Mantis released a great sigh.

  She had meant every word.

  It was with complete earnestness that she’d presented Ombira with the choice to end her life altogether rather than stoop to her request. Whether there had existed any real possibility of her opting for the former was unimportant. Mantis knew deep inside her that she’d meant it. They both did.

  And so the girl lived, and the Mantis would continue to torment Yriaa for at least another day. A bitter triumph for master and servant alike. A compromise.

  “Oh, kind fortune!” The brother sprung from his awkward seated position and ran to the girl, lying supine and nonplussed. “It’s all right. You’re all right.” He insisted; helped her to rise. It was not she who needed the reassurance, Mantis thought. Teela was only looking around herself as if every minute detail her eyes landed on contained a lifetime of information for her inspection. “Teela. You’re all right? You feel fine?”

  “Who are you?” she spoke, her brother ignored. She was now gazing directly at Ombira, and she her. It rang alarm bells for Mantis, who came close to intervening before the conversation could go on between them, but the Goddess ultimately looked away, a slight furrow to her brow but otherwise unmoved.

  “He shall want the bodies,” she told Mantis. “Do you have them?”

  “No. I can try to retrieve them, but I doubt the townspeople will have waited to burn them.”

  “Do what you must. The souls alone will not do, Mantis. Bring him the bodies, and make haste. It is the only way to right this wrong.” The severity in her eyes emphasized the importance of her orders, and her tone her lingering displeasure at having had to surrender Teela. The unexpected soul would have made for a welcome dessert. Yes. She would have rejoiced to receive an additional bite of nourishment from that innocent little girl.

  Mantis turned her sight away from her master, disgusted, and sensed her leave. The underbrush swished with the movement of her feet, sounding further away with every step. And then she was gone, back into the nearby greenery to vanish.

  Immediately the atmosphere lightened; the air thinned.

  A long silence stretched in the glade. Leaves rustled overhead, dancing to the tune of the Wind. Mantis’s chest was relieved, emptier, but the two remaining Sea souls swimming around in the alcoves of her heart still bothered her tremendously. She bid them to be still, to wait, but it wasn’t their nature to obey her commands.

  The boy was holding onto his sister like she could run away at any moment, but she was nowhere near as frightened as he. She didn’t seem at all inclined to flee, in fact. Instead, she was taking the opportunity to survey Mantis from head to toe with the shamelessness of youth, curious and wholly unafraid.

  Alas, the same could not be said of her brother. He was covered in bodily fluids emitted in terror.

  The girl said, “You killed me.”

  “Teela!” the boy reprimanded.

  “I killed you.”

  Silence again. Mantis had no patience for it. She turned away, toward the town, and started walking. She’d have to see about the corpses. The two shortly-lived Sea-men had been regulars there, or at least local folk. Mantis thought it awfully unlikely that their neighbors and loved ones would’ve just left them lying where they fell, but surely they could not have assembled pyres and burned them whole in the short time she’d been gone. If she hurried, she should be able to get to them in time.

  “Who are you? Or what are you?” Teela found her way to Mantis’s right side, a little too close. She rushed to keep up with her, matched her brisk stride, her brother hanging back from her arm with both hands and pleading with his eyes. “How am I alive, if you killed me?”

  Mantis pretended not to have heard her and sped up her pace. She suddenly deeply regretted not having brought the horse.

  But the girl was relentless. The harassment went on for long after it became clear that all questions would go unanswered. The boy who had so annoyed Mantis—coming out like the most agreeable person she’d ever met in comparison—only continued to try and fail at restraining Teela. He warned her of the danger they were in still, bid her to be quiet, barked threats, even begged; but she would not be deterred.

  The walk back seemed to take much longer than the way there had. Mantis was not used to children, or their babbling. Solitude had been her only companion for thirty years after she’d relinquished mind, body and soul—an exchange she wouldn’t for one moment believe unfair. But one that promised a miserable existence that she wished to share with no one at all, excluding Ombira, whom she’d just never be rid of. Nobody else did she wish to speak to, or to know.

  The tavern where Mantis had initially found the children at last came into view at a bend in the road. It was an aged but sturdy stone building of two stories with an old thatched roof, the sign on the front indicating the simple name, Oak’s Shade, in freshly painted white letters. It had the typical appearance of a small, family-run business, with its smaller repairs looking more recent and the larger jobs neglected for a lack of funds. All the curtains were drawn shut as if they had closed for the day.

