Stoneship 1.2
Episode 1.2
The forest swallowed them the instant they stepped beyond the clearing. Branches knit together overhead in a vaulted canopy that turned daylight into something thin and fractured. Gen moved at the front of the group with that deliberate, unhurried stride of his. Never rushing, never faltering, as though the world were merely rearranging itself around Gen’s feet.
Cassandra followed several paces behind.
The air that pressed against her skin was warm, damp and full of sap and moss and the green smell of living things. Worlds like this always smelled too rich, too alive. Their scent seemed to cling on her like grease on borrowed clothes. It was the aroma of a kitchen left running, thick with life she had not yet touched.
Behind her, Evelyn and Roben whispered to each other with voices that blended with the forest’s hush. Evelyn’s tone lifted now and again, bright with wonder. Roben tried to match it with hesitant mimicry. None of it held Cassandra’s attention. What mattered rested on her left shoulder humming like a furnace preparing to inhale.
Anslam.
Smoke curled from the shifting sphere of distortion, its edges flickering like heat rising from stone.
“We stray farther from the Court,” it murmured into her ear, voice soft as ash sliding through fingers.
“Gen has not stopped straying since he tasted wandering. Yet here we follow him.” Cassandra didn’t bother lowering her voice.
“And why?” Anslam hissed.
“We were bound by the Court. To him. A strange punishment or a misguided grace. It’s impossible to tell sometimes with them,” she said simply.
A pulse of distorted light trembled through Anslam that she took as its version of a laugh.
“I am older than the Court. I follow only my whims. Commands are conveniences, not chains,” it replied.
“You say that, yet there you sit, whispering your contempt instead of acting on it,” Cassandra murmured back.
“There is a time for flame and a time for patience. I am not some infernal beast lashing out on impulse. You know my kind. You know how we wait.” Anslam whispered.
She did. His kind remembered the dark before language, before shape. They did not drift without purpose. Even silence was a form of plotting for them.
Cassandra slowed her steps, letting Gen drift a few paces ahead. His shoulders were tight beneath the borrowed illusion of the suit the world had given him. He always held tension beneath stillness like a knot that wound tighter each time he refused The Court’s call.
Her own hunger twisted through her, sharp and coiling. Not for food, but for essence, for the life this realm dripped with. The Stoneship’s hunger echoed it. So did the river. So did whatever lived in the deep recesses of her being, the parts of her older than memory.
But Gen had ordered restraint.
Her mouth curled faintly. Orders always had edges to slip through. Words bent easily enough if one knew where to press.
“There,” Gen called quietly, ducking beneath a low branch.
He pointed to faint indentations threading through the underbrush to a path smothered by disuse.
Anslam slipped from Cassandra’s shoulder in a ribbon of warped light and shadow, streaking through the trees to hover above Gen. The forest stilled around them as the air was suddenly thick and watchful.
Cassandra’s breath hitched.
Something old flickered at the edge of her mind.
A knight in armor gleaming like a dawn she had never seen.
A sword raised.
Her claws arcing down.
A slash of metal.
Her own scream cut short.
Darkness.
Red, twisted hands dragging her upward from a void without bottom.
A circle of burning runes carved into the ground.
Her body made of owl’s talons, lioness claws, bat wings, maiden’s face all held still within the summoning light.
Words binding, not spoken to understand but to command.
And then Gen. Standing over her. Voice calm, eyes cold, sealing obedience into her spirit like a collar she could not remove.
The memory snapped apart.
Cassandra exhaled and looked down at her hands. Soft and human-shaped and fragile. They felt like someone else’s tools. Her true claws ached beneath the illusion.
She didn’t want to feed.
She wanted to unmake.
Up ahead, Gen still studied the faint path. Anslam’s form flared bright above him like a torch finding its fuel.
“What is happening?” Cassandra asked in a sharp tone.
“Anslam is finding our direction,” Gen said without turning.
Anslam dipped low over the path, its form rippling with heat that did not burn the world around it.
“Forward,” it whispered. “Mortals gather not far from here.”
Gen nodded once. “We follow.”
