Claire He

soft thud as it hit the carpet. She stepped towards the mirror and drew her fingers over her face. Maybe her round cheeks weren’t such a bad thing.

However, the single blackhead peeking out of the foundation caught her eye.

“It is alright to just remove one blackhead. Then, maybe you will be beautiful like me.”

Antithesis of Batesian Mimicry

Claire He

The journey from Ki’lanfold to Cathigan was twenty-one days. The battered path from the merchant capital to the fortress of the South was not a path most dared to tread. The Noranua River chiseled across the land, and from her vantage point on the mountain pass seventeen days in, it bent in the shape of a serpent’s spine, the riverbanks shimmering like scales in the summer heat. She thought it would look more beautiful if it wasn’t a wasteland. She craned her neck, blocking the sun from her eyes. Since the civil war, broken spears dotted what was once a battlefield, across a valley too vast for anyone to clean. The ash had long been wiped away by the autumn rains. It was simply dull now—the color of sand and dust and all things lifeless. Ahead of her, Commander Kanveth stilled his steed. In the clattering—and the silence—that followed, a falcon’s cry pierced the air. Her fingers tensed on the reins. Within seconds, their party had paused on the pass. “Sir?” The Commander lifted his hand, signaling silence. She shut her mouth. It took seconds, but eventually she heard it too—the slight pattering of footsteps, the unnatural whistle of arrows. Beside her, a lieutenant asked a silent question with his eyes. What do we do? She let go of the reins and reached for the sheath at her hip. They had done this a thousand times before. She was used to it. And she expected for the Commander to die today: he had been living on borrowed time since the ambush at Erindam, with a growing fracture in his left leg and lungs reminiscent of those who breathed in smoke from battlefields. A strong wind could kill him. From the cliff above her, there was a rumbling noise. It echoed through the otherwise empty valley. She was suddenly exponentially aware of how high up they were. The glittering port city of Cathigan was only miles away, but a tip over the edge of the mountain would be fatal. Fallen into the serpent’s maw, impaled by jutting rocks from beneath beneath the languid waves, left to float in the

current until some inevitable fisherman would be generous enough to bury you. The Drowned Desert showed no mercy to those who traveled upon it. And the bandits that roamed freely upon it, guided by the whipping wind, were even more deadly. In the years following the civil war, the capital troops had recovered countless wrecks from the edges of the mountains; those that could not be recovered rotted away beneath the blood sun. The bandits were upon them in mere moments. The fragile order that the Commander maintained broke within seconds as soon as the first of the arrows rained from the sky, downward. The lieutenant beside her was felled quickly: he choked on the blood that gurgled up in his throat, and the second arrow silenced him, piercing his liver. She gave him a curt salute, but did not dwell on his glassy eyes. A third arrow sent his horse into a frenzy and his body tumbling over the edge of the narrow path—she turned away before his body could hit the water. It was chaos when she glanced upwards. The Commander yelled indecipherable commands. The ringing in her ears persisted, but she attempted to read the Commander’s lips through blurry vision. Careful of where she stepped—the gravel beneath her was littered with arrow shafts—she made her way to him. His uniform was ripped in two different places, from where arrows had grazed past him in the initial assault. That’s fortunate, she mustered. His men were left to scatter like rats, struck down and stripped of their imperial belongings. Their arrows were long-range, and even squinting at their silhouettes would leave her staggering, blinded by the sun. The body of a dead falcon fell beside her, neck split cleanly in half by the poison-tipped steel. Showing off their archery, I see. “Sir,” she gasped, as she had at the ambush at Erindam. “What do we do?” He handed the reins of his prized stallion to her. The creature, whose amber fur was streaked distastefully with blood and dust, bowed its head at her. The weight of the rope rested like wire within her palm, and she closed her hands on it, as if a pearl in the hand of a peasant. Cathigan was four days away. Erindam had cleaved their numbers

in half, had left the escorting troops battered and silent and so, so obedient. Their troops put up a good fight today, she admitted, but even with fire burning down her throat and blood rushing to her head, she knew they had lost. They had weighed their prim advantages against the desperation of criminals and paid the price. And it was far from stopping. “Stay here,” the Commander ordered her with a firm hand on her shoulder. The arch of the cliff above made it so that they were in shadow for a brief second, protected from the chorus of arrows from a supply that seemed limitless. “But sir—” she protested, wrenching herself away. “Lady Tong’ae!” Her gut burned with frustration. Any second now, the arrows would pierce the velvet palanquin that was flanked by nowdead steeds. With the bandits’ aim—likely deserters, if someone asked her to guess—the noblewoman’s life was in their enemy’s hands. Playing with their food, and she knew that they would tire of it once the pawns were dead. She had sworn an oath to escort the noblewoman unharmed to the gates of the unforgiving fortress of Cathigan. But saving the Lady meant leaving herself vulnerable to the excruciating agonies of their stolen weaponry. How would she die: an arrow through the chest, froth threatening to burst from her lungs, dead long before she could hit the water? The Commander grabbed her chin with his rough hands, turning her face to look him dead in the eyes. “Stay here,” he repeated. “That is an order. I will retrieve Lady Tong’ae, and you will listen to me. Do you understand?” She nodded, once, jerking her head away from him to collect herself. Nausea unsteadied her. The stench of iron threatened to make her heave. Visions of Erindam swam before her eyes, and she feared that if she opened her mouth to affirm his orders, her tongue would be caked with the dust of dead skin. The Commander—soon, she would no longer need to call him by title—walked along the twitching bodies of his division. She watched him impale a bandit that had come down the mountain too early with relative ease, and for once she could perhaps see where the rumors of his old military prowess came from. The blood that he smeared onto the back of a fallen saddle glistened like the city in the

