Barbartu had circled the broken mountains for weeks. Devastated by the same magic that had destroy Nerigla’s capital, in many places the mountains looked like a glitched-out video game. Entire peaks were missing, as if they’d failed to load, spires had massive, irregular chunks taken out of them, and strange beasts wandered the empty woods, mutated beyond recognition.

  Her memories of the wilderness had also proven faulty. Granted, in the few times she’d visited her uncle, she’d rarely bothered to step outside the gates of his palace. The palace alone was the size of a city, after all, and beyond its gilded gates lay a city that dwarfed even the largest mankind could claim. There was no need to go looking to the distant mountains for entertainment, but she had been wrong to think they’d been uninhabited.

  As she flew over the ruined lands, she found dozens of small settlements. Like the capital, they were long abandoned - their inhabitants perhaps the very beasts that roamed the woods - but unlike the capital, the walls still stood.

  If nothing else, she’d enriched herself immensely on the trip. The abandoned homes she’d searched had offered up all manner of priceless relics. Most, of course, were simply curios that she could pawn off on the many collectors interested in the time before the war between Arallu? and Asra?tu, foolish children too young to remember the devastation as anything more than a historical curiosity. But Barbartu had gotten lucky; one of the settlements she’d found had been particularly rich, and in the home of the village elder, she’d discovered a handful of magical relics useful enough to join her own collection.

  Despite the profit she’d made, though, Barbartu was itching to abandon the search. She hadn't found any intelligent life in the abandoned wilds and yet, that nagging feeling in her chest that she was in the right place simply wouldn’t go away, and her intuitions were rarely wrong. So she persisted.

  Another week passed in drudgery. She discovered another abandoned settlement, enriching herself further, and hunted down a particularly unusual beast out of sheer boredom, but there was still no sign of her quarry. Then one evening, as dusk was fast approaching, she spied her first clue.

  Hidden in the piles of snow on a particularly twisted spire was a narrow trail. The snow had been compressed down until it was nearly ice, and on the hard surface she could make out the broken prints of something decidedly humanoid.

  As Barbartu followed the trail down the mountain, her certainty that she had finally found what she was looking for only grew. Unlike trails made by humans, which wound back and forth along a mountain’s side in an attempt to blunt the difficulty of the ascent, the trail plunged straight down, not even deviating when it reached a chasm that plunged a thousand feet down. There was no bridge to be found, but the trail picked up on the other side, fifty feet away.

  But when she was about halfway down the mountain, the trail disappeared. A shield? So knowledge of magic has been retained Hovering in place over the disappearing footprints, Barbartu stretched her hand out, but it met no resistance. She flew forward, unobstructed by anything, and as she circled back, a smile split her lips. It wasn’t just a shield, but a good one; now she had to just figure out how to break it.

  The damned tingling in his head wouldn’t stop as their unexpected guest continued to push and prod their defenses. Damn her. With an annoyed grunt, S?ar headed toward the borders, pausing to light a cigarette, before continuing. It was a filthy habit, one he’d picked up during his time amongst the humans, but unlike them, he had nothing to fear from cancer. His mood calmed as he took a puff, and he sighed.

  What did we do to attract the attention of a god? After their forefather had died, the lands of Nerigla had become a prime target not just for the forces of As?ra?tu but also for the envious amongst the lords of Arallu?. Nerigla had been one of the most powerful gods, after all, a position that inevitably required the making of a few enemies.

  The S?ukallu? were not weak. They’d held their own for a time, fending off an endless string of sabotage, assassinations, and outright invasions as the lords of Arallu? scrambled to fill the void left by Nerigla’s fall. They’d held on stubbornly, winning as many battles as they lost but, fortunately, the elders had possessed the humility to acknowledge the futility of their actions.

  With their lord dead, the elders realized that the S?ukallu? were doomed to diminish and, with no gods to support them, their numbers would slowly but surely be whittled away until they were reduced to a mere shadow of a people. Their fate seemed grim, but the elders had foreseen something else. A flicker of life remained in Nerigla’s corpse; their lord would eventually return and when he did, they were determined to be there.

  Thus the S?ukallu? had withdrawn from the ruins of Nerigla’s realm, retreating to a hidden fortress deep within the barren mountains. There, they had rebuilt, safely protected by the obscuring veil Nerigla himself had cast over the fortress.

  And, safe from constant assaults, their self-imposed exile had proved beneficial. As their numbers swelled, they began to venture back out into the world. With Nerigla’s death and their own disappearance, they’d been all but forgotten by the end of the war and had found it easy to infiltrate the remaining realms. Thus they ruled from the shadows, patiently preparing for the day Nerigla rose from his throne and reclaimed his realm.

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  But that didn’t explain why a god was now poking around the edges of their barrier. Admittedly, she seemed a minor deity; S?ar suspected they could drive her off without too much trouble, but that his curiosity demanded he hold his impatience in check long enough to figure out why she was here.

  He took a long, last drag from his cigarette as he neared the boundary, and tossed it aside, stamping the butt out in the dirt, before he finally took a good look at their unwelcome guest.

