Sturmkinter

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons anywhere, blessedly. Monsters were plenty; wherever the sky’s belly grayed and swelled and bore storms, one was sure to find myriads of monsters as wild and vicious as their natal winds. But dragons were singular, and free from the tantrum whims of nature—indeed it seemed as though they birthed their own storms. Although thunder and lightning often portended lesser terrors, there was but one sure herald for a dragon.

Warning came from the smoldering ruins of Sicusa, toppled from its mountain-perch: “Schicksal! Schicksal! Black rain falls, and the city with it! A dragon flies for the Fractal Shore!”

---

The Portal of Menze, more commonly referred to as “the Valley,” was a miles-wide cleave through the Bulwark Range, whose mountains, if Draichian cartographic estimations were to be believed, ran northward and southward “forever, probably.” On foot the Valley would take the better share of a month to traverse, which was obviously absurd, but expeditioners attempting to search the Bulwark for alternative routes found their rations inexplicably rotting, their chimeric steeds fleeing or throwing themselves to their deaths, and finally, for those few who dared persist, their bodies would twist and wither like sun-starved flora until they either relented or perished. So, the Valley it was.

Or wasn’t. After all, there was no reason to travel it. Its skies were often ill, its land largely inarable, and its single road was broken in most places or outright missing in others. All that waited on its sunset end was the Fractal Shore—or sometimes Sea—across which was, to once again cite the scholars of Draich and their exhaustive research, “nothing, probably.”

A Valley leading nowhere, a Portal through a shield guarding nothing, filled with storm-borne monsters and heretical outcasts. Small wonder then, that when the Schicksal storm which had leveled Sicusa veered west, not a single Dragonslayer was sent after it.

Keine went anyway. No one had sent her. No one would miss her.

---

The first week was fortuitously dry, and the better part of the road was on the east end. Riding atop her polymule, Bounty, she made good time. He was an old boy, a stag-goat graftling as tall and broad as a warhorse. His fur was thickly scored, his skin rife with callouses and scabs from innumerable grafts, most of them botched and removed, and altogether they made him a monument to the poor study-habits of a dozen neophyte teraturges. He would have been slaughtered and salvaged, but Keine had bought him off the butcher for five marks and a bad joke. That’d been four years back, and now she wouldn’t trade him for anything. He made month-long trips like this easily, and for her, easier.

She saw no one. Few people still explored the Valley; scholars found it beneath them, merchants found it profitless, and thus so did the bandits. Only heretics called the Portal home, and they lived further in, in the ruins of old Journeymen settlements. None of those this far east. The Journeymen must have realized how close they were to becoming Journeyedmen, and didn’t stop until the Bulwark was finally behind them, and they had reached the land of morning.

At night she pulled off the road regardless. The Valley was wider than many cities, and though there were few trees, closer to its colossal walls the ground grew more torn and rugged. Grassy, earthen waves formed hollow hills and shady burrows. Thick, woody branches sprouted from crevices in the rocky barriers above. In cramped, dark spaces she chewed rations of dried meat and hardtack, and when Bounty settled, she would pick small berries from his mane of brushy vines—a product of some particularly ambitious and talented student of teraturgy.

Grafting was an occult and rightfully reviled practice, but she wasn’t going to turn her nose up at a supposedly limitless supply of food, and he didn’t seem to mind. Bounty laid still, sleeping, and when she leaned back against his hide, amidst the mottled fur and patches of amphibious skin or reptilian scale, she could feel the beating of a heart he had not been born with. She would tuck her own wretched arm, wrapped in gauze and a thick leather glove, beneath her cloak and listen, and wonder if her own heartbeat was alien too.

In her uncursed hand she clutched a small pendant, felt the embossed form of a fallen god against her palm. The metal was cold, but holding it made her feel warm and wanted. It helped her sleep.

---

Early in the second week, she woke to distant thunder. Peering out from her hillside burrow, she saw the sky was heavy gray for miles, and fast approaching was a dense wall of rain. Not a Schicksal, but severe enough to warrant waiting out. Before it hit, she dug out the entrance to their hideaway to ensure it wouldn’t flood, and gathered rainwater in a bowl for Bounty. As the thunder grew closer and the wind quickened, she sat back and shut her eyes, and listened to the muted drumming of rainfall upon the hill.

