Varayana and Arjasoot set up camp inside a fisherman’s hut, a spherical shack of woven reeds raised next to the banks of a twisting river with churning, crystal-clear waters.

Arjasoot had many reservations about this choice of respite.

“Arjasoot,” Varayana said. “Put down your blade. We’re not in danger.”

“I don’t trust it,” Arjasoot insisted, brandishing their leaf-shaped blade towards the gushing river. “That stream could attack us at any moment!”

Varayana let out a long, weary sigh. “Rivers aren’t conscious, Arjasoot,” she told him. “They can’t attack you.”

“Yes, they can,” Arjasoot said, thinking back to the scrolls and codices they’d read in the library. “There’s even a special word for it: flooding!”

“That’s not …!” Varayana paused and let out a bitter laugh. “Alright, alright: fair point, Spirit.” 

“Really?” Arjasoot said, surprised at the human giving ground so quickly.

“I’ve seen one or two floods in my time,” Varayana said. “They’re nothing to scoff at. Even so…” She grabbed a branch from their crackling campfire and drew out a crude map in the dirt. “This river’s far from the mountains and the ocean,” she explained, tapping at different locations with her stick, “so the odds of a sudden flood are low. Furthermore, this river flows out from Wedwel Dom. If we follow it north, we won’t get lost on our way to the City of Springs.”

Arjasoots felt the chill in their heart-flame start to abate. “I suppose that makes sense…”

“Or we could take that in the morning,” Varayana said, point down the slope towards the half-rotten fishing dock and the reed boat moored there.

“Salt and Slither!” Arjasoot cursed, wisps of smoke breaking from their shoulders as they shuddered. "I still think you’re being too casual about all this!"

Varayana’s brow grew pinched with frustration: “Are all Smoke Spirits as twitchy as you?”

“Are all humans as cavalier as you?” Arjasoot retorted. “You haven’t seen what can come from the ocean.” Their next words were spoken in a hush: “You haven’t seen the demons that lurk in those cold depths.”

“Demons live on land too,” she pointed out. “Behemoths that crack the ground with their stride. Mound Thralls that creep from their crypts and stalk the night.” Varayana unbuckled her sword from her belt and laid it next to her bedroll. “Dryness and warmth don’t make a place safe.”

A silence came over theme both broken only by the trickling of the river and the crackling of the fire.”

“Maybe,” Arjasoot said at last. “We should stop worrying so much about monsters we can’t control. Not that we shouldn’t worry! What I mean is…we shouldn’t let our worry ruin our rest.” 

Varayana let out a long yawn, loud and mournful enough to rival the cry of a wolf. “A sound enough conclusion,” she said. “It’s pointless to worry about possible threats when we have a real monster on hands.” She held out her hands to the Smoke Spirit, her various bracelets stripped away to expose her bare wrists.

“You’re not a monster,” Arjasoot told her, picking up the shackles from the ground and sliding the links through their fingers.

“You don’t know that,” Varayana replied with a hiss. “Quickly, before I nod off.”

Arjasoot slid the cuffs over Varayana’s slender wrists. “They’re rather loose on you,” they remarked. “Won’t you just slip out of them?”

“I swell up when I sleep,” Varayana said. “Now the anchors. Quick!”

Arjasoot took two bronze spikes and drove them into the hardened earth, hammering them down with a stray rock until they were deeply embedded.

Varayana shook out her chains, the iron links ringing against each other like chimes. She leaned back into her bedroll, drew her carp-tongue sword, and laid it against her chest like a warrior-queen about to be interred in a barrow. 

“Remember to keep your distance when I sleep,” She told Arjasoot. “I don’t want to cut or bite you.”

“You’ve told me that many times, Vara,” Arjasoot assured her. “I won’t forget.”

“Good, good...” Her eyelids fluttered closed. “I don’t remember telling you to call me Vara,” she murmured.

“Was that too familiar?” Arjasoot asked. “I can stop if you like.” 

“I never said that,” Varayana said, her words barely audible. 

Arjasoot puffed out their chest. “Very well then,” they crowed. “Vara shall be your name henceforth...Vara? Vara?”

Varayana’s chest rose and fell in a quiet rhythm, her cheeks as round and relaxed as a newborn babe. All the tension she’d gathered from days of wandering was released, leaving only peace and relaxation.

“So this is what sleep is,” Arjasoot said, tossing a fresh log onto the fire and adding a handful of twigs to their brass pot. Both flames crackled and surged. Arjasoot sighed in relief and sat down by Varayana’s bedroll, resting the blade of their own sword across their knees. “It’s more pleasant than I thought.”

