Leroh was a cowardly shit, a sore disappointment and a laughable failure of a man. He’d always known it. But it was only as he crouched in front of the kitchen door peeping through the keyhole at the most horrific event of his life that he understood just how true his worst definitions of himself could ring.

  Teela lay dead, face down on the ground. The Mantis had taken her.

  Leroh shuddered but held in the whimper that tried to escape him. He couldn’t make a sound til she was gone. She could hear him—probably did hear him, despite his best attempts to keep quiet. His breaths were coming in wet, choked pants.

  It had happened as quickly as he’d always been warned it could be.

  That very morning Leroh had heard of her arrival at the town. A sideways comment thrown his way by an unfriendly tavern patron that he’d hastened to share with his friends. He’d been aware of the danger, and he’d thought his awareness would be enough as a way of prevention.

  So at some point in what had been an otherwise-unremarkable day of work, the small woman had entered the tavern and a strong unease had sparked in Leroh’s gut. He’d known her immediately. Her appearance was inconspicuous enough to not draw too much notice, but that day he’d kept a special eye out for the red mouth and apathetic demeanor she was known for, and he’d been especially wary of the possibility that she might stop by for a meal, exactly as had come to pass.

  Not that he'd feared himself or his family in any real peril. Her choice of prey was known, and Leroh had always made sure to stay well out of her reach. Easy enough to do, he’d thought.

  How could he have foreseen that she’d take little Teela? Why would she?

  The Mantis was now finished with her kill. Motionless, she looked down at his sister for what seemed a long time. The girl’s body was sprawled on the filthy wooden floor of the tavern, arms lifted halfway upward as if she’d tried to brace her head but found she lacked the strength to reach. The tangle of her heavy black curls and the warm brown linen of her skirts fanned across the ground.

  His little sister. His responsibility. Dead on the planks of wood she’d helped to sweep for most of her short fifteen years.

  He’d left her alone to die.

  Leroh found he was gasping for air too loudly and pushed a hand flat on his chest in an attempt to calm his heart. He could not give in to emotion just yet. He promised himself that when she was gone he’d be able to run upstairs and cry, that he only had to wait a little bit longer.

  He continued to watch in his best attempt at silence as the monster who’d destroyed his life bent and collected his dead sister from the ground, an arm hooking around her back and the other under her knees. With seemingly no effort at all, the Mantis lifted Teela’s body, and then she proceeded to walk out of the tavern with not a word or glance to spare for her stupefied spectators. That was when Leroh’s knees gave in and he slumped down onto the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.

  He’d allowed this to happen. He could have done so much differently, could have stopped it. And he hadn’t, and now Teela was dead.

  With his bent legs raised and his arms encircled around them, Leroh tucked his head into the safe space that formed in the center and wept then and there.

  Teela had been a burden to him.

  Perhaps a self-pitying thought, but the truth.

  When their father and main pillar of the family had died during a raid Mother had made it clear that the girl was to be raised mainly by Leroh. He’d only been a boy at the time, but his sister was three years younger, and female, and so he’d stepped up and taken charge.

  For their mother was not a nurturing woman, and she’d had to prioritize the business to keep the family afloat when their main provider was abruptly taken from them. Leroh understood this. It was just the way of things. And so onto him fell the weight of responsibility of little willful Teela.

  Always running around and getting herself into trouble, always asking the wrong questions and meddling where she had no business poking her nose, the girl knew well that any consequences she brought upon herself would inevitably fall on his shoulders, but she had always cared about that outcome not at all. She’d been so bent on stealing bits of freedom undeserved that she’d not seen an issue trampling over him to get them.

  But he’d never taken pleasure in imparting discipline, no matter how much she’d pressed him for it. He would have been perfectly content to never exchange a word with the girl at all, but his fate was another. It was his responsibility to strain his voice day after day chasing after her and begging her to see reason, his life’s mission to compel her to behave.

  And so his short life had insofar been an upward battle, a constant struggle for balance between preserving a crumb of his own time for himself, and avoiding to neglect his sister and fail in his duty to his parents.

  Now the scales had at last come to a tipping point.

  His father had wanted him to take up the mantle of leadership after him, to protect what he’d worked for and loved. His mother had needed him, entrusted him with the family’s means of livelihood and the wellbeing of his sister.

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  And now Teela was going to be eaten. Suddenly Leroh could not breathe.

  The thought hadn’t occurred to him until that moment. The Mantis would eat her, suck out the insides of her head and consume the power of her spirit, like she hadn’t mattered at all. As though his sister had been no more important than an animal. The memories of her life, her thoughts and knowledge, her pain and joy. The very essence of Teela’s being the Mantis would devour for its energy, as if that had been her sole value.

