Kytonia

By Garon Whited

“Hey, Velina?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m going to see if I can find another prisoner for the pantry. You want anything?”

“Something new for the garden, if you please.”

“Carnivorous or non-carnivorous?”

“Non-carnivorous.”

“I thought there was a problem with the composting unit in Number Two? Shouldn’t we get another carnivore plant for body disposal? We can’t have them lying around, stinking the place up.”

“Bronze healed it during her last incarnation. And you brought my sausage grinder last time you went shopping.”

“Is that why you asked for one?”

“Yes.”

“Damn it, Velina! You shouldn’t have to grind up bodies by hand! I’ve told you.”

“It is better to have the device than to trouble you with minor matters. There are times when you must not be disturbed,” she said, serenely.

Well, I couldn’t argue with that. Damn her. You’d think I would be used to being wrong by now.

“New fruits and vegetables, then?”

“Yes, please. I am content with the meats we have available. I know how to care for those animals. And to properly prepare some of them also requires the use of the grinder.”

“You win. You win! Plants you can eat rather than plants that eat you. I’ll see what I can find.”

I ran a scrying spell through the Stepstation, confirmed it was still intact and unoccupied, and used at gate to step into it. Next stop: the latest voidworld I’d been looking over. I never do my shopping in the same world twice, and I never go directly to any of them from the Flatstation or the Spherestation.

—

Since Bronze helped Velina stand guard over my projects, I came into town on foot. Rather than attract attention by wearing full armor, I wore mostly what the locals wore—sandals, a chiton, a belt with a dagger. I also wore a traveling cloak and a baldric, but who was going to give those more than a second look? And, at night, my cloak would make my sword so inconspicuous it might as well not be there. Aside from snide remarks.

Businesses were mostly shut for the night, but that was fine by me. I was looking for swirls of spiritual energy inside people. The ones I wanted would shine—if that’s the word—through normal walls. It wasn’t the intensity I cared about so much as the colors. Colors and patterns are everything inside a person.

One of the business establishments still open was a common house. No doubt there were other examples of evening entertainment, more specialized to the needs and wants of the public, but this was a good spot to watch people. Most other activities were more private and demanded a fee before allowing one to watch. Besides, even if I didn’t see anyone worth my attention, Firebrand might hear something that would give us a lead.

Lamps burned inside, leaking light through shutters and around the door. The stone lintel had something carved in it, roughly translated as “House of Barley and Grape.”

Not knowing the etiquette, I checked the door. It wasn’t locked, so I eased inside. A few people glanced at me but nobody asked who I was nor for a cover charge. I stepped in, closed the door, and looked for a place to sit. There were no tables, but there were a number of rough wooden chairs. Most of them were centered around a group of… Hmm. What to call them? “Armed jocks” might be close. “Hired muscle” implies less entrepreneurial spirit. “Self-employed assailants,” perhaps, with the understanding they would need a larger fee to do anything overtly illegal.

They occupied the center of the room, sitting or standing while they regaled the onlookers with stories of mighty deeds and derring-do. Heavy benches ran along the walls, so I had no trouble finding a place to sit. I signaled the host, got a bowl of the local beer, and gave him a silver blank. He examined it, flipped it to produce the ringing sound of silver, and nodded.

“I’ll let you know when this runs out.”

“Thank you.”

I found a spot on a bench and watched the room. I held the bowl with a corner of my cloak, as though it was hot. In this case, the cloak sucked up the beer. I couldn’t exactly drink it, not at this hour, and it needed to go away somehow.

The room was full of boisterous men and a few women. The women seemed intent on their work, whether it be to distribute consumables or to rent services. The men were of two major types. The majority seemed to be normal citizens, out for a good evening. The other type was busy swilling beer and bragging.

I watched all of them. My concern was finding someone who deserved to be removed from the gene pool. It’s not like I go through a lot of them—not unless something goes wrong—but it’s a hobby and it gets me out of the laboratory. It changes my focus and helps me re-think problems I have trouble solving. You know how it is. You get engrossed in a problem, hit a wall, struggle with it, and have to walk away for a while. Some people go for a walk, others go for a drive, some build model airplanes, some find evil bastards and stuff them in a cell to be used as food.

Okay, that last one is probably unique to me, but nobody said I had to have a humanhobby. Although, come to think of it, it is sort of a human hobby, interpreted broadly enough…

There were some candidates in the room. Not ideal, for the most part. Everyone has some dark and terrible thing inside them. It’s only human nature. Surprisingly few of them have the depth and breadth of nastiness I require before I’ll unilaterally declare them unfit to associate with people.

Considering I drink blood, devour spirits, and occasionally destroy civilizations, that’s saying something. Then again, it takes one to know one, or so they tell me.

Oh, well. Maybe I wouldn’t be adding to the collection, this trip. It was only a hobby. Getting out and seeing new places was the real purpose. I started paying more attention to the place and the people.

The boasting was exceptional. I’ve heard a lot of people shouting about their great deeds, bragging about what they did—or claimed they did. These guys were near the top of the list for loud. It was hard to make out what, exactly, they were saying, though. They talked over each other, interrupted each other, added extraneous details, corrected each other… yeah, it wasn’t an after-action report. It was boasting in a bar.

I wasn’t overly interested until one of them lifted a piece of broken statue into the air. People ooh’d and aah’d appreciatively. It was a head, intricately carved, and broken off at an angle through the neck, from one jawline down to the opposite collarbone. It was a beautiful face, twisted in terror, and had dozens of long, thin snakes for hair.

“And I slew it!” was the point. The speaker was accorded this honor by everyone, his fellow heroes included. He’d landed the deathblow, they all admitted. Half their number were turned to stone or poisoned by the venom of the snakes, but Iunius struck down the beast by cutting off the head. Once dead, it turned to stone, itself!

What bothered me was the size of the head, the shape of the face. Monster or not, I think they were bragging about killing a little girl. Fine, yes, I know. A petrifying monster with venomous snakes for hair. And a little girl.

Firebrand and I listened more intently after that. Where was this? When was this? What actually happened?

Someone saw the statues scattered in front of the old temple, which meant there was a medusa, or whatever their name for it was. The rumor of it spread until the local heroes decided to go investigate. They found a crazy man who tried to drive them off, then he shouted to warn the monster. They wounded him as he tried to close the temple door and forced their way in. The creature surprised them. They lost a few men to it, but they won and came back with the petrified head.

If it hadn’t been for the casualties, I might have assumed they found a statue, broke the head off, and came back with a story. Then again, it might all be a conspiracy to kill some particularly annoying examples of the local heroes and make the rest look good in the process. People can be devious.

Well, there was one way to find out. I went to see for myself.

—

An old, ruined road, now no more than a track through the forest, branched off. I followed it, kicking through the occasional tuft of weeds. If you’re going to have a dirt track, you need to let it get overgrown now and then. A good network of roots helps hold the soil in place and reduces the potholes, puddles, and ruts.

The track led me to a ruined temple. It reminded me of the Acropolis, although on a considerably smaller scale. The former rooftop might have been twenty feet high. The walls were intact, but the doors were ripped down. It was a ruin, certainly, but why was it out here? There was nothing else for a mile or more. Why build it here in the first place? Was it a requirement of the god? Or was anything around it razed to the ground when the religion fell out of favor?

Add it to the long list of things I may never know.

Outside the defunct temple, on the ground and on the steps, there were maybe two dozen statues, all done in remarkable detail. They were mostly surprised-looking people, all carrying unsheathed weapons. There were also perhaps six wolves and a large, predatory cat-thing, all in attack postures. The cat-thing statue reminded me to be careful of the local fauna.

On a more subtle level, they were all statues of things being hostile. We ancient evils from the dawn of time notice little details like that.

I listened. I sniffed at the air. I wandered around the ruined temple, looking at it from all sides.

Smells of old smoke and ashes. Dried or drying blood. At least one human being, probably dead. Another smell, this one similar to a human but with a slight strangeness to it. There was a fresh grave behind the temple, unmarked, but I know the smell of a grave. Inside the temple, through the stone wall, I could faintly make out the half-hidden glow of someone alive.

Well, the polite thing to do…

I went up the three low steps to the front of the temple, propped up one of the broken doors, and knocked on it. I could see inside and took note of three toppled, broken statues. The damage seemed excessive for a simple fall. Another statue, somewhat smaller, knelt farther in.

“Hello? Anyone home?”

One of the more subtle things about trying to not answer such a query is the unnatural stillness that goes with it. It’s hard for most people to recognize. On the other hand, I heard the sudden thudding of a panicked heartbeat, smelled the sudden sweat, could almost taste the fear.

What do you think, Firebrand?

I think it doesn’t want to be found, Boss.

A brilliant deduction. Any other ideas?

It’s afraid you’re going to cut its head off?

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Hey, that’s what it’s worried about. You asked.

A fair point. Thank you. Keep me informed.

Will do.

I put a toe inside, tapped it on the floor. There was no combustion. I didn’t burst into flames. I didn’t even feel warm. Someone had disregarded this place long ago.

I stepped in through the doorway and looked around. One corner of the temple was roughly walled off, under what remained of the roof. The material of the fallen roof had combined with local supplies to form a sort of private area. It would keep off the rain, but it was an open-topped box under an overhang. I hoped the local winters were mild. It would keep out most of the snow and none of the cold, but it should cut down on the wind chill.

A few steps inside the doorway was a bloodstain. I went to one knee and examined it. It was old and dry enough that it didn’t try to crawl to me. Kneeling behind it was the smaller statue, one hand on the floor, the other held level about a foot higher. This hand was covered in dried blood well past the wrist. The statue had no head.

Something hissed. It sounded like a snake. It sounded like a lot of snakes.

“I haven’t come here to harm you,” I said, to anyone. I didn’t look around, but I let a lot of tendrils loose to feel in all directions. “Also, I can keep a secret. I won’t be telling any of those loudmouthed louts they missed one.”

“And I should believe you?” asked a voice. I shaded my eyes and looked at the floor, scanning in that direction until I saw a foot. She was standing at the end of the privacy wall, using it for cover. Once I had her location, I closed my eyes. My tendrils can’t exactly take the place of vision, but they work for most things. Kind of like echolocation, or sonar—the sort of thing you might find in a… submarine.

Yes, yes. Or a bat.

“I guess you could live in a state of permanent anxiety,” I admitted. “Wouldn’t be my first choice, though.”

“What do you want, stranger?”

“I saw—and heard—a lot of bragging earlier tonight, in town. I also saw what they claimed was a stone trophy.”

“My daughter,” she said. “They killed my daughter. You humans! You damned, arrogant, destructive humans!”

She came the rest of the way around the wall and half-ran, half-stumbled toward me. I stood up and met her charge, allowing her to run into me. She beat at me with her fists. Her hair, twisting and writhing, struck and snapped at me. The hair was composed of snakes, all about the thickness of a pencil and long enough to reach the small of her back if they would just hold still…

“Ma’am, please. I’m not here to hurt you. Ow.”

She continued to scream and cry and strike at me. I let her. Even I am not stupid enough to tell an enraged woman to calm down. If she could be calm, she would. Telling her to calm down would only make her more upset. As it was, she’d get it out of her system eventually, then I could filter a pint of medusa venom out of my system. There are good points to being undead.

“Please stop hitting me,” I requested. She paid no attention. I kept my eyes firmly closed while she continued to strike me. The snakes weren’t an issue. I didn’t want to look a medusa full in the face. Sure, it was dark, but so what? Having vision that pierces darkness and sees to the farthest horizon is not to my advantage when dealing with gaze attacks!

“Those bites sting,” I added, as I felt one lock its jaws on the end of my nose. “I’m not the one—ouch—who did all this,” you know.”

She scratched me with her nails, opening up long furrows down the left side of my face. Another snake bit my left eyebrow and hung on. I sighed, but didn’t open my eyes.

“Okay. I’ll wait,” I said, and stopped talking. A snake latched on to my lower lip.

I didn’t fight her, as such. I let her hit me and bite me. What was she going to do? Barehanded, the best she managed was to scratch me with her nails. Those wounds closed up almost as quickly as she made them. Snakebites? Pfft. Poison? Double pfft. She wore herself out in her fit of rage. Give credit where it’s due, though. She kept going until she didn’t have the energy left to do more than hold on to me and let her hair chomp. Even those didn’t strike anymore, simply bit and held on.

I swung her up into a carry, careful not to dislodge her hair, and took her back to her… camp? The walled-off portion of the temple. She struggled a little, but I compressed her slightly and squeezed the rest of the fight out of her. There was a bed of sorts, made of some sort of leaves with furs thrown over. I laid her down on it.

“If I’m going to get you water, you’ll have to let go.”

She was too exhausted to care. She released me, hands, arms, and snakebites. I fetched water and started a poison-purging process on myself. I wanted it to finish well before sunrise.

I helped her sit up and drink. As if the water was the fuel, she started crying again. I let her, saying all the usual things one says. “There, there.” “Poor dear.” I deliberately avoided things like, “It’ll be okay,” since it wasn’t going to be, and “I understand,” because there was no way she would believe me.

I’ve worked really hard on the little things.

When she was all wept out, she fell into an exhausted slumber. I brushed back some snakes from her face and my fingers felt cloth. I examined it more carefully with tendrils, getting a more detailed minds-eye image of her face through a thousand delicate touches. She wore some sort of a bandage around her face, like a blindfold. Running my tendrils a little deeper, I felt her eyes beneath the bandage. They were damaged, badly, but were partially healed. They were there, but scarred and useless.

Does a medusa with no eyes still turn people to stone? Was she spared because she was harmless? Or did the so-called heroes kill one and call it a day? Was she even in the building when they came calling? Maybe I’d ask her later.

Since it seemed safe, I opened my own eyes and looked around. Sunlight would get in here, although not much and not directly. On the other hand, the inside of the temple was once tiled. Most of them were gone, but enough remained to make me wonder. If they were bright and glossy, they would turn an unpleasant, painful experience into an oven dangerously near my ignition point.