Eventually she heard monsters.

Some shrieked and howled like animals; at times was hard to tell a wolf from something much worse. Others, though, made sounds unlike any worldly creature. Through the wind she heard the clicking staccato of hunting calls, and the guttural layers of growling from things with too many mouths. There came the horn-like groaning of colossi and the quaking of their steps—their footprints would become ponds when they had gone. From high above, she heard deep and resonant wailing, as if from under water, echoing the thunder.

She kept her eyes shut. In a way these sounds, as grand and terrible as they were, were still a comfort. The presence of lesser monsters meant the absence of something greater. When dragons came, everything else tended to steer clear. Keine did not fear monsters. She did not fear dragons. She—

She felt something crawl over her leg and startled, jerking away and swallowing back a yelp. In the dim light she watched a large centipede skitter to the burrow’s mouth, stopping just before the broken veil of water. It waited there for what seemed like minutes, until suddenly, inexplicably, it stood upright. A little column of legs, outstretched to either side as if in worship. There it remained motionless again.

Lightning cracked far away. Keine saw something massive shift and vanish in the impenetrable rain. When she looked back to the dirt, the centipede was gone.

Her heart beat fast and her wretched arm arched. She touched her pendant. She was not afraid.

At length the storm passed, and she rode on.

The next day she found signs of the ancient journey, scattered about like debris left in the wake of a hurricane. Broken stone walls sunken into the earth and overrun with moss and vines; man-made craters and collapsed wells; wide swathes of beaten-down land where hordes of animals may have once been left to graze. Nothing lasting. In this last stretch, the Journeymen did not settle for long.

The Fractal Shore was close.

---

Many more times the sky clouded and she rode through frustrated winds and miserly drizzles, but it wasn’t until the end was near that another storm found her. The sky grayed before dawn, she heard thunder by sunrise. Bounty huffed anxiously and Keine felt an unnatural quivering deep in her chest. She decided to heed these warnings, veering sharply off the road to make for the Valley’s northern wall.

The rain caught them first, introducing itself not with some mild shower, but with a torrent. Heavy sheets fell upon and around them, pelting her back like hail and crackling like fire on the earth. It filled her ears, her eyes, it chilled her skin. Thunder grew closer, grew louder, until she could feel her bones rattling with every boom. She did not shrink. With one hand she gripped Bounty’s reins, and with the other she held her pendant to her chest. Her eyes turned skyward, squinting into the roiling armada of clouds. There was no sense praying to a fallen god—he couldn’t hear her and even if he could, Keine doubted he’d answer. But that was fine, she didn’t pray for answers.

Lightning flashed and for a blink she could see through the storm. The wall was close, rivers of rainwater ran down its rocky face. In the distance she spotted it—light. A tiny dot buried in a black hole at the base of the cliff. A cave. Fire. Even once the lightning had faded she saw it burned into her vision. Bounty saw it too. She didn’t need to flick the reins, he was clever enough for a man, let alone a beast, and redirected all on his own.

From behind them—or beside, or above, somewhere—a terrible roar pierced the thunder. Her eyes darted, but she bit back her panic. The rain fell hard, but not black, and though Keine didn’t know the sound of every monster, she knew this was not the cry of a dragon. Nor was the cry that followed it, or the one after that. The unnatural howls quickly became too numerous to count and impossible to place, so she didn’t bother. She clutched the reins tighter, brought herself lower. She watched the fire. Bounty moved in great bounds, slicing through the wind and rain entirely unencumbered. Every dash was sure, every leap found solid rock or resilient earth. If anything was chasing them, it would have done better giving up.

As they drew close the light was snuffed, but it didn’t matter. Bounty burst into the cave and came to a quick and easy halt. The cacophony of storm and beast quieted so suddenly Keine thought she might have gone deaf, but her ears adjusted, and it returned again not silenced but guarded. The air was filled with the smell of petrichor.

Wasting no time, she hopped down and put herself between Bounty and the cave’s throat. She could see nothing past a few feet, but just as surely as she felt the rain on her back and the storm in her arm, she felt a presence in the dark. If it was heretics she likely would have been met with fire and steel already, and a monster would have been even less patient. Whatever the case, standing there like a mute idiot wasn't going to do her any good.