  “Run back home, then,” she motioned with a hand.

  With her permission, the older boy started eagerly toward the building, but his sister stayed where she was and he looked on the brink of tears. “Teela, don’t be an idiot!”

  “I only want to speak to her. She isn’t going to harm me, Leroh.”

  “Again, you mean,” he whispered roughly, avoiding Mantis’s gaze as if that would make his words indecipherable to her.

  “You will both leave me alone now.”

  The girl seemed only mildly chastised by the statement. Her large brown eyes sought Mantis’s face for a hint of weakness, for a loose end in her resolve that she could pull on. It was only when she found none that she pursed her lips. For a moment it looked as though she’d try again, find a different approach, but at one more yell from her older brother she finally relented.

  Mantis watched her leave, saw her turn to catch one last glance of her and get scolded for it, then finally heard her mutter to her brother, “Ah, fine! Fine! I just wanted—Alright! Alright, Leroh.”

  And they were gone.

  Mantis closed her eyes and drew a deep breath of dusty air.

  The girl was alive and unscathed. The boy had gotten his beloved sister back. Mantis had not stolen her from him, from the peaceful life she now returned to.

  Stolen story; please report.

  A family had survived her mostly unharmed. She had preserved rather than destroyed life, for once.

  Mantis indulged in the feeling, patted herself in the back, thought of herself as anything but a monster for a little while longer. Then she was forced to acknowledge the unpleasant task nagging at her like a little itch, and started walking.

  The funeral pyres had likely been erected in the nearest plaza. Mantis could hear the crowd gathered at the site a few blocks away. Traditionalist communities always made a show of burning their departed as a stance for their freedom, to honor the dead by releasing them back into the land which had provided for them. No God would they allow to claim their bodies, to reap the value in their flesh, and by turning remains into ashes they ensured their wishes would be respected.

  Mantis made her way there to do the Sea God’s bidding.

  Forty to fifty people had come to bid farewell to their two neighbors. Mantis stayed just outside the circle of gathered folk and positioned herself between the closely-adjacent walls of two houses, the thin space providing some cover and allowing her to remain undetected as she watched.

  In the center, two large wooden structures had been raised. A pile of firewood and kindling awaited on the side, and gruff men hammered together planks of dry oakwood that would become a surface to place the deceased onto, the sound of their tools ringing loudly over the voices of those who’d joined to pay respects.

  Two of their own had given their lives and eternal souls away, sold themselves and betrayed their convictions in an attempt to rid Yriaa of the Mantis once and for all, and for their bravery they would be remembered as heroes. Mantis clenched her teeth hard at the thought. She knew her pupils had widened with her rage.

  But she’d put an end to their attempt on her life; their heroic souls rested pressingly inside her chest now. She’d won, and that reassurance helped her regain her aplomb. Anger served no purpose against the dead.

  The bodies of the men she’d killed were wrapped in white linen and positioned before the funeral pyre. Their loved ones were gathered around them, a widow weeping silently and holding onto the shoulders of a boy of about ten. He was looking straight ahead, pained but dry-eyed. Mantis’s eyes moved to two more children and a solemn woman standing close by them. They had their heads lowered toward the body of the other man and their hands clasped together, supporting each other through the sorrow.

  Mantis watched them for as long as she was able to, and then withdrew quietly from her hiding spot.

  The Sea God would not get what he was owed, she decided.

  Making sure to stay unnoticed, she left the square where she had been an intruder and headed for the inn room she’d paid for, ready to waste the rest of the day on a bottle of bad liquor.

  Teela had changed. This was an irrefutable truth.

  She’d had a taste of what was out there, the flame of her curiosity kindled and fanned, and now it was an unthinkable thing to go back to normal, to continue meandering through life in the dark. She’d glimpsed light, colors previously unknown, and as a consequence her need for freedom simply could not be repressed for another moment. She would have to take what she wanted by any means available, and fast.

  For she’d beheld with her own two eyes an entity that could only have been a God, felt magic course over her body, a heavenly current. She’d experienced the impossible. The very fact that she breathed now to tell the tale served as proof of something wonderful and secret and forbidden whose pull she could no longer resist.

