In the town of Leel, in the province of Kervannes, high in northern Oss on the continent of Trass, his life has never felt so small. Two thinnish upper limbs are helpless against the forces of the world. But Niru nevertheless holds fast to his carving knife, with its handle of bottle-pine. Steel and the hardest wood that grows on Trass can be lashed together, but they can’t make much of a difference under this pitiless sky.
Niru squats in the brush and watches for the cart that will haul his spouse to her vicious execution. His town wasn’t constructed around a square—it’s an accident of millwork that unfolded without a plan—so the scaffold was erected beyond the village. This one can secure up to ten bodies at a time. It has harnesses for throats and other manacles, and a dissection altar. That’s also made of sturdy bottle-pine, to withstand the blows of axe-heads. No artificial varnish can turn a wood that fathomless brownish red.
His joints stiffened long ago, for he crept to this hedge last night. He dozed off on his side, but awoke to relieve himself, sip from his water-skin and force down a leathery apple before the weaponmen started preparing for the executions. His skin is lashed with thorn-bites that complain when he shifts his weight. His half-starved wrists still show the welts of chains he only escaped by the will of fickle Liēr.
His god is absent today. Niru is sure of that, though every now and then he whispers a plea in his shuddering bush. For all of Liēr’s blessings, they disappear when the subjugators are around. The very rankness of Anselm’s agents drives the god off, as tooth-musk repels the gnawers that wander down from the Green Spine—invaders far more welcome than these loathsome weaponmen.
He is alone in his endeavor, as Ardou is alone in the cart that will soon arrive at the killing spot. Even amid the other condemned, she must feel solitary—abandoned by Liēr like every other Oss. The inhabitants of Leel—forced to muster at the scaffold in the lea beyond the town—must feel much the same, even in their nervous throng. Every adult is tightly scarfed against the gazes of weaponmen as they file across the grass that is turning sparser month by month, under these gatherings.
No sign yet of the cart. Niru hunches his shoulders, as the locals hunch together and bow their heads. A trio of executioners ready their instruments on the stage. Long before Niru was born, Oss held public hangings, but the one who pulled the lever was always masked. Anselm’s executioners are proud of their bare faces as they flash their torture-tongs and skinning knives. Professionals in their own right or dilettante weaponmen, he doesn’t know—they wear the same bleached clothes, and the same red belts and boots. They shear away all of their hair like weaponmen, as if to defy Liēr, the benefactor of beauty in this world.
Like the arbitrary expansion of his village, Niru has no a plan. There are fourteen weaponmen stationed around the scaffold, not counting the three on the stage. Each soldier herding the locals carries a crossbow and stubby sword, and no doubt unseen knives under their clothes. And they are trained. Niru is just a musician—his wrists and fingers and mind attuned for tender strings. He chews on the meat of his cheek and refrains from loosing his scream—his welling tears. His hand throbs around the blade that he doesn’t know how to use.
“Nothing,” Niru whispers, disturbing leaves that already sway in a guileless current. He’s a leaf himself—pointless against the steel of the manacles and weaponmen’s swords. What can he do for his Ardou but witness her death, in gritted duty, so that she is honored?
But he will do it, out of wanton adoration. “Liēr, I beg you keep me from fainting,” Niru whispers. Tears like oil slip over his cheekbones and dampen his scarf. “Keep me from turning away from my final sight of living Ardou.” Or bring me a revelation! he shouts in his mind, pressing the hilt of his knife against his thigh until it bruises.
The resentful crowd breaks out of its quiet. Heads turn towards the west and loved ones shift together. He sees it now—the execution cart. It trundles over what used to be a flower-field, bringing six condemned. There is no scarf on Ardou’s head, and she’s been shrouded in Ansel white for the occasion. The subjugators haven’t yet cut away her hair. But that will be the first part of her body to be excised once she’s onstage.
His frantic gaze sails around the landscape. He doesn’t realize that he’s panting as he imagines rousing the crowd to rush the scaffold. But that would be their death. They are not armed. Black-red spots dart across his vision as he grabs hold of a root, for he’s canting into a panic that will soon become a faint. Some way to distract the soldiers, Niru labors, but comes up blank. A single leaf can’t generate much of a diversion.
An Ansel captain calls out each name of the condemned as the prisoners rattle up the scaffold steps. This audience is not like those that used to heave with delight and zest before a show—the plays and exquisite concerts now forbidden by the subjugators. This meadow is not the lea where Niru capered as a child, avoiding the furry bees that stewarded all of the flowers that no longer grow outside of Leel. Everything of Oss has changed—it’s unfamiliar under Anselm, like manacles and scaffolds, and hyperventilation.