Cassandra felt her lips curl in a slow, quiet smile as she stepped toward the path.
Whatever this world offered, she would take her share.
Gen’s restraint would not cage her forever.
Anslam led them along an overgrown footpath until the forest thinned, giving way to a line of packed dirt. In the center of it were two ruts carved by countless wagon wheels rolling back and forth. Cassandra stepped onto it and paused. The moment her foot touched the road she was hit with the scent memory of mortals, both beast and human.
Traces of life ran all over this area. If she focused, she could see faint glowing impressions of hoofprints still fragrant with the essence of creatures that had passed through hours or days ago. Fragments of their life force shimmered in the dirt to her like dying embers.
There was no trace of the Court’s corruption in any of it.
A thread of tension wound itself through her chest as she realized Gen had been right when he had said they had drifted so far as to be nearly free of the Court’s shadow. There was no thrill in the assumed freedom. She wasn’t a creature fighting for wild abandon. The guiding hand of the Court gave her purpose. Without that guidance, what purpose remained?
Between her and Gen, Anslam pulsed with a slow glow.
“Mortals gather ahead. A cluster of lives bright as coals. A short walk and their heart shall be visible,” its calm rasping tone not fitting its words.
“This place reminds me of home.” Evelyn stepped around Cassandra.
“Every world reminds you of home. You see familiarity where there is none.” Cassandra let a sharp laugh slip out.
Evelyn started to speak, appeared to think better of it, then lowered her gaze. The sight irritated Cassandra. Something about the girl’s behavior grated against her. There was something in the way she spoke and thought that Cassandra loathed about her.
Anslam drifted closer to Evelyn as its shape swirled into something warmer.
“This world stands five, perhaps eight mortal generations behind the one you were born from.” A softness entered Anslam’s voice that Cassandra recognized as verging on predatory.
“I know it isn’t my home, but it looks like it could be. A little,” Evelyn said quietly as she pointed to where the road opened to golden patches of fields.
“A resemblance, yes. The echo of a place that once birthed you.” Anslam flickered.
Cassandra stepped forward and deliberately brushed past Evelyn hard enough to make her stumble sideways toward Anslam’s drifting heat.
“Don’t coddle the vagrant. She will burn regardless,” Cassandra said.
“She bears Gen’s blessing. The captain keeps what he chooses.” Anslam flickered in that same glow that Cassandra took for laughter.
“Gen should know better than to play with his food.” Cassandra looked back just long enough to show her teeth.
The smoke-flame creature pulsed again with amusement before sliding onto her shoulder.
Roben moved to Evelyn’s side and murmured something soothing but Cassandra didn’t bother listening. Their words were the sounds prey made before the inevitable.
The road crested a small rise. Cassandra stepped to the top and stopped.
Below them a string of wooden buildings lined the road. Each structure looked thin and weak, small boxes she could imagine her claws tearing into with ease. A sign before the buildings was written in mortal symbols that the river allowed her to understand.
“GREEN CLEARING,” sat emblazoned on the sign just outside of the mortal grouping.
The name offended her. It was the simplicity of it, the lack of depth, the way mortals used symbols without respecting their weight. A shallow language for a shallow species.
She inhaled and hunger rolled through her like an opened wound. This place had not yet known the hunger of the Court. She wanted to be their teacher. They could give her the purpose she craved.
Gen turned as if he could sense her.
“Be cautious. We’re being watched.” His eyes narrowed.
“Let them watch. We have arrived to feast.” Cassandra smiled at the timid cluster of buildings ahead.
“No,” Gen said sharply. “We are not here to destroy the settlement. We take only what we need.”
She dragged her gaze from storefront to stable to saloon. She studied the brittleness of their structures, the dry timber that would burn quickly. She looked for the mortals whose essence flickered like candles that she could snap closed with a thought.
So easy. So deliciously easy to unmake.
She kept walking, her hips swaying like a lioness, her hunger growing in her chest.
Gen’s restraint, his rules, felt thinner here than ever before.
And Cassandra had no intention of letting this world pass untouched.