Earthwitch

1. Anele

Anele wiped her lip and winced. Blood streaked along her finger, but that was fine – it was mostly hers, a familiar sight. The shard of bone digging into her fist hurt more. As the boar slumped against the steep dune, she put the splinter between her teeth and pulled.

The boar slid halfway down the slope before a mound of sand grew big enough to stop it, so heavy it carved a groove in its wake. It left a wet glowing trail that ran from her feet to the shadow of its cracked skull. Not blood, but something even more vital to life.

Ethos. It shimmered like quicksilver under the desert sun.

Anele swallowed a wave of nausea. "Sorry, friend."

The pain in her belly was deeper than hunger, and more urgent. Food wouldn't soften its jagged edges. For the last three years, all she'd known was the squeeze of that cramping emptiness where her soul should be.

When she caught the scent of fresh magic in the air, it gaped like an open wound.

"Appreciate the fair fight," Anele said, trying not to heave. "Honest word I was rooting for you."

Couldn't think of a worse place to die, though, she thought, and almost did. Or live.

The desert blew sand into her eyes in agreement. She chose not to blink out of spite.

There was a reason her kind kept to icy mountains and caverns where Earth aura flowed in molten rivers. Those were settled places, heavy and ancient. Here, the magic that held their stone-hard bodies together was restless, scattered, always eroding.

Over time, even a healthy Earthwitch with a magnetic soul and deep reserves would drown in a desert. A dying one with a relentless ache eating them hollow...

"Hmm." Anele surfed down the dune on bare feet.

Hot air ruffled the skirt she'd made out of feathers and wire, rattling the little pots tied to her hip. It swept through a crown of locs twisted with clay so black it drank the sunlight. Her shawl, at least the parts still hanging on by a thread, was so worn she could guess the time of day with her eyes closed.

The only things she hadn't scavenged were the copper anklets that jingled as she skated around a glittering puddle. Well, maybe. She'd worn them for as long as she could remember, but three years wasn't a long time. Whatever came before had got up and built a wall there.

Someone living on the other side must have taught her how to make the clay too. She sure as iron didn't have any memories of learning. But memories were like that. You didn't have to know you had them to have them.

All she knew was that clay cost a lot to make a little, and she was running low. Worse, painting her whole body was becoming a necessity, and not just to keep cool. The last of it covered her arms like a second shadow, hiding a patchwork of claw marks so thick they climbed over each other.

Sculpt first a skin of granite, the tenet went.

Hmm.

Anele slid to a halt a few steps from the boar's skull. She was close enough to look into the fissure between its eyes, close enough to taste the source of the cool, white glow in the air. Something hiding behind her stomach growled.

"Was a time when I wouldn't need this, friend," she said, pulling a glass knife from her skirt "Can't say it spares either of our dignity but... well..."

She gave up the hunt for a silver lining. The knife was a jagged thing, as crude as a shard of ice and cloudy at the hilt, but the edge sparkled, cutting the sunlight into rainbow bands that danced over everything but her void-black arm.

Ethos pooled under the boar in a thick puddle that mirrored the sky, even as it sank into parched... sand.

The ground blurred, then tilted up to meet her.

Anele scrambled for balance on loose soil, stumbled, and crashed into a thick hide. Luckily, the boar was twice her size, and almost as heavy. She held herself up on a tusk as long as her arm.

I dare you, she told her buckling legs.

Hunger could bring a person to their knees, or the grave. As it were, it had brought her ankle deep in a muddy pool of Ethos, but mud was better than sand. It held itself together, at least.

Beyond that patch of stable ground, the desert moved in red swirls, breaking up the Earth aura in every grain of sand. It wasn't like other forms of elemental magic. You couldn't breathe or drink it, or draw it in with meditation. Earth aura had to be cracked out of gems with the teeth, and scraped from veins of metal ore like marrow.

This close to the boar's head, the light of its stoneiris made her skin tingle. A third eye didn't store Ethos like the soul. It fed on knowledge, and grew by layering memories on top of memories like bedrock. To eat a stoneiris was to live a second life, and swallow madness.

Pulling the boar's head down by the tusk, Anele angled her knife into the fissure–

And froze.

Every pore filled with sweat all at once. Something growled behind her, not loud but far too close. A long shadow stretched over the dune. She turned slowly, and looked up at a giant mandrill looking down. Its long limbs sprawled across the top of the dune, attached to bristling shoulders that fanned out its silhouette.

On solid ground, she might have sensed it coming. This close, though, she could feel the power of a wild soul pulsing down the dune – barely. It put a weight in the air.

"There's enough to share," she said.

The mandrill stared down its red snout and held her gaze. Wild animals didn't do that; divine beasts did. It had the eyes of something that kept complex thoughts behind them, so Anele tried her luck.

"You can have the whole carcass, if you like."

Wide shoulders rose and fell. A chuckle.

"Everything but the stoneiris."

Those bright eyes darkened. Well, it wasn't much luck to begin with.

Hunger came in many forms, some of them with long yellow fangs and a blue maw. Most wild things got their Ethos from hunting or grazing. Some, like divine beasts, learned the art of meditation, using their souls to harvest the natural aura around them – but you didn't get that big just meditating.

"Fine." Anele sighed. "Let's talk about it."

The mandrill threw itself downhill, launching off paws that could pull trees, arms spread against the sky like a bird of prey. The boar blocked any hope of retreat. At times like this, most sensible people uttered a prayer from the depths of their soul.

Anele dug a heel into the sand. The desert blurred again.