  Then the sound of steps begrudgingly approaching from deeper within the kitchen brought Leroh back to terrible reality. His head sprung up; he blanched. His mother had likely heard him sobbing and finally decided to come and see to the issue herself.

  “Always trouble, you. Always some problem,” came her tired, irritated voice as she made her slow way toward him. “What is the matter now?”

  For the second time that day, Leroh fled.

  He could not face her. Before her frame had even poked around the bend in the wall, he was gone.

  She was looking for his little sister, he knew, and he couldn’t let her find him with the news that he’d abandoned her to get killed and eaten instead.

  So he scampered across the tavern, noting in passing that people were gathered around the corpses the Mantis had left behind, and when he exited through the front door, he wiped his shirt sleeve across his face to clear away the tears that marked him as a sissy for all to see.

  He would recover Teela’s body for proper burning if it was the last thing he ever did with his miserable life. He would not face his mother empty-handed.

  The wooded area just outside the town would do fine.

  Mantis thought of riding Otto there but decided against it. It wasn’t far, and the girl was but a wispy little thing. It would’ve been more trouble to retrieve her stallion from the inn stables than to just carry her in her arms. And bearing her lifeless body in such a way felt meaningful to her. It was right.

  On her way toward the edge of the forest, Mantis took vague notice of her surroundings, of the charming rudimentary streets of the little town just outside the capital. They kept a closed community there. Traditionalist—free. To keep away from the grasping hands of the Gods they maintained themselves strictly isolated, and refused to surrender the stance despite the hardship that accompanied it.

  The child she carried in her arms would have led a decent life in such a place, Mantis knew, or as honest as any inhabitant of the secluded kingdom of Yriaa could get in present times. She’d been free. In a state of perpetual alert, and shackled in ways, yes. But free.

  As was the dilemma of all Yriaans.

  Teela was her name. It was what the rough-mannered young man that currently followed Mantis down the street had called her back in the tavern. He was doing a very poor job of remaining unnoticed by her, now. Mantis paid him no mind.

  Some of the local folk watched her, timid, as she passed them, and a few men dared to shoot her hateful looks, but all was well otherwise. They knew of her, feared her. As they should. She’d be relieved to leave them in peace soon, when her business at their town was concluded.

  A red wildflower flung across the middle of the dirt path. Then a scrap piece of home-spun cotton fabric, dyed red with fresh blood and draped atop a cart wheel. Mantis scanned the streets with her eyes but found nothing else, no more red. All was well. As it should be.

  The forest, when she reached it, was homogenous and uninteresting. They always were. It’d do. Mantis was not there to admire the vegetation. Five souls were currently crowded inside of her, and so it was a matter of severe urgency to relieve the pressure. Now.

  Now.

  The splitting headache from the memories was in itself torturous, but the heavy weight of no less than five human souls swirling in her chest and straining outwardly for release was just short of unbearable.

  Mantis had developed somewhat of a tolerance to it over the years, but this was more than she was used to. Too many inhabited her at once. It couldn’t go on. She’d pressed her limits with more imprudence than she could recall having done before, and was at present paying the price for her lack of judgment.

  So once she’d walked deep enough into the woods, Mantis made haste to lower Teela down onto the grass of a small clearing, making sure to position her arms tidily folded atop her ribcage and smoothing down her curly black locks.

  She might have been sleeping. A little girl sleeping.

  “I want my sister’s body back.” The young man spoke from behind her. “Intact.”

  Mantis turned to him. He was hiding behind a tree.

  A long silence stretched when she didn’t offer a response. She turned back around and stood to take a few steps away from the girl. When she heard the brother approaching Teela, Mantis spun again and swept him up and down with her gaze, not sure if she was dealing with a very brave man or a rather unintelligent one.

  He crouched by his sister with arms outstretched, ready to pick her up. Mantis shook her head no at him, and he froze.

  “But—” he tried. “I’m taking her home!”

  “Not yet.”

  “You can’t have her! She didn’t do anything wrong!” He stood, attempting to glower at her, but he was having trouble looking at her face. Not much of it was visible with the draping fabric of her hood covering most of it, anyway.

  Mantis took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Sit over there. I’ll give her back to you shortly.”

  “I won’t let you eat her! She didn’t do anything wrong!”

  Mantis reached back and pulled off her hood so she could bore her eyes into his. He fell down.

  “I’m not going to eat her, you moron.” She bit out, turning away from him again.

  Then, facing the trees, she closed her eyes, quickly expelled him from her thoughts, willed her breathing to a slower pace.

  She filled her lungs with the smell of nature, her ears with the sound of harmony. When it was time, she went to her knees, brought her core down low onto the earth, and placed the heels of her palms on her clavicles, arms crossed and hands flat against the pulse points of her neck in the proper position for prayer.

  And she began to quietly recite the string of words in the old language she’d uttered countless times before which would summon the Goddess Ombira.