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  A Fist Full of Sand by A. J. Galeyn

  © 2018 A. J. Galeyn

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Sam’s Song One: A Fist Full of Sand

  A Book of Cerulea

  A. J. Galelyn

  Contents

  Extra Life

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Cerulea Terms

  For Kevin, my partner in adventure in this world and all the others, too.

  Extra Life

  A potion of the proceeds from this book go to the charity Extra Life.

  Prologue

  In a faraway land,

  in a faraway place,

  there was born a girl without a face.

  Her father sighed,

  and her mother cried,

  and when the tribe moved on, they left her behind.

  But the sand was her cradle,

  and the sun kept her warm,

  the wind took a vow to protect her from harm.

  The dustdevils gave her sandrubies for eyes,

  and her mouth was carved out

  by a soft summer storm.

  Soon she grew from a babe to a girl.

  First she could run, and then she could twirl.

  Around and around,

  like the buzzards on high,

  she danced with the wind, and fought with the sky.

  “Rebellious child!” they told her one day

  “We love you, we love you, but you just cannot stay.

  You must venture forth,

  take your leave of this land,

  find your own people, and learn of their ways.”

  From the desert she took

  the mirage that conceals,

  the peace of the night,

  and all that was real.

  She waved to the jackals, kissed the scorpions farewell,

  and came into town with a story to tell.

  Chapter One

  [Level: 0]

  [Hit Points: 6/8]

  The world pulsed into focus. My head was a throbbing island of pain. Around it lapped a sea of fear, urgent, but out of reach. My arms were bound, sensation ended at the constricting chains around my wrists. I remember nothing. My name… my name is…

 

  Yes. The name spelled out in my head in letters of light, it was my name; it had always been mine. Not much else was, really.

 

  I shook my head to clear the voice: but moving was a bad idea. I was unable to fall over only because I was already chained to a short, forked post stuck into the ground. As the hot pain receded, the fear came in its wake, cold and cramping. I became aware of other voices speaking, these ones not in my head.

  “I want to eat her.”

  “I dunno. Shaman Bisquik will pay good money for a kid.”

  “This one’s dead anyway.” suggested one of the thick voices. “How about we can eat half of her, and then sell the rest to the little goblin?”

  In case this inspired further such reasoning, I stopped playing dead. “I am not a kid!” I insisted, struggling against my bonds and failing to stand up.

 

  The small clearing we were in could hardly be called a campsite; it was just an area with no trees in it, with the local underbrush uprooted and pushed to the sides around a pile of rags and lumpy sacks. I noticed a ragged cloth backpack that couldn’t possibly fit anything as big as my captors, and wondered who its hapless owner had been.

  There wasn’t even a fire pit. Some logs smoldered nearby, giving off more smoke than anything else. The creatures looming over me were huge, easily seven feet tall, all gnarled arms and hunched spines and hairy hide. One of them pulled a dagger out of its roughly tanned belt.

  “Yeah?” it said, leering with all the malice of someone very stupid having what they imagined was a bright idea, “How’s about I make her dead?” and stabbed the dagger downwards into my shoulder. I screamed and twitched away as far as my chains allowed; the blow had been imprecise, slicing instead of severing; superficial. The sharp pain seared away my foggy headache and focused my resolve. Keep trying, you big bully. I’m not going down so easily.

  Blood ran the length of my arm and dripped into the dust.

  The second creature--

  insisted the Voice.

  Right. The second ork, the one with blue engravings twining round its lower tusks, laughed at this new game. It pulled out its own weapon, a rusted shortsword, and made a playful jab at me. I twisted away from Blue Tusks, only to meet the dagger-wielder stabbing at my legs; I pulled my legs in, drawing the ork’s arm near me, and kicked out as hard as I could. I caught the ork’s hand, which I noticed had only a semi-opposable thumb, and the dagger went soaring off in a glittering ark into the dead underbrush.

  [Feat acquired: Dodge]

  “Ow!” it snarled. “You little ookra!” Plain Tusks unfolded its mile long arm and backhanded me with a blow that was neither playful nor imprecise. My head slammed back against the post and fireworks of pain obliterated the world.

