“Move your lazy tails before I beat you!”

“If you aren’t moving in the next thirty seconds, I’ll rip your fangs out and make you a gummy myself!”

The swarm was beginning to snap at each other as my trusted khatif forced them into trying to get moving quickly. It wasn’t a common sight for keelish to get moving quickly, usually more of a lumbering beginning followed by a slow acceleration into a steady lope. In this case, however, I was not about to let the swarm take their sweet time to get moving, and did everything short of setting the wolfstags on them to instill in my lazy subordinates a sense of urgency.

It felt like an eternity, but it was only maybe a quarter of an hour before the swarm was moving, following the tracks left by the deserting swarm last night. It wasn’t long before the flames of rage were culled to just smoldering embers, and I finally began to take in our surroundings. The plains we entered were impressively featureless: An unfathomably wide and long plain filled with nearly endless amounts of browning grasses. The grasses were probably green in the spring and summer, but fall was truly under way, getting towards winter even, and the grasses had obviously begun to transition back into a more inert winter form.

The plains spread endlessly before us, and I couldn’t help but appreciate their uniformity. The only difference between one area and the next seemed to be only which part was swaying in which direction in the wind, and that difference was only visual at best. A good part of the plains was that following the deserters’ tracks was simple as could be; there was a wide track of tramped down grass that we followed ever onward.

Onward and onward we traveled, the minutes changing to an hour before anything could be noted to have changed, that change being one of direction. Before, the Shemira’s deserters had been moving generally east, just as I wanted to, but their tracks made a sharp left turn, heading nearly due north.

“This is a branching path.”

I sighed and looked at Sybil. “You don’t say.”

“You know what I mean. THIS,” She gestured in a broad swathe before me, “is a branching path. What direction do you want to go? What actions do you plan to take?”

“... I know. I just… don’t know. But Dulvroc take me, I’m going to do something, and I’m not going to do it by halves.” Steeling myself, I channeled my magic to my throat and, to the thrumming power of [Innervating Address], “We will chase the deserting cowards for one more hour! If we do not see them by then, we will continue on our path to Nievtra. But make no mistake! If they escape today, I will personally seek them out and punish them myself in the near future!”

With that, I sent the thrum of power out of my throat and to the surrounding swarm who recommenced the pursuit with howling shrieks and cries of “NO MERCY FOR TRAITORS! NO REST FOR DESERTERS! NO SURVIVAL FOR THE WEAK!”

With renewed vigor, the swarm rushed to follow the path left by the hundred fleeing keelish. In the lead, I was the first to notice when there was, for the second time in our hours long pursuit, a change. The earth underfoot changed, the grass thinned until it was only a sparse covering over the ground instead of the thick foliage of before. Firm earth changed to loose sand, slipping underfoot and flowing through and over my toes. The small part of me that remembered burrowing a den into the moist, firm earth of my home couldn’t help but laugh, thinking that there was no way that this sandy earth could support any meaningful hole. How far I had come since then, with the first sprouts of kingdom establishment peeking their heads out in the back of my mind.

My musing over the earth quality saved my foot, since I felt the sand falling away underneath my step. With a lunge and subconscious hiss of anger, I jumped up just early enough to avoid snapping jaws from amputating my foot.

Beneath me lunged out what could only be called a sand fish. I’d heard stories about Isnanna and Ishtar (the legendary twins, not my children) fighting hordes of things like this, but I’d never thought the stories true. They were, supposedly, called ishabaak, which meant sand shark in the ancient common tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to think about any more than that since the gaping maw of the beast was coming dangerously close to eviscerating me.

I kicked out and sent the ishabaak flying, its head snapped to the side painfully with the strike. I grinned and lowered my jaws, fangs snapping at the beast’s belly. It wriggled madly, trying to get down into the earth, but I hugged it tight to me, both arms wrapping completely around it while my jaws continued snapping deeper and deeper into its viscera. After just a moment, the ishabaak began going limp and I drew my head back, victorious and ready to glory in my kill.

That was when I noticed that the beast wasn’t alone–all around and through the swarm, individual ishabaaks were appearing and beginning to hunt my swarm.