Page 11 of Fog of War
We were standing far closer than I’d thought, and when a stray breeze disturbed the stillness of night, her scent wafted by. She was as lively as her temperament. Flowers and rain and human musk. Her soul was energetic, vibrant…
I let her arm go, swallowing hard.
“I’ll go paint Leonide’s spire then,” she said, that heat creeping up her cheeks once more. “Good luck. I hope that you find the mate you’re looking for.”
The human returned to the Satoris clan, where Leonide bent his head so she could paint his spire. She gave him a human hug–not the back clap of a venandi, but the kind where her arms wrapped around his ribs and her soft face smooshed against his chest. He patted her back but was at a loss of what to do, and when she pulled away, half her features were imprinted with his lumi powders. Then she ran off with Leopha, chatting and trailing her fingertips through the thick fog. I watched until they were swallowed by the throngs of clanmates, sinking into the hopelessness of my predicament once more.
With her there to tease, I’d forgotten for a blissful moment what was to come.
06
Gabbie
Leopha pulled me by the hand as she bumped and shoved her way through her family members like she was a bowling ball. Their plates collided and mandibles clacked like echoing skeletons in the still air. Faces with painted eye sockets and mouth parts, totems that looked like ancient humans, talons dipped in neon colors…
Had I been transported to a demonic rave in the Underworld? Hades would have been proud.
“Outta the way!” Leopha bellowed, yanking me towards the front of our watch tower. Eventually we hit the edge of the packed group and I braced myself against the railing with wide eyes.
The valley stretched out around us like a bowl filled with dry ice and a chill descended, biting into my cheeks and ears. Fog poured from the ground along streams beneath the grass and waterlogged ditches, collecting in the damp air as dusk shifted to night. Pink prisms strummed the horizon, embedded in the sky like the powder in the grooves of my fingers.
A drone glided by, buzzing as loud as a cicada. It turned towards me and examined my face. I glanced at the holoscreens hovering above the myriad watch towers littered throughout thebattlefield, and saw myself reflected back like a kiss cam at a baseball game. I gave the drone a little wave, fighting off the instinct to scrunch up my shoulders and disappear.
“Good luck, everyone!” I yelled at it, making a heart symbol with my hands. Whistles, clacks, growls, and hollers rose around the valley. The drone wandered away, looking for the next novel face.
“So uh, what I said about orgies,” Leopha yelled in my ear.
I laughed as she handed me a shot of blue alcohol. “Please tell me we don’t have to watch your brother at least?”
I’d expected her to scrunch up in disgust like any human sibling, but instead she clinked her glass against mine. “Hebetterfuckin’ converge!” She threw back her drink and tossed it down a tube in the watchtower wall. I followed suit,absolutelyneeding the liquid courage. “But if it sucks, tell me, okay? Battle consummation isn’t exactly everyone’s forte. The hjarnahateit.”
I nodded, snatching up another shot from a leviplatter hovering nearby. As I swallowed the drink in one gulp, an eerie horn warbled through the valley and the merriment fell silent. Leopha grabbed my hand, and for the first time, I realized how nervous she felt. I leaned into her side and squeezed her palm with both of my hands in solidarity.
“He’s going to be magnificent,” I murmured into her shoulder as the vid drones all turned towards the center of the battlefield. She squeezed my hand with a timid flutter of her mouth parts.
On the holoscreens, an ancient venandi with cracked grey plates ascended a crystal dais carved straight from the ground. He was adorned with a mantle built from thin, shivering blades that warbled and sang when he moved as if he were wearing a cowl of pheasant feathers. The flat tapes of gold decorated his calves and waist, too, catching the light thrown off by his whitebody paint. Totems hung from his spires like a veil to either side of his face, tinkling and chiming as they jostled about his chest.
His entire body was painted in white except for his groin plates, which had been painted red and matched the half-mask that obscured his mouth and nose with uncanny human features. Wrist cuffs connected two extra digits to the outside of his hands with a ring and fine gold chains that moved with his talons. When he stretched his arms to the prismatic lights in the sky, the drones caught deep carvings in his plates that harkened to anatomical illustrations of muscle tissue inGrey’s Anatomy.
The effect was astonishing. Ancient, unforgiving, exhilarating…
“That’s Tyrus Murua Primus. The high priest of the Muruic Temple,” Leopha whispered.
He spoke in a ghostly, vibrating rasp that didn’t sound weak but otherworldly. Like Chiron on the River Styx asking for your coin or a grim reaper that had known every human age, a timeless being that had stretched his mortality beyond the limits of science. Goosebumps rose across my skin as he chanted Muruic prayers and tossed powder into the four quadrants of the battlefield, honoring each clan.
As the prisms of light in the sky faded–the sun having dipped too far below the horizon to ignite the mountainous veins of crystal–he inhaled deep and curled over himself. Then the war horn rose again and my mouth fell open.
The Murua Primuswasthe war horn.
His body blurred from the vibration and the metal cape about his shoulders shivered like a thousand rattlesnakes. The sound reached through every cluster of onlookers as loud as a cruise ship set to sea. Like when the Tetradi champion had purred for me, the vibration slithered under my skin and ignited every nerve ending with pleasure just on the precipice of lust.
It lasted for as long as the priest had breath and long after he’d stopped, the echo sloshing back and forth across the landscape in deep, sweeping gongs. And then he sat upon his crystal pedestal, murmuring to himself as he swayed to the beat of drums being projected beneath every watchtower.
“Wow,” I breathed, panting from the way my lungs had constricted and my lower abdomen tingled. Leopha mirrored me, blinking in shock.
“Holy shit,” she awed.
“What was that?”