  [Dodge check: Failed]

  [-1 Hit Point: Bludgeoning damage]

  [Hit Points: 5/8]

  I remembered. I remember the desert. I remember its wide open skies and hot sands and unforgiving rocks. The wandering wind and the smell of scorpion shells and sunbaked sagebrush, the tenacity of the life that makes its home there in utter spite of its destitution. The desert does not yield; neither water, nor life, and what lives there does so with a sort of patient madness, waiting out the day, waiting out the dry season, waiting in ambush. I too, knew how to wait.

  Every living thing in the desert either bites, stings, is poisonous, is venomous, has thorns, or all of the above. I was born with none of these advantages, but I leaned to mimic them. The leather skinned cacti taught me to guard myself. From the black carapaced scorpions I learned respect, they taught me the best defense is a good offense, and the best offense isn’t obvious but very, very potent.

  There is a kind of jumping mouse there which famously does not drink. It goes its entire life without ever tasting water and gains its moisture from only the seeds it eats. When threatened it does not scurry, but instead leaps into the air, braving the hazards of the hawks to leave its enemies snapping at its dust. From the jumping mouse I learned courage.

  My earliest memories of the desert were of the sun. As best as I remembered, the sky was my mother, and the sun is her heart: passionate and hot and inexhaustible. I slept on the cradling sands, warmed by her during the day, and at night she would tell me all of the stories of the ten thousand stars. She told me about Celestia, the Star of Truth, and her consort and enemy Oridon, the Demon Star. She showed me each of the Sylvan Sisters, who conspired to betray the moon, and lost their eldest Phosphoro. Phosphoro fell to earth and died. They say her ghost still haunts us, and one day she will rise again. I know the three names of the Day Star, in his incarnations of morning, evening, and eclipse. Then there is Alizerion, the Risen Wizard, who left his
tower in ashes when he ascended to the sky, and the twin stars Keri and Kalari. I know to avoid Hydria, the Plague Star. I know where to find Pilos, the Way Star, and how to read his riddles. Pilos was the one who led me out of the desert, when it was time.

  From my brother the wind, I learned to speak. He speaks every language of every land, even if he doesn’t always remember them. The wind is an artist of sorts. He carved the Copper Canyons down south of the Inkling Oases, and painted them in all the shades of sunset, in honor of our mother.

  In the desert, I remember the storms. They came on sudden, barely in advance of the warnings of the wind, and spat out lightning, tornados, and hail. They would make giant thunderheads that swelled in the sky, awesomely huge, transient towers of clouds with the rising ambition of mountains. When the storms came there was nothing to do but take cover (never in a canyon though, or the long awaited water would show up in a hurry of a flash flood), and hold out for its eventual passing. After the storm, the sand held ephemeral mirrors of puddles, as turquoise as the sky, and for a day the desert would bloom in a sudden haste of wildflowers. From the storms I learned of absolution, and fury.

  And then one day I had to leave my home and playground, because it was not a place for people. An exception had been made for me, child that I was, but I was not a child any longer. Mother sky, I miss you. My brother the wind had followed me to the edge of the desert, where there had been people. I piked from caravan to caravan, making my way east, and eventually towards the foothills of the great Stormshade Mountains. On the other side, the city-state of Triport awaited me, filled with strange people from every strange place in the world. Maybe, somewhere amongst all those strangers, there would be a place for me.

  I had never seen a city before.

  The caravans passed under the mountains by way of the dwarven tunnels, but I had no money to pay the passage, and came over Morrison Pass instead. The rocks crowning the mountain pass were steeper than anything I had ever seen in the rolling desert sands. I remembered… standing on a precipice, my arms spread wide, listening for the wind. I turned at a sound behind me, and my feet slipped from the moss-slick rock, and I fell. Past the green and grey cliff face, through the tops of the evergreen, I bounced off one of the branches, and then, nothing.

  [Background selected: Wild Child, Waif of the Sands]

  I really, really hate falling. Falling is stupid. Gravity is stupid. Orks are stupid.

  When I came around this time, I was angry. I was also still chained to the thrice damned post. Posts are stupid. The orks were nowhere to be seen or heard, probably out hunting. I sat up straighter, blood dripping from my shoulder into the dust, and pulled with all my might on the chains, to no effect whatsoever.

 

  Huh?

 

  The stats read off like a list, and I wondered what they meant. Besides the fact that the stress of my impending demise had obviously driven me crazy.

  the Voice continued proudly,

  “Is that good?”

 

  Huh.

 

  How fine is “fine”?

