The Serpent

I have flown many flags in my long life. Every land ruled, every host led, requires one. Heraldry is a source of pride, a rallying point in battle, a warning to enemies and a beacon to friends. In the early days, I did not put much thought into them as perhaps I should. It was only as my life progressed, as my legend built, that I adopted colors, symbols, and designs. Soon, they became as another name.

The most common symbol upon my banners has always been the feathered serpent. You will see her on my coat of arms that hangs in the feasting hall of Stormspoint. See her on the battle banner of Malthu's Marauders, reared up to strike. See her still, flapping in pennons over Ironmotte.

Any who know of me knows why the feathered serpent flies over my castles and hosts. What is not known is how this came to pass. As with anything related to my time in exile, there exists no authoritative chronicle. This chapter will rectify that. What follows is the tale of my meeting with my Quiyahui.

After the battle against Texomoc, I followed the Ocaital to the west, continuing to assist those who needed it. News of me had spread. The defense of Tlaican was already taking the flavor of a legend. Descriptions of Ur-Anu were extravagant, from stories of priceless jewels to the intricate haft to the power that pulsed through it. All focused on the blade that looked like obsidian but would not break.

I was not the only legend in the jungle. The Ocaital is a magical place, a place where stories take on their own life. I began to hear stories of a place in the highlands as the Mixtayhua, the Land of Clouds. The locals claimed this to be a land of the city of the gods. I could not resist such a summons, and made for it.

The highlands, called the Copatloc, rise roughly in the middle of the Ocaital, with many towns and villages set in the places where the rivers flowed from the peaks and plateaus. The land here is fertile but rugged, the people a hardy lot.

I found a pathway into the hills, and quickly regretted being so cavalier. The more I climbed, the colder the jungle. Clouds slithered down from the highlands in sticky tentacles, bearing with them a bone chilling cold. I was shivering miserably on my ascent when I wandered into a town called Montlís.

Montlís was nestled into rolling hills, where herders grazed flocks of the same birds I had first encountered in Pelesamatu. They looked to be shorter and stouter, with thicker feathers, and impressive head crests. I would learn they were the local strain, bred to survive in the highlands. Their feathers were thicker, their bodies laden with savory fat.

As I strode into town, the locals stared at me. I was quite obviously a northerner, sported long, unkempt hair and a wild beard. I was clad in a loincloth and boots, along with a wide and shallowly-conical hat I had taken from a dead man. It had kept the sun and rain off my head and shoulders, and I did not mind the bloodstain on the chin strap. Lastly, I carried the spear, the one that was already a legend.

The locals wore simple kilts with leggings beneath, along with vests, and often jackets, all topped off with feathered cloaks obviously made from their avian charges. They grew their black hair long and kept it in elaborate braids, with modest tattoos on their cheeks and the backs of their hands.

I was making my way up the road that cut through the town, shivering in the highland cold when a local man approached me. He had kind eyes and a few threads of gray in his black hair, but he was still young. "Traveler, you look cold," he said. His accent was strange, but his Huyu was quite understandable.

"I am," I said.

"Then you will come with me, traveler."

I was not taken aback. Hospitality is a sacred tradition through this part of the world. It is one of the reasons I hold the people in such high regard. He led me to his home, a stone and mortar building with a thatched roof. A stable with a fenced-in corral was home to a flock of the local birds.

Inside, the central room was about a hearth, where a woman tended a fragrant stew. Two children looked up from their games. The fire instantly put some warmth in my bones, and the delicious aroma made my stomach rumble. On all three faces I saw only welcoming curiosity.

"This is my wife, Pumaya," said the man. "My children, Kasha and Palca. I am Mamak."

"Ashuz," I said, removing my hat. "Thank you."

He waved me off. "It is my honor."

"Ashuz, what are you doing wandering the Copatloc dressed like that?" Pumaya demanded.

"I came up from the Ocaital. This is appropriate dress there."

"Not so here. Mamak, find this man some clothing."

"That's not necessary," I said, though I knew the argument was pointless. One was supposed to object and be overruled. It was part of the custom.

"Nonsense. Warm yourself by the fire, Ashuz. The stew will be ready soon."