How badly did I want to avoid finding out? Pretty badly. Badly enough to summon a couple of double-walled tents, complete with metal-foil inner layer. Combined with the shade from the ruins, I’d be fine. She might even like having them when it got cold. If it got cold. Voidworlds can be unpredictable.

I wonder if she knows what grows around here. Maybe she could help me with my shopping list.

—

She was still sleeping when the sun came up, or the world turned, or whatever the local astronomical setup did. I cleaned myself and set about cleaning everything else. She had a huge, shallow stone bowl for cooking, set high on three large rocks, and a place for a fire underneath. I laid fresh wood, cleaned the bowl, freshened the leaves and furs of the bed, removed dust, dirt, and fungus from the camping area…

When she woke up, she sat up and turned her face toward me. Snakes hissed warningly.

“Morning.”

She didn’t answer immediately. I offered her a half-full jug of water and sloshed it to make noise. She took it and I went back to making sweeping movements with my hands, urging things out of the walled campsite.

“What are you doing?” she asked, head cocked slightly, listening to me move around.

“Magic.”

“You’re… you’re a sorcerer?”

“I’m not in league with dark powers, if that’s what you mean. Do you know what a wizard is?”

“There’s no such thing. Wizards are a myth.”

“Okay. May this dark enchanter and purveyor of the powers of evil offer you breakfast? You don’t have a lot on hand, but I’m not too bad as a hunter.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re lying.”

She shifted on the bed. She would have glared at me if she had eyes.

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“I walked into a ruin. I said hello and promised to keep you a secret. At this horrible insult, you decided to beat me, claw me, bite me, and poison me. Now I’m offering breakfast and you’re trying to petrify me for calling you out about not being hungry. I recognize you’re going through a tough time and you probably don’t believe in the kindness of strangers, but you might want to take a minute and judge me on my actions.”

On the plus side, I was glad to have one thing settled. She needed her eyes to petrify. I felt fine, even during the day. Maybe the heroes had blinded her? No, that didn’t make sense. Her eye injuries were old.

“So, do you want something?” I asked. “I’m going to bring in more wood, refill the water jugs, and cook something for myself no matter what you say. I only ask because I’ll need to know how much to fry.”

She responded with a sullen silence, but on her it looked good. I recalled the legends on Earth about Medusa. She was a beautiful woman. So beautiful, in fact, she was favorably compared to the goddess Aphrodite. The goddess was so offended by this—possibly because the truth hurts—that Medusa and her sisters were punished. From then on, their gaze turned people to stone. There are variations galore, of course. Some say their faces were made so ugly that they turned people to stone. Others stories leave out her sisters. Some say Medusa was a priestess of Aphrodite and claimed to be more beautiful in Aphrodite’s own temple. And a hundred other embellishments.

What I had here was Grace Kelly with no eyes and head full of long, venomous snake-hair.

“Do you want me to light the fire before I step out?” I asked.

“I can light my own fire.”

“As you prefer.”

I went out and whistled down three of the largest local birds—they reminded me of peacocks, but redone in yellow and green, and without the males’ feathery fan display. I gutted and skinned them before bringing them inside.

She was right. She could light her own fire. She had it going well by the time I got back.

“Forget something, stranger?”

“Nope. Done. Got some birds.”

“What?”

“I’m done. All that’s left is to cook them.”

“Oh! You must be an archer.”

“I’m middling-good with a bow,” I admitted, “but my daughter—probably my eldest daughter—is the archer in the family.”

Her face went into neutral, or tried to. Her hair hissed a little, but sank down listlessly. She held out a hand without a word. I placed a bird in her hand and realized I shouldn’t have mentioned Phoebe.

The medusa felt around, picked up her knife, and started carving the bird, laying pieces of it in the bowl with a surprising exactitude. Blind, yes, but she knew her way around this operation. I copied her, adding pieces from another bird.

“What are you doing?”

“The same thing you are. I got more than one.”

“Don’t. You’ll ruin my arrangements. Just give me the other one.”

“There are three. The one you have and two more.”

“You got three?”

“I’m hungry,” I admitted. “I can spare another one, though, if you want.”

“You can’t eat two of these. They’re too large. You’ll be hard-pressed to choke down one.”

“I will bet you anything at all that I can.”

“I have nothing to wager.”

“I’ll give you odds.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind. I’ll eat every bit you don’t, I promise you.”

And I did. She insisted I leave her alone to cook, though, and I could understand why. Everything had to be exactly where she put it because she couldn’t see to confirm it. If anyone interfered, it would be frustrating, and frustration wasn’t something she needed.

I cheated a little. I summoned a container of salt, some pepper, a few fresh lemons, and butter.

“Do you mind if I help a little?”

“Don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t. I just want to start something in the bottom of the bowl.”

“What do you mean?”

“Melted butter, some lemon juice, and a pinch or two of salt.”

“Salt? You have salt?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

Note to self:  Salt. It’s important.

As I watched butter melt, I wondered whether there were any plates. I looked around for anything that might serve, but didn’t see anything. At a guess, she—they—used to eat straight off the… grill? Stovetop?

Breakfast wasn’t impressive, but it was good. I think she liked the lemon-butter sauce on the bird. She also liked the ground pepper.

“How rich are you?” she asked, finally.

“Would you like this temple restored?” I asked. “How about I buy all the land hereabouts and put a wall around it? You can have it. I won’t even notice.”

“That’s pretty rich.”

“Material goods are the least of my concerns.”

“Then why are you here? Just exploring for no good reason? Boredom?”

“Partly. I’m looking for new fruits and vegetables for my garden. Also, I go for walks when I’m working on a problem and the answer doesn’t want to come to me. I try to forget about it for a while, then come back to it with fresh eyes.”

Her face shut down again, but her hair hissed at me with considerable venom.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have put it like that. It’s only an expression.”

“It’s… all right. It was a long time ago.”

“If I may ask, what happened to your eyes?”

“I took them out.”

I let that sentence hang for a while.

“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “Or, rather, I understand what you said, but I don’t have a context to frame it in.”

“My man. He was the only one I ever liked. He decided to stay with me, so someday, sometime, he would inevitably have looked into my eyes. I didn’t want him to.”

“Ah. And where is—” I began, and bit it off. The statue of the headless child, kneeling next to a bloodstain. The hand soaked in blood, hovering above the floor, as though pressing on the wound. The fresh, shallow grave out back. “No, don’t tell me. I figured it out.”

“Is there anything else you need to figure out?” she asked, bitterly.

“I’m still a little puzzled why the local heroes decided to come all this way just to bother you.”

“My daughter and I are monsters. We’re too dangerous to let live. You’re a human. You know how it is.”

“I was human,” I corrected.

“What are you now?”

“That’s hard to explain. Like you, I’m an entity with certain powers.”

She cocked her head at me and her snakes blinked.

“Something I’m wondering,” I began. “Can you see through your snakes’ eyes?”

“Not exactly. Dimly. It’s a strange and ever-shifting thing. I can’t control where they look and they can’t see very well. I don’t run into things, usually, but I can’t really see.”

“Sounds awful. How about we grow your eyes back?”

“Oh, would you?” she asked, sweetly venomous. “And while you’re at it, could you bring my daughter back from the dead? And my man?”

“Sorry. Resurrection isn’t my forte. It only works under special, very narrow sets of circumstances, and I have to be right there and ready for it. But growing back a lost limb or an eyeball? That’s pretty straightforward.”

A lot of snakes stared at me, tongues flicking.

“Are you mocking me in my misery?”

“I only mock people when it’s necessary to a larger purpose. I don’t have any plans involving you, so no, I’m not mocking you.”

“You’re serious? You can really…?”

“How many times did you bite me last night?”

She thought about it for a moment. She obviously hadn’t considered it before.

“Why aren’t you dead?” she asked puzzled. “You should have died, sobbing for a drink of water.”

“I’m really good as a healer.” I did not add that you can’t really poison a dead man.

“But… but my eyes…”

“Yes, well, I’ll have to take a look at them, won’t I? Do you feel comfortable showing them to me?”

“No.”

“Okay. More lemon? More pepper? The sauce at the bottom of the bowl is delicious.”

“No. No, thank you.” She bit her lip while I continued to eat. I swiped a bit of bird through the fat-lemon-butter-salt at the bottom of the bowl and ate it. With the intensity dialed down, it really was delicious. The bird reminded me more of turkey than of chicken and wasn’t as juicy, but the sauce made up for it nicely.

“I’m not sure I can hope about anything,” she said.

“I’ve suffered tragic losses, myself,” I admitted. “Not your loss. That’s unique to you. Only you can understand the depths of it and I won’t even try. We can’t compare pain. I only offer the idea that I do know what it is to be hurt, so you have my empathy and my sympathy, for whatever those are worth.”

“Then fix my eyes,” she said, and removed the strip of cloth.

I didn’t look. Not immediately. First, I felt carefully for any magical forces in play. While there was a magical aura around her eyes, it was restricted, contained, almost frustrated, in the sense something without volition can be frustrated. If you’ve ever driven a car that could complain about cold mornings or rush gleefully down a hill, you know what I mean. The force within her was highly specialized, moderately powerful, and trapped.

Excellent. I examined the physical structure of her eyes.

She had done a pretty fair job on them, I had to admit. They weren’t gone, but they had been badly cut open. They had healed about as well as an eye could. That is, she still had eyeballs, but she was about as blind as a typical jellyfish.

“Oh, that’s nowhere near as bad as I figured. Most of your eyes are still there. We won’t have to deal with regenerating an optic nerve or even most of the retina. It’s just the front that’s damaged.”

“Just?” she asked, incredulous.

“As in ‘merely’,” I agreed. “Regenerating whole eyeballs is much more difficult. This is damage to be repaired, not whole eyeballs to be replaced.”

“You mean you can…?”

“Sure. Hang on a minute while I pick the spells I’ll need.”

“You can really do this?” she asked, again, not quite believing.

“Yep. Can you avoid biting me while I put my hands on your face? I have to concentrate and I don’t need a snakebite distraction.”

“Yes. I can. Go ahead. Yes.”

“Thank you. Sit down. Hold still.”

So I touched her face, tracing lines along her fine, black brows, down the bridge of her nose, across her cheekbones. I told her to close her eyes and I brushed fingertips along the eyelids, trailing lines of magic. I would have preferred to actually draw lines on her face, as with some sort of makeup pencil, but it wasn’t entirely necessary. She would wear an invisible mask of magic, like some art nouveau piece of wire-work for Carnevale.

“Okay. It’ll take a little while for your eyes to recover, but the process is started. You should notice improvement by morning, if not sooner. It’ll be the better part of a week, I’m guessing, before your vision is back to normal.”

“Normal.”

“I’m restoring your eyes, not making them better than they were.”

“You… you wouldn’t lie to me?”

“Why should I? What do you have that I could take from you? How am I going to benefit from deceiving you? I lie whenever it suits my purpose to do so, but to you, I have no reason to lie.”

“We shall see.”

“No, you will see. In about twelve hours, I think. At least the difference between light and dark.”

—

I spent the rest of the day doing a lot of things. One of them was pumping vitality and magical energy into regeneration and healing spells. This was the hardest sort of regeneration, since it wasn’t based on a copy function. If you’ve got one working eye, I can copy it, mirror it, and tell you body to grow another one according to the blueprint. There will be some fiddling with the optic nerve and the muscles to align everything, too. But if I don’t have a good example to copy and paste, that won’t work. Your body has to be persuaded to heal itself, rather than fill in a blueprint, and with all that scar tissue, your body is already confused about what’s supposed to be there.

It’s not easy. It’s complicated and it’s power-intensive. Eyes are delicate, complex structures, too. And regeneration is demanding on the body. All of which means it takes days to regrow the things!

In retrospect, I suppose I could have copied the basic structures of any human eye—cornea, iris, and so on—and mapped those onto the ruined eyes. Then they could have reshaped quickly to the new parameters, becoming functional, then worked more slowly on the little details. For a human, that’s probably what I’ll do for a shortcut in the future. For a medusa, though, it would be a risk. At the time, I didn’t know if her healthy eyes bore more resemblance to a human’s or a snake’s!

They looked human, if you’re interested, and intensely green.

I introduced myself as “Halar.” Melletanethriandia—her name reminded me of Rendu’s elf-names—was hungry an hour after breakfast and stayed that way despite her rapid eating. She was pleased at her appetite since it implied something was going on. I went hunting for second breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. I cheated, though, and summoned a lot of things I couldn’t possibly have found. Wild carrots? Nope. Supermarket carrots. Wild potatoes? Nope. Supermarket potatoes. There was a whole list of things, including vitamins and nutrition shakes. The specifics of medusa biology are a mystery, but she needed materials to work with. She didn’t ask where I got any of it, which was a relief.

I really need to ask her about the things she eats in the region. I recognize a lot of the local edible plants—many of which are growing in greater abundance than I would expect. I think someone has been helping them. Not farming, exactly, but planting them where they could be mistaken for wild-growing plants.

I also brought in “my gear” from outside. I grabbed a couple of cooking pots, plates, and utensils. It’s all very companionable, standing around the big bowl and eating from it like a common soup pot, but I didn’t like the way her ragged dress came so close to the fire.

I might have also fireproofed her clothes. And, maybe, started a repair spell on her tunic-dress-thing. It had two parts, a linen undergarment and wool outerwear. She was willing to wear a thick shawl, which provided the extra material for repairs. The shawl got a bit thinner and her clothes got considerably better.

She sat down next to one of the tents I’d brought and leaned close to it, moving her head back and forth while her snakes swayed with her. She finally asked what it was. I had to lead her through the process of unzipping one end so she could crawl in and feel around.

