Epilogue

 

Harran was finally here. The city that sat beneath the burning ring in the sky. It wasn’t visible at the moment. Dark storm clouds hung over the entire land, unleashing a torrential downpour broken occasionally by sharp lightning cracks. While most surely hid away indoors on days like this, Harran was thankful for the weather. For a thunderbird like her, a little rain and a little lightning wouldn’t normally have stopped her from flying.

She looked back over her shoulder. The dark and the rain made it hard to see. Was she still being followed? Or had they given up?

Harran grasped her useless, broken winged arm and trudged through the mud. It didn’t matter how far back they were. She was here.

Al-Mir. A city that had sprung up practically overnight a few years back. It was said to be a safe place for humans, demihumans, and even beastmen like her. Word of its existence spread through the lands of the Beastmen Tribes and through the Tetrarchy. Rumors at first, rumors that she and the other trophies of Governess LeBeau of the Artesie province hadn’t believed. Upon being traded to the neighboring governor of Hennaut, perhaps the most vile human Harran had yet to encounter, she decided to see if the rumors were true… or die trying.

She wasn’t dead yet and the rain slowed her would-be captors more than it slowed her.

Harran pulled her cloak a little tighter, trying to hide a few more of her feathers as she headed into the city. For all the rumors she had heard, they were just that. Rumors. Ever since her capture out in the Tribelands, she could count the number of decent humans she had encountered with one feather.

Al-Mir lacked walls. That was the first and oddest thing she noticed. Out in the Tetrarchy, walls were everywhere. Every city, every burg, even small villages put up walls. Roving bands of beastmen would attack humans on sight. A village without a wall wasn’t going to last long. Even with walls, Harran had seen more than one village fall after discovering that the inhabitants were too old or infirm to properly mount a defense.

A few villages in Mystakeen all lacked walls, which she had seen while flying over before the hunters managed to nick her wing. They must not have had so many threats to worry over here.

She walked past the rows of hearty stone buildings out on the outskirts of the city where, in any normal town, the outcasts would have been shoved into shacks and cabins barely held together. Even the streets were paved with large flat tiles, each bearing a faint twisted maze-like pattern. Small glowstones set into the center of each tile lit the way forward.

Maybe it was the dark of the storm, but their violet glow felt ominous, as was the lack of people. Harran knew they were taking shelter from the storm, but the empty streets were starting to feel unsettling. It made her gizzard tingle in nervousness. Worse was that she didn’t know where to go now that she had finally arrived. Her first thought was to some kind of guardhouse, which she had assumed would be plentiful along the walls.

But there were no walls. There were no obvious guardhouses. If one of the stone buildings around her was a garrison, it wasn’t well advertised.

Harran considered just knocking on one of the doors around her. A little light leaked through the gap in one door, implying people were inside. Maybe they could point her in the right direction? She wouldn’t even need to say what she was doing or why she was out, just that she was a traveler.

But what if they were humans? Tension in her chest locked her in place. She knew humans lived here. They lived among beastmen and demihumans. They wouldn’t—shouldn’t—care if she a beastman as well.

But…

What if they did?

“There she is!”

“Ahead! I see her silhouette!”

Harran craned her head, twisting to stare fully behind her.

There they were. Three men. They were short. Not even as tall as she was, though not quite as small as gremlins. They had to be small, for next to each, their mounts stood. Stymphs. Large brass golems fashioned in the images of birds. They could fly without the aid of magic, though a rider did require a little magic to lighten the load. They were her pursuers, her constant hounds ever since her escape.

And they had caught up. Her pace had slowed since entering Al-Mir.

Harran’s talons scraped against the stone tiles as she scrambled forward. The buildings were close together, but they had just enough of a gap between them for her to slip through. She turned between buildings at random, moving from street to street, trying to lose her trackers.

She took a wrong turn. Because of the panic and darkness, she didn’t realize until she crashed straight into the stone wall of a building. A building in front of her and on either side. No gaps between. The only way out was the way she had been running. Pushing off the wall, ignoring the pain in her wing, she tried to hurry to the nearest gap before…

“Well, well…”

Before that.

One of the men came around the corner the same way she had come. He was clearly trying to look casual about it, but his chest was heaving from exertion. His two cohorts followed and immediately spread out as much as possible in the small corner, blocking off any thought of running. The path was too small of a gap for their stymphs to follow, not that they needed those mounts here. Not that it would matter.

The lead had one of those brass pipes in his hands, held up and aimed directly at Harran. They were like miniature cannons. They didn’t take strength or effort to wield like swords and hammers and they didn’t take time to activate like spells. They represented instant defeat.

“You…” He breathed. “You thought you could get away?”

Harran felt a weight in her chest. She had been so close. All she needed to do was to find someone who could help. For all she knew, someone was on the other side of the wall she was backed up against. So close, and yet…

And yet…

And yet he wasn’t moving.

