Black Halo

‘ If you could predict what I wanted you to say, you wouldn’t have gotten hit. That’s what it means to be a shict.’

‘ So, violent hypocrisy makes a shict? That sounds pretty simple.’

‘ You disagree?’

‘ I do.’

‘ Then tell me.’

‘ No.’

‘ No?’

‘ Whatever I tell you, you’ll just hit me until I say what you want me to say. If I’m saying what you want me to say, I’m not a shict. I know that much.’

She had smiled once.

Kataria stared up at the sky, folding her arms behind her head as she lay upon the shore. The sun was moving slowly, sliding lazily behind the grey clouds, completely unconcerned for her careful scrutiny of its progress. By the time it peered out behind the rolling sheets of cloud, as if checking to see if she were still watching, she estimated three hours had passed.

She craned her neck up, looking past her bare feet.

The shoreline greeted her: vast, empty, eager. It was all too pleased to show her the rolling froth, the murmuring surf, the endless blue horizon stretching out before her.

And nothing more.

There was no wreckage, no movement, not even a corpse.

She sighed, turning her gaze skyward again, wondering just how long it was acceptable to wait for signs that one’s companions might have survived after being cast apart in an explosion of sea induced by a colossal, flesh-eating sea serpent.

Whatdoes one look for, anyway?she wondered. Wood? A severed limb?She recalled the Akaneed’s gaping maw, its sharp, flesh-rending teeth. Stool?

Very little sign of any of that, she noted with a sigh. And why should there be? What werethe chances of one of them washing up, anyway? And if they did, why would they wash up as she did, having lost nothing more than her bow and boots?

They were dead now, she told herself, floating in the sea, resting in a gullet, picked apart by gulls or about to wash up as a bloated, pale, waterlogged piece of flesh. They were dead and she was alive. She should count herself lucky.

She was alive.

And they’re dead.

And she was not.

And he’s dead.

And she was a very lucky shict.

Shict, she repeated that word in her head. I am a shict. Shicts are proud. Shicts are strong. Shicts don’t fight fair. Shicts were given instinct by Riffid, nothing more. Shicts fight to protect. Shicts fight to cleanse. Shicts kill humans. Humans are the disease. Humans are the scourge that overruns this world. Humans build, humans destroy, humans burn and humans kill. Shicts kill humans. Shicts do not trust humans.

Nature conspired in silence at that moment. The roar of the ocean lulled, the whisper of the breeze stilled, the sound of trees swaying stopped. All for a moment just long enough for her to hear a single, insignificant thought that crept into the fore of her consciousness.

But you did.

The creeping thought became a sudden rush of memory, memories she had tried her best to shove in some dark corner of her mind until she could experience a blow against her skull and lose them.

But they came back, no matter how much she tried to block them out.

She remembered the sight of a silver mane, remembered how she thought it was so unusual to see in a human. She remembered how that had made her lower her bow, lower the arrow that had been poised at his head, a head so blissfully free of suspicions and projectiles alike. She remembered being intrigued, remembered following him out.

Shicts kill humans, she told herself, trying to drown the memory in rhetoric. Shicts slaughter humans. Shicts cleanse the world of humans. Mother told you what shicts were.

But she could not drown the sounds. His sounds, the sounds she had studied and learned: the murmurs that meant he was nervous around her, the griping that meant she had said something he would think about if not talk about, the sighs that meant he was thinking about something she had yet to learn about him.

Humans don’t have thoughts, she growled inwardly. Humans only have desires. Humans desire gold, desire land, desire whatever it is they don’t have. Father told you what humans were.

And through it all, she heard the distant beat of a heart. The sound of a heart that had beat fiercely enough to drown out the sound of a roaring sea. The sound of a heart that she was supposed to cut out, the sound of a heart that had fed the pulse in a throat she was supposed to slit. His heart, his pulsating, hideous human heart that she had heard before they departed. His horrific heart. His human heart. The heart she heard now.

But that’s just a memory. This knowledge came without forcing, the thought resounding in her head only once. Those are just sounds. He’s dead now.

And the memories were gone, leaving that thought hanging inside her head.

He’s dead. Your problems are solved.

She rose up, stiffly. She turned from the ocean, not looking back.

He was dead. He was a dead human. Her world was restored. She didn’t feel anything for a dead human. Dead humans did not have heartbeats. She was a shict once more.

This is more than luck, she told herself. This is a blessing from on high.

That thought gave her no comfort as she walked over the dunes and away from the shore.

She was a shict. For her, all that was on high was Riffid.

And Riffid did not give blessings.

‘ What is a human?’ her daughter had asked.

She had paused before answering.

‘ Your father should have told you.’

‘ You said Father didn’t know what a shict was.’

‘ I didn’t say that.’

‘ You implied it.’

‘ And you wonder why people hit you.’

‘ If you can’t answer it, just say so and I’ll figure it out for myself.’

‘ A human is … not a shict.’

‘ That’s it?’

‘ That’s enough.’

‘ No, it isn’t.’

‘ Has anyone ever told you you’re amazingly bull-headed?’

‘ Grandfather says they filed down my antlers after I was born. But that’s not important. What is a human?’

She had wandered away from their village, into the part of the forest where the earth beneath their feet and the ancestors that came before them were one.

‘ Humans are … not like us, but also like us. They fight, they kill, just as we do. And what we claim is ours, they claim is theirs. Our cause is righteous. They say theirs is, too. We do what we must. They do as they do.’

‘ Then how do we know they deserve to die?’

She had stared at a grave marked with long white mourning feathers.

‘ Because they knew we deserved it.’

She journeyed over the dunes, through the valleys of the beach as the sun continued to crawl across the sky. Always, she found her gaze drifting off to the distant forest and shortly thereafter to her own belly as it let out an angry growl.

The knowledge that any food to be had would be found in the dense foliage gnawed at her as surely as the hunger that struggled to wrest control over her from a frail and withering hope inside her. In fact, she knew, it would be wiser to go into the woods now, to begin the search for something to eat as soon as possible, lest she find herself too weary and starving to conduct a more thorough search later.

Still, she reminded herself, it’s not like it’s hard to find something to eat in a forest. You’ve never had trouble sniffing out roots and fruits before. Hell, find a dark spot and you can probably find a nice, juicy grub.

The image of a writhing, ivory larva filled her mind. She smacked her lips. The fact that she was salivating at the thought of a squishy, tender infant insect brimming with glistening guts, she reasoned, was likely a strong indicator that she should go seek one out, if only to keep herself from dwelling on how bizarre this entire train of thought was.