Reborn From the Cosmos

Faye knew of the Temple; children in Quest had little else to talk about besides the giant floating rock and all who lived atop it. The school was host to all types of characters, no more notable than the Harvest Hero himself. It was no wonder it captured the imagination and held onto it.

The Temple played the role of bedtime horrors, the fun variety. She remembered giggling when she was told of the people who dressed in the skins of animals and played pretend. They sounded like great fun, as imitating beasts was a game she played with her friends. She laughed when her father mimed claws with his fingers and tickled her, telling her that the Skinwalkers, an old name for the Temple the group didn’t take kindly to, loved to eat bad girls who didn’t go to bed on time.

Now, she didn’t find his stories quite so amusing. Without the nameless woman’s limp attempt at an interrogation to distract her, Faye’s attention turned to the guards. Most of them were fairly ordinary, the darker coloring of the south dominant among their numbers, the distinguishing black rings present on every neck.

But among them walked those that inspired the stories of men who ran on four limbs and ate meat when the animals were still warm after death. Those with features that didn’t belong on people. Ears that were too long and covered with fur. Hands tipped with nails long enough to be considered claws. The slit pupils of predators and extra appendages.

The Grand Summoners and her own contracted elemental had made her more familiar with the concept of body modifications, but those were done to make people better people. Better versions of themselves.

The Temple didn’t want to be themselves. They didn’t want to be human. They wanted to be beasts and that made them insane.

Yet, they were powerful. One of her brothers had challenged her father’s tales, saying that the guilds wouldn’t let monsters live among people. Her father told them of the special healers who used magic to give heroes their power but quickly spoiled their sense of wonder with tales of the Temple’s melders, fleshshapers. They perverted the vaunted art that defined knighthood; instead of perfecting the human form, they twisted it, imbuing their mad worshippers with harvested limbs from manabeasts. He spoke of twisted things with paws for hands and snakes for tails. Like beasts, they hunted people, but they were even more dangerous because they thought like men, at least enough to wield their weapons and organize in ways no simple beast ever could.

Seeing the guards as they made their final preparations, Faye acknowledged that her father was perhaps being influenced by old ideas that didn’t hold the Templetees in high regard, exaggerating their nature to keep caution against them fueled. But the caution itself was well-deserved. There was something unnerving about their otherness, their grace, and the quietness in which they worked. Where melding was rare throughout the kingdom, it was standard practice for them, a religious right. Every man, woman, and child contained a hidden power, further enhanced by natural weapons. They weren’t enemies that could stand against the full might of the kingdom, but Harvest didn’t have conflict of that scale. Most violence happened among individuals, rarely escalating to larger groups. On that scale, she imagined that the Temple utterly destroyed anyone foolish enough to stand against them.

The guard captain alone could likely have demolished the muscle used by the Grand Summoners. Callan had asked them what they were willing to sacrifice to improve their lives. It wasn’t about what they were willing to give; he wanted to know what they would take from others. Fey didn’t like their methods, but the world had long ago shown her the value of a life. Blood became the currency of the Summoners and those who had spent their lives scraping by spent it to achieve everything they ever wanted.

That included strong bodies capable of incredible things, but not the experience to wield them. A thug didn’t need to know how to fight if he was twice the size of his victim and strong enough to put his fist through a wall. For most corners of the city, being the biggest was enough.

No one was bigger than the woman leading the Skinwalkers. There was nothing about her uniform to distinguish her, but Fey knew what she was with one look. She was a head taller than the tallest of her subordinates, not including the white horn on her forehead, with shoulders that would make walking through doorways a challenge and legs that could be mistaken for logs. She had all the feminine charm of a mountain, her muscles standing out even covered by the thick fabric of her uniform, but she had the presence of one as well. Everything felt smaller measured against her. Fey felt smaller and she hated it.

She hated her, the woman who arranged their ends with a flat expression and hard eyes. There was something inevitable in the way she tested the strength of the chopping block by stomping it or checked the executioner’s axe by splitting a log with almost contemptuous ease. It brought Fey back to a time where everything felt inevitable. The weight of the woman’s gaze, passing over Fey as she routinely checked her prisoners, dragged Fey out of her daydreams and into a fatal reality.

Fey hated the woman even more as the guard captain personally opened Callan’s cage and dragged him to the block. Two others took hold of him from there, forcing him to kneel.

“Callan Atkinson.” Even the woman’s voice was powerful. “For your crimes against New Quest, you have been sentenced to death. You have one minute to speak your final words.” To the side, another guard carrying a wooden board readied a smudgestick.

Fey leaned against the bars, not wanting to miss a word.

Despite the short time limit, Callan was unhurried. He slowly lifted his head and met the mountainous woman’s dark gaze.

“One day, you’ll want more. Then you’ll be the one losing their head.” He huffed. “My only regret is that I never learned her secrets. I searched for them. For why. Because I refuse to believe that disgusting woman earned all of this. Earned her.”

He tilted his head back and stared at the sky.

“It should have been me.”

To their credit, the guards waited the full minute, even if the rest of it was spent in silence. But once it ended, they wasted no time forcing his head to the block. The executioner, his dark mask hiding everything but his dark eyes, stepped up behind him, raising his axe and aligning it with Callan’s exposed neck.

Fey wanted to shut her eyes but something in her couldn’t turn away. She tensed, bracing herself for the moment the blade fell.

A howl of rage and pain shattered the moment.

Fey shrunk away from the bars, her gaze darting about, searching for the source. She knew those screams; it was the sound of their sins.

She didn’t have much contact with her contracted elemental. The elemental was tied to her mana core, but served the Grand Summoners. The arrangement suited her; the creature unnerved her. So did its many projects. She saw its underground lair once; she thought it would be strange but wonderful, for what else could such a master create? There was plenty of strange but no wonder. Instead, she found horrors she could never imagine.

The abominations she’d thought would never see the light of day breached the wall around the guard building, misshapen men pouring over its top like a tide. The guard stood like a cliff face and the wave broke against them. Red stained the green uniforms as the two forces met. The guards were the superior fighters, but the abominations had a suicidal zeal and an unnatural endurance. They also outnumbered the city’s defenders five to one; Callan had been generous to the elemental. It might have been enough to overwhelm the guards if not for their captain.

Fey couldn’t ignore the awe in her breast as the woman’s horn began to glow. Her dark skin gained a red tint as she shrugged off her jacket, exposing her powerful arms. She charged into the abominations with a bellow that caught the attention of dozens.

They leapt onto her, bone protrusions cutting into her skin, acidic spit burning where it dripped from gaping maws, and bodies crashing against her legs to arrest her movement; it didn’t matter. She was an unstoppable force. No matter how many grabbed on to her, she kept running, slamming full force into the wall. Bodies and stone were sundered, the rubble of earth and flesh surrounding her as she stood tall. Then, like a maddened beast of the field, she began to stomp, crushing her opponents and making enough noise to draw in others. Her guards took advantage of the beasts distraction, cutting them down with brutal efficiency.

But they weren’t the only ones.

A red form came over the wall at incredible speed, its multitude of limbs fanning out like grotesque wings. Six guards moved closer to Callan, ready to defend their lawful right to execute the leader of the Grand Summoners. The captain had also noticed and was running toward the criminal who had regained his energy seeing the carnage.

They were decisions made in a split second and they were wrong. Fey saw nothing but a blur approaching her. Between one breath and the next, her cage was held aloft. Her hands reflexively grabbed the bars as she was thrown against them, her savior dashing away as its mad experiments covered its retreat.