Page 12 of Red Demon
I stammered out a thank you as I fished the coins from my pocket and hustled away.
There were curious glances as I wandered the streets, and one woman who reared her horse away from me on the road with a curse. Someone followed me down the road a few blocks, but no one threatened me.
I finally found a pharmacy, grateful I had enough coin to buy some herbs for my cough. As I walked out of the Asri town—close to sunset, with the folding pan under my arm and the bag of herbs in my pocket, a flicker of hope warmed my aching ribs. I felt brave enough to light a fire that night outside of town. I brewed some tea in my pot and cobbled together some scallions, mushroom and animal fat to make something of a soup.
The next morning, my cough was less racking. By the following day, it was gone.
When the Asri ancestors terraformed Nara Mnaet, they built forests full of useful things that would yield food in any season. After I’d recovered from my cough, I gathered what I could find in the woods outside the town: cranberries, chives, and a patch of wintergreen. I walked back into the same Asri town where I bought my medicine, found the market, and laid the bundles on my blanket in an empty spot on the ground. I sat by my wares, waiting.
Although I’d yet to risk hypothermia from bathing in an icy river, I’d made sure I was presentable. I’d heated water in my new pot and cobbled soap from wood ash and animal fat. While the traces of charcoal left their mark on my clothes, I trusted they’d smell my berries and mint before me.
To my delight, it worked. I sold some of those chives and berries. Around noon, I broke down and ate a basket myself before selling a few more. In the early afternoon, an old woman in an elaborately swirled cloak approached: a town elder, I think.
She smiled; I smiled back. I didn’t understand all her questions, but I understood when she asked me to leave.
After I found my way through the woods and back to camp, I refused to risk staying another night. Maybe some Asri here wanted to do more than ask me to leave; maybe they’d hunt me. Packing up, I kept walking toward the coast, hearing birdsong the following morning for the first time in months.
In the next town, they too asked me to leave after three days of sales. I kept that going, continuing north. I learned to fold wax leaves into baskets for a cleaner presentation and learned which nuts would still look edible if I could rescue them from under the snow. Hot meals in taverns got me through the coldest days, especially when the snow fell wet and heavy. Even when I had enough coin for a few night’s stay at an inn, I saved that in case I needed passage on a ship to the inner empire. I’d survived this long outdoors.
Animal pelts and game: those I’d learned not to bother with; not to wear, and certainly not to sell. The Asri did not believe in harming any creature with a brain. “Niire Mai” is how they say that; “Never harm,” more or less. My leather bag alone was enough for me to be turned away at a town gate once. Lesson learned.
My worst encounter, in a grove-shadowed town built around a whispering river, left me feeling like a kicked dog. The market smelled of spice and horse waste, with stalls overflowing with goods. I approached a century fabric booth. I’d read about it in school, but never saw it up close until that day. It appeared delicate and thin like silk, most woven in a maze-like design of animals and plants. Yet it was durable enough to outlive the owner, hence the name. Before the Asri lost their tower in the war, they used to wear the same robe from life to life, reincarnating, growing up and claiming it back from their family homes. Their immortals weren’t reincarnating anymore, but they still made the robes.
Manipulating the fabric between my fingers, I asked the shopkeeper if they ever thought to thicken it up and make armor with it like Chaeten leather. It seemed to me their fabric would work just as well for armor. His bearded, sun-weathered face contorted in distaste. So did the braided woman in the booth next to him, selling pottery. They lashed their words at me, sharp and too fast for me to make out beyond the curses or “Niire Mai”. The fingers pointing out of the shop made the message clear enough. They followed me, yelling, until I was outside of the gates. Shame lit my cheeks as I’d retreated to the cold.
The Asri make swords for battle—they have exceptions to their rules against killing, as any Chaeten knows. So there should be nothing wrong with my question if I had the vocabulary to best frame it. Beyond “how much is this?” and the phrases I used to sell my forest goods, any attempt at conversation would resort to pantomime at some point—false starts that left me feeling like a babbling idiot. So I needed to keep whittling down the language barrier, and to do that, I’d need to keep talking to people—Asri people.
