Her name was Lupa Famelico and she had a broken stigmata. I have previously mentioned that a divine sigil can be read to determine just what it does, like any other magic spell one might inscribe. The complexity prevents understanding typically. Nearly universally, the stigmata includes an enclosure, a ring most commonly. This constrains the logic as well as maintains the effect in perpetuity.

Hers was open, unfinished.

While that prevented her from exerting any magical force on the world, it created a remarkably dangerous effect upon other stigmata. By biting through Lucius’s crest she consumed the ability, or she would have if he were not who he was. Anyone else would have been striped bare of their powers for the rest of their lives, if they survived the bite at all.

Lucius was merely rendered weak for a time, as redundancies in his healing regenerated the stigmata to the ire of the tribal priest that captured him. And so, the day after arriving in the wastelands, Lucius was her prisoner and he could do little more than wonder why Golden had allowed himself to be captured as well.

The questions mulled in his head, for the two of them were kept separate lest they conspire with one another. The angel needed no special protection, whereas Lucius had his hands bound by braided cords of leather, in turn connected to a leash that was tied about Lupa’s waist and there locked.

On that first day, he did what he had been taught well to do, he looked and he listened and he learned. This was his first time witnessing the sunless desert and it contained many wonders that he had heard of but never seen. Perhaps the reader has misapprehensions about the southern continent as well. Most curiously, it isn’t hot, but it is dry. While traveling can be quite pleasant at first, many an explorer has met his end with a parched throat and delicious, digging fruitless holes to well up water that doesn’t exist. Every drop of sweat is a little wound that scratches away at a man’s life.

In taverns and harbors across the world, there is a persistent rumor that the only way to survive is to drink one’s own piss. There is no evidence that any of the tribesmen of the sunless desert partake of this barbaric indecency. Such an act might add a day to a man’s life in extremis, but would be ludicrous for one living there. It is purely made up by men who visited those lands without knowing what they were doing. This rumor has led to several decades now of rumor born of the perversion of the gossipmonger, not of fact.

Now, to contradict myself. The desert is not devoid of life, the life is simply different. The best example are the desert whiskers, a mere type of grass that roots deep in the sand, tangling the dust together to form a sort of bedrock that the rest of the wastelands layer over. They rise high, enough to clever a man’s waist at times. Mice, snakes, scorpions, and the like love to live in such sparse habitats, making them rather dangerous for a walking human.

However, they thrive at the sky fractures, the most curious of natural features in the wastelands and the very reason I went to so much effort getting Golden a human body. Of course, it was not the humanness that mattered, but the stigmata he now carried.

The very morning after they were captured, he had bartered with the desert folk for proper rations in exchange for guiding them to the nearest fleeing oasis. While the dunes of Giordana can be plagued by phantom mirages which are nothing more than the sky reflected back across the layers of heated air, a traveler in the wastelands might spend an hour chasing after a water spout only to find it empty and dry by the time he arrives, some damp sand if he is lucky.

This water is very much real. It is no work of a djinn, though the wastelands have numerous daemons of just such a malicious intent. What baffles the northern explorer is that the water falls from blue sky, or gray depending on how far south they are. The wastelands don’t have clouds and the water does truly fall from the empty sky above. No human alive, save a few surviving veterans of the emperor’s army I suppose, can fathom the true nature of the material world beyond the protection of Helios.

What matters is that such leaks from the sky are the very manna from heaven that the sand people survive from, along with a few more permanent trickles at certain shrines. Golden proved himself a better dowsing rod than any of their trackers, thorough only after a heated debate with the priest. He won the debate of course, but in doing so was drenched by the falling water.

This sight I was able to pull from Lucius’ memories clearly because Lupa burst out laughing as she watched the affair. The idea that his warden might have a sense of humor about it baffled the future emperor.

“Am I your captive or not?” he asked.

Lupa sat upon the sand and grinned at him. “You’re chained up, aren’t you?” she asked, speaking perfect Vassish.

“Are you going to ransom me or something?”

“You’re the backup plan,” she said. “But the priest is a good deal confused about what to do with you. Never seen a stigmata heal before. You might be more dangerous than the cannons.”

“I still can’t believe you found cannons.” Two of the prototypes had been dredged out of the sand. They hadn’t been sent to the wastelands, but fashioned there by Raymi’s engineers the year prior. Despite explicit orders to only fashion the ley into movable shapes, the southern lord had taken it upon himself to prove that they worked by making cannons himself, then abandoned the crude things in Mandible Bay.