Varayana’s sleeping form convulsed. Her spine bent backward in an arch, sickening pops echoing through the evening air as her flesh rippled like sea-water and jagged bone spikes pierced outward from beneath her skin. Her long, dark hair started writhing back and forth like a nest of snakes, and tusk-like fangers burst through the folds of her lips in a shower of blood.

"Salt and Sliver!" Arjasoot screamed, stumbling back in horror as the human’s long hair started writhing like a nest of snakes. "I take it back! Wake up, Varayana! Wake!"

# 

By the time Varayana settled down, Arjasoot was tempted to try out sleep for themselves.

#

A little past midnight, Arjasoot heard howling in the distance.

They sprang to their feet, blade leaping into their hand. The light of the campfire extended ten paces around, reflecting in patterns off the Smoke Spirit’s well-forged leaf-blade. Beyond that circle of safety lay darkness, a thickness like nothing Arjasoot had ever seen before.

Varayana –– the creature Varayana had become –– stiffened and emerged from the darkened recesses of the fisherman’s hut. With a predator’s prowl, she crawled on all fours towards the noise, eyes shining with a blue light through the tangled, writhing hair that veiled her face. The chains on her over-grown arms clinked as they were dragged against the ground.

“Whoah there!” Arjasoot said, grabbing one of the chains and giving it a tug. “Easy now! You need to finishing resting, remember?”

Varyana let out a shriek and leapt at Arjasoot, an arm with bulging muscles and too many joints lashing out at the Smoke Spirit’s head.

“Whoah!” Arjasoot leapt away from Varayana, drifting on the breeze and landing five paces away from the campfire. “Easy now! It’s me! It’s Arjasoot!”

Varayana screamed and leapt again, only for the chains to go taut and slam her back to earth. She thrashed on the ground, her backwards canted legs kicking up dust. Pink slobber dripped from the side of her crooked mouth as she snarled, drool slipping out from between what could only be described as a gash filled with tusks.

“It’s okay,” Arjasoot said, holding out their hands, taking a step back towards the fire’s light. “We’re safe. We’re not in any danger.”

A bandit stepped out of the darkness and swung his knife towards Arjasoot’s throat.

If Arjasoot had been younger and less wise in the arts of battle, they would have tried to block the knife with his sword, and gotten their bronze blade nicked or bent in the process. They, however, were a Spirit grown…and thanks to the many books on swordplay they read, somewhat wise.

“Soft towards the Hard, and Hard towards the Soft.” –The Copper Fern Sword Codex, Verse 3, Line 4.

Arjasoot released the chain and floated back. Their sword sang from its sheath, slipping past the bandit’s guard and nicking his wrist.

“Blast!”

The bandit leapt back, his slender knife falling to the ground. Red blood seeped from the gash in his arm, which, to Arjasoot’s understanding, was generally a cause of great alarm to humans and other fleshy creatures. 

Against all sense, the bandit paid no heed to his gory cut, instead snatching a rock from the ground and hurling it towards Arjasoot with all his might. 

Arjasoot could have flowed like silk across the living breezes to dodge that rock. Instead, they took the path of least resistance.

The jagged chunk of stone bored a hole through Arjasoot’s head, trailing wisps of smoke behind as it vanished into the dark. For a human, a hole in the head would be fatal…

…but for a Smoke Spirit near a roaring fire, such wounds were more annoying than anything.

Arjasoot breathed in, drawing in smoke from the campfire. “Are you done?” Arjasoot asked the bandit, the hole in their head closing up as they talked. “You can’t hurt me, Brigand...but you haven’t even begun to discover all the ways I can hurt you.”

The Bandit gawked at the Smoke Spirit, then reached up and drew back their hood, revealing a tanned, leathery face, thinning blonde hair…and a bulbous, pulsing tumor growing from the side of his cheek.

“Arjasoot?” The Bandit asked, speaking with a familiar voice.

Arjasoot blinked. “Chunky? Could it be…?” They let out a bright chuckle. “What are you doing inside that human?”

“Eh, you know how it goes,” the Sap-Spirit replied, scratching at the pulsing green tumor on the bandit’s cheek. “You’ve got a gold-debt to pay, but you don’t have any opposable thumbs, so you find a cutthroat and borrow their body for a spell!”

“My gold wasn’t enough?” Arjasoot asked, frowning.

Chunky shrugged. “What else can I say? Being in debt to a Dragon’s a scary thing!” 

“Hsssssk!” Varayana lunged towards Chunky, her writhing, prehensile hair lashing out like a whip towards the bandit’s ankle.