Each quiet night, the forest became my classroom. I mimicked the rhythms of Asri speech, the lilt and dip of their voices, the way their hands danced in the air to paint spaces between certain phrases. I found comfort in the patterns, in repetition, in practicing something new. And at some point, that goal of bridging that understanding became just as important as what Iden suggested I do: find Z’har and tell them everything. I’d yet to stumble on a Chaeten soldier or police in their red uniforms, and I didn’t trust the Asri enough to tell them where I’d come from even if I could get the words out. The North Barrack—the largest in Noé—must have known about the attack on my town by now, with as long as I’d been on the run. Besides that, I was in no rush to hop on a ship to a Chaeten city when all I knew was Noé. These tall trees smelled like home, the icy streams murmured words I knew, even when the Asri didn’t.
I hadn’t given up on finding my own people. I couldn’t afford the license for a good tracking device, but I finally found a fabric printed map in my next Asri town that marked out a Chaeten settlement nearby.
Near the end of the three-day walk, I clutched the strap of my bag between gloved, numb fingers. I pushed through the brush onto the frozen road, reminding myself it should be safe to be out in the open now. The sun dipped lower, casting long shadows beside me as the cold scratched my throat. I quickened my pace, hoping to arrive at the town before nightfall.
Then, I smelled it. Thick, greasy smoke, not the comforting burn of a fireplace. My heart raced away, trying to escape my panic. Fire meant people, but smoke like that…
Curiosity, tainted by fear, propelled me forward. The road twisted, the air heavy with the acrid odor, threatening to resurrect my cough. The trees thinned, and the settlement lay broken before me.
Desolation everywhere: skeletons of Chaeten houses, once painted in cheerful hues, stood charred, their roofs collapsed inward. My stomach lurched. I knew the scent of rancid blood, what was left of a deer weeks later if scavengers didn’t find it first. Spoiled meat and burnt garbage filled my nostrils as I walked closer.
Voids, I should not be on this road, but there was only open land between me and the debris-littered wreckage. I walked closer in the gray light, past the blackened and rusted carcass of a truck and some other machine too broken to identify.
In the center of the town was the pyre, a macabre monument of bones. The edges of the pyre never fully burned, the bodies contorted and blackened where the snow had quenched the fire. Acid rose in my throat.
I ran for the woods. This wasn’t war. This was a massacre, a calculated act of cruelty that spared the Asri towns around me, who were carrying on their lives and buying my fucking berries. How many killers had smiled at me, thinking of this?
I jogged north, planning in the dark, trying to put as much distance between myself and that town until my body gave out. Iden was right. I needed to go to the North Barrack, to take that ship to the central empire, to Thebos or Ea Shadohe. I waited for the courage to accompany that decision, to give me the strength to tear out the last bit of my life that felt familiar. Noé was not safe; home was a place I’d never been.
Chapter 6
Raven
Many weeks into my ritual of survival, a brush of morning sunlight seeped through my closed eyes. The sky above me rolled clear: violet splashed with streaks of rose and gold clouds. With a sigh, I crawled out of my piles of leaves to my feet, the damp chill of earth seeping through my worn cloak as I brushed off the debris. I’d traded for an Asri style cloak a few days before, wearing it over my Chaeten coat. I found it put strangers at ease if I looked like everyone else from a distance. It put me at ease too.
The death scream of a rabbit found its way through my dreams last night, and I found it caught in my snare. I untangled it, field dressed it, and cooked it for breakfast.
I was two days from the North Barrack, and only a little light on cash. By a fallen oak, I hid my meager belongings under a pile of leaves. Then, I took my emptied backpack and walked into the woods to forage. As usual, I took that time to stoke my hope to a healthy fire, reminding myself that better days were coming.
The stream I followed wound through the forest, sunlight dappling on the water and sprinkling shadows through the leaves overhead. I thinned a patch of early morels that was too bountiful to harvest all at once. For variety, I selected some pale gooseberries and juicy strawberries, and I washed and packed them in my homemade boxes of woven wax leaves.