 

  I think I could use a little less Wisdom at the moment. “I am very in tune with the urgent need to be elsewhere, right now. Perhaps we could borrow some Strength from Wisdom and pay it back later?” I asked hopefully.

 

  “And what about this Charisma?”

  the Voice said bitterly.

  “What are we going to show them?”

  the Voice said smugly.

  I stopped trying to pull myself free of the chains and instead focused on slipping out of them. I straightened my fingers and tucked in my thumbs, and then twisted around and bit my own wounded shoulder. Ow. It started bleeding again, and I sucked up a mouthful of bitter blood, mixed it with saliva, and spat the slimy mess onto my chafed wrists. Thus lubricated, I pulled again; it hurt, for a moment, almost as much as my head.

  [Skill acquired: Escape Artist]

  My left hand came loose, as slow and raw and bloody as a newborn babe, and about as useless. I tried to flex my fingers. With my new and improved range of motion, I rolled onto my knees and looked at my right hand; it was huge and swollen, the flesh puffy against the over-tight chains, which I now saw were secured with a padlock.

  Behind me I heard the snapping sounds of twigs and smelled blood, not my own. The orks were returning. I pulled again on the right hand chain, twisting and writhing, desperate. Come on. Come on. My hand, stubbornly, stayed put, swollen and obstinate.

  [Escape Artist check: Partial success]

 

  The snapping twigs were too close now, and the growling, joyful voices of the orks entered the camp. I quickly spun around and sat down in front of my post, which I now saw was a stripped down oak branch, hammered deep into the ground, no doubt, by hairy hide arms a mile long. The orks sure hadn’t dumped Strength.

  They came into the camp exuberant from the kill; a wild female boarox, her body broken and limp, her shaggy hide dripping blood and offal. The boarox is a distant relative to the goat, though bigger and more densely muscled. It has the goat’s long legs and independent nature, though it takes its name from its swine-like, mobile nose, sharp tusks, and fierce temper. They were not animals easily hunted. I hid my hands behind my back and tucked in my legs, staying curled up, small and quiet, and hoped the orks would forget about me. I know about waiting.

  It seemed to work. The orks ripped apart the boarox, heedless of the slimy mess they made of the body, or of the smell. Clearly they weren’t worried about attracting predators. They ate most of it raw. A few pieces went onto the fire, but, impatient, one or the other of them would pull the meat back out and swallow huge chunks of it whole. I couldn’t make myself look away from the gruesome scene. That mess was going to be me the next time they got hungry. It occurred to me to wish for something sharp, and I could cut away my right hand… surely one handed and free was better than two handed and dead. Right?

  I tried not to throw up.

  It occurred to me that as long as I was wishing for something sharp, I could chop away at the post instead of my hand. I just needed an axe, and a quiet hour, unobserved. Patience. I reminded myself. Do not scurry.

  [Skill acquired: Stealth. +4 size bonus as a halfling]

  Eventually Blue Tusks, evidently sated, picked up a thigh bone and threw it at Plain Tusks, who retaliated with half of a rib cage. Thus began a food fight of sorts, and what pieces of boarox weren’t eaten were instead trod into the bloody mud that now made up the floor of the clearing as the Tus
k Brothers chased each other around, hooting and hitting each other.

  “Got you!”

  “Hurhur, nuh uh, got you!”

  “Got you first!”

  “Ow!”

  “Sissy! Take that!” Plain Tusks shoved Blue Tusks, who tripped over the remains of the rib cage. The dagger at his belt flashed in the firelight, along with something else, solid and shiny. Blue Tusks snarled and rose, angry now, and then kicked Plain Tusks in the solar plexus, who stumbled backwards, right into the remains of the fire. I began to entertain a hopeful notion that the orks would kill each other.

  Plain Tusks howled in earnest as the coals burned into the compounded callus and dirt that was his foot.

  “Ow! Ow! It hurts! Get it off me, get it off me!” Plain Tusks one legged hopping nearly smashed me and my damnable post both, but instead managed to miss me and land on the boarox rib cage instead. One foot burned, and one foot encased in bones, Plain Tusks gave one despairing howl and sat down, a look of utter confusion on his face.

  Blue Tusk started laughing.

  After a moment, Plain Tusks seemed to realize Blue Tusks wasn’t angry anymore, and started laughing too. I stayed small, and curled up, and kept all my laughter inside, because I had recognized the shiny object on Blue Tusks belt.

  It was a key.

  said Voice.