  The goddess’ bronzed skin paired nicely with her long, black hair, and a pair of keen, amber eyes so bright they almost glowed. Her left arm was tattooed with the stylized swirl of a wolf’s head - likely her emblem, he decided - and there wasn’t a certain wild fierceness to her features that made him guess she was one of the se?ru. Why are you here?

  Though he couldn’t name her, there was an aura of familiarity around her that eased his concerns. S?ar could feel the touch of death upon her and, more reassuringly, could sense that kinship lay between her and their lord. Nerigla’s heirs died though, didn’t they? It was also possible that an heir had been hidden away, but the more likely conclusion was that the goddess was a more distant relative. Unfortunately, that didn’t help place her.

  He hesitated, tapping his fingers against his pocket, and made his decision. We’ll see what she wants. Perhaps she too has sensed Lord Nerigla’s return.

  As Barbartu continued to prod the magical defenses, she quickly realized it was far more complex than she had anticipated. It took an hour longer before she concluded that it was her uncle’s handiwork, the spellwork simply too similar to that which still survived in Es?kinna to be anything else. Her excitement ramped, as she realized she may have found a genuine outpost of his people, one protected since before the war, and she threw herself into the task with renewed vigor.

  Still, she had barely made any progress unraveling Nerigla’s spell when a man stepped through the barrier. At first glance, he seemed almost human. With shaggy brown hair, three days' growth of stubble on his chin, and a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers, the man looked like he’d stepped off the lot of a small town gas station - while he would have, if it wasn’t for the devilishly debonair charm that lingered around him.

  He offered her a grin that didn’t reach his eyes and took another puff of his cigarette before speaking. “It’s been a long time since a goddess wandered these hills.” He inclined his head slightly. “Don’t mean to give offense, but I don’t recognize your emblem.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Barbartu replied bluntly. “It’s a convenient form, nothing more.”

  “Oh?” The man tilted his chin, meeting her eyes without a touch of fear or deference. “Still like to know your name.”

  Barbartu hesitated, torn between giving the name she went by now or revealing her true name. But if her suspicions were correct and this group was a remnant of her uncle’s servants, she decided that speaking the truth would be to her advantage. “Most know me as Barbartu now,” she said, gesturing at the wolf on her shoulder, “But my uncle knew me as Lamas?tu.”

  The man’s shoulders tensed, and there was a faint trembling in his fingers when he took a drag of his cigarette. He kept his voice under control, though, when he spoke. “Lamas?tu? Heard she disappeared a few decades ago.”

  “I had other matters to attend to,” she replied brusquely, not inclined to disclose the humiliation she’d suffered when she was kidnapped. “But if you’d been paying attention, you would have heard of my return.”

  “I may have heard that,” the man allowed with a dip of his head, “but then, perhaps you did too. No offense, but you wouldn’t be the first minor deity to claim to be someone else.”

  The man’s cigarette fell to the ground as he was lifted into the air, a clawed hand wrapped tight around his neck. “Offense taken.” Barbartu growled.

  Yet, despite the small pools of blood growing beneath her claws, the man smirked as he looked down at the chimeric body that had burst into being. Her clawed feet, taloned hands, voluptuous, naked breasts, and the head of a wolf. “Welcome back, Lady Lamas?tu,” he rasped out.

  She growled, irritated at herself for taking the bait, but shrunk back down. The claws and talons disappeared as her preferred form took hold, but Barbartu made no attempt to set him down gently. “A thousand years ago, I would have killed you for that,” she snarled.

  “Then I’m grateful to have met you now,” the man replied lightly. He bent down to retrieve his fallen cigarette before extending his hand. “I’m S?arru-iddin-Nerigla, but you can call me S?ar. Did Nerigla’s return bring you here?”

  She glared at the proffered hand silently, refusing to accept it, until he lowered with it a grimace. “I hope you won’t hold my little joke against me,” ‘S?ar’ continued.

  “If you truly pray for my uncle’s return, you best learn how to behave,” she replied curtly. “Unlike myself, he hasn’t had a few millennia to mellow. But no, while I did sense his presence in Es?kinna, I am here for more personal reasons.”

  The man frowned. “I’m sorry, Lady Lamas?tu, but if you are looking for someone you knew from before the fall of Es?kinna, I’m afraid none survive. My people are longer-lived than the humans, but we still die.”

  “Nothing like that,” she responded dismissively. “I’m actually looking for someone rather young, a young girl named Jenny.”

  “Jenny? Are you sure you don’t want to check amongst the humans?” Though the man tried to crack a grin, Barbartu sensed his distress.

  “You know her,” she said accusingly.

  “There’s no one by that name here.”

  “I do not care what name you call her by,” Barbartu snapped, and the man shifted uncomfortably as talons once again erupted from her fingertips. “If she is here, you will bring me to her. And if you have any delusions that you can thwart me, then know this - S?arru-iddin-Nerigla. A god more powerful than me has taken an interest in her, and you do not wish to cross her.”

  The man straightened up, and the illusion that he was a human dropped away as he met her gaze with decidedly inhuman eyes. “You can’t have her.”

  “You don’t get to make that decision.”

  “Neither do you.”

  Barbartu laughed, a wide grin splitting her lips as her body once again shifted into its natural form. “It seems you’ve been free of the gods too long, boy. Let me remind you who’s in charge.”