a writer, perchance

She’d taken to calling him Fortune. Only in her own head, though—out loud and to everyone else, he was t’hiat. The guest. But she couldn’t help but think him fortunate; what else was it to survive the shattering of both his horns?

Aspiration ducked into the healer’s tent, a wooden tray of food in her hands. Shellfiend soup and roasted grubs; sliced purple yams and small yellow plums; ashnuts and smoked fish and her grandmother’s best flatbread. “Won’t get well if he doesn’t eat,” the old woman told her, piling plates and bowls high. “You see to it he eats.” And so she had, for all the good it did. Most days she came back with the tray untouched.

He was dozing at present, or something like it. Sprawled on the sleeping mat, a pile of blankets half-on, half-off his tall, emaciated form. The healer said his temperature wouldn’t settle, dragging him wildly between chills and fever, and nothing so far could steady it. Intuition was doing what she could, she and her apprentice both, but they’d never dealt with a shattered infernii before. All the stories said victims of such assault rarely survived, and if they did, they were forever altered—and such altering often stole their lives in the end.