(fragment of the Hill City Daily, found lining a rice bowl in Trellis)
Shard Mosaic
Dylan Amaranth reporting
The Eastern Shift, past the Nightmare Reaches
"He changed us like fire turns sand to glass."
Sukh Third Horse speaks from the side of a dung fire. He's old, thin, brittle, one-armed, drunk, and the last of the Golden Khan's generals left alive.
Ten years ago, he led twenty thousand warriors on the Khan's left flank, scouring the stable lands. Today, he, his wife, three grown children, one daughter-in-law and two grandchildren are fugitives.
Like so many of the Khan's inner circle, Sukh and his family have been hunted across ten worlds since their leader's death, blamed for the destruction the God Beasts brought into the desert. Were his own people to find him, he would die in an excruciating way: staked alive in the sand, perhaps, pecked to death by chiropterons or devoured by slizzards. Fortunately for him, the Shift is large. Your correspondent only found Sukh through a combination of strategy, guesswork, footwork, and dumb luck.
Still, Sukh claims that some day he will be remembered as a hero, not as a harbinger. "The Khan made us one before the Settled people broke us with their God Beasts. We are a thousand shards of glass now, each sharp, each brilliant. We slice at each other, scrape across the surface of ourselves." He draws fingernails thick and hard as bone across a small stone he holds in his lap. "But the edge remains, and we can only devour our own entrails for so long. Not even the God Beasts can cow a people forever."
He waits as if for my opinion, as if by virtue of being a settled woman I can tell him that yes, the God Beasts too are mortal, that one day the Tosh will drive them from their land and be whole again. If I knew how to rid a desert of hungry near-immortal insects the size of mansions, though, I'd be in a different line of work. As it is, at their mention I look over my shoulder.
Only the night waits beyond the circle of our firelight. It is old. Somewhere, I hear a baby cry.