distance. The palanquin curtains opened. A woman with powdered, pale skin, hardly touched by the sun, lifted a trembling hand towards him. Nominally, the noblewoman had been a war prisoner, captive from the West and brought to the South as leverage to her General father. Her captors’ idea of imprisonment had been to let her do as she pleased, and within a year and a half, she had been returned to her father, untouched, when they won. She doubted the woman had seen the scars on the valley before, or if she had ever stared into the sun to determine in which direction the well-trodden paths were. A hundred soldiers had sacrificed themselves for her sake, in her first return to the South since the end of the war. The Commander wrenched her by the wrist into the sun, not wasting a second. As if on cue, the arrows resumed their fire, ricocheting against his weapon. The woman’s breath came in gasps, as if on the verge of panic. The first arrow that broke past his defense clipped him on the side of his stomach, and he stumbled, swaying dangerously. The meters between them shortened in length, yet it seemed as though the distance was longer than the path to Cathigan. Her sweat gathered in her palms, making the reins slick. And she waited what seemed like a lifetime for the Commander to return. Her gaze fastened on his silhouette, watching as he was struck by another arrow, shielding Lady Tong’ae from the brunt of the assault. The blood splattered all over the woman’s pretty face, covering her lips with something redder than the cosmetics they used in the pampered city of Ki’lanfold. The gap between them closed ever so slowly. The poor woman looked as if she would collapse under the weight of the Commander’s armor and the arrow wedged between it, cutting to his collarbone. Her heart pounded faster and harder, as if the thud of heavy footsteps. Cheeks flushed red from the sun, it took all of her strength to keep standing, leaning against the fur of a horse that was coated with dried fluids. She reached out, weakly, when the Commander was in hearing range. He shoved the noblewoman towards her and pressed two days’ worth of individual rations into her left hand. Makeshift bandages

of torn velvet from the palanquin curtains were wrapped around her wrist. With a parched throat that threatened to spill blood, he choked out, “Run.” So she did. He mouthed “keep her alive” and she turned away. There was a myth that the nobles told at festivals in the winter, when the audience was too far removed from the heat to care. It was the story of a goddess that drank rivers as wine. This goddess— Noranua—was said to have been the most beautiful in all the heavens, her eyes as deep as the vast oceans on the borders of her domain, her skin like gilded porcelain, her lips painted with dye from the minerals deep in the desert. But she had become ambitious, and envious of the other gods. Noranua killed the queen of the heavens so that she could take the heavens for herself, as if another one of her male conquests. And here was where the storytellers of the festivals would lean forward in feigned excitement, accentuating the story with their motions. This was the part of the story that had become muddled over generations, like the surface of the river beneath her.

Noranua knew she was weaker than the other gods, the storytellers would say to the audience. So she wrapped her wedding veil around a mask of wood and pretended to be the queen. The goddess, when discovered, was thrown from the heavens, into sand that ruined her beauty and boiled her eyes. Her lungs filled with coarse grains and she suffocated, her blood seeping into the salt river. She had heard the story enough times to recall it by heart, even though more recent retellings left the ending open, as if the goddess had lived her life pretending to be someone else. The river and Cathigan served as a makeshift grave for the goddess, made by atheists who told myths simply because it was convenient. The civil war had spilt blood on the land once more. She told the myth to Lady Tong’ae in the absence of conversation. Tending to their wounds and turning hostile eyes from the sand to the sky, she thought she could see the heavens and Cathigan on the same horizon. It took four days, at full speed, for her and the noblewoman to reach the city gates. She starved on the few provisions that didn’t rot. Lady Tong’ae’s pale skin blistered beneath the Drowned Des-

ert’s sun. After they reached the main gate, she paused. Dismounting the stallion, she held her hand out for Lady Tong’ae to take—as a courtesy. The gates hung beads of bronze and ruby, traded along the Noranua River with the merchant capital. She did not belong here, but nevertheless, she had promised to escort the noblewoman to the gates. One hand remained clenched on the reins, even though the rope burned her fingers. Her mouth failed to bring saliva to her lips. “Thank you,” Lady Tong’ae addressed, putting her hands in a poor imitation of a salute. “For following your oath. My father will be pleased.” She paused. “My condolences for your commander’s death. He was a dutiful man.” The noblewoman folded her hands nervously before her, and she could almost pity the poor thing. A falcon circled overhead, crying out as if in anticipation. She had half the mind to kill it, watch its bones crush and heart still beneath the weight of a blade like an offering splayed across the vanity of a diviner. “Lady Tong’ae,” she began, “Kanveth was a necessary sacrifice.” They had reached the outskirts of Cathigan, and that was as far as the noblewoman would go. War did not end: it was a fire which burned brighter in the dry valleys of a desert and in the shadow of unsettled debts. Soldiers followed orders, but she was no soldier. She thirsted with the same desperation as the bandits in the mountains. She dressed herself in the stained fabrics of Lady Tong’ae once she had slit the girl’s throat. With blurred eyes, she saw the reflection of Erindam’s fallen in the noblewoman’s visage. And she returned the blade to its sheath just as quickly, disposing of the body on the banks of the ophidian river. The indolent current would send the corpse far, far away. The girl’s skin turned the color of ash. It had taken twenty-two days to leave Ki’lanfold far behind her. Thirteen to abandon the wreckage at Erindam and march into the mountains. She took a knife to the reins of the stallion and sent it towards the desert. “I’m sorry, sir,” she offered, talking to a ghost. Noting how her voice was not melodious, instead raspy from dust and sand, and how that should be remedied. “But my duty is not yours.”