Harran blinked her large, round eyes, staring. He still held that metal pipe, but he wasn’t talking or approaching or even heaving his heavy breaths anymore. His skin had gone all pale, more like marble than flesh.

His two cohorts noticed after a short delay. Both shouted some slurs in her direction, as if she was at fault, as they ran up to him. One grabbed his shoulder, shaking lightly as if to wake him from his stony state.

The other stopped short, face filling with horror as he looked up above Harran’s head.

She craned her neck and gasped.

A large, humanoid snake clung to the building, prone against the roof with hands gripping the end of the stone shingles. Rain dribbled off the scaled hood of the creature, flowing down iridescent black scales that still seemed almost luminous despite the darkness. The snake slithered down, dropping the short height to the ground at Harran’s side… Below the humanoid waist, there were no legs. Just a long tail that twisted and undulated with every movement. The tail ended in interlocking, intricate metalwork that moved with the rest of the tail. A sharp needle-like spike at the end slid out from the rest of the contraption.

The gorgon—Harran realized with some amount of dread, knowing the snake-like beings would eat a harpy without hesitation—darted forward, coiling that long tail around one of the men, aiming that sharp spike directly between his eyes, while grabbing hold of the other at the same time, preventing him from drawing his own brass pipe.

“Sstill yoursself or I will sstill you.”

Harran looked around, wishing some opening had presented itself. If not for her injured wing, she would have tried the skies.

There was a temptation to try anyway.

“What have we here?” another voice cut in. A woman with a crooked beret on her head stood atop another roof, looking down with a frown on her face. “Trespassers? Spies?”

Harran shied back, hoping that wasn’t about her, as the woman’s gaze crossed turned to the men.

The man with the needle in front of his eye was too frightened to respond. Or move, really. His teeth chattered as he stared unblinking, as if a slight movement would trigger it. The other, who merely had his arms pinned at his sides, curled his lips back in anger. “This is our business. The harpy broke the law. She is to come with—”

“Let me stop you before you embarrass yourself,” the new woman said, hopping down from the roof with a grace that humans didn’t usually possess. She clasped her hands behind her back as she strode toward the gorgon and the hunters. “You’re in Al-Mir. The only laws that matter are our laws. We do not abide by the Tetrarchy’s decrees. You are invaders. Your machines will be confiscated—the engineers are already delivering them to Who and Agnete who, I am sure, will love another opportunity to dismantle Tetrarchy innovations—and you will be incarcerated for a period yet to be determined, interrogated, and likely sent home with nothing but a potato sack to wear.”

“You can’t—”

“Ssilence,” the gorgon said. Not that the man likely heard it, his body turned to marble under her gaze.

“Zharja…” The woman rubbed at her face, exasperated and disappointed. “I wasn’t done.”

“You can talk to them in their ssells. I have my own tasskss,” the gorgon said. She left the third hunter coiled up as she turned to face Harran.

Harran shirked back, pinching her eyes shut as she tried to meld into the wall. It wasn’t working.

“I am Zharja, the negossheator. You are a beasstman.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”

“Ssorry?”

“Please don’t eat me…” Harran murmured.

A long, hissing sigh came from the gorgon. From the slight drop in the gorgon’s voice, Harran could tell that she turned away. “Ssee what I have to deal with? No one trussstss me.”

“You did just petrify two people and have a needle filled with caustic venom pointed at a third. I’d be frightened if I didn’t know what a softie you are.”

“Ssoftie? Ssay that again. I dare—”

“Softie.”

The gorgon hissed. This time, it wasn’t long and tired. It was clipped and angry. “Alma…”

Harran watched the strange… performance. That was what it felt like; a performance. Like one of the governesses’ plays where actors used flowery words and actions to convey some meaning. These two didn’t feel rehearsed, but the effect was there. The gorgon clearly wasn’t as angry as her tone might imply and the other was far more focused on the remaining unpetrified man.

It was her. They were trying to calm her. Maybe they hadn’t realized that her wing was broken, maybe they thought she would bolt to the skies if frightened further.

“Ssorry,” the gorgon said, turning back to Harran. “Ssome of uss are lesss professional than otherss…”

“Don’t worry,” Alma said, putting on a polite smile. Her teeth were slightly sharper than the norm. A werecat, she had to be. “We know you’ve been on the run for a while. We’ve been tracking you for some time.”

“Tracking…” Harran murmured, looking between the two. The tension in her spine was still ratcheted up, but she could feel herself slowly calming down. The gorgon wasn’t attacking her. She had to avoid meeting the gorgon’s gaze, both out of fear of being petrified and because there was just something about gorgon that made her quiver despite the politeness.

“There has been a fairly steady influx of people, mostly beastmen, coming from the Tetrarchy and the Tribelands in the last few years. We have a dedicated team watching the borders—mostly in case the Tetrarchy tries something foolish, but we catch ones like you every now and again.”