“They’re heresy, you know? For us at least. All of us here are heretics. We’re dancers strung along on Luigi’s pipe tune and we’re too far along to go back now. He turned our backs on the gods and we must either go to the sun lands, or to the darkness. At least we understand the sun lands.”

“I doubt that.”

She laughed at him and told him to sit. He chose to continue standing, but it was his loss. Watering the camels and filling the water pots could take hours and was only kept in line by the whip hand of the glass master, turning sand vials over one after the next to track the hours with one hand and lashing out at laggards with the other.

Lupa asked him, “Do you feel bad about the people you kill?”

“In war?” he asked. “I wouldn’t be a very good warrior if I stopped to think about it too much. I have no choice but to trample my enemies.”

Lupa kept an easy smile as she continued, “But every man, woman, and child in the sun lands can think, can’t they? They have hopes and dreams. They love and abhor, don’t they?”

“Is it different here?”

“So the daemons say,” she said. “Do you need to eat? Or are you immortal like the daemons?”

“I won’t die from it, but it’s not pleasant,” he lied.

She clapped her hands together and patted the sand. “Well then, you’ll have to get your own food. Take a look, dinner is stirring. We’re close enough to the water that they’ll start slithering out to wet their bellies and they’ll be happy to take a bite out of you too. Man flesh is a delicacy second only to mice for these poisonous snakes… or are they venomous? I can never remember the difference.”

Lucius’ gaze dropped at once. He spun about, kicking sand across the whiskered dune. He saw the way it fluttered and slid, revealing the hidden paths beneath the surface. They leapt up like rain drops across a window pane. Memory of the Giordanan sand snake slammed to the forefront of his mind as a copper-jacket asp spiraled out of the dune beneath his feet.

The reptile hissed at him, baring a half dozen rows of venomous fangs as it danced through the grass and closed in on him. He had no weapon, not even a stick or a rock. He had nothing with which to beat it bloody, save for raw confidence in his stigmata, or perhaps I should say all the years I spent beating fear out of him so that he wouldn’t miss an opportunity.

He dashed at it, the half step allowed by his leash. Making a show of stomping on the creature, he threw himself down the dune. The yank of the leather spun him about as he snatched the snake with his hands. It writhed and bit the leather cuffs before he threw it at Lupa.

The wastelander shrieked, throwing up her hands and legs as she fell upon the sand and the snake landed across her breasts. Frantically, she clutched it to her chest and fought with it before she gave a jerk and fell still on the sand.

Lucius breathed thrice, slowing his heart and watching for any shift, especially that of the escaping serpent. Then he fell on his knees beside her to undo the lock.

“Gotcha!” Lupa shouted as she rolled back over and threw the snake into his face.

He screamed, falling to the sand to avoid the living missile, only to see it land beyond him and slither away as Lupa collapsed in hysterics.

“Are you merely ignorant or also a fool, Solhart?” the girl asked as he tried to compose himself. “What use would a snake have for venom in these lands? To ward off us humans who arrived only a few generations ago? And you were so vicious, trying to stomp the poor thing when all it wanted was a drink of water. They eat scorpions, you know!”

He snarled at his captor. “Next you’ll tell me the scorpions are safe too!”

“No, they’re quite dangerous…” Lupa said as she wiped a tear from her eye. Then she did stop moving, transfixed by the thing that put a tickle through Lucius’ scalp. “Don’t move.”

“You know! At least in the donjon I’d have the dignity of privacy! This is no way to treat a prisoner,” he roared as he brushed the sand from his hair, feeling the tangle of sweat.

Then the scorpion that had been stuck on the nape of his neck clung to his wrist and promptly stabbed his arm.

Lupa swept over him, snatching it off of him and ripping the creature in half. She devoured the venomous tail with the power of her stigmata before hollering to the tribal workmen. “We need a knife!”

Lucius staggered, his arm feeling at once ablaze and thrice as heavy. The shock struck him harder than most for he hardly remembered what it was like to feel pain and not also the tingling rush of power as his stigmata healed him. “That was poisonous, wasn’t it?”

“Venomous,” Lupa said, holding his arm before him. The skin welled from one color to the next, rainbow bruises spreading through his lymph and veins. She swore and bit the rotten flesh off, ignoring Lucius’ screams.