We spent a good portion of the day with her telling me what was around the old temple. When she ran out of material, I told her stories. She found hobbits fascinating and considered elves decadent. She asked me about where I came from and I countered by asking about her family. She wasn’t ready to discuss her husband—“her man,” as she put it—and daughter. I wasn’t ready to go into long explanations of other worlds, differing technologies, and the whole cosmological collection. We both gave sketchy details.

She had a daughter. I had several kids.

Her man was a mundane—although unusually tolerant—human. I was immortal and there was more than one mother to my children over the course of my life.

Almost all humans regarded her as a monster. They didn’t like me much, either, but I could blend in better.

That’s about as far as we got before the unpleasant memories started to make her snakes hiss. We stuck to less personal topics after that.

—

While Melletanethriandia slept, I looked the temple over.

I really ought to ask her if there’s a diminutive form of her name. I’ve been avoiding addressing her by name—relatively easy when there’s only the two of us. I had a hard time thinking of her as “Melletanethriandia,” though. Mentally, I tagged her as “Mell.”

The temple wasn’t a hostile form of holy ground, but I wasn’t sure if the entity that owned it didn’t mind or simply didn’t have the power to argue. It was a ruined temple, after all, and might not be… what’s the word? It might not still count as a personal space for the celestial. Who was the celestial entity? What was the basis of the worship?

The ruins held the usual sorts of things. An altar for sacrifice—practical, not metaphorical, complete with grooves for blood to drain—benches for the faithful’s exercise—sit, stand, kneel—and mosaics on the walls for the religious artwork.

A lot of the artwork was missing. The tiles were gone. Pried out by treasure-hunters? Fallen in the course of time and swept out during a cleaning spree? I should ask Mell if she ever cleaned the place.

The only real clue I had was the idol, or the… what do you call it when the statue isn’t the god, but a representation of the god? A totem? An effigy? An icon? I think it’s an icon. The definition can probably be stretched to cover it.

So, the statue, an icon of the god. It was a woman, about twelve feet tall, set on a plinth. When the roof was on, she would stand nearly as high as the ceiling, looking down on everyone. Her smile struck me as a benevolent one, though. The way she was scantily clad and generously padded implied either a fertility deity or one devoted to erotic arts. It’s hard to tell with other cultures. What do they regard as sexy? What do they regard as motherly? Are they the same or are they drastically different? The sexy girl is young and thin, while mothers are mature and plump? Or are young women regarded as nervous virgins and too silly to be interesting, while the mature women are the sexy ones?

Although, come to think of it, the local tavern had professional women. I didn’t evaluate them, but I bet I could watch them trolling for business and get a good feel for the various womanly qualities. Note for future reference, if I ever need to figure it out.

I re-hung the doors. If for no other reason, it would keep out wildlife. As an afterthought, I added some extra wood to them, repairing them. I also examined the statues out front. The bodies were stone, but so was all the gear they carried. Breastplate? Rock. Sword? Rock. Wooden shield, brass rim, leather straps? Rock.

How the hell did that work? I mean, I know it can be done, but it’s a complicated bit of nuclear chemistry to turn everything into silicates. Although, come to think of it, there’s a lot of hydrogen in a human body just waiting to be used as additional protons for bumping almost anything up the periodic table, but we’re still talking about nuclear reactions!

Is it possible to balance the energy requirements? Some things fuse into heavier elements while others break down into lighter ones? Can we use some of the hydrogen, fusing it into helium or even into heavier elements, and channel that energy into further metamorphic nuclear reactions?

Or is this a power-intensive, “messy bits” spell no matter what I do? Should I go through all the nuclear chemistry to figure it out, or do I simply accept “It’s magic!” and go on with my life? Some spells don’t have a good explanation—correction: I haven’t found a good explanation—for how they work. This smells like one.

Hey! If Mell can turn things into stone, maybe she can demonstrate. It would help a lot if I could observe the process. I’ll have to ask.

I regarded the doors. They were wood, not stone. Did she ever look at them? Or does her magic require a living being? Regardless, they weren’t very sturdy and they were the only doors in or out. She needed something more durable. And a way to escape when people came knocking. Fortunately, this was a voidworld with a pretty good magical environment. Generating a little more wouldn’t go amiss, but only as a way to hurry things along.

Thinking of the new doors, a new roof wouldn’t go amiss, either. Maybe I could convert the interior of the temple into a house? There was space for two floors, but not enough material to also have thick walls. Thick walls seemed a good idea. One floor, then, with an optional basement and secret escape tunnel…

I admit it. I do enjoy my building projects. It always improves my mood. I should do this more often.

—

I’d already cleaned up and started breakfast when Mell woke up. She started the day with a shout and a lot of wild hair-flailing. She sat up and looked around.

“I can see!”

“Yep.”

“I can see!”

“So you said. I have eggs.” I put some on an aluminum plate and held them in her direction, careful not to look at her.

“You weren’t lying!”

“Nope. I really do have eggs. I hope you like them scrambled. I can add cheese, if you want.”

“How can you do this?”

“I had to learn to cook to teach my daughter. Take the plate, please.”

She took the plate.

“I mean about my eyes! You’ve—you’ve—how can…?”

“It’s several spells, not just one. One spell to do it all would be incredibly difficult. Eat. You need the material.”

“Why? Why would you do this for me?”

“I didn’t have anything pressing to do, so I goofed off, did some temple maintenance, and fixed your eyes. Haven’t you ever cleaned something because you didn’t have anything demanding your time?”

“You healed my eyes because you were bored?”

“Nah. It needed doing and I was here. You just came to my attention, that’s all, so I fixed the problem. Well, almost. Like I say, it’ll probably be a week before your eyes are perfect.”

She grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Close your eyes,” she commanded.

“Uh, okay.”

“Are they closed?”

“Yes.”

She turned me around, hugged me hard, and kissed me on the mouth like she meant it. I suppose the gift of sight is a precious thing and deserving of a kiss. I wasn’t complaining. I tried to give as good as I got. I was a bit distracted by the way the snakes were rubbing their heads up against the sides of my face, though. It wasn’t unpleasant, just unusual. I wasn’t too worried about being bit; I already encountered the venom and was confident I could survive it long enough to eliminate it.

Confident. Not certain. But the snakes showed no inclination to test my abilities.

She finished the kiss and put her head against my chest, bending a bit to do so. She was taller than I’d realized. I put my arms around her and patted her back. She felt cool to the touch, but so do I for twelve hours out of twenty-four. The snakes kept affectionately rubbing their faces against mine.

“I do have one favor to ask, if I can,” I told her.

“Ask anything.”

“Your name is a bit of a mouthful. Can I call you ‘Mell’?”

She tensed for a long moment, to the point I thought I’d offended her. Even her hair held still.

“Yes,” she decided, finally, relaxing against me. “Yes, I will permit it. No, I will be happy to let you call me ‘Mell’.”

“Huzzah! I’m delighted. Now, Mell—eat. Your eyes aren’t done and you need food to heal.”

“Yes,” she agreed, taking up her plate again. “What kind of eggs are these?”

“Chicken.”

“What’s a chicken?”

“It’s a kind of bird, bred in captivity to produce eggs and to be slaughtered for meat.”

“I don’t know of them.”

“They come from a long way away. Can I interest you in some more of those birds from yesterday?”

As we ate, she insisted we sit back-to-back, for safety. She was the expert on turning people to stone, so I did as she instructed. She wiggled happily against me as we leaned back on each other. When I asked about her petrifying gaze, she explained the workings.

“If you look into my eyes, you’ll turn to stone. I have to see your eyes and you have to see mine before there is a link. Then the curse falls upon you and you become a statue.”

“That’s why you can’t turn the doors to stone? They can’t look at you?”

“Yes.”

“So, a blind man can’t be turned to stone?”

“That’s right. And if I can’t see you, you won’t be in danger.”

“Hang on. I have to see your eyes, right?”

“Yes.”

“We could be in a totally dark room, nose to nose, eyes wide open, and I’d still be safe?”

“Yes. But even a little light, enough to give us a glimpse, would be enough. Especially that close!”

“Someone far away could, if his eyes were sharp enough, be turned to stone?”

“Yes, but I have to see his eyes, too. That puts a practical limit on how far away I can do it. An archer with the sun behind him might see my eyes and I still couldn’t see his. A man with poor vision could be ten paces away and be safe because he couldn’t see my eyes.”

“Gotcha. Keep eating. I have to go fetch something. A present.”

She continued eating, carefully not watching me go, but I was back after only a moment. I knew exactly what I wanted. She didn’t recognize it and asked what it was for.

“Pull the cloth strap. See how it stretches?”

“Yes.”

“The curved panel in front has a notch in the middle and padding around the edge. Put the panel on the bridge of your nose so your nose is in the notch. Press the whole thing to your face so it covers your eyes. Pull the stretchy bit back and settle it on your head so it pulls the front part gently against your face. The clear section in front of your eyes has a special coating. From your side, it’s clear. From the other side, it’s reflective. While you wear the ski goggles—that’s what these are called—no one can see your eyes, but you can whip them off if you need to.”

She donned the goggles.

“My eyes are closed. Look and see if I have it right.”

I checked her over, adjusted the elastic strap to free some trapped snakes, and confirmed she was safe.

“And these are for me?”

“Yep. My present to you. Now we can finish breakfast without worrying.”

“And the shiny thing you wear over your eyes? It is different from the ‘skigoggles’.”

“These are called, funnily enough, ‘safety glasses.’ These are a wrap-around version and have the same reflective property as the goggles—mirrored on the outside, clear on the inside. These come off easier, but yours should stay on even if you take a tumble. As long as one or the other of us has theirs on, we’re fine, right? Or have I misunderstood?”

She thought it over working through the possibilities in her head.

“No, you have it right. Mine keep everyone safe. Yours only protect you.”

“Quick question, though. If you see your reflection, do you get turned to stone?”

“No. A reflection isn’t the same.”

“Good. I’d hate to find the safety equipment endangered you.”

Once she was adequately fed, we took a walk together. I guided her and she held on to my forearm. Her sight was far from perfect. Legally, she was still blind. She could make out some shapes and tell the difference between light and dark, but that was about it. Even up close, her fingers were more use for identifying a carved symbol than her eyes. She didn’t trip over anything, though, partly because she knew her way around.

“The floor doesn’t feel gritty,” she observed, as we left the temple.

“I cleaned a little.”

“You didn’t touch the little statue!” she said, sharply. Her fingers dug into my forearm.

“Of course not!”

“Thank you,” she breathed. “I’d like to see it.”

I led her to it and she knelt beside it. With her for scale, I could guess at the daughter being between nine and twelve. Mell knelt by it for a long time, one hand resting lightly on the outstretched hand of stone.

“I recognize this may be an inappropriate question,” I began.

“Go ahead.”

“Is there some tradition or ritual that needs to be done? Humans get buried or burned, mostly. Is there an equivalent for…?”

“Kytonia. No. We… there aren’t enough of us to have such traditions. We don’t have communities. We wander when we do not live alone.”

“Why is that?”

“Our gaze works just as well on each other.”

“Oh! Your eyes meant you wouldn’t rock your man, but also wouldn’t rock your daughter.”

She bowed her head.

“Yes. Once I had what I needed from him, I told him to leave. It is the way of my kind to take what we must have, then drive the men away. He would not go. I told him it would not be safe. But he wouldn’t listen. He refused to leave. He said he loved me. He stayed with me. He followed me when I tried to leave him. When I finally realized he would never leave…

“Even with Melletendansolaria’s birth, he stayed. When the snakes opened their eyes in her fourth year, her gaze became deadly. I begged him again to go, but he said he had seen his daughter and was content to carry her image in his heart. He took to wearing a blind about his eyes, learned to live in darkness with me so his daughter would never have to be afraid to look at him, be afraid she would…” Mell peeled off the goggles and put her face in her hands.

I stood aside and waited, not sure if I’d be snakebit if I tried to hold her.

“I should have found a way! I should have sent him away—or cut the cord and stoned him! Why did I have to like him? Why did I let myself learn to care? He risked everything for me and my daughter, and when the heroes came, it cost him his life!  If I had waited—if I had not been so foolish—if he had not… if I had not…”

I had a hard time following the timeline, but grief-stricken ravings aren’t known for their clarity. I got the idea, at least.

“You couldn’t have made him go,” I told her. She shot a nasty look my way, but I was wearing my mirrorshades. “You had to protect your child from your gaze, I get that. But could you have survived for the first four years of her life if you were blind and alone? I’m guessing it wasn’t easy, even with his help, and harder still when the only sighted person in the house wasn’t yet five years old. How much harder would it have been? Impossible?”

“Damn you.”

“It’s a reality you don’t like, and I understand that. I have a lot of those and I don’t like them either. Hanky?” I offered, pulling one out and holding it in her direction. She snatched it without thanks, made damp, organic noises with it, and slapped it back into my hand.

“I didn’t really want it back.”

“I don’t want it anymore.”

“Perfectly understandable.” I refrained from any comment about medusa snot. “Did you dry your eyes?”

“Yes.” She put her mirrored mask back on and settled it in place. Her snakes writhed around the elastic band this time, helping her settle it. They didn’t like the elastic.

“Thank you,” I told her.

“For what?”

“Sharing. I appreciate you telling me all that.”

“I shouldn’t have. It’s not right to expect you to listen while I complain about how the gods have cursed my life and tormented me. The gods laugh at the agonies of my kind.”

“Sometimes they get a chuckle out of human suffering, too. Besides, it’s not right to expect you to hold it all in forever, either. I’m glad I was here to listen and, in my own small ways, to help.”

“I’ve asked before, but you didn’t answer. Why are you being kind to me?”

“You’re in my field of view,” I told her.

“I mean it. Is it because I’m beautiful? I know men find my kind so. Or is it because we are both monsters? Or does it please you to know the town those men came from will be full of statues when I have my full power again?”

“No, none of that. I really am just a helpful person. I like doing nice things for people.”

