Fowlhunter [GL]

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Jemi Garen pried her eyes open.

Grimacing, she sat up, running fingers through her hair.

It took the woman a few attempts to blink the disorientment from her eyes, adjust them to the low light. She appeared to be in a small cave, back propped up against the wall. No… not a cave, but a tunnel: the corner between the wall and floor was sharp. It was dark, the floor below her damp. It smelled distinctly wet, too: an ammonic scent, like algae and organic matter.

The only source of light was a campfire built on a rough pile of sticks. It burned away at the woman's feet, valiantly doing its best to keep the air warm.

In its orange cast, she looked down at herself, stared as rumpled curls of tarnished-gold fell around her neck. She was dressed in her hunting cloak and usual forest gear. Her scarf had come slightly undone; reaching up, she tugged it closed around her neck once more.

Something wasn’t right. That was for sure. This left her with three questions:

What had just happened?

Where the hell was she?

And, how did she get here?

The first, she could answer. It took her a while, but not very long at all. The memories came rushing back to her in a tide: of icy rain, slashing across her wet cheeks. The stench of boiling sulfur, suffocating smoke, roaring rivers of fire racing down a black mountain. Of a gurgling cry ripping from her throat. Then the silence—of a hundred faces looking back at her, entombed in stone. A graveyard suspended within the sky—before they all fell, pulverising to ash, smothering the mouth of a newborn volcano.

The Cockatrice had made many of these graveyards before with a single look. One, she had made out of an abandoned quarry more than nine years ago, right at the foot of Mount Casca. That had been a great, coordinated effort: she had commanded the Beasts to round up all the angels within the pit, including that vermillion-haired Warden General. Once she’d trapped them there, she lifted the beak of her mask. It had been so easy, back then. Then, there was the time about a month ago, circling the Fifth peak on Ying’s back, watching the thousands of angels on the cliffs freeze in place, like pressing the shutter on a camera.

But a graveyard of Beasts, this… this was a first.

Jemi Garen considered this. She decided to move on to the second question.

Reaching into her cloak, she pulled something out from her pocket. Like a small, smooth pebble, it fit neatly in the crook between her index finger and thumb. It shone dully, as if made of a frosted white glass. Black essence swirled within it, like a drop of ink in milk. Jemi had told the others that this was a tiny piece taken from the Kraken, a geode that allowed them to locate where the rest of the mighty monster was.

That wasn’t entirely wrong. It would help them find the Kraken. She just hadn’t told them the whole truth.

Jemi watched as the essence pushed against one side of the geode, dark light reflected onto the pad of her finger. Then, supporting her hand on the wall, she took a deep breath and pushed herself to her feet. Her other hand was already reaching into her pocket-

But stopped. Violet eyes widened.

As she stood on the balls of her feet, rocking on her toes, she realised something very strange.

Her body didn’t hurt. At least, not much as it should’ve.

Cautiously, Jemi rolled up her sleeves: first her cloak, then the tight sleeve of her tunic. Holding her marble of light above her arms, she saw that her skin was pristine. The last time she had gazed upon them, there’d been a number of injuries spattered over them: sustained from her recent tussles with guards in the mines of Kanch whenever she’d used her arms to block, from bad landings, or from scraping her limbs too hard while climbing surfaces. She knew a number of other spots on her back, and her legs, that were also supposed to be hurting, but simply didn’t. As for what she felt below the skin… if she really focused on it, she could feel the ache in her muscles that had become so familiar to her. But now it was small, even distant, like there was a warm wall between her and it. Jemi knew her body well—painfully well—and this simply didn’t make sense, considering the amount of work she had just put it through.

She rolled her sleeves back down. Jemi walked through the still, damp passageway, following the vitreous pulse of her light. Her boots squelched through carpets of muck, but the princess of Beasts was no sheltered highborn; she stomped through them, uncaring of the mud that splashed onto her tights and skirt. It didn’t take too long before she saw misty rays of daylight from around the corner.

No longer in need of it, she stuffed her geode back into her cloak. She stepped out the mouth of the tunnel.

She was standing under the low ceiling of a bridge. Water babbled past in a canal, maybe a hundred metres wide. The tweeting of birds drew her attention upward; she spotted the nests of hatchling pigeons nestled in the joints below the bridge. Up above, broken into two halves around the bridge, the blue sky stretched on, streaked by clouds.