“It’s okay,” she said, soft and quiet, though her voice still managed an echo. “I’m not a monster.”

There came a sharp snort of laughter from the dark, and Keine recoiled, albeit more from surprise than fear. Lightning revealed a narrow man leaning against the cave’s end—shallower than she’d anticipated. She saw a hood and rags, but no armor and no sword. Not a heretic. When the dark settled once more, she could still see one eye. It was a deep, fiery orange, and glowed as if it had drank in the flash of light.

“You know, despite evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to believe you.”

“I followed your fire. I don’t mean any trouble, I’d just like to wait out the storm here, if that’s alright with you.”

“Wouldn’t have set it if I didn’t want your company.”

Keine’s fingers twitched. The wet hairs on the back of her neck struggled to rise. “Do we know each other?”

Footsteps. She placed a hand on Bounty’s harness, ready to flee.

“I don’t believe we do,” he said, emerging from the dark. Keine stifled a gasp.

Half his face was gone, or rather, half his face wasn’t his face. The left side was normal enough, with the salted hair and lines of a man in his middle years. The right side, however, had no skin at all. Instead it had lightless onyx scales. Some were as big as a thumb, others as small as a nail, but together they covered every inch. He had no hair on that side, but he did have his nose, as well as his lips, which were covered but not sealed. His ear was gone, but his right eye—the eye she’d seen in the dark—was still bright and held an incredible malice that entirely alien and borne nowhere else on his face. In fact, he was smiling. When he pulled back his hood, she saw the scales on his right hand as well, and they ran up into his sleeves just as they ran beneath the collar of his shirt. She guessed that beneath his right boot was a scaled foot, and above that a scaled leg, and so on for the rest of that side of his body.

Fittingly, he was only half right. She did know him.

“You’re the Halfman,” she muttered.

“Well, my lovely mother named me Dyssos, so I’d prefer that if you don’t mind.” His burning eye looked her up and down. When she said nothing, he went on. “What’s your name?”

“Keinedoter.”

She saw sharpened teeth on the right side of his grin. “‘Un-daughter.’ A cruel mother for you, then.”

He came closer, and Bounty grew tense. Keine let go of his harness and shushed him soothingly, patting his neck and scratching around his horns until he lowered onto the damp ground.

“That’s a marvelous beast,” Dyssos said, sitting down on a rocky jut in the wall. “Big for a polymule.”

“You were expecting me?”

“I noticed you travelling alone—now I know why. Not many people want a Stitcher for company.”

He gestured to her arm, its wrappings soaked but still tight. She turned it from him.

“Sorry,” he said. “‘Grafted,’ then.”

“Cursed,” she corrected, and the Halfman scoffed.

“Curses are for gods. Teraturgy’s for people, though I can see you’re no stranger to either. Who’s that around your neck?”

Keine saw the pendant still dangling over her shirt. Hastily she covered it, only to realize there was no point. This man wasn’t a heretic, and he wasn’t a Polygott. Sour as it was to swallow, he was like her.

She sighed. “Astra.”

“Astra,” he repeated. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

He seemed surprised, perhaps because she’d answered quickly, or perhaps because she’d answered honestly. Keine saw no reason to lie to him.

“Not many kids your age worshipping dead gods. Why him?”

She shrugged.

“Do you know why he fell?” he asked.

“Because storm magic is cursed.”

He nodded side to side, considering. “Because people can’t do it. The thunder, the lightning—can’t touch it. That’s all storms, and storms are for monsters.”

“So is the rain, but there’s still a god of water.”

Another sharp laugh. “True enough, Un-daughter. True enough. So I take it you and your dead god are here to kill the dragon?”

“Aren't you?”

“Sure, one of them.”

“One of them? How many—”

Thunder struck, close. The whole cave rattled, shaking dust and loose pebbles from the walls. Keine heard skittering, and looked down to find dozens and dozens of insects crawling from the dark. Beetles and spiders and things she did not recognize, but mostly there were centipedes. They scurried along the ground, over her boots and Bounty’s hooves, stopping for nothing in their mad dash out of the cave’s mouth. She watched, baffled, as the rain obliterated them, and the wind whipped their shattered bodies away. A handful made it far enough to find shelter beneath fallen branches, but they did not burrow. Instead the centipedes stood upright, like poles, their little legs outstretched, pincers snapping at the air. Soon enough they were crushed too.