“Even monsters?”

“You think ‘monsters’ and ‘people’ are mutually exclusive? Aren’t you a person? Or are you only a monster?”

“You seem very strange to me,” she replied, dodging the question.

“I’ve been called a lot worse than ‘strange’.”

“I can imagine,” she replied, dryly. As a fellow monster, I was pretty sure she could.

We continued our walk by going out and around the temple. She enjoyed being outside, in the sunshine. We didn’t talk much, but she squeezed my forearm a few times when she didn’t need to. I think it was her way of saying thanks for taking her on the walk.

“How are we on water?” she asked, once I had her back inside.

“Lots.”

“Really? You found the stream in the hills?”

“No, but we still have lots of water.”

“How can that be? Did it rain in the night?”

“No. I’m a wizard, remember?”

“How do you magic water?”

“I make it rain inside the jars. It’s a tiny little rain. Much easier than making the whole sky do it.”

“Is it?” she asked, dubiously.

“Much.”

“You must know many spells.”

“I suppose I do. Doesn’t seem like it, sometimes.”

“You said you can’t bring back the dead?”

“Mostly, that’s correct. If I’m right there when they’re killed, it’s possible I can help. If I come along just a little bit later, though, it’s too late for me to do anything about it.”

“Once they start the journey, it’s too late to call them back.”

“Pretty much.”

“I think I would like to eat, now.”

I cooked. She didn’t seem in the mood for it.

—

Over the course of the next few days, her sight improved by leaps and bounds. By the third day, she could see well enough to see my face as a face, not a pale spot with a funny-colored band partway up. By the sixth day, she could spot birds in the trees at a hundred yards.

“I think your eyes are back in shape. They haven’t improved at all from this morning, so I’d say they’re as good as they can get.”

“This is fantastic. I can see, really see!”

“Yep. Now, would you like to try your eyes on something? See if you can still turn them to stone?”

“You mean I might not be able to?”

“I don’t know. When’s the last time you heard of a kytonia losing her eyes and getting them back?”

“Hmm. All right. What should I try?”

“I’ll find something later tonight. We can try it then.”

“Either way, it is good to have eyes again.”

“Makes life a lot easier, doesn’t it?”

“Yes… but it also reminds me I have to think about the future.”

“Oh?”

“I have to think about a child. I can’t let my line die out. Also, I must go away from this place. Living here is no longer safe. Men know where to find me. Or they will soon, once I make some statues in the town. They’ll come here, so I have to prepare. I have to leave. Although,” she added, glancing around the interior of the house, “this doesn’t look like the abandoned temple I used to know.”

“I made a few changes. I thought you’d say something before this.”

“I barely noticed, at first. The wall to my sleeping area is a better wall, a real wall, but it’s still where my feet remember it. The rest of the place isn’t really important. I assumed it was all your doing.”

“Quite correct.”

“Why?”

“You didn’t want a house? You wanted a ruined temple?”

“No, not that. I mean, you did this all for me?”

“Shouldn’t I have?”

“It’s… surprising.”

“It wasn’t much. A couple of spells here, a couple of spells there, a little nudge, another nudge, and presto. Masonry where you want it.”

“I do like the little garden of flowers around Melletendansolaria’s remains.”

“You didn’t want anything done to it, so I left it exactly where it was. I wasn’t sure about the other statues, so I left those alone, too.”

“So I see. Do what you will the rest.”

“Happy to help.”

“Is that all, though?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Is that the only reason? Just because you’re happy to help?”

“I’m on vacation. I’m allowed to be a nice guy.”

“You’re not… expecting anything?”

“What would I expect? You don’t have anything. I can’t think of anything you can do for me. Well, there is one thing.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “And that would be?”

“I do want to see you turn something to stone.”

The goggles gave her a fantastic blank stare. I felt her looking at me.

“That’s all?”

“I suppose I wouldn’t mind a sample of your snake-venom,” I mused, thinking how the sample I extracted from me was contaminated by being in my veins. A pure sample would be better. “It could be interesting to analyze it. Aside from that, no, I can’t think of anything.”

“You are undoubtedly the strangest man I have ever met.”

“I believe you.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing else I can do for you?”

“A petrification demonstration… venom from a quasi-supernatural source…” I trailed off, thinking. “No, that’ll do it.”

“In that case, I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“You say you’re a monster, but you used to be a man.”

“I said I used to be a human. I’m still a man.”

“Ah. That answers my question, but it confuses me.”

“How so?”

“You say you’re a man, but you don’t want me?”

“For what?”

“Sex.”

“It would be an outright lie to say I’m not interested, but it’s not a pressing concern. You’re certainly beautiful, and, if you wanted to, I would be happy to help with that, too—or not, as you prefer.  I’m not as driven by those desires as most men. I’m not sure why.”

I suspected it had to do with being alive only half the time, but how would I test it? It wasn’t a good time to go into what I thought about it.

“But you like it? You enjoy it?” she pressed.

“I always have.”

“You mentioned you’ve had children, yes?”

“Yes. Several, spread across many, many years.”

“So you can have sex and you can sire children. I want to be perfectly clear on this.”

“I am quite capable, thank you.”

“Good.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she decided.

—

Later, as it turned out, was to be considerably later. Around sunset, I crawled into a tent in the darkest room in the house. Mell already knew about my twice-daily transformations, but wasn’t entirely up to speed on their exact nature. She met me as I came out.

“Can we talk again?”

“Is it later?”

“It is.”

“Okay, but I have an errand to run. Can it wait?”

“I suppose,” she agreed, sighing. I think it was frustration, but it might have been exasperation. It was mild, so it was hard to tell the difference.

“Great. I’ll be back with your present shortly.”

“What present?”

“You’ll see.”

And she did. I’d been thinking about her earlier comment about a town full of statues. I had no doubt she could turn a lot of people to stone before they killed her, but she couldn’t take on a whole town. I understood the motivation, the desire for vengeance, but her plan was awful. How does one achieve the feeling of vengeance, the catharsis, without causing massive collateral damage?

It’s a question I’ve had cause to think about.

I went into town and hunted around until I found out where they kept the stone medusa head. Someone built a box for it and mounted the box on a wall in the Barley & Grape. Unlike other trophies, it required no taxidermy. Handy, that. Convenient. More awkward to mount, though. I promptly stole it and replaced it with a double fistful of sand. Who knows? They might assume the dead ones crumble to dust after awhile.

With the head recovered, I found the loudmouth hero—the one who bragged about delivering the killing stroke. He was asleep alongside his girlfriend—at a guess, his current, temporary girlfriend. After siphoning off most of the vital force from both of them, I dragged him out of his bed, threw him over my shoulders, and carried him eight miles to the old temple.

I’m not Bronze, but I’m strong and I run very fast.

I conjured a light from the ceiling of the entry hall. The annulus glowed all around the glass-domed oculus in the center. It illuminated me, my burden, and the little flower garden around the beheaded statue. I plopped the unconscious hero down on the tile before I stepped into the flowerbed to put the head back on the broken statue. A little stone-flowing here, a touch there, and a bit of minor rearrangement on the features…

I didn’t want her to have an expression of terror for eternity. Fortunately, I’d had opportunity to make her mother smile and overlaid that image on the statue’s face. It was a good thing they looked so much alike—the daughter seemingly a younger version of her mother. I told the stone to copy the new pattern and it shifted to match.

“Mell!” I called, putting the finishing touches on the reconstruction. “I’m home! I’ve got that present!”

She came out of the bedroom and looked toward me.

“What is this?” Mell asked, voice trembling. She had one hand on her mirrored goggles. She was looking down at the unconscious hero.

“This is Iunius. I’m told he did the actual chopping.”

She stomped forward and kicked him, whipping off her goggles.

“Look at me!” she demanded. “Look! Wake up and see me!”

“He can’t,” I told her. “He’s unconscious. I’ll fix him in a minute and you can zap him with your eye rays. For the moment, though, I want you to put on your mask and look at the statue. Have I repaired it properly?”

She stared down at the unconscious hero for half a minute more, willing him to wake up. She kicked him in the ribs, hard. He didn’t stir. With reluctance, she donned the mirrored goggles again and turned her attention to the statue.

“That’s her,” she stated, flatly. “That’s my daughter.”

“Everything in its place?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Do you want her to stay kneeling, or would you rather she stand, or lie down, or what?”

“You can change it?”

“If I can fix the break, I can change her position. Look at the house. Stone and I get along. Remind me to tell you about my pet rock, sometime.”

“You have a rock for a pet?”

“I used to. It was the fastest rock you ever saw.”

“You are jesting.”

“No, I’m just not terribly serious, usually. I really did have a pet rock.”

“How?”

“I brought it to life and it was my friend. It’s hard to explain.”

“You brought it to life?” she asked, sharply.

“Yes, and I can hear it in your voice, so let me stop you right there. What you want, I can’t do. Yes, I can animate a statue and make it walk around. No, it will not be your daughter. It will be a statue, enchanted to move, no different from a metal statue or a wooden one. It will be magic moving the material. Your daughter will not be inside. What I can do is reshape the stone, bending it to sit, stand, lie down, or whatever. This stone memorial of your daughter will look however you want it to look—but no power at my command can make it be your daughter.”

“I… I understand. You can’t bring her back. You’ve said so. I just keep hoping… wishing.”

“I wish I could.”

“So do I.” She turned and regarded the unconscious man on the floor. “You want to watch me turn him to stone?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“It will be one of my few pleasures in life. But there are things I want to do first. Wake him up.”

—

I’m not going to detail what happened to Iunius. I try not to think about Johann and his theme park of sadistic attractions. Most of the time, I succeed. Mell, however, made me queasily aware that those memories are still on file in the mental library.

The process was lengthy and painful and involved quite a lot of snakebites and fingernails—some of Mell’s, some of Iunius’, although used in different fashions. Iunius screamed and bled and shivered a lot and I didn’t blame him a bit. Mell was not a professional torturer, but she was imaginative and she had all the bile, all the anger of a mother who had her daughter’s murderer at her mercy.

If that’s not a chilling thought, I don’t know what is.

When Mell was done, she turned to me.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yes.” I’d had my spells ready for an hour.

She took off her goggles and grabbed Iunius’ head in her hands. It was hard to get his eyes open. A lot of his flesh was puffy with the tiny doses of venom from the snakebites. He oozed blood in his sweat, his spit, and his tears. The little nibbles weren’t meant to poison him, only to scratch him enough to get a trace of venom into his skin, and it worked. Mell pried his eyelids apart, almost pressing her forehead to his.

He froze in place and a soft grey tint spread through his skin. He went from tanned, bloody, bruised, and puffy to grey, dry, hard, and lumpy. He was a perfect statue of misery and pain. Elapsed time: less than a second. She was pretty close to touching eyeball to eyeball, though, so it may have worked faster than usual. Ideal circumstances and all that.

Mell put on her goggles again.

“Did you see what you needed to see?”

“For now. I may want you to do it again, later, once I’ve had a chance to experiment with what I’ve learned.”

“Later. Yes—later. Now, though, you come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“My room. I’ve avenged my daughter and now I want to forget about everyone and everything for a while. Almost everyone. I want you to help distract me so I can forget for a while.”

“How can I help?”

“I’ll show you.”  She grabbed my hand and towed me behind her.

Yes, it was nighttime. My blood doesn’t flow the way a mortal man’s does, but I can use magic to pretend. She seemed pleased for quite some time. Breathless and exhausted, she finally called a halt. I lay beside her and let her recover. She rolled over to me and draped herself all long one side. The tongues of the snakes tickled my skin everywhere they could reach.

“Do you,” she asked, still breathing hard, “ever get tired?”

“Only during the day.”

“Why then?”

“Because I’m more nearly mortal, then. At night, I’m more of a monster.”

“You keep saying that. You’re a monster? Or are you immortal?”

“Yes.”

“Both, then? Immortality doesn’t show, but how are you a monster?”

“Promise not to panic?”

“Panic?”

“I’m scary.”

She didn’t answer immediately.

“All right. I think I have a grip on myself. Try not to be too frightening.”

“We’ll ease into it,” I promised. I opened my mouth and licked the tip of her nose without moving my head. She was startled, but giggled.

“That’s not scary.”

“Look at my mouth.”

“Are those fangs? You didn’t have fangs a moment ago.”

“Yes. They retract. Touch my teeth.” She probed gently with a fingertip, first a fang, then the others.

“They’re all sharp?”

“Very.”

“I have dozens of teeth just as sharp, although smaller.”

“There’s more.” I held up a hand and she took it. “Watch the fingers,” I suggested. She did. I extended my fingernails into talons.

“Impressive,” she observed.

“I change color, too.” I deactivated my disguise spells, allowing my skin to darken to charcoal-grey and my eyes to turn black. She wouldn’t see my eyes, of course, because I was wearing my eyeball armor, but the skin was obvious.

“Does your kind always change color like this? Or is it because you are a wizard?”

“I think we generally change color, but I may be unusual. I hide my coloration with spells. This is what I look like at night. During the day, I’m generally pretty normal-looking.”

“You’re cold, too,” she observed, after a time.

“Yes. So are you.”

“It’s normal for me. But you? You used to be a man—of the race of men, I mean. The only thing I can think of can’t go out during the day, but you do.”

“True, but there are many kinds, many variations. Did you know there is a type of kytonia that has a terrible form? A long, snakelike body from the waist down, a scaled humanoid body from the waist up, and poisonous blood?”

“I did not. So, you are a vampire?”

“Of a sort. A specific type.”

“How can you have a daughter, then?”

“During the day, I’m alive. At night, I’m as dead as anyone.”

“You don’t feel dead.”

“Check again. No pulse. No biology. That stuff only happens when the sun is up.”

“You mean all this was wasted?” she demanded, sitting up.

“Was it a waste?” I asked, and she checked herself before speaking again. Her mouth quirked in a smile.