He sniffs and puts control back into his breath, and the black-red dots in his vision fade away. The carving knife in his hand reminds him of stalwart things—of steel and bottle-pine, and the tides lashing Trass’s shores. Of the ancient volcanic rock that shaped his continent—Liēr give me limbs of basalt, immune to the edges of swords. Of furious preservers—the champions of Oss whom Anselm claims it extinguished.
Gripping the knife and the sumac root—which leaves a sticky red stain between his fingers—he tries to imagine the mindset of a preserver. Those warriors wouldn’t countenance the affront that unfolds before him and all over Oss, so perhaps the subjugators did indeed erase these fighters, who danced and flew with their swords, according to the canon. Preservers would gorge on these weaponmen like a puff-tart. One or two would be enough to free the condemned.
But the preservers abandoned Oss. Their bones are in the soil, one year after the invasion. Nor has Liēr even bothered to transfer the mystical skills of Oss’s protectors onto Niru, whose helplessness is nothing but a sweat that stings his thorn-bites as he watches a weaponman clamp a harness on Ardou’s throat atop the scaffold.
“I’m hardly tempting Anselm,” Niru huffed when he told Ardou his idea, weeks ago. “It’s restive Liēr we tempt if we keep our instruments silent, especially on the Day of Passion.” He added this last in exasperation—at the very idea of overlooking such a duty.
Ardou blinked at Niru with apparent disapproval, but she also gleamed. He could see it through the dimness of their bedroom, where they whispered to each other after an exuberant play that left him with a feral tangle at the back of his head. It would take a bit of nut-oil to undo the following morning, and a bit of combing pain, but in the moment he didn’t care. He clasped her nearest hand and made his charming face, which usually softened Ardou.
She scrubbed his cheek, making her patient face. She knew as well as he did that his contraband instruments—secreted under the floorboards—were already risk enough. They slept above an outrage: their reams of composition, and Niru’s vielle and lyre, all of it wrapped in leathers against the damp of approaching autumn.
“Old Avi says he’ll join us, and Elim and Barlini.” Their former band-mates—the ones who yet survived—were just as eager to let sound loose. “Avi has a flautist cousin in Carselonne. She’s got experience holding concerts since the invasion. So far hasn’t been caught.” Niru smiled out his temptation, coy and languid.
“It’s one thing to strum alone, with minimal application,” Ardou whispered. “A ring of music-makers will lift a wave that might well carry back into town.” Her instrument was her voice, and she hadn’t used it fully for nearly a year.
“If we set up in the stone-glen, I agree. But for this we’ll head further north.” He rose onto an elbow, wanting to use more gestures in his persuasion as he spoke. “Remember that grove in the little forest about a day’s dawdle from here, with the freshet and fairy-rings? We can gather there in a camp, for a night or two. What business does Anselm have there in the wilds?”
“That’s nearly at their border.” But Ardou’s gleam had gained some.
“It’s nearly in Vast Bog,” he modified. Which was technically part of Anselm but which was in fact a wasteland void of people and Anselm’s laws, for not much could be done with a noxious swamp. “There are no weaponmen there—it will be a reprieve.” He twisted his lips in disdain of occupied Leel.
“That grove had every footprint of Liēr.” Ardou seemed to be pining as she relaxed into the pillows, disappearing into remembrance.
“They summon us to a spot where they can be worshipped again.” He put a thumb against his breastbone, as if he felt the call of their god where it counted most. “We can make a little Liēr-staff for the occasion. I’ll bring a hatchet and paint.” Niru smiled at the thought of such a liberation.
“Dancing,” Ardou daydreamed.
“Singing,” Niru breathed. He nuzzled Ardou’s nose and basked in her agreement. “A picnic of wine and cheeses, and something sweet to tempt Liēr to give us their blessing of passion for the coming year.”
“You are already blessed with that,” she chuffed against his throat. She threw her arms around him and pulled him close again, and theirs was an embrace of mutual gratitude amid the mutual deprivation of their heart-skills.
These heart-skills were released on the Day of Passion, as Niru promised. He and Ardou and Barlini crept from Leel before the sun rose—the days were growing shorter, though summer’s mildness lingered. They walked on nimble feet through Niru’s favorite weather—curling mist so thick that it muffled the very world and tried to convince the trio that Oss wasn’t touched by Anselm. Weaponmen lurked about—logy in their watch—but there were only a handful in pre-dawn hours. They were easily evaded.