“Whoah-ho!” Chunky stumbled back, gaping shamelessly as Varayana slobbered, shrieked and tore up the ground with her nails. “What the hell kind of monster did you catch, Arjasoot?” A greedy gleam flickered in the eyes of the Bandit Chunk was possessing. “It is a rare breed?”

Arjasoot stepped between Chunky and Varayana. “She’s not a monster, Chunky,” they said. “She’s a human.”

Chunky gave Arjasoot a pitying look. “You haven’t met many humans, have you, kid?”

“No,” Arjasoot confessed. “But trust me on this. Her circumstances are…unique.”

“Unique enough to sell to a king’s private menagerie?”

“No, Chunky,” Arjasoot hissed.

“Okay, okay. Just asking!” Chunky tore a trip of cloth from the bandit’s shirt, winding it around the bleeding wrist of their host. “Enough about me. What the Wastes are you doing here? I thought you were heading south!”

“I was heading south,” Arjasoot said, starring at the ground.

“Hmmph.” Chunky barred the teeth of their bandit body in a mirthless grin. “Got lost in the bog, eh? Told you it wasn’t a short-cut.”

Arjasoot folded their arms across their slender chest. “My dear Chunky,” they said. “You know I detest telling others how to live their lives.”

“But you’re going to do it anyway,” Chunk grumbled.

Arjasoot gave Chunky a fearsome glare shot through with embers: “Stealing a human’s body to take the wealth of two resting travelers? Ill-done, my friend.”

The Bandit looked offended, or be more precise, Chunky used the Bandit’s face to express how offended they were: “That’s rich, coming from the kid who paid me to help him desert!”

“That’s different,” Arjasoot said, the heart-flame in their breast flickering.

“Is it, though?” the Sap-Spirit asked. 

“Yes,” Arjasoot growled, their long eyebrows burning white-hot. 

Chunky shrugged and scratched the hairy back of their bandit host. “Fine, fine! I don’t steal from old clients, and this body’s broken anyways.” Chunky paused for dramatic effect: “But.”

Arjasoot’s heart-flame flickered within their chest. “But?” 

“That pet of yours ain’t long for this world,” Chunky explained, nodding towards the hunched over, hissing Varayana. The bulging cyst on the bandit’s cheek started to swell up. “You’d better make a run for it, friend, before the Thralls get you too.”

“Thralls?” Arjasoot said, thinking back to what Varayana had said around twilight. “Mound Thralls? Why would they be after us?”

The bandit’s cyst exploded, blood and bile spraying across the ground. A thin strand of milk-white fog escaped from the ruin of the bandit’s cheek, the essence of Chunky’s mind and soul.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” The Sap-Spirit howled, his voice blending with the river breeze as he vanished into the night.

"Wait, Chunky!" Arjasoot hollered, raising a hand. "Have you heard anything about the Godcarver? Rumors, whispers, anything!"

Chunky was already long gone. "Wodr Peh Mer," Arjasoot cursed, swearing in the Ancient Language. “That water-drinking bastard. Who do they think they are?”

The human bandit, freed from his possessor, stumbled forward like a drunkard, blood leaking from the hole on his cheek. Light and awareness returned to his eyes.

“What…” He stammered. “What is this? Where am I?” He snatched his dagger from the ground and pointed it towards Arjasoot. “Who are you?”

Varayana snarled, slobber dripping from her rows of curled tusks. She backed away from the bandit, withdrawing into the shelter of a fisherman’s hut like a beast returning to their cave.

“Great Gods, what is that thing?" The Bandit took a step back in terror...

...and practically threw himself into the arms of the horde of living corpses standing right behind him.

" Deiuos!" Arjasoot swore in the Ancient Tongue, springing back into the ring of campfire light. 

The bandit screamed as dozens of withered, mud-caked arms wrapped around his waist, his arms, his legs. He swung his dagger around wildly, the slender blade rising and falling, drawing forth black ichor from the things that were holding him.

“Help me!” He begged. “Help, Help, help!”

A pair of rotten yellow teeth sank the Bandit’s throat, silencing their cries… 

And then he was gone. Dragged away into the dark.

"...hello?" Arjasoot said, their bronze sword trembling in their grip like a leaf in the breeze. They tried desperately to remember if humans could survive having their throat ripped out. "Are you there, Brigand?"

There was a ripping noise, a gush of red. The bandit’s dagger flew out of the darkness and landed at Arjasoot’s feet. 

Then there was only the cracking sound of mandibles gnawing on flesh.

Next Chapter: Chapter Four