her arm, Sora turned away from the scene, ready to be done with the grizzly work. Botaran took her by the elbow, and she turned back reluctantly.

“We should bury them,” he said slowly. Sora sighed, then looked at the pitiful remains. He was right.

She set the clothes aside and focused kar from her blood and through the silverglass in her ear. Elenkar spun in the air before her, and she guided it towards the earth, using gentle webs of power to lift away large clumps of wet soil. The ground was hard from moisture and tree roots, but after a few moments of effort, she’d excavated a small hole deep enough for a proper burial.

Botaran did his best to gently move most of the remains into the grave as Sora and Jotaranell watched on in silence. In the end, Sora had to lift the ground with her kar to get all of the dusted corpses buried. They filled the grave by hand at Botaran’s insistence. His argument was something about a proper burial being done with proper labor, but Sora wasn’t paying close attention. She just wanted to be done with it all.

When the grave was filled and the dirt firmly packed, Botaran pulled a simple copper brooch from what he’d scavenged from the corpses and placed it atop the mound. It was an unfamiliar flower, purple with seven petals around a pink center. The craftsmanship was poor, but there was an earnest flair about it, Sora had to admit.