The hikers carried sacks of contraband, but once they were north of town they could relax. This year the Day of Passion fell on a Homeday—Niru wouldn’t be missed at the flourmill, where he made his coin since the invasion. He gripped his spouse’s hand and pulled her onward—what bliss to anticipate the feel of strings under his fingers rather than the rim of the slipper, which he was employed to shake, straddling a crossbeam while stronger workers hoisted sacks up to the hoppers. When the grinders were at full power and the workers caterwauling, Niru could sometimes sing under his breath and not be heard—not even by Paimini working the slipper on the opposite beam. There were rarely any weaponmen at the mill, but collaborators were unseen threads in the cloak of conquered Oss.
It took them most of the day to reach the distant grove. It lay beyond the grain-fields—a leftover knot of forest spreading forlornly under the border. As it didn’t impede the farmers who wanted nothing of that frontier, the knot had been spared from axes and left to the wild—an untouched piece of Oss. That wholesomeness livened Niru. He tested his freedom with a shout as he slipped into the woods just as the sun began to gild the branches in its descent.
“Evohē!” came a reply from deeper in the forest. A most forbidden expression—the defunct greeting among the preservers who once warded Oss.
No preserver emerged to greet them. It was just Old Avi being rebellious in this sequestered place, where he could spread his musician presence after all this time. He stepped onto the path with the fullest grin, hands outstretched.
“Evohē,” Niru echoed, testing a word he’d never uttered even when preservers lived. He clasped Old Avi’s hands—gnarled in their disuse but pulsing with strength. “Did you get here early as planned?”
“Last evening. This is my cousin, Sordou Yel of Carselonne.” Avi presented an elder figure in a dress as dark as eggplant. “She’s managed to hold onto her flutes through this whole abomination. She’ll play with us.”
“With gladness I join you tonight. It’s a precious invitation.” Sordou pulled at her braid in a gesture of devotion to Liēr.
Avi slapped Niru’s back as Sordou shook everyone’s hands. The delight in every face—in Niru’s breast and spine—could almost illumine the forest that slowly gave up its light as this mutiny of musicians coalesced. Elim was already there, tuning their portable clavier, which was normally hidden in its several components back in Leel. Weaponmen had destroyed Elim’s family pianos, but here was a lightweight survivor no larger than Elim’s chest. It was subtle as a minor after-key on its makeshift stand of deadfall.
Niru couldn’t help it. He twisted away from the others to pirouette about the grove. Never much of a dancer, he articulated sheer elation at being here among his kindred. Not just his fellow Oss, but true-minds in need of music as tongues are in need of drink. His heart-skill had fled its prison, if only for a night, and his fingers itched for the strings as his toes expressed the lightness in his body.
No one minded him. Even Ardou was distracted as she made small talk with Sordou, admiring a set of flutes laid out on a velvet cloth. Happily sweaty, Niru left off cavorting to unpack his instruments and tune the strings, indifferent to the decibels he created as he plucked. He even closed his eyes as he hummed and twisted the keys. What relief to be in a place where a melody wasn’t bait for weaponmen.
Elim and Old Avi set out a communal supper, and Niru—true to his promise—found a discarded bough and made of it a Liēr-staff that Sordou and Barlini helped him paint. It was only four feet tall, and very poorly shaped by Niru’s inexpert chipping, but in the light of oil-pots they gave the staff a face, a winding sable braid, and eyes that shone like onyx. This one had no relation to the Liēr-staff that used to loom in the heart of Leel, before invasion—that one’s braid had been brown and its eyes a vivid mauve. The Liēr-staff Niru made was in honor of elder Sordou, who had made a trek of days to add her flute to their devotion in the grove.
“Idealized.” Sordou picked up the cue, but compared her greying braid to the infallible black on the Liēr-staff.
“They always were,” Niru grinned—then lost his glad expression when the past tense escaped his mouth, as if it were a verdict pronounced on their god-in-hiding.
“The staffs are meant to reflect unbounded youth in its full potential.” Barlini seemed proud of her tutelage, but flushed at her gaff when she met the eye of Sordou.
