Blood Moon Born

Chapter One

"You a mercenary?" growled the short man. He was squeezed into the wagon across from Loae. They were all sitting down—all the travelers too poor for their own carriages and horses—so she couldn't tell if he was actually short. But she'd bet on it.

"What?" Loae asked, her voice no more than a grunt. She didn't like the way his teeth flashed. He'd replaced at least three of them with bits of gold and it made him seem all the more unsavory.

"You a mercenary?" he repeated, leaning in towards her. No one else on the wagon looked at either of them. Everyone pretended to be alone. "B'cause I might have some work for ya. There's a couple of men up in Segget—"

Then the wagon jerked to an abrupt stop, drawing quiet cries of discomfort from the passengers.

The driver shouted, "Eoibrun!" His deep southern Siimonien accent turned the word to Ya-bru and made Loae wonder how many travelers had missed their stops due to mishearing.

"Next time," Loae nodded to the gold-toothed man as she hopped off the back of the wagon.

As soon as her boots splashed in the mud, the wagon looked already another half-mile down the road. The tottering wagon looked strange through the sheets of rain shooting down from the black and blue sky. Like an apparition: quivering, wavering and then gone into the mist. It unnerved Loae. Then again, everything she'd come across since she boarded Hesrse unnerved her. Every quiet, undisturbed moment this last year unnerved her. She felt like she'd spent an eternity wandering the tunnels of a pitch-black cave, only to emerge into light so blinding, it made all objects and people appear contorted and wrong.

But from the looks she received from others on her journey across the western continent, she was wrong. She didn't retract from their gazes, but also didn't force herself into the light. She just was. She wondered if a past self might stand boldly and proudly for being different. Her current self barely cared. She straightened her shoulders and headed towards the high stone walls that circled the city of Eoibrun. Her home. Though she'd spent as much time out of it as in it. This last great decade of her life had been so transient, she wondered if she even knew the meaning of the word 'home.'

The rain doubled over on her three miles out of the city walls. She didn't recoil from the heavens opening up. The water was cold, but not the downpour of ice knives she was used to. The rain soaked her, weighing her down and she pressed on at a fuller pace to make it into the city before she drowned on the road there. As she drew closer to the place her family had resided since the start of the Basindr line, Loae swore the scent of the city grew thicker. A deep, industrial smell overcame her. Smoke from off the mines, the fresh, sharp scent of timber. It reeked of civilization, of urbanites, of waste—all wrapped up and bathed in the eerie and somehow comforting fog that warmed the outskirts of the city.

Loae passed through the gates of Eoibrun in the swell of a well-sized herd of newcomers and returners, merchants and momentary passerby. Every city in Siimone was surrounded by a great wall pinged with guard towers, monitored round the clock by the king's own guard. The walls were erected over four hundred years ago in the War of Corsican Conquest where their neighboring empire of Corsica swallowed nearly the entire western continent of the Known World whole. Only over time was Siimone and its allies able to beat the greedy empire away and return its cities to former glory. But the seemingly endless war left a deep imprint on the land; every city felt like its own impenetrable fortress.