She glanced ahead of her.

On the concrete, someone sat cross-legged by the edge of the canal, back faced to her. From her back, a pair of large, feathery wings rustled, white as a snowy dove’s. Sleek pink hair fell from her scalp, loose and long, the auroral hue the sky took on when the sun crowning Mount Casca began to deepen and fade away into the dusk. This hair fell smoothly over the corded muscles of her back, where blue uniform was cut to let the wings through, draping over white radii and brown shoulder.

…That answered her third question.

Jemi walked quietly as she approached—it was force of habit—but Ennanis Zoleil didn’t pretend not to notice her.

“Morning,” the angel said as she glanced back.

“Where are the others?” Jemi answered with. The only one here was the angel; her other friends were nowhere to be seen. “Ying? Asha? Lochlan?”

“How are you feeling?” Ennanis asked instead.

Upon hearing the question, Jemi’s head ached fiercely.

“...I should be dead,” she said, clamping her forehead.

She remembered: her harpy mount turning to solid stone below her, eyes frozen wide and baleful. Cassia had fallen, and her rider with it, plummeting head-first in the thick of a thunderstorm, through rain and fire and rubble. She should have been shredded to pieces by falling stone. She should have burned to a crisp in the lava, or succumbed to fever thereafter.

Ennanis looked at her. And tilted her head. “Well, you aren’t.”

Jemi exhaled. Wrapping her scarf tighter around herself, she walked up next to the angel, still keenly watching the canal water.

“What are you doing?” she asked her.

“Fishing.”

“Fishing??” Jemi raised her brow.

Ennanis raised her finger. On it, the gold band of Lienna glinted. A fiery beam of Soleki sparked at the end of her fingertip. Then, like a laser, it shot soundlessly forth and into the water. The water here was murky and relatively unpolluted, so the angel’s endeavour, however incomprehensible, would not be entirely fruitless. Back in her hometown, as a child, Jemi had sometimes climbed down into the drains to catch fish after a storm. In rural Fenlin the drainwater was clear as crystal, and you could nab fish as large as rainbow trout and snakeheads on a day after rain.

Ennanis let the golden thread between her finger and the water hang in the air for a while. Then, the thread retracted, and at the other end a flopping bluish thing got reeled in. It looked like a sultan fish. The angel caught it in her hand, looking awfully pleased with herself.

“Great job,” Jemi deadpanned. “But—why.”

“Why do you think? Making breakfast.”

Ennanis said this as she moved her other hand to the side. There was a second pile of dry sticks next to her, much like the campfire that had burned by Jemi in the tunnel. The ends were blackened. As the angel brushed her hand over the pile, it caught fire anew.

Jemi watched as she dropped the entire sultan on the fire.

Ennanis hummed to herself.

Jemi looked at the fish rapidly turning to soot on the campfire with a mixture of horror and morbid curiosity. “You cannot be serious.”

“Really? Many tend to say I am too serious.” Ennanis reached into the fire barely minutes after she’d put the fish in. Withdrawing the sultan fish, she attempted to tear it apart, but it was obviously too raw for that. A normal person would have given up and chopped it with a knife. Instead, the angel lit her fingers with Soleki enhancement and crushed her nails into the flesh, prying apart the fish by brute force. The result was two flopping halves, mostly carbon on the outside, pink and gummy on the inside, ripped chunks of innard dribbling out of each end.

As if seeing absolutely nothing wrong with this, Ennanis devoured the tail end, swallowing it with a gulp. She offered the head to her. Jemi stared at the slimy remnants of its liver and gut hanging out from the uncooked flesh.

Pressing her palms together, Jemi did a deep bow.

Ennanis’ slitted-gold eyes widened a fraction. “Oh, you don’t have to thank me-”

“I am apologising to the fish,” Jemi interrupted her sharply. “For its utterly wasted death.” She snatched the fish head from Ennanis and threw it in the canal with a splash. She rounded on the angel, an exasperated look on her face. “Aren’t you supposed to have experience hunting? Have you never learnt to dress your game?”

“Why would you need to put a dress on your game??” Ennanis looked confused.

“Oh Medusa. Let me guess. You hunted for sport, never to eat.”

Ennanis’ expression morphed into one of suitable admonishment.

