I.iv

It was midday in the outside world. But in the kapalia none would ever know. Small licks of sunlight wafted through cracks between carefully pinned fabric and holes in stone. In a house of drink, time stands still.

Beside this building, to the left, a bed waited for me. It comforted a part of you when drinking, to have a soft place to settle yourself at the end. Arash had followed on my heels into the establishment, after a bed of his own.

Mykon was large. It was grand and coloured in a way the village of fisherman was not. But in every way that counted they were the same. The kapalia sat dusky and dark in the center of the city, romantic and soft where the fisherman’s house of drink was simply too poor to afford much light. But men came from work at the water to drink money away, and women served it and ignored the gently roaming hands and sparkling eyes cast in her direction.

Niko

She ran away

I heard his voice, then. Like metal against crystal it sung to me, but only for a single electrified moment. Memory makes things languid and soft, warbling tones and warping faces. Everything is heard through a pile of sand. Time ebbs and flows over images in the mind like waves over stone, eroding detail.

Like the gods we were shaped after, our lives are filled with mistakes. Unlike them, with their memories lacking flaw, our tragedies fade and fall from our minds. When tales are recited of the gods repeating their failures of fornication and hedonism, you can only take it in with awe. When you doom yourself to mirror crimes passed, its only because the pains edges have been dulled.

But in moments like this, your mind latches on to something deeply stored away. It brings it to you, unfaded and crisp.

Fuck off

It was said with the vitriol and confidence of the young. And the tone of a boy who hadn’t yet seen a hair on his chest.

It hadn’t been directed to me. Boys older than him but younger than me, bigger than they should be by a large margin. They had been gifted well by the gods. Or simply fed correctly, as a child should be. On Lycos, that would change. Hunger was a call to be resisted. A soldier does not fail a watch or fall to a blade because a baser urge takes him.

They hadn’t taken kindly to his tone. Or his unspoken language.

They had been accustomed to luxuries. When their second meal of the day had not suited them, they chose to accost Niko for his. Niko had looked around for help, but this was a first lesson on the captains urge to see us fight. Not only for entertainment, but for practice.

So his back rose, then. A natural instinct when you call the streets your home and bedding. When you go for a few days without food whilst working without much-wanted rest.

His fists had clenched and his jaw had tightened and his neck had tensed. All of this was only seen for a moment before he leapt at the two, genuinely pounced, his feet leaving the ground.

I was tall even then. A girl of twelve, more man than woman in my shape. I had worked to give us scraps before Lycos. Pulling wood and pushing sand and lifting rope. It had built me, forged me into something other children weren’t. These two boys had been large and well-fed, but they did not have whatever I did.

I broke two noses and shattered four wrists that day. Blood coursed from a split lip afterwards, knuckles torn from punches thrown without knowledge of how to do so. My eye felt as big as it ever had, already hot and swollen in the midday sun. General Harriadis hadn’t much cared for any party involved that day. He, unlike the captains, did not take kindly to violence in the units. They fanned the flame in you, had it swelter and grow like a furnace left unchecked, but they wanted that power aimed at their enemies. It’s not something you spoke of or gave signs of until the moment your feet hit foreign sand and your blade met enemy steel or enemy flesh.

And yet many more fights broke out in my years there, many with me at the center.

I had felt pain that day. Before, on the cities of the mainland, I had felt hunger. Or a sharp burn when ropes were pulled quickly along my skin. Or the throb of wood catching on flesh. But the whips were the first bite of war that had drawn my blood.

I drank. The taste was bitter honey, sweetness masking something darker underneath.



---



It was finally a moment of calm. My body undulated pain, but for now the grass beneath my ass was soft and my cracked and stiff hands were resting.

One lounged in my lap. I tried not to tense it, feeling every vibration and twitch as I kept it as still as possible. The back of it felt stretched and bloody, but only a small discoloured spot blemished it. A blunted sword had struck it in an attempt to take my weapon away. The tactic had worked.

The other hand took the brunt of my weight, palm down in the grass and fingers spread. Niko unwrapped his fingers from his own training sword and gently placed them over my own. Shifting blades of grass gave my skin a familial kiss as they were disturbed by the movement.

He was young. Big eyes, dark, a body made of muscle and not much else. Like a sinewy twig.

He smiled. A small movement of the mouth, gentle, instinctual. It stopped immediately at the look I gave it.

Smiling was not forbidden in Lycos. I saw it daily, from comrade to comrade. But it was not for the young. These men that smiled did so after years of fighting and anger and living on the edge of sanity and themselves. They knew what a smile was worth. It was a weapon they were allowed to wield.

But the aspagia were raised like pit dogs. We were rapidly eroded to our core, like water against rocks at a lightning pace. At the end, you were simply right and wrong, them and us. Feral. And then you were brought back up from that valley into the light of Lycos and your unit. After you lived your many months and years in the pool of blood and steel they steeped you in, a hand was offered to pull you out, and you were grateful for the relief.

“I’m sorry,” Niko said. He didn’t speak further on that particular subject. It left me wondering whether he was directing his words to my hand or his smile. His face lay blank now.

“As am I.”

As Niko did only moments before, I denied any detail on the words I spoke. I was unaware of what I was apologizing for, as all we had done was spar and then talk as we rested. It felt like important words spoken through me by someone else.

I felt movement around me. The air creaked and tilted.

Niko looked away from me, to meet gazes with the ground.

And then I was tired. My mouth filled with the aftertaste of a honeyed burn, my eyes buzzed as they were forced open.

The cot creaked again.

Annoyance prickled as darkness lay over me like a blanket.

