The world spread out before the nekfehr, the slight curve of its horizon partially obscured by hazy clouds. Unlike the flat plains directly before the vessel — a raven, black, sleek, and intelligent — this horizon rose in a nubbled, broken line.
South.
The Annekteh would go south.
It hadn’t worked out well, last time; so many years earlier. The hill folk had been waiting and ready, forewarned by the seers once grown thick in that nurturing land.
The Annekteh had lost that fight — but they had prepared the way for the next. They had burned the generations of seer wisdom, lore, and observations — every one. They’d ransacked houses, stripping all charms, all the protections that could be copied and used without a seer’s understanding.
Every one.
And the seers themselves had died readily enough. Or fled.
The raven’s wings caught a thermal; the bird adjusted — a shift of feather, a tilt of wing — and the annektehr within barely noticed. That was what the nekfehr, the Vessels, were for: to do the things the Annekteh could not. To see, to fly...to feel. The annektehr — one of many, so consumed by the whole it didn’t even understand the concept of individuality — stared at that bare hint of the southern mountains, sharing the image among the Annekteh even as it maintained awareness of each of its fellow annektehr at work in other vessels. Human bodies, mostly, supervising the insignificant, unTaken servants.
Yes. South. Where the abundant lumber was imbued with the natural magic of the mountains — the same subtle magic of the plains, distilled and amplified and then submerged to run deep along the ridges. Magic that would protect the Annekteh, so quiet that the humans barely knew it was there.
But the Annekteh knew.
And the Annekteh intended to have that magic, and that land, for their own.
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