  Like a hidden passageway suddenly revealed in a wall previously thought solid, the world Teela had only been able to fantasize about had suddenly presented itself as a tangible possibility within arms’ reach. An alternative.

  “Leroh, who was that woman?”

  Her brother was sitting beside her, both with their backs against the side wall of the tavern, not yet ready to explain their absence to their mother. Leroh had suggested holding back for a while.

  “It was the Mantis. A God servant.” He seemed tired and his voice was pinched with exasperation, but Teela hadn’t been expecting an answer at all.

  “You knew her?”

  “She’s known among the men. But it’s a secret, so don’t go prattling about it all over town.”

  Teela nodded, stored the clue in her growing mental cache of precious information. “And the other woman—was not a woman at all. That was her God.”

  Her brother didn’t bother to reply, which was a more typical reaction. Teela wanted to ask him a nearly insurmountable number of questions, but knew to contain herself. She was surprised he’d been willing to share anything at all with her, so she didn’t press her luck further and instead opted to pore over the details that had been revealed.

  The Gods looked like regular people, she’d learned. But they could never be mistaken for such, if the one she’d seen was any indication. Her unearthly air and the way her presence ambushed the senses could never be overlooked. Teela had been overcome with the Goddess’s strangeness the instant she’d regained consciousness. It fascinated her.

  The beings who owned the world walked among them, and she'd spoken to one.

  And the strange hooded woman—the Mantis—was a God servant. That would mean, Teela surmised, that she’d given herself to the deity in the forest. Had she done so through prayer?

  Could anyone do that at any given time?

  “Teela,” her brother popped the bubble of her reverie. He stood and offered his hand to help her up. “We should go inside. I’ll talk to Mother. You keep your mouth shut.”

  Teela was only too happy to obey. She had no desire to talk to their mother. So, when they entered the building and Leroh headed to the back where the door to the kitchen loomed, she scurried upstairs to the small bedchamber she and her brother shared.

  In the far right corner, Teela had many years ago discovered a gap in the wooden planks of the floor. The small opening sometimes allowed her to listen in on conversations taking place in the kitchen, so she went there and pressed her chest flat on the planks of wood to push an ear over the gap.

  At first she heard nothing. Then came the sound of a short inhalation of breath and a loud, reverberating slap. A few moments later, the familiar rattling of a whisk against a bowl, and Teela knew her mother had gone back to cooking after smacking her son across the face with an open hand.

  Teela had been surprised before by how much that hurt and shocked the ear rather than the cheek. She thought Leroh must have been temporarily deafened from so loud a blow.

  “You lie,” her mother declared. “I’m ashamed of you.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “People were there, boy. They saw everything. I know what you did.” The steady rhythm of the whisking remained unaffected by her words.

  “I abandoned my sister. For that I can never be sorry enough. But I got her back, Mother. She’s upstairs, unharmed. I retrieved her from the Mantis.”

  The mixing stopped. A sharp intake of breath, and then a sigh. “She didn’t take her?”

  “No. Only s-stunned her. Temporarily. Teela’s fine.”

  A period of silence held for a while, and then the clang of the whisk hitting the sides of the metal bowl resumed.

  “Very well then. Good.” Mother didn’t speak for a time after that, but Leroh didn’t retire from the kitchen. It wasn’t a surprise when her resonant voice filled the space once again, full of contempt. “You left your sister in the presence of that creature, you coward.”

  Leroh made no reply. She wasn’t finished.

  “You allowed the monster inside in the first place. A man might’ve denied her service. Or kicked her out at the first sign of trouble.”

  Leroh released a shaky breath but raised no argument.

  “You put shame on your father’s name. Eighteen years of age, and all you do is embarrass me. Fail me. Do you know they’re all talking about us? Everyone saw. They know what you are, and it speaks ill of me. Of our family.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  “It changes nothing that you’re sorry. Such a disappointment you’ve turned out, after all the work I put into you. All that sacrifice for nothing! For you to run like a girl when it comes time to protect your family. Look at you, boy. You pissed yourself?” A pause. A small sound from Leroh, something like an attempt to clear his throat that turned into a thin whimper. “Pah! Get out of my sight. Go on, now. Leave, before I get a mind to teach you a lesson you won’t forget.”

  And as he walked away, his footsteps a defeated drag on the ground, she added, “Up before Sunrise tomorrow. We have to make up for the business you cost us today.”