Open your eyes

And then something shifted and spun inside me as I recognized a shadow and-

“The Wolf of Lycos sends his regards.” A voice gleamed above me. A flash of shaded moonlight from inside the black shape. A thread of quickly travelling starlight from the side.

My hand caught the wrist holding the blade. Something deep inside, my mind in its feral state, had already made itself aware of knees around my hips and thighs straddling my torso. I bucked. No thought. Simple action.

A mask over the face. Smooth, metallic, silver. An oval-shaped moon with darkly beating eyes set inside it. As the man was pushed to the side, they grew manic.

We rolled and I let go of everything I could and then we both made noise as the floor met us. The sound rolled across the night.

Another roll, off his body, to the right. Away from the bed. The thin sheet had come with us on our small journey. It hung loosely off the side, wafting in a gentle breeze from the window across the room. It waved at me, and I tugged roughly on it, prepared for it to be tangled beneath the masked man. It wasn’t. The extra momentum threw me into another roll, and I ended up even further away, on my feet, cloth in hand. By this time the man was in the same situation.

I quickly managed the sheet into my hands, making it into a weaponized length between them. He lunged, too quickly and without enough power to do much of anything. I fell for it and threw my upper body out of its way, to the left. His sudden backslash cut across my upper chest. There was lightning in my head and my heart and my veins, and I felt it jump to quickly cover the pain, like a mother’s hands over her child’s eyes when they’ve seen something they shouldn’t. It helped. I still shouted.

But I threw myself into the pain. Into the attack. Closed the distance. Another stab came out. This one from the shoulders, from the back. With force behind it. A lover’s bite this time, pinching my right ribs. But the knife came through all the way behind me, and I spun, my back suddenly against the man’s chest, the sheet tearing as the blade ate through it like fingers in wet sand.

With a tight twist I caught the weapon in a bundle of cloth and the man immediately dropped it. Backed away from me. I couldn’t go for his head. The mask shone in the moonlight, absorbing the silvery glow like the Goddess of the Hunt had found a new home for her celestial light. My hands would break against the metal before I hurt him.

So I spun as he took a step back, momentum adding even more force to the closed hand slamming into the side of his lower abdomen. There were valuable things in there. I’d hoped I’d hit as many as possible.

My bare feet slid against the wood floor. Exposed toes, easy to break. No direct kicks. Instead, a step in, and a shin sent to his groin. A pained noise escaped his lips. Almost embarrassed. Then, he involuntarily fell to the ground. Knees buckled without permission.

And after only a moment my hand was on his throat, throwing him against the wall. His skull cracked like bone on thick stone should. It resonated in my mind, a single deep note. Sent a thorough hum through my body.

My other hand ripped the mask off like a blade out of a scabbard. Underneath it was no one. A face I didn’t recognize. A man, around my age, shaved clean of face and head. Sunken cheeks and sharp bones. Skin dark from a lifetime of training on an island of sun and sand.

I hit him. My knuckles were thick and scarred. Built by a lifetime of fighting, first for an army and then for survival and then for a living.

I hit him again. Pulled back my arm, and the slight spot of crimson on my fist was like dark wine on the night’s shroud.

I hit him again. I wanted to feel something give. Bone did, eventually. A pop and a noiseless creak. I felt it more than heard it. My hand was warm now.

Suddenly, a creak from elsewhere. The door, opening fast. I threw the man’s head against the wall and turned and dove for the knife in the same action, fumbling it from the bundle it sat swathed in like a newly born child.

“Helena, stop. Stop. Stop. It’s Arash.” All the words came fast, not just from the lightning coursing through my body, but from the storm in his blood as well. His eyes were manic. They hummed with dark energy.

I kept the knife in my hand anyways.

With purposeful slowness, I made my way back to the man. My legs were going to start shaking soon. I gripped the handle of the blade tightly.

The man’s head was away from the square of direct moonlight leaning in from the window. If you simply took a glancing look in the dark, it seemed oddly misshapen, like he was wearing a malformed helmet, meant to mold to a different creature’s head.

But it was still shaven, clean of face and head. Still darkened by a lifetime of training on an island of sand and sun. And with a turn of his arm, etched deep into the skin of his wrist, three thick black lines, stacked on top of each other.

When I turned, Arash saw them as well. First a curious glance, then a purposeful gaze as he took it in. Confused, because he didn’t quite know what he was looking at. Then the wide-eyed sunrise of dawning realization. Then a slight turn of his head, to stare me in the eyes.

The Wolf of Lycos sends his regards

Niko

Sends his regards

Lightning in my veins again. Burning my eyes, my mouth, my limbs. My nose flared and took in air to fuel the flames stoking inside me.

He was young again, in my mind. Big, dark eyes. They smiled. I told him not to with only a single look. Disappointed, in myself. In Lycos. Not him. He had to unlearn what was natural.

“I’m sorry.”

“As am I.”

And then suddenly, a knife was in his hands, and when I turned, the blade was in my throat.

I blinked.

“Helena,” Arash spoke. Softly. The words were coddled. And coddling. I wanted to spit at them.

I had been standing there for minutes, and he had simply been staring at me.

I blinked once again.

“I have more gold. It will be yours if you lend me your assistance.”

He blinked, this time. In surprise. Taken aback.

“With?”

My throat was almost closed entirely. I swallowed and felt it pass the blockage hard. It was painful, almost.

“Transportation.”

The pressure around the blade’s handle lessened. My fingers did not relax. But they focused.

The Wolf of Lycos

Niko of Lycos

Sends his regards

I knew where he was. He wouldn’t survive the week.