“No. No, I shouldn’t say it was a waste. I chose the wrong word. It was more than worth the effort, but I was hoping to get a child.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why me? And why so eager?”

“It is the way of our kind. I have much the same form as a human female, but I am not one. I am kytonia.” She lay down next to me again. “As for why you…” She tickled me under my left arm and a dozen snakes stroked their heads through my hair. “You’re here, of course. You’re willing. If nothing else, those would be sufficient. It is nice that you’re also extremely attractive. I am entirely pleased with you.”

“And you want a child by me?”

“If I can.”

“Me, specifically?”

“It does not matter who sires it. It will be kytonia. It always is. We need the race of men for our survival, but they are our greatest enemy.”

“What do you mean in the matter of siring children? About how it doesn’t matter who does it?”

“We always have kytonia. There are no half-breeds. There are no males. If not by you, then by another shall I have a child and so propagate my race. I must. It is the way of my kind.”

“It must be hard to find someone who will risk it.”

“Not so hard as you think. We are beautiful. There are always men who will care only about beauty and take any risks to possess it. When we have what we need and they have gained what they sought, we leave. Sometimes, I believe, some kytonia will gaze upon the men they have used and turn them to stone. I have heard stories.”

“You have? From who?”

“It is not so hard a thing to put on a hood and walk among men with one’s eyes downcast.”

I thought about it for a moment. As long as she didn’t make eye contact, maybe. With a hooded cloak—and maybe a hairband, or snakeband—it might be doable.

“I hope you’re nicer than that.”

“To those who are kind to me, I am always kind. Both times,” she added. “But we do not take mates as the swans do, but only find them and depart. It is the way of our kind and the way of men.”

“I thought you lived with a man…?” I asked, trailing off. She turned her face away and said nothing. Eventually, she answered the implied question.

“He was not as other men. He chose to stay.”

“You cared about him.”

“Eventually. It was difficult to accept he cared about me.”

“I am sorry I did not come sooner. I am also sorry I could not help.”

“It is the way of my kind. Our kinds,” she corrected, sighing, turning to face me again. “I had forgotten. He made me forget.  It is not something I can undo. We are what we are, and I must bear another child to preserve my race. Will you help me?”

“Are you certain there are no male kytonia? If they exist, I can probably find one.”

“There are none. There never have been. It has always been so.”

“That’s more of a problem.”

“It certainly is! Especially if you will not help me. No, you are helping me a great deal. You’re not being useful at night!”

I thought about it. Given the circumstances, what would it cost me? Another two decades while raising a child? No, clearly not. While she wasn’t firmly against the idea, she clearly didn’t feel comfortable with a long-term relationship. It also wasn’t the way of her kind. It went against her expectations. As for my own reservations… Such a child would have a mother that wanted it, and my cultural anomie had yet to be proven beneficial to anyone, including me!

Then there was the question of what would happen if I refused. Did it matter if I sired a child for her? The other option, apparently, was for her to hunt down some random guy for the task. This risks his life, but is that really my problem? Where does my responsibility end for the things I do, or don’t do? Where I think it does? Or—in this case, at least—where she thinks it does? Who has the final decision on this? The guy just passing through, or the lady who lives here and knows exactly what she wants?

“If this is what you truly want, I can be useful in the morning. If you still wish it.”

“You can?”

“During the day. Whenever the sun is up.”

“When the sun is up,” she repeated. “That matters?”

“It matters to me.”

“I do not understand you. I don’t understand the nature of what you are,” she confessed. “It doesn’t seem… You’re supposed to be one thing or another, not first one thing and then another. You’re a human, but you’re not. It confuses me.”

“It hasn’t always been convenient,” I confessed.

“Which reminds me. Do you sleep?”

“Not for a long time, no.”

“Would you stay here with me while I sleep, this time? Can I ask that of you, too?”

“Go to sleep. I can be here all night, no problem.”

“I’m not tempting you to bite me?” she asked, suddenly. “Is that why you go away in the night?”

“No, you’re no more of a temptation than any throat. I’m not hungry, so you’re safe. Some other time, if you’re comfortable with it, I’ll bite you a little so you know what it’s like.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little. I can take chunks out, but that’s when I’m in a hurry. My fangs are sharp enough to poke little holes.”

“And you won’t drink much?”

“I’m not hungry,” I repeated.

“All right. Show me.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, please.”

“If you like.”

I held her to me and brushed a fistful of snakes gently back from her neck. They watched, tongues flicking, curious. I bit Mell very lightly, with only the tips of my pointiest teeth. She inhaled sharply through her nose and clutched at me, but she didn’t cry out.

Her blood was much like human blood. There was an undertone to it. Richer in magic, steeped in it, as befit an innately magical creature. Cooler, like her spirit, but not cold. Her passions were less heated, less volatile, less aflame with the volatility of a human, but if they were slower, they were at least as deep. I licked the side of her neck and closed the pinpricks of my gentlest bite. She relaxed, stretching out on the fur, and shivered all over.

“You okay?”

“I am very well. Is it always like that?”

“No. Usually, I don’t have a volunteer. That’s faster and can be much more messy. Briefly.”

“What did you think?”

“It’s good. I like it. If I ever taste kytonia blood again, I’ll know it for what it is. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She pulled me close and snuggled down, practically glued herself to me. I raised my body temperature. I have preparatory spells I like to use before a night-to-day transformation. One of them adjusts my temperature to normal body heat levels. It’s by no means necessary, but it is a good deal more comfortable. I raised it another two degrees as she snuggled closer.

“Now you’re warm,” she said, sleepily.

“You like the heat.”

“I like you, too,” she said, and slept.

As for myself, I stepped inside my headspace to review the petrification data.

—

The next morning—after the requested high-intensity cardio workout—I prepared breakfast. Mell did some housekeeping and looked exasperated.

“What have you done now?” she demanded.

“I have no idea.”

“The bedding!”

“What about it?”

“I was planning to change the hyssop leaves for fresh ones, but these are still fresh!”

“Oh. Yes. The furs are clean, too.”

She snatched up the nearest one and sniffed it. She threw it back down.

“What am I supposed to do? You’re cooking, cleaning, hunting, gathering, filling the water, stacking the wood, repairing and rebuilding this… temple? House?… and I don’t know what to do with myself! What do you expect me to do?”

“Anything you like.”

“There’s nothing left!”

“I apologize for being efficient and effective. However, I should point out I have planted flowers in the front hall. You might see if they’re going to survive. They probably need to be watered and I don’t know if the skylight is giving them enough sunshine.”

“It’s something, at least.” She breezed out while I continued cooking. I didn’t know what to make of her complaint. I suppose it’s possible to get so bored that housework and chores are things to look forward to. Could it be she was looking for things to distract her, still? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed likely. What was kytonia psychology like? They were female, but did that mean they thought like humans? If they grew up knowing they were hunted as monsters, how would it change their perspective? How would it affect their whole race? And knowing they needed a human male to continue their line surely wouldn’t help matters.

I laid out breakfast on the new stone table—new table, old stone—and called Mell in. We sat together and ate.

“Do you always eat so much?”

“It slows down the processes that require me to eat people.”

“Ah,” she nodded, sagely. “They do not have as many victims to miss.”

“Partly, yes.”

“Will you come with me into the town?”

“For what?”

“I plan to take a horse—horses, if you will come—and leave this place.”

“Ah, yes. You mentioned something about turning a lot of people to stone.”

“As many as I can.”

“Have you ever heard of a phenomenon called ‘the cycle of violence’?”

“No. How does it work? Can it be used to kill men?”

“In a manner of speaking. The idea is if you keep taking vengeance for wrongs done to you, you provoke others into taking vengeance for wrongs done to them. They hurt you, you hurt them, they hurt you, and the circle keeps whirling around.”

“You’re saying I should let them get away with killing my children? That they do not deserve punishment?”

“Not at all. I’m saying if you choose to provoke them, they will kill your children. There are many of them, well-armed and willing to fight. Sure, you can stone a dozen or more of the stupid ones, but the dangerous ones know how to avoid it. Then you’ll never have any more children and your branch of the kytonia line will end.”

Mell was all set to give a sharp answer until the last statement. Her mouth closed with an audible clop.

“I don’t like what you’re saying.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“You said it despite this?”

“I could say something you didn’t want to hear or I could say nothing and risk your life. Going into town to steal a horse or two and stone as many people as you could—that’s not safe, and it will definitely convince everyone how you’re a danger to them all.”

“But they deserve it!”

“Yes. Do you want to convince them you deserve to be beheaded?”

“They think that already!”

“But they aren’t doing anything about it,” I pointed out, reasonably. “If you go there and rock a dozen or more, they’ll chase you because you’ll have proven to them how dangerous you are. Are you dangerous to them? Or dangerous to the one who slew your daughter? You already gave him a thousand times more suffering before you killed him. How many more have to die because killing him didn’t make you hurt less?”

“You trouble me,” Mell admitted.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t what I intended.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Perfectly fair. While you’re at it, would you mind if I examined your eyes?”

“Examined—? In the names of all the gods, how do you plan to do that? Just looking at them will turn you to stone!”

“Mirrors. Later tonight, if I can get enough information, I might even look at them in the dark.”

“What will that accomplish?” she asked, now distracted from the earlier topic.

“I can see perfectly in the dark. If you don’t see my eyes, you don’t stone me. Right?”

“That’s true.”

“Then we’ll hide in an inner room. At night, it will be pitch black. We can even throw my cloak over a tent and make sure it’s dark.”

“But, until then… mirrors? How will that work?”

“Magic. I’ll show you.”

I set up a mirror for her while I used a smaller one for myself. With a scrying spell tied to both of them, she could see in her mirror what I saw in mine. As for mine, I put an invisible, intangible scrying sensor in front of her, focused it down so it magnified, and slid it harmlessly inside her left eye.

“I feel something,” she said.

“Does it hurt?”

“No, but something strange is going on.”

“Everyone has a basic feel for magical forces. The more intense the forces, the easier it is. If I were to aim a hostile spell at you, you’d feel it and reflexively try to resist it or avoid it. You might not understand what you’re doing, but you don’t have to understand how your muscles work to jerk away from something hot. The only reason I can look inside your eye this way is because you know it’s happening and you’re allowing it.”

I didn’t think it politic to mention I could overwhelm her resistance. It’s a basic principle, not an inflexible rule.

“Is that the inside of my eye?”

“It is. The structure of it is largely the same as a human eye. Let me magnify it some more.”

Pupil, iris, sclera, cornea, aqueous humor, retina… magnify more. Blood vessels… rods, cones, ganglion cells—and what are these? A pattern of tiny, black spots? Scattered as they are, they probably don’t interfere with vision, but they aren’t part of a human eye.

Magnify. Magnify again. Magnify!

Is this a silicate I see before me? I think it is. These are cells, alive, connected in much the same way as the rods and cones to the nervous system. They also have lines connecting to the optic nerve. Do the perceive something? What do they detect?

The lines from these small spots run along the optic nerve all the way to the back of the brain. They diffuse into the primary visual cortex, mingling and spreading and ending there, tied into the way she sees. She sees eyes and something in her takes note of the fact.

All right, let’s look at the magical signature. Yes, these silicate bits have their spark of magic, much like other specialized organs in other magical creatures. If these are tissues designed—or evolved in a magical environment—to do a specific thing, they will be much more efficient and effective than any handwaving, any spell, any enchantment.

What do they do? They turn things to stone. How? That’s a good question. I know what they do, but not how. It’s like saying “electricity makes the motor turn.” I know the electricity makes the electric motor go, but everything in the guts of it is a mystery.

“Do you feel like doing some more rocking?” I asked.

“What did you have in mind?”

“I’d like you to turn something to stone while I watch how your eyes work.”

“I’d like to see, too.”

“Certainly. Let me get a bird.”

We took a couple of stabs at it. The results were mixed. Her eyes tended to shift involuntarily even when she wasn’t using her power, but they jerked quite sharply while she kept her eye on the birdie. I had to fix a scrying spell to the interior of the eyeball, mounting it, as it were, inside. I also needed secondary and much more specialized spells to examine her visual cortex and the visual cortex of the targets. It took eight small birds before I had enough.

As far as I can tell, there’s a moment when creatures look at each other. My eyes meet your eyes, and we are both looking at each other, trying to take in as much information as possible. This is, in a minor way, like a magical foot in the door through the typical magical resistance. Normally, if a spell tries to directly affect a person—not create flames to burn them, but to directly raise their temperature to make them combust—the person instinctively, reflexively resists. It’s much easier to ignite wood or a corpse than a living being. But the eye contact acts like the ionized pathway for a lightning bolt. The spark of power leaps from Mell’s eyes and straight into the poor schmuck who had the bad luck to get into a staring contest with her.

Satisfied, I shut down my various spells. Mell rubbed at her eyes for a moment.

“That was a most peculiar feeling.”

“It didn’t hurt, did it?”

“Not at all, but it was strange. It felt as though my eye was… was… heavier? Thicker? I was more aware of it. I could feel it more. It was more obviously there in a way it isn’t, usually.”

“Back to normal, now?”

“Yes. Are you wearing your eye-coverings?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Thank you for asking.”

She turned her head, working her neck and rolling her eyes around to stretch everything. I gently stroked some snakes out of the way and massaged her neck and shoulders. They flicked me with their tongues. I think they liked me. Cats don’t, but snakes and spiders do.

When she felt better, I pointed out we needed more wood. She went out to gather it. I also conjured up a broom. If she wanted to do things—and she said she did—then I would be remiss if I did not let her. I think it has something to do with feeling useful. I’m very good at being lazy, though. I have spells for it. I’ve worked out lots of ways to be lazy. Having it all dumped on you at once could be a bit of a shock, I suppose. How would a Victorian household react if they never had to clean, repair, or restock anything? They’d need a cook. Maybe a valet and a gardener. A ladies’ maid, too, probably. As for the rest…

Maybe I shouldn’t be quite so lazy. At least, not where anyone can see.