“Eat.” Ardou put a dish in Niru’s hands: figs warmed over the fire and several kinds of cheese and hot-smoked spacklefish. The food tasted more of life than anything he had eaten since the invasion, and the spice-cake soaked in honey was as much a treat for him as for the Liēr-staff, where chunks of cheese and dessert were piled on a plate beneath the totem.
The musicians lolled on quilts and loosened their fingers with wine, as the paint dried on the Liēr-staff and the moths discovered the lamps set about the clearing. Each one of the six clipped off a lock of hair and burned it in a dish at the foot of the staff. Sordou and Old Avi rocked in prayers for protection, and at last the grove was sacrosanct enough to fill with music—an abandonment of sound that lifted the musicians out of occupied Oss, up to a space of being where one’s self was not coerced to do anything against its nature.
It wasn’t Old Avi’s percussion that awoke the very world. It was Barlini’s deep-voiced thrum-harp, whose sound Niru felt in his chest whenever she pulled her bow across the strings. It was Ardou’s celestial singing that held, it seemed, the shade of every melody ever sung—a gorgeous patina on giant wings that sailed over Niru’s head. It was Elim’s accompaniment—they backed up Ardou’s voice with a baritone that Niru envied. His own voice was a tenor, and serviceable enough, but never as convincing as Ardou’s thrust or Elim’s undercurrent.
These were the richest sounds, but Sordou’s copper flute was the finishing ribbon they invited, and Niru’s lute or vielle added playfulness to the pieces that were spun out in the grove. As Ardou swayed in the center of the clearing, loosing tones improbably sustained—the most beautiful of all the instruments—Niru’s eyes grew damp and his throat too tight to utter the merest vocal over his chattering lyre. Eventually he gave up, shaking his head with a smile. He gazed at his instrument as a parent gazes down on their swaddled child, marveling at this reunion of muscle and music.
He left the singing to Ardou and Elim and sometimes reedy Barlini. He found his bliss in watching Ardou twirl about with her rattles, indulging her heart-skill. Beyond, under ruskwood boughs that stooped with history, Sordou was only a face and a gleaming flute. Her hair and dark-clad limbs pulled the rest of her into shadows—a fabulous effect of the trance that Niru enjoyed thanks to the music and the wine, and the near-licentious relief of this stolen moment.
Sordou’s floating head wasn’t the only strange effect. As the music swelled, it seemed the grove expanded. The trees began to sway as Ardou swayed with her singing. He knew it was his fancy, but still he was enthralled as he watched the ruskwood branches begin to glow a yellow-violet. This light tinctured every moth-wing as the insects danced through the air, whirling around the oil-pots. The knobs of autumn mushrooms radiated the same bruised shining. Their stubby fungal heads, in a ring not far from Niru, pulsed in time to the music, as the branches that banished Anselm waved to Avi’s drumbeat.
Niru blinked—he sat erect and missed a fret. Then he smiled and nodded again and doubled down on his playing. He knew it wasn’t real, but still it was an honor—the sight of Liēr themself oscillating in the grove not far from Ardou. The god took the form of the staff, as if in recognition of this minor offering of cheese and cake and music. Their braid wrapped around their trunk and swung about their ankles, their face and figure rejecting any one way of being—now male and then now female in their shape, pleased to embody what wasn’t a contradiction. At times they danced with knives, at others with blossom-branches heavy with sleeping birds. Their features were sometimes wrathful, and sometimes as serene as Ardou’s expression.
“Day of Passion!” Niru crowed, and others did the same, and the force of their instruments intensified as Liēr swayed in full approval and as the boughs over Niru’s head knotted together amorously. He imagined he could hear the branches slipping into unity, and the beating of the mushrooms in the grass.
“Heart of Oss!” he added, nearly burning the pads of his fingers on his strings. Tears of longing stained his cheeks as he recalled his homeland before the subjugation. As if in response to this, Liēr looked suddenly fiercer and grew a curving sword across their back. Their hair unloosed from its braid and swelled out in defiance, and now they were a preserver in a blue-black uniform, and their eyes were bright with fury as they drew and brandished their sword. The gesture was like a promise.
It was only Niru’s fancy—his particular drunkenness—and no amount of wishing for protectors would turn the subjugators into charnel. Liēr’s projection reflected this understanding, for soon they were braided again, the sword evaporated, their empty hands uplifted in supplication. With a mildness much like Ardou’s, Liēr danced about the grove, a magnet for the moths and Niru’s fascination. He’d had very little sense of Oss’s god-in-hiding since the invasion. Now this sense was a surfeit in his breast, and Niru wallowed.
