It’s over. It’s all over…
She let go the railing and fell bonelessly into a heap. There was nothing left in her and she closed her eyes and let the blackness take her away, down, down, into the Deeps where the dead of Isle Calinda lay. Where they rested. Where Ilior rested. She smiled faintly.
I’m coming, my friend. I’m coming.
And his deep, rumbling voice, full of love and free of pain, answered.
Not yet.
The night was thick and black as the bulbous moon hid behind storm clouds. The jungle teemed, as if biding its time when the embers would finally burn out and it could reclaim the land stolen from it so many years ago.
Behind the melting shell of the keep came a rattle and then a small explosion of glass and burnt timber. A plume of oily smoke rose from the ruins, and a deafening roar silenced the jungle’s cacophony for a few brief moments.
Svoz strode out of the remnants of the greenhouse, knocking aside the few beams that remained standing as if they were sapling branches.
“Where is she?” he seethed to the nigh, his blood-red chest heaving. “Where is the old husk?” He threw back his head, unleashing another deafening roar.
In the silence that followed, he listened to the wind. He sniffed the air. His master’s scent was there, detected under the smoke, under the stench of every other human that exhaled their stinking breath; and shed skin, bit by bit; and released their hair, strand by strand, into the air.
Svoz found his master’s debris and inhaled. The whole of this wretched, watery orb telescoped like one of master’s little spy glasses to one place: a ship. The floating vessel of timber and hemp his master loved so much. Loved more than anything.
But for her.
The sirrak felt the pull. He was supposed to be with the master. Bound to him by blood, to be separated for too long was dangerous. But his master’s last order had been to kill the old witch. Svoz’s black eyes seemed to blacken further at the memory.
The witch had won. She’d cheated, of course. The glass of his weakling cousins, the djinn, could hold them for eternities upon eternities, but not him. It had given way to his might—as all things should. Had she not cheated, his victory would have been assured. He’d have cleaved her in half. With one hand, if he so chose.
Twin plumes of putrid smoke puffed out of his nostrils. He’d spent his short tenure in the djinn’s glass plotting all the ways he’d tear her apart. Another deprivation. She was dead. He could smell her debris and it was rotting. His master’s last order was moot and now Svoz couldn’t move until he uttered another.
Call me, master, he said to the wind. Call me and I will return to you.
In the meantime…
Svoz craned his massive head to the jungle. His stomachs rumbled. He loped away from the melted stone and embers that reminded him of his own plane but they held no nostalgia. There was no blood on his plane and for it, he and others of his ilk would subjugate themselves to the human vessels that were full to bursting with it. But the jungle was rife with creatures that would satiate his body, and that would do. For now.
A slow smile spread over his face, one of dual pleasure. His hand shot down and he snatched up a blind mole, poking its head out of hole in the soil. He smiled as the bone and gristle burst under his mighty jaw, a small but satisfying spurt of blood following after.
And he smiled to think he still held some power on this plane. The old witch had called him a slave. How wrong she was.
Master is slave to me until our blood oath is fulfilled. Call me, master. He swallowed the mole and it went down his gullet in a visible lump.
I’m free now and I wish to play.