—

Mell seemed happy enough with the chores. I really do think she wants to feel useful. There also exists the possibility she wants to be nice to me, but I don’t believe it would account for the level of effort she’s exhibiting.

While she found things to do, I spent a good portion of the day looking at things. Islands, mostly. I did put some effort into the local area, but only enough to discover it wasn’t viable as a permanent residence.

One island in particular was about the size of… what’s that small island in Hawaii? Ni’ihau, I think? This was a tropical island, largely covered in green. It was clearly the cone of an old volcano, worn down over the millennia until it was an almost-closed circle. A good-sized lagoon filled a portion of it near the rim, but the rest of it was jungle, worn mountains, and bits of beach. Overall, the land surface might have been seventy square miles. Of that, maybe thirty could be classed as easily useful. Doing some back-of-napkin calculation and discounting the prospects of fishing, that works out to a sustainable population of a little over six thousand, plus or minus the usual variations for soil composition, crop rotation, and farming technologies.

Hmm.

That island took quite a while to find. There were several candidates, all far enough from other habitations to be difficult to reach. I also searched them thoroughly for signs of an indigenous population before settling on this one in particular. All this work left me with only a little time to look over the nearby town.

I don’t know what they call the place, but I’d call it a good start on civilization. They hung lamps on chains and lowered them outside the city’s thin, high walls at night. Inside, they had no public lighting, but individual houses and businesses usually had an external lamp. Glass was in evidence, but it was rippled, distorted stuff. It was used only in lanterns and in rich houses. Windows were double-shuttered, inside and out, although the inner shutters often had movable louvers to control the amount of air and light. Not all the streets were paved or cobbled, but some effort had gone into every street to reduce the mud and improve drainage. Sadly, the gutters were the sewers. Someone had the job of walking along, scooping up stuck muck from these and carting off whatever didn’t wash away.

All in all, not too bad. They did try to build in stone wherever possible, but wooden upper floors and outside staircases told me they had some population pressures. No real structures existed outside the walls. The only people living outside were those who would be kicked out, anyway—beggars, lepers, cripples, and other unemployed, unemployable, or just plain poor.

I checked in on Iunius’ friends. They were drinking together, as I suspected they would be, and discussing where he’d gotten himself off to. The speculation consisted of three main camps: jail, passed out drunk, or tied to some lady’s bed until he cried Uncle. They were making and taking bets, with drunk being the odds-on favorite.

Okay, they didn’t miss him yet. Things hadn’t reached the point where I would have to rush.

Well, most things. Mell wanted me to come inside.

—

After we were mutually accommodating and the sun went down, we made sure we were in absolute darkness. I took another look at her eyes, this time more directly. Since she couldn’t see me, her silication rays didn’t affect me. Yay. Being a vampire is rocky enough. I didn’t learn anything new on the physical level, but I did see how her eyes interlinked with her personal vital force. Turning someone to stone wasn’t difficult for her, but it was a drain on her energies. It might be possible to send enough things against a kytonia to wear her down, reduce the power of her gaze, and thus reduce the range at which it worked. Fresh, she could rock a man a hundred yards away. Wearied from a dozen or a score of men? It was possible she might not be able to zap someone across the room.

Then it was time for her to sleep. She snuggled up to the warm body—me—and seemed quite content. I, for my part, stepped into my headspace again and laid out all the new data on my mental desk.

Can I turn someone to stone? Yes. Can I turn them back? No. I don’t think the process is reversible. However, if the process is interrupted, they may have a chance. At close range, a kytonia turns a man to stone damn quickly. At greater distances, it takes longer, but I don’t have enough data points to plot a curve of distance-vs-time. Still, it’s theoretically possible to stop the process in mid-transformation and cause it to reverse itself. Once it’s complete, though, there’s none of the original pattern of the person left. They’ve become a rock. Turning them back isn’t going to work. You might as easily carve a statue and then turn it into a person.

While I’m sure I can interrupt the process or block it, the most important thing is I feel confident I can temporarily disable it in a kytonia. Kind of like turning down my sense of taste or smell, it should be possible to suppress the magic-focusing organs in the kytonian eye that cause them to petrify people.

There’s nothing to be done about the hair, though. I’ll figure out how the toxin works later.

—

In the morning, I checked on the town. Iunius’ friends were sleeping off the prior evening. I’d check again around lunchtime.

Mell woke up as I put my pocket mirror away.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“It’s stuffy in here.”

“That’s me. Sorry,” I told her. She wrinkled her nose.

“It seems like this every morning and evening.”

“Yep.”

“How do you stand it?”

“I clean up quickly.”

“Which reminds me. It’s bath day. I’ll heat some water.”

I kept my mouth shut about magical conveniences in hot water, bathing, and hygiene in general. If she wanted to heat water for a bath, I wouldn’t interfere.

We had breakfast and, while she did her thing around the house, I did some more planning. I summoned several packets of seeds. I also summoned a dozen or so of those little trays gardeners sometimes get, these filled with different sorts of food crops.

“What are these for?”

“Later.”

“Later?”

“Not that sort of later.”

“Oh. Surely you don’t plan to plant them around here?”

“No, I plan to take them with me.” I said nothing about not calling me Shirley.

“Where to?”

“Somewhere far away from here.”

“I had in mind,” she said, “an answer more along the lines of exactly where.”

“I know of an island that could stand to have some people on it. Which reminds me. I meant to ask how long your people live.”

“I don’t know. As long as men? My mother was killed before I was old enough to find my first man.”

“Mmm. I see. So you could be immortal, provided nobody kills you?”

“I… had not thought of that,” she admitted, startled. “I suppose so. But we are always killed, or so I’ve been taught. My mother never mentioned any elder kytonia.”

“You should figure it out.”

“I’d love to. How?”

“Go live on an island. Get a bunch of other kytonia to live there, too. Fish the lagoon, farm the land, hunt the forests a little, and live as long as possible.”

“Yeah. That sounds wonderful. Where do you suppose I can find a hundred—or even a dozen—kytonia to go to this paradise?”

“I’ll find them, but you’ll have to do the talking. The snake-hair will put them more at ease.”

Mell’s face was hard to read behind the mirrored ski goggles, but I could judge by the open mouth that she was amazed.

“Are you serious?”

First “surely” and now “serious.” It was so darn hard not to make the obvious play on words. The only thing holding me back, really, was the way her language didn’t have the same parallels. “Shirley” wasn’t a name—not that I knew of—and “Sirius” wasn’t a star and had no connection to dogs. It hurt me to not make the jokes, but not as much as making them and watching them flop.

“Mell, finding a kytonia isn’t hard if you know how. Thing is, I’d rather not have every meeting be like our first one.”

Kytonia can blush. In Mell’s case, she not only blushed but her snakes curled inward on themselves, hiding their faces in the body of her hair.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“It was appropriate for what you thought at the time. I forgive you.”

“Thank you.” She cleared her throat and resumed the subject. “You can really find some of my sisters?”

“They have an obvious physical characteristic. I can probably find all your sisters.” I sent a micro-gate to locate a head full of snake hair, skipped over Mell, and brought up the image on my mirror. “Recognize her?”

“No, but I do not know any others of my kind. I am told we all look the same, and she looks like me.”

“She does, doesn’t she? Want to talk to her about living on an island? She looks as though she’s traveling.”

“We generally do. I only stayed here for so long because of…” she trailed off.

“Ah, family. They do tend to pin us down, don’t they? I’m a bit of a wanderer, myself, but I have places I’m trying to catch up to. So, you want to talk to her? If I show up on the road and pitch the idea of kytonia island, she’ll either laugh at me or look at me, and neither one helps.”

“I don’t know enough about this island of which you speak. Can you tell me more?”

“Easy enough. How about we go look it over?”

“How long a trip is it?”

“As long as you like.”

“I mean, how long will it take to get there?”

“Two seconds? Maybe three?”

Mell’s lips compressed to a thin line.

“You are joking.”

“Often, but only because I’m not a very serious person. Since we’re in a highly-magical world, though, and it’s only a spatial gate…”

I waved hands around the front door, zapped it, and watched the world outside flush away into the distance. An instant later, an island view came snapping back. Sea smells vied with jungle. A hot wind blew through the gate and, as the cloud moved away, a blast of intense sunlight shafted its way into the foyer.

I already checked. I’m cautious about time zones.

“How long does it takes to step through a door?” I asked, reaching through to pluck an elephant-ear leaf from the nearest plant. I let the gate relax and handed her the sun-warmed leaf.

In context, her comment wasn’t meant to be taken literally, although I was willing if she insisted.

“And we can go there?” she added.

“It’s a door.”

“Let me… no, never mind. Open it again, please. I want to see.”

“Sure. Here, take these trays. I’ll get the bag.”

“What is all this for?”

“Farming. Well, gardening, I suppose. There’s a lot to eat on the island, but I don’t trust it’ll have everything you might want. These are for variety. Which reminds me. I need to see if there’s anything new and interesting to eat on the island.”

I waved hands at the door again, tapping the power-panels over the roof and personally stretching a bit to gather as much power from the local environment as I could. One-ended gates are taxing, even if they’re only spatial ones instead of interuniversal ones. Demonstrating as I had, I taxed my power budget. We stepped smartly through the re-opened gate and it snapped shut behind us immediately.

I always carry a power crystal, but I was going to need to charge it some before we could go back. I started a power conversion panel and set it to replicate while Mell looked around.

“This is beautiful! And so warm!”

“We may be in a tropical zone,” I warned, still setting up panels by hand. “I haven’t checked the stellar mechanics.”

“The what?”

“It’s an occult discipline. Don’t worry about it. The climate is warmer, here.”

“Let’s walk along the beach.”

“Go ahead. I need to set up a structure to make it easier to get back.”

“Oh? Is this a sorcerer thing?”

“It’s a wizard thing.”

“I meant that. Sorry.”

“I get the impression you don’t have professional magic-workers. Or, rather, the race of men does not generally approve of the practice of magic?”

“Not really.”

“Then don’t sweat it. Just another reason the locals will think of me as a monster.”

She explored the beach while I stacked our stuff in the shade and made a crude doorway. A length of wood across two small, close-spaced trees was all it took, but it would work for my purposes. I used my fingernails to carve a little on the trees and the crosspiece, too, attuning everything to the purpose I intended.

When I finished, I checked on the power panel production. They were set to use ambient magical energy as well as the local sunshine, so the array had already cranked out another one. I put my crystal off to one side to charge and went to check on Mell.

She was naked as a nymph, lying on the sand, soaking up sunshine. Her goggles were the only thing she wore. Her hair spread out all around her head, green and brown, a thousand happy snakes lying contentedly in the hot sand. Her feet were in the water of the lagoon, occasionally splashing contentedly.

“Hey. Move up the beach a little.”

“Why?”

“To get your feet out of the water.”

“I like the water.”

“So do I, but something in the water may like your toes. It connects to the ocean, so anything could come along and nibble on them. I haven’t looked at the lagoon to see if anything nasty uses it for a home.”

She sat up, crab-walked backward a few paces, and lay down again. Her snakes, only slightly disturbed, didn’t even hiss as they stretched out again. I seated myself near her hip so as not to sit on a snake.

“What do you think of the place?”

“It’s wonderful!”

“I mean, as a place to build a house, plant a crop, raise a kid?”

“If there’s no one on the island, I’ll say it’s perfect.”

“Great. Found anything to eat?”

“Huh? No. I haven’t looked.”

I sighed inwardly. As someone who spent most of her life traveling and avoiding people, her survival skills ought to be pretty good. In this climate, I’d have thought finding fresh water and food would be right up near the top of the list.

“Come on. We have to find out if you can survive here. Let’s get lunch.”

“If you insist.” She gathered up her garments, shook sand out, and donned them again. She carried her sandals up from the beach and sat down on a fallen tree to put them on.

The island wasn’t bursting with food, but there was no shortage. We found everything from wild berries to something resembling a purple jackfruit. Mell declared it all delicious and I took her word for it.

Water was, initially, a problem. The ocean was salt water, so that wasn’t going to help. Actually, it would, later, when she needed salt; she could gather salt the old-fashioned way, by letting the sun evaporate the water.

We fell back to the lagoon and started walking around it, looking for water flowing into it. We found a thin little creek, but it was fresh water. We would need more for a community, but where there was one small trickle, there would be others.

“I like it here,” Mell offered, licking berry juice from her fingers.

“It still needs a shelter. Someplace to live. I imagine the storms can be intense. And the tides look as though they move pretty high on the beach. Gardens will have to be higher up, probably somewhere along that little watercourse.”

“You’re right. It’s still a lovely place.”

“Do you think others would like to live here?”

“I do.”

“Then we’ll see if we can find you some company. Rather, see if they want to stay.”

“You can bring them here, but what if they change their minds?”

“They’ll have to decide before I go.”

“You intend to leave?”

“Yes. I have things I have to get back to,” I told her. Mell nodded thoughtfully.

“I agree. If you have to drink blood, you need men. We can’t afford to have—say! How will we survive? I mean, as kytonia? We will need at least one man.”

“There are shipwrecks—the remains of shipwrecks—under the water, along the eastern edge of the island. I presume explorers or storms are responsible. At least once a generation, you ought to get a survivor or two you can nurse back to health.” I mulled it over for a moment. “That’s not a guarantee, though. I’ll see about setting up a couple of contingencies.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably, but it would involve a lot of explanation. How about, ‘It’s magic,’ and we leave it at that?”

“I can do that.”

I don’t know why I’m surprised.  Mell is remarkably agreeable.

