Zolantos

set the lasercopter down

on the other side of

the Nameless Mountains,

at the bashful edges

of the Fallow Lands,

unsown

for a thousand generations

for reasons

no one remembered.

The landing claw dug deep

into the gelatinous black mud,

and the sorcery-engines sighed

in hissing blasts

of scalding green steam.

The sun was setting,

and opaque

orange light

sank to the bottoms of the sky

like silt

sinking to the bottom

of a river.

They carried He-Thing out

and laid him down

amidst the quivering grasses

and gentle breeze.

Zolantos lit a fire,

while Vaila

washed He-Thing’s wounds

and applied the Ultimate Sorceress’s

famous salve,

which had once restored

the extirpated spine

of Motedd the Warlock,

four hundred years ago.

But,

it was when Vaila

turned He-Thing over,

and saw the thick blood

caked to the backs of his thighs,

that she realized

what had truly befallen him,

and her tears fell from her cheeks,

onto He-Thing’s skin,

where they mixed with his blood.

Vaila remembered

when they were just

children,

Alam chasing her

through the ancient,

overgrown gardens

of the imperial palace of Asmodel,

the antinomy

of the thrill of eluding him,

and the inevitable ecstasy

of him catching and tickling her

until she burst into laughter.

Had that really happened?

It seemed too distant

to be a memory,

more myth than history,

a flower

that had bloomed,

but had never decayed —

just slowly had become invisible,

hidden behind other things,

misplaced.

“The salve isn’t working,”

Vaila told her father.

“I doubted it would,”

spoke Zolantos, resigned.

“Wake him. Give him your tea.”

Vaila held a harsh stone spice

under He-Thing’s nose.

He jumped,

fell into a coughing fit,

and then his eyes

filled with shock

as he recognized them.

“How?”

he asked,

recoiling.

Zolantos furrowed his brow

and spoke —

“I promised your father

I would protect you.

And I always will.”

Vaila prepared her tea,

a complex concoction

whose recipe of herbs and roots

was

one of the few things

she had left of her mother,

a frontier witch of some reknown,

until

her beauty

had convinced a provincial governor

to make her his wife

and try to turn her into lady.

But that had been

before her father,

before

Zolantos.

He-Thing

took the tea from Vaila,

but was too ashamed

to look her in the eyes.

How he had loved her

when they had been children!

How troubled he had been

when her body had bloomed!

And how he treasured her

still.

But his dishonor,

his failure,

his weakness!

He-Thing couldn’t imagine

that he would ever

be able to meet

Vaila’s gaze again —

she must now consider him

the most pathetic,

the most repulsive

creature

in the Omniverse.

to be continued...