“How…” she mumbled, refocusing to find Dyssos was watching them as well. “How many are there?”

“Two,” he said, not taking his eyes off the rain. “Well, two-ish. One’s an egg. That’s the one I’m not killing. Or rather, wasn’t planning to. Now that you’re here I won’t have to worry about it.”

“Why?” she asked, not particularly caring which question he answered, so long as he did.

He didn’t. Instead he stood up, stretched, and moved to the mouth of the cave. “You know what’s always bothered me about teraturgy? Well, one thing, anyway. We’re always taking. Right? Always taking, never giving anything back to the beasties. Seems so strange when you think about it—wasteful, really. Never cared much for the place, but I'm starting to think Sicusa was on to something.”

And with that he threw up his hood and walked out into the storm.

Keine jolted and ran after him, but the wind and rain whipped her hard. Bounty appeared beside her, and she steadied herself against him, but when she got her bearings Dyssos had vanished.

“Come to Liscal,” she heard him shout, his voice miraculously clear in her ears. “Bring her to the college.”

She pulled herself onto Bounty’s saddle, chose the direction she thought made the most sense, and rode. The storm continued to rage, but amidst the horrible chorus of wind and rain and thunder there was no monstrous roaring. On the ground though, she saw more centipedes racing madly or standing upright, oblivious to all but what called them, careless to the doom from above. There might have been hundreds, Keine couldn’t tell. They were a blur of chitin and legs and bugmatter.

Bounty halted suddenly, and Keine’s attention shot up. At first she saw nothing, but gradually the rain began to weaken and some distance away a pillar revealed itself in the mist. It was tall, thin like a tree but it stood resolute against the wind, and it had no branches.

Until it did.

They unfurled like wings. Four, five, a dozen, then a dozen more, and more, and more all the way down either side, but they were not wings, and they were not branches either. They were arms. Long, crooked, terminating in hands with fingers too few or too many. The pillar’s head, she realized, was not solid, but two greater arms interlocked, their hands clasped as if in prayer to the sky. Slowly, they unwound.

Keine felt the air charge with potential. Her wretched arm shuddered and ached. She clutched her pendant, but could not pray.

The world flashed white as lightning struck the bristling pillar. Bounty did not flinch, but Keine shut her eyes and hunched away. She waited for the dark to return, and when it didn’t, she opened her eyes and stared in awe.

The lightning bolt was there, frozen in place, grasped in the pillar’s great hands.

Thunder came, and with it, the Halfman’s voice filled the air.

“O Donnerwyrm! O Lamb of Storms!”

The Donnerwyrm’s arms strained. It pulled, and pulled, until suddenly it tore the bolt in two and held either crackling splinter aloft. Fulminant light dripped in long strands, and each of its hundred hands took hold of one until they were all clutching electric threads.

“O Fated Egg, ne’er to hatch!”

Slowly, the Donnerwyrm began to twist around, and as it did the light of its threads lingered. With each revolution it became more encircled. Encased. It drooped low, curled on itself, and the threads thickened and closed. In the work of minutes, the Donnerwyrm was cocooned in lightning, still attached to the sky by its celestine umbilical cord. As the clouds above tumbled on, the cord pulled taut, and the egg rose languidly off into the air.

The pain in Keine’s arm flared, broke her from her trance. With a tight flick she ushered Bounty on after it, racing until they passed underneath, and then ahead. She led them up another rise, and when they crested, she leapt from his saddle and threw off her cloak. The egg dangled closer, but the winds shifted, and it began to veer away.

Keine gritted her teeth. This was not a dragon, but the pendant burned against her skin, and her heart screamed, and she knew she could not turn away. She raised her wretched arm, opened her wretched hand. She prayed to her wretched god.

The air began to haze around her and a violent hum filled her ears. Still she heard his voice.

“Go unto the Gray and be still!”

Veins of light converged above, and for an infinitesimal moment a thin azure line connected her to the sky. Another heart beat in time with her own. Then lightning struck, but this time Keine did not close her eyes. She watched the bolt coalesce before her, felt its heat and its power threaten to burn her away.

And she grabbed it.