The grove lost its pulsing aspect of hallucination. Liēr had dissipated and Ardou was resting her throat as the other musicians played with waning energy. Even the moths seemed listless as Ardou leaned against Niru, allowing him room to strum as she stroked the nape of his neck. The Day of Passion, after all—of course there were gentle kisses in the grove between the spouses, and looks of invitation arcing through the air between Elim and Barlini.
“Sing your latest, my only,” Ardou whispered in Niru’s ear as a delicate minuet approached its closing.
The other players couldn’t have heard her, and yet when the piece was over, each one paused and looked at Niru. Musician instinct, surely—common as the growth of trees, but equally mystifying. Niru smiled and bobbed his head, swapping out lyre for vielle.
“A dirge for Oss,” he introduced as he twisted the tuning-keys.
The other musicians nodded in expectation.
“I deem it a just contribution,” Niru added, cocking his head at the surrounds—at the fulsome evening. He plinked a test, and then another. “But not a final send-off, for Oss will return to us. I don’t know how, but I feel it strong in my bones.”
The others did more than nod. They beat on their instruments in full agreement. Elim threw back their head and let out a howl for Liēr.
Niru settled his bow in his palm and laid it against the strings. Ardou picked up a rattle—knowing the piece already. She shook out a wretched rhythm and Niru took up the cue and drew out the deepest mewl from his instrument. As misery filled the air, he filled his lungs with the death-sweet of the grove—the autumn grassiness, the black-green scent of moss, and the darkling whiff of hibernating life. Using this inhalation, Niru exuded his plaint:
They seized our ancient codex,
Stained its vivid pages with that horrid, not-quite-red.
They broke apart its backbone,
And moldered it with disregard.
(I sigh, Ardou supported, in this interval.)
The pages of our codex
Are shreds and ash and remnants in the now-polluted wind.
But the hand of these pages’ author
Bides in—
Elim unexpectedly added their voice to the elegy, but the tone and decibel—the very placement of their note—was garish and off. Niru glanced in the direction of the clavier, irritated by the falseness of the other’s interpretation. But the shaking of Ardou’s rattle and the mewling of Niru’s vielle were suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of Avi screaming.
Spread beside the clavier, lit by toppled oil-pots, Elim lay contorted.
Barlini danced grotesquely on her harp-stool—the impact of whizzing bolts that sheared apart her body.
Avi’s scream of horror turned into a scream of pain.
A bolt tore off the face of Niru’s vielle. Onto the grass he dropped, with Ardou whole beneath him, thank Liēr.
But what was wholeness now, with weaponmen emerging from the trees? Niru couldn’t count them—he pressed his face into Ardou’s, not willing to see. Too soon he was hauled to his feet, smacked four times across the face, then pushed onto his knees as an enemy bound his hands behind his back.
The grove was a burial ground—six lives were winking out, with every note they’d played this lavish evening. Liēr’s dance-prints in the grass were erased by Ansel boots, which crushed the mushroom-caps and smashed through instruments in another kind of dance, this one lumbering and full of indignation. The whiteness of the soldiers’ uniforms shocked Niru’s eyes, which avoided the sight of crumpled Elim and Barlini—of Avi, who was wounded. Shot through the knee by a bolt.
By some small grace his Ardou was unharmed. She drooped at Niru’s side, a shuddering thing in chains as weaponmen desecrated what was left of this memory too sweet for occupied Oss. By another grace Sordou stood, unbound and unharassed, avoiding Niru’s gawp and Avi’s condemnation, which he shouted at his cousin in disbelieving curses. Around her eggplant dress the moths still circulated, but they left her for the backs of weaponmen—the only brightness in the gloom once the oil-pots were snuffed out in soured dirt.
Five lives are forfeit now, Niru corrected as he sobbed. The sixth is an affront to everything that ever breathed in fellow-feeling. But he had no will to curse the collaborator. The greater treachery was his alarming separation from his spouse. Anselm pulled him from Ardou’s side and out of the mourning grove.
It is no grace, of course, to survive a volley of bolts at the hands of weaponmen. Elim and Barlini had the favor of Liēr. Such a blessing should have befallen myself and Ardou, Niru regrets, rather than a scaffold death. Rather than his own escape from a dungeon hole—more miracle than blessing. It was something fruitless given to Niru by his god. Old Avi felt the same, for he opened his foremost vein with a bit of gravel three nights ago, in the pit he shared with Niru, instead of testing his bounds. Now only Ardou remains in Anselm’s grip—though this is optimism, for every Oss alive is a condemned.