Jemi scrubbed her face and sighed. “Dressing means to clean your hunt to prepare it as food. You have to strip out the internal organs, because you don't eat those. Especially when it comes to wild animals—there’s tons of nasty things in them that stay toxic even after thorough cooking. And regardless, you need to thoroughly cook meat, or it’ll make you sick. Or kill you.” She gave Ennanis another look. “Well, I guess it won’t kill you, angel, but that shit’s just not edible for humans.”

“Not even for Beasts?”

Jemi inhaled. Then, slowly, she said, “Edible for some Beasts. But not for others.”

Ennanis stared at her. Then she nodded. She glanced down at her fingers, nails cracked and skin peeled red from ripping the raw fish. Beams of Soleki began to float around her hands again, coalesced daylight, and Jemi saw the friction burns clear from her skin like paint being washed off. Soon, it was brown and pristine again. The skill known as Soleki mending.

Jemi became aware, once again, of that warm wall between her and her aches. She brushed the thought off. “What made you decide to take up fishing all of a sudden, anyway?” she asked.

“Like I said. Breakfast.”

“Don’t you have literally any other food?”

“I’ve got ration bars,” Ennanis said, “but you told me you didn’t like them.”

Ah, those dry, packaged things that angels carried around on the go. When circumstances were dire, Jemi had scavenged them out from the pockets of dead angels. They were nutritionally dense, but hard as bricks and packed full of preservatives—all part of guaranteeing their infinite shelf life. The taste was also extremely lacking. The one in apple flavour wasn’t so bad, but Ennanis Zoleil only enjoyed the nectar-flavoured ones. She had offered some of them to Jemi back in the tunnels of Kanch, and tossed her one as a joke.

Jemi’s stomach growled loudly. She had no idea how long it'd been since she last ate.

“Just hand over the ration bars already,” she grumbled. “I'm not so picky as that.”

Ennanis’ little sulk vanished instantly, her face lighting up at the words. She stuck her fingers in her pocket and tossed two nectar bars at her. Rolling her eyes, Jemi caught them from the air and swiftly unwrapped them. She bit down and tried not to break her molars. The taste of the nectar came shortly after: it was the bitterness of an espresso shot, then a ghastly sweetness like artificial honey syrup. It… wasn’t horrible, but Jemi might’ve been hallucinating from sheer famishment. Only angels, really, were fans of this stuff. Once she'd swallowed them she started to feel corporeal again, the fog hanging over her brain clearing.

Finally, she made her way over and found a clear patch of concrete to sit down on.

“So,” she said as she chewed, “want to explain what we're doing in Archizoun?”

They had last been in Kanch, the northern volcanic kingdom of Loukoumades. Archizoun was an entirely different kingdom, all the way in the west, bordering the ocean.

“How did you know?” Ennanis asked.

“The design of the bridge,” Jemi replied. “It’s quintessential Archizonian architecture.”

“Nice try. That’s a lie,” Ennanis said. When faced with Jemi’s flabbergasted look, she went on, “I’ve stayed under bridges across Wataron and Kanch. This is a very common type of bridge.”

“Do you stay under bridges a lot?” Jemi queried dryly. “Is that why we’re here and not in an inn? Is that why you didn’t go out to buy bread, instead catching fish in a drain like some kind of mongrel?”

Impervious to her distraction, Ennanis repeated, “How did you really know we were in Archizoun?”

“......” Jemi sighed. She gazed up at the nests prickling from the divots in the bridge, rustling with activity. “Okay, Miss Three-Pennies. I overheard the pigeons.” They were two flocks, one that had just flown in from Kanch, communicating with a flock that had been staying here. She twisted up the wrappers of her ration bars in her fingers. “I can understand and talk to animals. It’s a talent I’ve had since I was young. I don’t know where it came from or why. Some in my village said it was because I was always alone at home as a kid, and ended up spending more time with the farm animals than with any other people.” While some others thought I was a demon’s child.

“I see,” the angel nodded. “That’s how you managed to summon that storm.”

Jemi’s hands paused fidgeting.

The rush of water under the bridge seemed to recede, replaced the sound of wind shrieking past her ears. The memory. Of dark skirts billowing around her knees above her, plummeting headlong into a volcano—before her back thumped against something solid and warm, a wall, a shoulder, a beating heart.

You can rest now, Jemi—that was what the angel commander had murmured to the Cockatrice.

“...You’ve known all along, haven’t you,” she said.