—

We found a nice cave for me to hide in, rather high up from the lagoon. A tropical paradise may be beautiful, but it isn’t vampire-friendly. I need either a well-constructed building, some variation on a coffin, or a hole in the ground. As it was, I endured deep shadows during the sunset, but the cave faced east. I’ve dealt with worse. I didn’t look forward to the sunrise, though, when the early-morning rays would shoot into the cave. I started some overnight adjustments on the entrance, growing a lip of stone from one side of the entrance so there wasn’t a straight shot inside. Mell encouraged me to come to bed.

“No, I’ve got things I need to do to the island,” I said.

“To the island?”

“Yep. You go ahead and sleep. Nothing will come into the cave.”

“But… what are you doing to the island?”

“I need to check it for venomous creatures and other dangerous things. It needs more underwater reefs to discourage large ships from landing, and it needs a more beach along the outer shore for wrecked sailors to wash up on. The whole place needs to look inhospitable from the sea. I also don’t like the way it’s vulnerable to storm surges all along the north and western sides. Those areas need to be higher and more clifflike. Maybe the whole island should be. It could also stand to have shallower sea access in the narrow area where the lagoon connects, to discourage large predators. On second thought, I should put reefs throughout it. We want fish to swim in and out. I’ll probably give the channel a bit of a curve so there’s no direct line of sight in from the sea. And I should deepen the lagoon once I’ve confirmed nothing particularly nasty lives in it. In a year, you should be able to constantly fish the lagoon and never worry about being seen by passing ships. Stuff like that.”

Mell stared at me for several seconds. I could tell from the glowing colors of her spirit that she only partly understood and was uncomfortable about what she did understand. I wasn’t sure why. It was all stuff to make the island a more habitable and survivable spot.

“I’ll wait here,” she decided.

“Great. I’ll see you before morning. Promise.”

“Thank you.”

So I did the things. I went for walks along the nearby ocean floor, set up spells to adjust the reef-maze I laid out, sorted some issues with the outer coast, all that stuff. In a year, the island would be about the way I wanted it. In ten, it would be perfect.

Now, the real question was what to do about kytonia reproduction. Apparently, they needed a human male to provoke a reproduction reaction, which caused a new kytonia to be born. Did it actually involve any genetic contribution, or was it a mystical thing? I had not been in the best position to examine the phenomenon dispassionately.

So, assume they need a real person. If no convenient sailors are shipwrecked, how do the kytonia get the help they need? Clearly, they need to be able to go to the continent and hunt one down. Not every day, not even every year, but maybe once every… ten years? Twenty? How long is a kytonia generation, anyway? Or, maybe, instead of putting together something time-dependent, set it so it only works once for any given person?

Hang on. How do you tell kytonia apart? The differences are subtle, possibly too subtle for a typical identification spell. If they’re as nearly clones of each other as their appearance indicates, this will be difficult. A spell that only works once for someone has to differentiate between individuals. If they’re too close a match, it won’t work. Then again, I have an idea for how to keep them from turning each other to stone. Maybe a unique identifier can be incorporated into the design.

Okay, I can arrange this. A magic cave with a shifter diagram, I think. The only complicated part now will be how to auto-target out-of-the-way places near human settlements. Humans are easy to find, but abandoned buildings, hidden groves, empty caves, and similar things are hard to define without a long list of conditions. I need smarter spells.

—

We spent a week on the island, or mostly. Mell wanted to return to her house to collect her things, so we went, gathered up everything, and brought it back. I commandeered the cave as a place of power and incidental lair. Mell picked herself a good spot down by the beach and I recommended a second spot much farther inland. She wasn’t used to coastal areas, so she didn’t understand about storm surges and high tides. As I suspected, she proved adept at putting together a shelter. While she organized her dwellings, I expanded the cave and enchanted stuff.

My Caves of Wonders drew on a collection of solar arrays, high up, in an arch from north to south. They were set to pass visible light, but an ultraviolet and infrared “shadow” would slide across the island during the day. I had more than one chamber in the cave that needed power. One of these held a teleportation circle. Much like a shift-booth, it defined a cylindrical space and shifted it to the continent. The spell also moved the inscribed metal floor-plate—really a double-width manhole cover—with it. Coming back was as simple as standing on it and telling it, “Take me home.” It also worked only once for any individual. After that, it would not acknowledge them. Everyone could have their chance to find a mate—and, potentially, bring him home, if that was their desire. If even one person in a generation brought home a boyfriend, kytonia custom would make him the father of the next generation, no problem.

I’m not sure how many men would give up their lives to go live in a tropical paradise filled with beautiful women who wanted to mate with him. I suspect there are more of them than I think, and I used to be one of them. If they told him they would eat him after he sired their next generation, they still might get volunteers. I would have lost interest at that point, but maybe I’m not as much of a fool as I think.

For safety reasons, I also included a recall function on the transport plate. If the residents of Gorgonzilsa decided someone had been away too long, they could summon the spell back again, returning it to its place in the cave and, effectively, assume the kytonia who last used it was lost. If they felt like it, they could still use someone else’s ticket to go look for their friend. How they used their gadget was up to them.

Once you have the future father of the next generation on the island, how do you keep him alive? That’s a key point when dealing with people who can turn you into a statue by blinking wrong.

Personal safety, more generally, was always my big concern. Not just from the outside, which was mostly handled by the rising reefs, the growing cliffs, and so on. Internally, it’s not just about keeping the man alive. It’s about the population as a whole. If everyone in the community can turn each other to stone with an unwary or unexpected glance, it’s like having everyone carry a loaded gun in one hand at all times, one they can’t unload, can’t put down, and has a hair trigger. Accidents will happen faster than replacements can be generated.

Mell’s mirrored ski goggles were one solution. Her snakes didn’t like it. The elastic band was uncomfortable for them even in the best possible arrangement. Regular sunglasses would work, but anyone who’s ever worn glasses knows how unpredictable the things can be. Smoked glass was a low-tech, mundane solution they could manufacture on their own, but it wasn’t a good solution. Seat belts are good, but seat belts and airbags are better.

All right. I’m a master wizard. I can solve this.

The solution was, from a technical standpoint, rather straightforward. Implementing it was the complicated part.

Mell now has a gold choker—a collar, a torc; it’s a close-fitting gold band around her neck—with a diamond centerpiece. There are actually multiple diamonds embedded in the gold; each one does its one thing, but the central diamond is the obvious one. The spells in the diamonds are constantly drawing magical power from her. Specifically, drawing energy away from the specialized structures in her eyes, minimizing their force. The energy absorbed is then redirected into a barrier placed along the surface of her eyes. While worn, her eyes look a shade or two darker than their usual color, but the spell is tuned to specifically block the petrification… Stuff? Frequency? Whatever. The stony-gaze rays. The rays are weakened by having their power input reduced, then the weakened rays are blocked. Not only does it block outgoing rock-rays, it should also block incoming ones, making it a safety device both for and against petrification.

On the other hand, if she needs to use her petrifying gaze, she can place a fingertip—not a cloth, not a chin, not the palm of her hand, but her own fingertip and nothing else—over the visible diamond. That suspends the spells for as long as she cares to keep her finger on the crystal petrification button.

We tested it. There are a lot of birds, some fish, and a wild pig that have failed to be turned to stone, even at close range and with protracted eye contact. The birds turned to stone when she wanted them to. The rest of them we cooked and ate. I’m calling it a success, but I’m keeping a close watch on how it affects her eyes. I don’t want to find it slowly drives her blind.

No, these spells aren’t easy or simple, but now that I’ve got them, building them into a necklace thing isn’t a major issue. Building one of these torcs for each kytonia who might live here—potentially, several thousand of them—that’s an issue.

First, I need materials. I picked gold because it’s malleable and easy to work. If the thing is uncomfortable, bend it until it fits properly. It won’t rust or corrode or do bad things to their skin. And the diamonds are self-evidently useful in magic item construction.

Second, I need these materials turned into a torc, suitable for wearing. A lump of gold and a few gems are not sufficient.

Third, I need a way to produce these spells on an industrial scale. I’m not going to cast the spells thousands of times.

This is where the “master wizard” part comes in.

There isn’t a lot of gold on the island. However, I can import enough for ten thousand torcs and hide it inside the stone wall of the Cave of Wonders. With a tiny tube leading down and out to the sea, another spell can extract gold from seawater—a miniscule amount, to be sure, but it only has to be enough to make up for any permanently-lost torcs. At least, assuming they wind up with a stable population…

Anyway, the process is this. When they have someone who needs a torc, they light a small fire in an alcove, just off the teleportation cave. There are spell diagrams carved around the opening to the alcove and all over the interior. They come back in the morning, or in the evening—half a day, anyway—and the carbon from the fire has formed small diamonds. Anything else is on the floor, outside the alcove, and can be swept away. Gold has also welled up into the alcove during this process. The gold forms a torc and the new diamonds takes their places, mounted firmly in the metal. The spell diagrams inlaid in the walls of the alcove detect a completed torc and imprint the safety spells in the individual gems. Voila! Torc of Protection from Petrifying!

The niche in the wall is enchanted; it needs to be a no-fail system. It’s as close as I can get. The torcs, on the other hand, merely have spells on them. If they somehow fail, the torc can be put into the alcove again and it gets a new spell. It helps that the fire—to produce the raw carbon for manufacturing diamonds—also feeds the power matrix. High-magic world or no, the manufacturing process requires a serious amount of power and the panels only operate during the day.

…said the vampire. Oh, the irony.

I’ve tested it. It works. Now I’ve hastened it a bit by adding a bucketload of diamonds. At maximum speed, it can produce a new torc every hour, maybe a little less. I’m building up a supply in anticipation.

Mell, meanwhile, has started on a garden. There’s no way to produce metal tools here on the island, but it doesn’t seem vital, either. Wood and stone were good enough for Mell to clear some ground and plant things. With a dozen or a hundred more people to help, it will still be labor-intensive, but practical. Besides, if they’re really hard up for a metal tool, someone can pick up a few on her trip to find a mate, I suppose. Mell tells me that well-behaved snakes, one hairband, and a hood can do wonders. Given that she’s been successful in finding at least one mate in the course of her life, I’ll take her word for it.

Mell has also constructed half an A-frame structure. Two trees form the end posts. Two of their branches are bent slightly and lashed to a length of wood in the middle. Long poles, stripped, lean against this central spine and small sticks connect the poles. Tough, leathery leaves are pinned to these sticks, like shingles, starting at the bottom and working up. It’s like a pattern of scales. Rain runs right off it.

She put the garden next to it, and she made a spear for herself. It’s her garden, not a free buffet for whatever wants to root around in it, and I respect that.

She also found a deposit of clay and is working on shaping various implements. Bowls, mostly. There’s a large, thin slab of some rock—shale, I think—over a fire, for now. She’ll need a kiln to fire the clay, so I know what I’m doing today.

—

“How many of these neck-things do you have?” Mell asked, early one night. I lay there next to her in my cave and she cuddled up to me. Her shelter was adequate for the environment, but it was nowhere near light-tight.

“I don’t have any,” I corrected. “You have seventy or so, last I checked. Tomorrow, you should be pushing a hundred.”

“Then it’s time to talk about my sisters.”

“The other kytonia.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got enough shelter for several and the island provides adequate hunter-gatherer supplies for more than a hundred. Start with no more than a hundred and work your way up from there. The real trick is to learn to live sustainably. You can’t support more than seven thousand, I think, by my most recent math. More than that will strain the resources to the point where you’ll all go a little hungry.”

“You say that as if you aren’t going to be here.”

“I told you I can’t. I have things I have to get back to.”

“And if you didn’t?” she asked, quietly.

“I could spend a while here. It’s nice. The company is good. It’s quiet. Peaceful. Sometimes I wish my life was more like this. Sand between my toes, a comfy place in the shade, something delicious on the grill, a cold drink at hand, the occasional bit of research or experimentation, no pressures, no lofty goals… I could retire to that, I think. But not yet. No, not yet. ‘…for there is much to dare,’ and all that.”

“When you are done, do you think you will return?”

“I may not be done in a hundred years—or a thousand. I don’t know how long it will be. But I promise you this: If I live through all I have to do, I will look at this island again. If you are still here, I will come back.”

“Then I will hope kytonia do not age as men do, so I may remain.”

“I hope that, too.”

I got up and finished some things around the island, getting it ready for occupancy. In the morning, we started Mell off on her first trip through the teleportation room. I came along to target it and operate it, but she would approach the target kytonia and do the talking.

—

Her fire had burned to embers down in its shallow hole. She was wrapped in a heavy garment and lay much too close to the embers for safety. As I watched, she woke up enough to push away a moderate-sized rock, forcing it next to the fire, and rolled a similar rock away from it, closer to herself, to draw warmth from it. From my earlier observations, she looked a great deal like Mell.  Now that I could see her directly—my eyes are very good—and had Mell close at hand to compare, it was still hard to tell them apart.

Mell and I appeared a hundred feet away. Next time, I’d let her try it and then reset it so she could use it again.

“How do we approach her?” I asked, quietly.

“Openly. Never sneak up on us. We are loners, nomads, and we are wary.”

“Noted.”

“Hello the camp,” Mell called. The other kytonia sat up, snakes writhing out from under her hood, tongues flicking. She flung a prepared bundle of twigs onto the embers. The fire leaped up and illuminated the night. Reasonable. Her greatest weapon required vision. I wouldn’t have, though. Archers in the shadows would be nearly invisible and could fill her full of holes. Her decision made sense if she was more concerned about being stumbled upon, rather than actively pursued.

“Who are you?”

“I am Melletanethriandia, a kytonia, like yourself. May I share your fire?”

“Step into the light.”

We advanced through the undergrowth to the edge of the firelight. I tried to hang back and let her handle things, but Mell reached for me, grabbed my hand, and towed me with her.

“You won’t stay in the shadows,” she said. “We will do nothing to deceive. Our purpose here is honest and honorable, so we will behave accordingly.”

“I agree unreservedly,” I told her. I bowed in the direction of the other kytonia. “I am Halar.”