I set Ur-Anu next to the fire, my hat next to it, and settled down in front of the flames. Warmth covered my body, banishing the deep cold that had taken root there. Mamak returned with leggings, a jacket, and a cloak. "These should do. That is quite a weapon, Ashuz. You are a warrior?"

"Sometimes." I wrapped the cloak about my shoulders and instantly felt better. It was made of feathers, layered from the soft down out to the stiff outer feathers. I would soon learn that it kept the rain off me and the warmth within. The jacket and leggings were of supple skin, laced with leather.

Palca, the boy, stared at me in wonder. "Really?"

I looked about, finding the expectant faces of my hosts. "Can I tell them a story?" I asked Mamak and Pumaya.

"They are children," Pumaya warned.

"Of course, yes. Let me tell you the story of Izhapoma and the City of the Dead." I wove that story, though it still had the power to cut me. I did not dwell on the horror of the rotkin nor of their monstrous god, but even so, little Palca hid his face during Mh'rohgg's rampage. Kasha, however, watched me raptly during those parts. I also omitted my dalliances, saying only that I intended to marry Ixem.

"That is quite a story, Ashuz," Pumaya said at its finish. "And you tell it so well."

"Oh, it is..." I watched her eyes widen, giving me her meaning. "Yes, I am a storyteller. It's a gift. A way to repay kind hospitality."

She spooned stew into bowls, giving the guest the first one. The meal was hearty, and between that, the cloak, and the fire, I was truly warm for the first time since leaving the lowlands. The spice was subtle and complex, every spoonful a dance of flavors.

After feeding me, my hosts retired to their rooms, giving me leave to sleep in front of their hearth. I slept well in a cocoon of warmth, grateful to these people.

The next day I went on my way, wearing the clothing Mamak had given me and carrying a sack of dried meat and berries they'd insisted I take. As I climbed, thunder echoed through the highlands more persistently. The air held a prickly charge. The clouds above went from white, to gray, with a deep black at their center. I felt as though I were walking into a storm.

It was a sensation I knew well, and one I thought lost in the past. When my familiar died, that connection had been severed. The connection to the skyfire was gone, a scar across my soul. I would no longer call the storm. And yet, the sensation I felt now, the bright scent in my nose, could be nothing else.

I came around a turn in the path and I beheld what had to be my destination. A peak in the middle rose high above the others. A ring of stormclouds darker than lead clung to it. Inside lightning flashed in the pregnant clouds, sending thunder rolling down into the lowlands. My breath caught. I saw not only beauty, but fury. This could only be the Mixtayhua. Inside, must be the city of the gods.

Paths thinned, became trails. I continued, and though finding food grew more difficult, I relied on the principles Chala taught me and survived. Nothing would keep me from that central peak.

The clouds slithered down the slopes on some days, enveloping me in a blinding, chilling fog. On others, they retreated to the peaks. As I left civilization behind, the highlands took on a feel of magic. The jungles were dense and mysterious, and the rolling peaks, clad only in soft grass, were breathtaking. The clouds about the highest peak were always dark and rageful, growing white as they shed down the slopes.

More of the mountain birds grazed in open areas. Four-legged creatures, feathered and beaked, hunted them in packs. I watched these predators warily and more than once I was obliged to convince them I was not worth their trouble. Their meat was stringy and sour, but it was edible enough.

My ascent was not direct. I was often forced to backtrack around valleys and cliffs. I would not allow myself to admit defeat and return to the lowlands. There was no purpose in my wandering and thus the purpose I gave it mattered more than any other. I had decided that I would make it to the Mixtayhua, and thus I would accept nothing else.

As I drew nearer to the clouds, they eclipsed the sky. Soon, I was walking through perpetual night. I shivered in my cloak, but I never stopped my journey. I started to see rivulets of rainwater finding their way to the rivers and streams. These grew, multiplied. Then, one day, I crossed a curtain, and I was in the rain itself.

It was colder than the warm rains of the jungle lowlands. Here, it carried with it a feeling of ice. I was grateful for my hat and the cloak. They kept the worst from me.