The yellowed, flowerless grass before the scaffold is finally empty of the crowd. The autumn sunshine has died, and the season’s chill has roused itself and now prepares for winter. Niru shivers in his meagre clothes, still hidden under brush. The leaves in his shrubbery have retracted in fear of frost, and the last of its berries have fallen to the ground. Under mid-moon the field appears to be void of weaponmen. The latest trio of soldiers assessed what hangs in chains, determined the causes are lost, and trotted back to the outpost they’ve made of Leel. That was an hour ago, and still Niru waits in fear of an Ansel trap.
On the scaffold hang four corpses and two surviving condemned. They sag from the harnesses that clasp them at the throat and waist. Those that still have arms are also manacled at the wrists. Ardou has been left with one of her upper limbs. The other lies at her feet, along with her hair and tongue—the instrument of a singer—before the placard announcing her treason: cultural sedition it reads in Oss and Ansel. As if it signals truth.
There isn’t much left of Ardou and her fellow condemned, and there isn’t much left of Niru, mostly mind-burnt in his shrub. His horror was exorcized along with Ardou’s shrieking, and now he’s as drained of revulsion as Ardou is drained of blood. She lived, between the stain at her mother’s hips and the stain beneath her feet on the dripping scaffold. She left a mark of beauty on her land. Life as Niru knew it is over now, but Ardou is still alive in the technical sense. Every so often she sputters, or waggles a leftover finger. Somehow she hasn’t collapsed against the harness and choked herself, as happens to those who haven’t yet bled to death.
No more, Niru rocks in his hidden patch. Remorse is all that remains of his distress.
As certain as he can be that Anselm has left no guard, he shudders out of the leaves and creeps towards the scaffold. He holds his knife flat to his chest, worried it might reflect the tumescent mid-moon overhead. No more, is his refrain, which distracts him from his self-loathing. No preservers swarmed the scaffold to salvage Ardou and the other condemned—to protect the sacred finery of Oss, which they vowed when they took their oath. It’s easier to resent the absent protectors of Niru’s people than to wrangle with his culpability.
He scurries up the steps, looking over his shoulder. He will suffocate in his grief once his spousal duty is done—it fills his legs and stomach with sharp-edged rocks that make it hard to move, and those rocks will flood his chest and seal his throat once he has done the only thing that he can do to ward his Ardou. He is stiff with more than the cold as he scrapes across the scaffold, avoiding the other condemned and gagging on the odors.
“No more,” he sobs as he stands in front of Ardou.
Her head is bowed in her near-unconscious state. The harnesses are locked, but even if he could free her, there’s no living left in his spouse, who holds onto an ember though she’s been exsanguinated and her stomach disassembled with a blade. He knows—with a life-mate’s intuition—that Ardou doesn’t sense him standing with his brow pressed to her own.
“No more,” he breathes as he kisses her a final time, then—with surprising readiness—pushes his carving knife between her breasts and ends her anguish.
For a time he holds her body as it sags and cools in its harness. He would stand with her forever if he could. He’d erase the blight of Anselm if he had one mote of power. But Niru is a leaf made of temporary veins that are as fragile as the light that penetrates gossamer skins. There is no joining of a multitude of insufficient strengths to make even one preserver out of civilians. His people will continue to gather before the deaths of blameless compatriots, as he will be forced to do if he stays in Oss.
He is of nowhere now—Oss does not exist, and the living as he knew it has turned to offal on the boards of the loathsome scaffold. When he can bear to back away from Ardou’s remains, he does his civic duty for the other surviving condemned, who begs for Niru’s knife in ragged snorts. Then he scuttles away from the scaffold—away from Leel and the howl of Oss to his east and west and south—before he can be recaptured by asphyxiating grief. He flees towards the nowhere and the nothingness of Vast Bog, where there’s no steel or bottle-pine or even the limbs of people to offset the marshiness and sinkholes of a mud that will be fatal.
| Ranylt Richildis is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Ottawa. Her short fiction has appeared in SFF venues such as PodCastle and Strange Horizons, among others, and her story “Charlemagne and Florent” was selected for Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, introduced by Margaret Atwood. Ranylt was the founding editor of the Aurora-nominated Lackington’s Magazine, an online SFF quarterly devoted to stories told in unusual or poetic language. |  |
One thought on ““Niru Wallowed” by Ranylt Richildis”