“What do you want, strangers?” she demanded.

“I would like your name,” Mell replied, somewhat sharply, her snakes hissing a warning. Oddly enough, the snakes seemed to make the other relax. It was like watching identical twins.

“I am Thalassianeerandania. You may share my fire.”

“What of him?” Mell asked.

“I do not know him.”

“He is mine,” Mell replied, which was news to me.

“I have had poor luck with trusting the race of men, of late.”

“Then it is good he is not of them.”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“Show her.”

Show her? I wondered what she meant. Bite something? Sprout talons and teeth? At this distance, in this light, those would be hard to spot. On the other hand…

I suspended my disguise, going full-on Dark Lord, talons, tongue, and teeth. Thalassi… Thalla… Tha… nuts. Thal looked at me with wide eyes. I wasn’t wearing my mirrorshades for our evening excursion, but I had my anti-petrification spell running as a matter of course. I took a few steps forward, met her gaze, and smiled at her.

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I told her, and bowed my best dojo bow, never breaking eye contact.

“You… you are not…”

“Stoned. Correct.”

“That is impossible,” Thal said, sounding more than a little panicked.

“It is not,” Mell assured her. “It is necessary.”

“Necessary?”

“How many children have you had?” Mell answered. “How many of them are statues? How many risked your life as soon as their serpents awakened?”

Thal did not answer.

“Halar and I… I have a place, a good place, where we can look upon each other and upon our children without fear. A place far away from the race of men, where the land is good, the sun is warm, and we may live.”

“What is it you want?”

“We want you to come and see.”

“Why?”

“Because I would not be alone.”

Thal glanced at me, then back to Mell. She swept her hood back with both hands.

“You are looking at me,” Thal said. She looked at Mell’s feet rather than risk looking at her face. Mell tapped the gold at her throat.

“I wear a magic circle that allows me to do so without fear. Halar?” she added, pointing up into the trees. I shrugged and sent tendrils writhing up into the leaves. I found a bird, brought it down, and perched it on a finger. “I may look upon anything I choose, even my own children, and neither of us need fear the other’s gaze. Or, if I choose,” she said, placing a fingertip on the central gem, “I can use my gaze as easily as I ever could.” The bird turned to stone and fell, cracking when it hit the ground. “It gives me a control I have never had before.”

“You… can choose not to…?”

“I can choose,” she said.

“Then look me in the eyes and tell me this is true.”

Mell smiled as Thal lifted her face. They stared at each other for several seconds. Thal sat down, harder than she intended. She looked back and forth between us, her world now turned upside-down.

“How do I get one? What must I do?”

“They are the property of Halar—” Mell began, but I interrupted.

“They are not. They are yours, for you and all your kind. Any who decide to live on Gorgonzilsa. I don’t own it or the torcs. I gave them to you, torcs, island, lagoon, and magic cave.”

“You… you give it all to me?” Mell asked, startled. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought.”

“I told you I would be leaving. Did you think I would try to claim something I would never use? It matters to you, so I give it to you. And you,” I added, nodding at Thal. “The kytonia are a rare breed and, from what I’ve seen, are likely a dying one. You can’t live among men for long. Now you don’t need to.”

“I do not understand all of this,” Thal said. “Where is this island? I must go there to gain control over my gaze, is that not so? How long is the journey?”

“Do you wish to go?” Mell asked.

“Yes.”

“Then,” I said, “it is a journey of but a single step, if you will take it.”

“How?”

“Take my hand.”

She approached me somewhat cautiously, reflexively not looking at my face. Her snakes wove nervously about each other, agitated. They were shorter than Mell’s and somewhat thicker, tending toward brown patterns. At least they weren’t completely identical. I winked at Mell. I came prepared for a sudden return to Gorgonzilsa, just in case the cave-shifter didn’t work exactly as planned. I walked around the two of them, scratching a circle in the dirt and stepping into it with them. This would have more impact.

“Take a breath,” I advised. She inhaled, held it, nodded.

The beach at night is a pleasant thing. The wind is little more than a breeze inside the ring of the mountains—the old volcano cone, I mean, but it was a dead volcano and one of my spells would work its way down for a thousand years to make sure its corpse would never even twitch. The lagoon was wide and the beach as smooth as a fresh snowfall. The night-sounds were different, here, and the air held a heavy, warm scent, reminding me of another jungle and several very pretty young ladies…

“Where are we?” Thal whispered, eyes wide as she slowly looked around.

“Gorgonzilsa,” I said. “We have been transported here by my power, traveling the width of the world in the space of a single breath. If you like it here, you may stay. If you do not choose to stay, I promise I will return you to exactly where you were, so do not be afraid.”

“Come,” Mell said, grinning hugely. “We have some dinner remaining, despite his best efforts. Do you like roast pig?”

“I haven’t had meat in at least twenty days.”

“We should do some fishing tomorrow,” I suggested. “Fried fish would also be good. And we should start extracting sea salt, too, to go with the fish.”

I left them to their dinner and their talk. I went back to Thal’s camp to reset the cave. I shouldn’t have worried. It worked perfectly.

—

Mell and Thal have taken great delight in establishing themselves in their tropical paradise. I’m very pleased. They don’t really need my help at this point.

I’ve paid attention to a slightly bigger picture. Where are the nearest islands? What sort of currents are we facing? They may not need to know, now or ever, but the information should be available.

That was pretty simple and straightforward. I carved a map in the Cave of Wonders.

In the more short-term, I’ve done a pretty thorough scan of the planet. It is a planet, for one thing, with a sun of some sort skidding around and around along the Firmament. Hey, whatever works. But what I’m interested in is the total number of kytonia. Not counting, of course, any of them currently held in magic circles or wizards’ workshops—excuse me, make that sorcerers’ dungeons—or other shielded locations.

Counting Mell and Thal, twenty-two, three of which were still children. And, as Mell pointed out, none of them were male. I did look.

This bothers me something awful. Twenty-two creatures isn’t enough of a gene pool to be stable, not in the short-term, not in the long-term. Even if each one of them has a child by a different creature outside the group, it’s still too small a breeding population to be stable.

On the other hand, every one of them I’ve seen bears a stunningly similarity to the others. There are minor differences in snake coloration, sure, but they’re so alike they might as well have been marched off an assembly line.

I had to remind myself I’m not dealing with human women, no matter how much they may look it. They’re magical creatures. Perhaps they started out with one individual, cursed by the gods—or zapped by the sorcerer, or whatever caused it—and have managed to grow their population over the centuries from one to twenty-two. They don’t know because they’ve lost their origins to attrition. Mothers died before they could pass on their knowledge and the like. I find it likely they all share a common ancestor.

Yet, despite all this, they persist. They continue to reproduce and to look exactly as they always have, regardless of the male genetic donor. Whether the fathers are tall, short, thin, fat, dark, light, or anything else, their daughters are miniature versions of their mothers. It’s as though they reproduce by parthenogenesis, but somehow require a male to kick-start the process. Is this part of their curse, if it is a curse? Or biology? Or is it both, now that it’s been generations since the beginning? Has a curse evolved into a biological reality?

I see no way to tell, really. Not without a great deal more investigation than I am willing to do.

Speaking of things I’m not willing to do, how would I go about producing a kytonian Y chromosome? I’ve got X chromosomes galore, obviously, but what this race of beings needs is a good Y. Could I take some samples back to the lab, manually insert a donor Y chromosome into an egg, and grow a male kytonia? Given time and a lot of trial and error and maybe some encouraging spells, I’m sure I could… but what effect would this have on the world? Would the male kytonia be able to sire male children, or would the limitations of the female kytonia still produce only females? And, if he can, how will that change the society and structures of this world? The kytonia have built-in problems when it comes to being an independent race, and the anti-petrification collars can only produce so fast… plus, humans aren’t going to be pleased about snake-haired anybody, especially when you add in the venom and the propensity for sudden statuary.

I’ve made it possible for kytonia to survive away from human communities. They’ll raise kids, live their lives, and stand a good chance of not being murdered. I’m not sure I’m warranted in doing anything else.

—

Mell reminded me about her venom. I’d forgotten I even mentioned it. Once I fetched an appropriate container, she had her snakes bite a lot, one after the other. Venom dripped through a rubber layer to collect in a glass ampule.

“What will you do with it?” she asked, as I rolled it around inside the glass. A couple of other kytonia looked at us, curiously, as we sat in the shade, near the beach.

“I have no idea. It’s rare, though, and normally hard to come by. I may as well look at it and see how it works. Poisons aren’t really my thing, but I’m a naturally curious person.”

“You want it only for curiosity’s sake?”

“Is there a better reason?” I asked, putting the vial in a pocket.

“For you? Perhaps not. I still do not understand you, but I know you better. You are strange.”

“Thank you?”

“In a nice way,” she added, squeezing my arm and resting her head on my shoulder. Snakes tickled my cheek with their tongues.

“I may not be nice, but I try to be kind.”

“You succeed.”

“Sometimes. Thank you for the venom.”

“You are welcome.”

“Is there anything you need?” I asked.

“Not anymore, no.”

“Anything the island needs? Tools, plants, anything?”

“I do not think so. There are too few of us for the island to notice. We fish, we gather food, we have shelter from the rains, if they are too cold. We have your cave—and others—if there are storms. You say there will be storms?”

“There will.”

“The walls of the lagoon will blunt them. We will build better shelters. And we have these,” she touched to gold at her throat, “and we have each other. Soon, we will have more. What else is there we could want?”

I could think of a thousand things without even trying. A whole constellation of interrelated tools, techniques, and materials go into making a civilization… but a civilization according to my provincial views. If a sailor washed up on their shores and found them living like Pacific Islanders, did it matter? If they were happy, did they need advanced mathematics, combine harvesters, and coal-fired power plants? Maybe there was something to be said for enjoying life instead of constantly trying to improve on it.

“I hope you’re right.” I stood up and brushed sand from my legs. “It’s time for me to go.”

“So soon?”

“I never could stay. I have been away from… a task I set myself and have not completed.”

Mell looked around the beach. Six of the kytonia were playing in the lagoon. More were preparing food. As she watched, one adult and two children emerged from the treeline and added piles of some small, hard nuts to the food stores. Another had some crude, clay pots and was carefully planting and tending different nuts and seeds.

Two were testing their prototype of a potter’s wheel. I had nothing to do with it. It was entirely their idea.

“Yet you have done all this?” Mell asked, gesturing. I ignored the overabundance of credit she gave me.

“I needed a break,” I said, instead. “This was my vacation. Tropical beach, sunny days, pretty ladies—what more could anyone ask?”

“Even so, you worked this hard?”

“It’s not work if you enjoy doing it,” I confessed. “Besides, it’s different from the work I was doing.”

“What were you doing?”

“Taking apart creatures made of light so I can learn how to take them apart more easily.”

“I do not understand.”

“I know, and I’m sorry about that.”

“It is possible,” she decided, “that I may never understand you.”

“It’s possible,” I agreed. “I hope you enjoy trying, though.”

I did not add how, if she did ever understand me, she might not like me nearly so much. I know me pretty well and I’m not sure I have too high an opinion of myself.

“Always. When will you go?”

“Now. I’ve been away too long and you don’t need me here anymore.” I chuckled, remembering how we met. “When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go.”

“It seems unfair.”

“Doesn’t it, just?” I kissed her forehead and she grabbed my ears. There would be no silly forehead-kissing in this farewell. She kissed me, hard, and lot of snakes wrapped around my head and through my hair. The kiss went on for a long time. When she finally let it end, she hugged me hard and pressed her head to my chest. I stroked a lot of sad serpents down along her back.

As an aside, no, kytonia do not have forked tongues. They might be a little longer than average, but they’re human-shaped.

“You did promise to come back,” she reminded me.

“I will look for you when I am done, yes.”

“You don’t know when it will be?”

“I have no idea. I’m making progress, but I don’t see the end.”

“Then I will hope without expectation.”

“Probably wise.”

“I’m glad you agree.” She helped me to my feet, heaving hard because she knew about my weight. I picked up the tray of local fruits—I had not forgotten why I came here—and led me to the tree-based doorway I constructed when we first arrived.

“This is a magic door?” she asked.

I didn’t want to explain how I planned to use a shift-space spell to head back to Stepstation and then to the Spherestation. Starting that explanation would create complications. Still, this was a good opportunity to get rid of the gate anchor point.

“Yes. It will consume itself, however, when I step through. You’ll want to stand well back.”

I led her back several paces and placed her safely. She caught my arm as I started to turn away.

“It is strange.”

“What is?”

“It is not the way of our kind to stay with any man for long. Sometimes I think it is the way of men to come and go as they please, but I am not so foolish as to think it is only they who choose this. Yet, I have known a man who was loyal to me. I think he loved me.”

“I would not be surprised. You would be easy to love. As for men? Look long enough and you find the exceptional examples. The trouble is you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.”

“I do not understand what you mean by that, but I do know I am fortunate to have found two exceptional examples. No, I know you do not love me. You would stay if you could, though, and you might learn to, perhaps. But you must go, I know, and I will miss you.”

I kissed her cheek and she let go of my arm. I approached the basic gate spell I’d constructed, added some discharge and pyrotechnic carvings to the tree-trunks, and connected my ring to the Stepstation’s arrival area.

The open space inside the makeshift door whirled away into the distance and whirled close with a snap. I picked up my tray of the local fruits again and stepped from hot sand to cold metal. The door behind me was wreathed in flames for an instant and I put the tray aside quickly. I sat down, knowing what was coming.

The portal collapsed and took the sunshine with it. Which, of course, meant I died on the spot. I was okay with that. It’s much easier to die than to come back to life. I rested there, adjusting to being dead for a moment. I took a couple of practice breaths, just to make sure everything was settled in. I lay there for a few moments more, thinking about Mell.

“You, too, will I miss,” I said, across the gulf of infinity, “in my fashion.”