I saw massive, shaggy lumbering creatures that browsed low-hanging branches for food. They were not dangerous so long as I gave them their space, but once riled, they could be fearsome. One day I was watching one of these from beneath the shade of a branch while the rain came down all around. I was considering killing the beast for meat, wondering if I could find a place to smoke its flesh. I would not slay the creature and waste the dragon's share of it. I am sentimental in that way.

A bolt of lightning hit it. That was what I thought. It was yellow, shot through with blue, and struck faster than my eye could see. But it did not blind me the way a lightning strike would, and there was no pop of skyfire, no charge in the air.

The bolt coiled around the beast, now uttering mournful, frightened honks. It was no bolt, but a serpent, covered in bright feathers. It had struck out of the sky and now constricted this beast, working the creature's head into its mouth. I watched as the serpent, with reptilian inevitability, swallowed the terrified creature inch by inch.

When it was finished, it struck the air and took flight. The elegant feathered thing, though swollen with a fresh meal, slithered off into the sky and was gone in the clouds. I was amazed at the creature's beauty and the terrible efficiency of its strike. I would later learn that these creatures were known, if rare, through Uazica. The word for feathered serpent in Huyu is

coatl

.

The following day, I saw another one of these creatures, a brilliant green, in the clouds. I crouched in the protective embrace of a tree until it was out of sight. I saw two more the following day, and more the day after. The sky thickened with them the closer I drew to the peak. They came in every scintillating color, darting through the clouds like living lightning. They were beautiful but terrifying, hunting and killing whatever they wished.

The thunder was deafening now, and it no longer sounded exactly like a storm. An impact came, and the ground shook with each strike. The rain was not entirely constant either. Sometimes it would be thick and driving. At other times barely more than a cloying mist.

There is a sensation that I had come to know well during my time in exile. I first felt it most strongly in Storm's Rest, when Old Heacharus tried to make a meal of me. This is the sense of knowing that you are prey. It is a physical sensation, a weight on the back of the neck that never truly goes away. The blood thunders with its own storm, the heart beating a deadly tattoo.

I began to see one coatl specifically, shadowing me from high above. This one's feathers were snowy white like the clouds at the base of the highlands. I caught sight of her out of the corners of my eyes, darting through the leaden clouds. I began to look upon her as death, dogging my every step. A beautiful, elegant death, something I no longer feared.

The peak was not distant. The thunder had grown impossibly loud. The feathered serpents were everywhere and of every size. The smallest, like the white who hunted me, was still twice as long as I was tall. Others were far larger. Prey had thinned too, the walking birds, the shaggy browsers, even the four-legged predators. I soon became aware that I was the biggest landbound creature in the area.

I was deep in the cloud now. The rain was a solid thing. I felt as though I were swimming rather than walking. Were it not for the hat keeping the water from my eyes, I would be blind. The ground fell away in front of me and I stopped, the sight before me pulling the breath from my lungs.

The peak was not a peak. It was a bowl, a crater where a peak had once been. Inside was a truly mammoth feathered serpent. Its sheer impossible size would have driven anyone else mad. I had the enviable position of encountering such monsters in the past. I had seen such a gigantic creature in the recent past. Mh'rohgg, the god of the rotkin was as vast, though where that beast was hideous, this was one of indescribable beauty.

It was in pain, thrashing about in place. Chains of rusted metal bound it to the mountaintop. A bed of volcanic glass covered the floor, the pieces slicing into the magnificent beast. Swirling above it was a cloud of feathered serpents, all of different sizes and colors. They danced in the stormy sky like ribbons on the wind. Lightning spidered over the clouds while thunder crashed like an avalanche. My hair stood on end, the scent of this creature bright and burning. Its feathers were of every color, intricate patterns all over its body.

The great serpent turned, its obsidian eyes finding mine. For a single moment, its thrashing abated. Its scaly mouth opened, its gargantuan teeth bared. Its tongue, longer than a ship, flickered out, tasting me on the air. Its hiss was a typhoon. A hood of feathers frilled out behind its incomprehensibly massive head. Above, the serpents wheeled in the sky. The creature's attention was a weight upon me, wringing the breath from my lungs as surely as the coils of one of the serpents.