“Then… why—”

“Didn’t we step in earlier? Politics,” the werecat said with a sneer. “Treaties and agreements and Arkk technically isn’t the ruler of this land even though he practically is. We’re not supposed to have much authority outside here, Elmshadow, and the Spire of Moonshine Burg. Sorry about that.”

“Oh.” Harran didn’t know what to say to that. She had passed Elmshadow on her way here. Would she have been safe there? She could have ended her journey much earlier, before she even got injured.

Or Moonshine Burg. She had seen that Spire that Alma was talking about. An obsidian needle jutting out of the land, surrounded by jagged walls of dark stone, all poking outward away from Mystakeen, like some kind of wall that hated everyone on the other side. Harran had deliberately flown wide around it. It creeped her out. Just thinking about it now made her shudder.

Alma didn’t seem to notice. “Got to get these guys to the dungeons,” she said, turning away.

Just when Harran had started to calm down, the werecat vanished. It wasn’t just her. The three men who had hounded her across the country disappeared as well, both the stone statues and the still fleshy third were simply gone. That left her cornered, facing down the gorgon alone while trapped against the stone buildings.

The gorgon’s tongue, long, thin, and forked, darted out and licked the air. “I ssmell blood.”

Harran pressed back against the wall. That was probably her blood from her wing.

The gorgon slid forward, hands clamping down around Harran’s shoulders before she could try to dodge. That tongue came much closer to her face this time, almost licking her.

“You’re hurt,” the gorgon said. “Sshould have ssaid ssomething.”

Harran heard concern in the gorgon’s tone, but her mind could only comprehend a note of hunger. The tail suddenly wrapping around her did nothing to help. The gorgon raised one hand, forming a strange three-finger pattern.

Before Harran could consider any course of action, she felt a sudden pull in her stomach. The world twisted into a pinpoint, blacking out for just a moment before it untwisted in front of perhaps the only thing more frightening than a hungry gorgon.

A skeleton, meticulously cleaned and lacking any sinew or meat, stared at her with empty eye sockets. Then it moved, reaching forward with a bony hand.

Harran screamed the sharp, shrill shriek of a harpy as the world blacked out once again.

Things didn’t return so suddenly this time. Head pounding and mouth dry, Harran found herself staring upward at a stone ceiling from a surprisingly comfortable bed. Evening light flowed in from an open window, painting the room in deep orange light, while a strange noise came from the other side of a closed door. Muffled talking. Harran couldn’t understand the words exactly, but from the tone, someone wasn’t happy.

Harran didn’t move. She didn’t try to listen in. For a long few moments, she relished not having hunters chase after her, gorgon corner her against a wall, or skeletons jumping out at her. It was the first time in weeks that she felt she could just sit still. It was so oddly comfortable that it took a moment to realize that the ache in her wing wasn’t there anymore.

Slowly, she lifted her wing. It wasn’t broken anymore. The bleeding had stopped. It even looked like someone had cleaned her feathers of the matted, dried blood.

She was better?

Harran’s sharp eyes drifted to the window. It wasn’t the largest window, but she wasn’t the largest harpy.

And she was alone.

Slowly, carefully, silently, Harran got to her feet. With a slight hop, she threw her wings over the windowsill and shimmied forward, over the edge. Freedom was there.

But she stopped. Not because she wanted to.

Her hips got stuck, locked against either side of the window. She tried to rock back and forth and side to side. The loud creak of the door opening made her freeze.

“—time and time again to not send patients to Braun,” the angry voice of a young woman snapped. “People who aren’t used to undead just panic and hurt themselves even more than they already are.”

“Sorry, sorry. You just looked busy,” an easygoing voice responded. “And, to be fair, I don’t know that sending patients to you is all that more reassuring…” There was a long moment of silence as the man trailed off. “Um…”

Harran quickly shoved herself backward, back into the room. She wasn’t going to go down without a fight and it was much easier to fight if she could see what she needed to claw with her talons.

There were two people. One was a man. Just a man. He wore a long green tunic, had short brown hair, and a bit of a beard that he probably shaved down once every few days. The only truly notable thing about him was that his one arm ended in more of a claw than a human hand and his eyes glowed a bright red. Normally, Harran might have been alarmed by those traits, but at the moment, they seemed positively mundane when placed next to the monster at his side.

She was short, almost half the man’s height, but covered in heavy white scales. Her eyes were a silver with thin black slits running from top to bottom. Frost crystals clouded the air in front of a set of razor-sharp teeth. She had wings. Unlike a harpy’s wings, they were not part of her arms, but instead separate, massive appendages that stuck off her back. Her hands were even more claw-like than the man’s and a thick scaled tail gracefully waved back and forth behind her back.

Harran shrank in on herself under the gaze of a predator’s eyes.

She would rather have the gorgon back.

“Hey there,” the man said, raising his human hand in a polite wave. “Sorry about the trouble. Don’t worry, you’re safe now.

“Welcome to Al-Mir.”