The wrappings of her arm turned to ash, the glove melted and sloughed to the dirt. What remained was a gangly limb coated in gray, chitinous scales, and a hand with just enough fingers, viciously clawed and clutching the bolt of lightning as though it might otherwise disappear—which it would. Tendrils of electricity crawled up to her shoulder, leaving white hot trails that turned the rain to steam. It was warmer than her pendant, but only just.

A red stain began to radiate from her palm, crawling up the bolt and turning it a bright, bloody red. Once it had spread higher than she was tall, she gripped tighter, and jagged cracks formed at the stain’s edges as though it were ice, or glass. With a mighty heave, she tore the crimson, crepitating spear free, and the rest of the bolt fizzled away.

Keine reeled it back, free hand guiding forward, sighting the egg between two fingers.

“May you sleep forever.”

With a bestial cry she flung the bolt out, and it shot across the sky as fast and true as it had come from above. Thunder rumbled in its wake, and when it struck the egg there was a deafening crash before it carried through and vanished into the clouds.

Red light spiderwebbed from the wound. There was a sharp keening sound as the egg flickered, and then exploded with light. Sizzling embers fell to the earth, but nothing else remained. She stood there a long time to make sure.

The rain continued to weaken, the Halfman’s voice grew fainter.

“May you dream of the morning.”

---

The storm followed her to the Valley’s end. The rain had stopped, the thunder quieted, but the sky was gray and low and she could not tell what time it was until she saw the moon setting. A whole day, then, but it didn’t matter. She’d reached the end. The Fractal Shore was before her.

The horizon was glass.

She did not miss this place. There was a reason it went largely unwritten; looking upon it made her eyes burn, and her head fuzzy. Beyond the moon, the black sky was oily and nacreous. It shifted with strange patterns that melted and seeped into the water, which moved not like liquid, but in stutters, and was in fact not water at all, but glass like the skyline. Waves of glinting geometry lapped at the shore and dissolved back into the sea. The sand shimmered and cracked under Bounty’s hooves, unsure of itself.

Past the water’s edge was an umbral mass, a great blot in the night, laying upon the crystalline surface. It was wings and limbs and twisting horns, all too dark and mangled to be discerned from each other, but Keine knew immediately that it was a dragon.

And that it was dead.

She dismounted, and something crunched beneath her boot that did not feel like sand. Looking around, she found shards of ivory at her feet, strewn in a trail all the way to the dragon’s corpse. She picked one up, turned it to find that the underside was pearlescent and warm. When she touched her fingers to it, a heartbeat pulsed against them.

Eggshell, she thought urgently. The Hatchling.

The dragon twitched. Keine jolted back, claws splayed. Her eyes darted skyward, but no black rain fell. No rain fell at all. How? But there was no time for questions. It seemed she would still do what she came to.

She raised her arm to the clouds, commanding dead Astra’s favor. The dragon twitched again, but it had yet to rise and already she felt the puissant hum around her. Fury spilled from her heart and filled her chest. It made her eyes burn, it curled her lips into a snarl. She would be Keinedoter, Dragonslayer, again, and again, and again until it was done.

O Donnerwyrm…

Something pulled itself from the dragon’s carcass and collapsed onto the water. Gasping, Keine yanked her hand down; the charged air dissipated instantly, and with it her fury was doused. Within and without, there was only silence.

The thing began to crawl for the shore. It looked like a blob at first, but as it drew closer she saw claws. They scraped the water’s surface, and it rippled wrongly but did not shatter, or crack, nor did it let the small creature sink through to the yawning void below. Ten thousand Journeymen had trekked a thousand years across this sea, it would hold for this.

Keine had never seen a dragon hatchling, she did not know what to expect. But with the imminent threat gone, the thoughts came rushing back to her. No storm. No black rain. No Schicksal. No Schicksal, no dragon.

And as it finally reached the water’s edge and stood up, she saw it was no dragon indeed.

She was half Keine’s size, and all down her arms and legs, and spattered on her chest and up her neck, even on her cheeks, were scales as black as the Halfman’s. Hair the color of bone fell wildly about her, all the way to her feet, which, like her hands, bore wicked claws. Leathery wings stretched out and then wrapped around her like a blanket. She yawned, a mouth full of sheening razors, and when her eyes finally opened, they were bright as the moon, and just as cold. But not malicious. Not monstrous. Not a monster at all.

The girl was cursed, just like Keine.