Ur-Anu struck out with too many threads to react to. I saw myself killed more times than I could understand, the only real difference the color of the feathers and size of the serpent. I hurled myself backwards, tumbling down the hill. I felt the strikes of the coatl as the sizzle of lightning.

I slammed into a tree, bringing me to a stop. The coatl were thick in the air, ready to strike. I dove beneath the protective canopy of the trees. They slithered about the trunks, lighter than air, trying to find a place to coil and strike.

Fate sent a thread to me, and I whirled, thrusting the tip of my spear. The coatl struck, its serpentine mouth wide. The obsidian blade sliced through the beast's skull easily. I pulled the weapon back, leaving the beast to its death throes on the jungle floor.

Three more of the creatures had kept up their pursuit. One was the white, and I saw hunger in the beast's white-blue eyes. One was twice the size of the white, its black and crimson feathers dark in the shade of the trees. The last was the biggest of the three, with feathers like fire.

Ur-Anu showed me ten different futures, all with one of the creatures wrapped about me, my head disappearing down a serpent's gullet. I put my back to a trunk while the fire-colored one reared up to strike. A hood of feathers frilled out form the base of the head as its mouth opened with a terrifying hiss.

I bloodied the beast with a thrust, whirling on the black to give it a taste. The white was more cautious. I battled the three serpents. The graceful beasts were too wily to catch, no matter how many threads Ur-Anu showed me. Eventually, the three retreated, leaving me for easier prey. All three had been given something to remember me by. I was tired and bruised but they had never laid a fang on me. Lucky that, when a coatl strikes, they seldom need a second try.

The white lingering the longest, slithering through the trees, hunting for another opening. Without support, though, it was lost, and it too left, the feathers at the tip of the tail flattened and frilled.

Finally safe, I rested, eating from my meager stores. My thoughts turned to the leviathan imprisoned at the peak. It was not merely that I could hear the beast thundering about. Chaining such a creature was a crime. I longed to free it. I tried to think of a way that would not immediately result in my death. I had come searching for a city of the gods, and I had found a god.

I would have to approach undetected both by it and the swarm of serpents that I now took to be this creature's offspring. I would have to creep across a field of broken obsidian, the shards ready to slice me to ribbons while crunching loudly under my tread. Ur-Anu would be able to handle the chains. If not, there was nothing to be done, so I had to assume. Then I would have to make my way out. It was a daunting task, but I never thought of abandoning it. This was my purpose.

I settled into the boughs of a tree, folding myself into the cloak of feathers. It was a miserable night, but far from the only one I had spent in the rain since the beginning of my exile. I drifted off to sleep with the sound of the rain drumming on my hat.

Over the next several days, I crept up to the rim of the leviathan's prison. Time was hard to reckon in this land of perpetual twilight, but I did my best to make the journey at different points in the day. The storms that raged about blotted out the sun, the only light coming from flashes of lightning and a strange glow that clung to the clouds like a moss. I was not certain if that was magic from the serpents, or if it was merely the final wisps of sunlight that managed to batter their way through.

Each time I made it to the lip I was only there for moments before I was spotted. Most often it was the imprisoned monster. Then the pursuit started, and I would be forced to drive the serpents off. The white was always part of the pursuit, but after the second day, it did not attack. It merely watched as I drove the others off into the sky.

No plan crystallized in my mind. I do not know how long I would have continued in futility. Fortunately for me, I received unexpected help.

By this time, I had managed a shelter of sorts. Woven from branches and layered with leaves, it took the form of an egg open on one side. It mostly kept the rain from me at night, and my hat and cloak did the rest. Ur-Anu leaned against the trunk nearby, ready to be taken up in the event one of the coatl decided to make a meal of me.

My meat had run out, and if I wanted more, I would have to journey farther down the slopes to where the prey animals still gathered in numbers. Fortunately, Chala had taught me enough, and I was able to make meals of berries and roots. Far from the most satisfying repast, but in my time in the wilderness, I had grown used to it.

This absence of creatures was why, when I heard the sound of passage through the foliage below, I was initially nonplussed. I peered out into the darkness, wondering if luck had brought me one of the shaggy foragers whose meat would sustain me and whose hide might give me another warm layer. That night the rain was thick, falling in opaque sheets. I could see nothing until the flash of lightning.