Death's chill cut through the hot sun upon Zhaleh's folded wings. She clutched the poorly bandaged stump of her right shoulder, nothing remaining of that arm, and hurried down the old path towards the river. Blood soaked the cloth and dripped from her claws, sprinkling a reddened trail in the dry plains. Not much of that blood was hers, though her hasty sealing of the severed artery wouldn't last much longer.

  Nor would she.

  Hyenas whooped and barked hunting howls in the distance. Zhaleh's crest feathers bristled, but not because of the predators.

  She fled along plains without cover from any watchers upon the lonely mountain rising behind her. Hundreds of good perches dotted the cliffs, where she and her fellow disciples had trained and played. The crags and rocks had been so friendly before. Now they towered behind her, threatening and foreign.

  Her foe bloodied talons dashed, sometimes stumbled, across the dry ground and grass. Through great effort and luck, Zhaleh didn't trip.

  Fear turned her thoughts instead of her head.

  Could those monstrous raiders have followed her through the tunnels? The caves were well disguised, but the raiders had entered through the hidden eastern passes. As if they knew all of her sect's secrets. The legends of what nested in the mountain long ago, before her sect settled it, must have been true.

  Nothing else could explain the monstrosities she witnessed.

  Zhaleh panted, beak hanging open, trying to center herself. Moving commanded all of her remaining focus. Her vision blurred every other step, making her blink sluggishly to clear it. The pain of flesh hardly touched her heart. Instead, deep in her chest ached a wound worse than any upon her body.

  Her sect and home burned, and she couldn't glance back. The smoke rising from the village hidden in the lonely mountain's bowl shaped valley would deal a mortal wound to her if she saw the black plumes now. Everything, everyone, had been taken by monsters she never believed in before today.

  Her talons kept moving, lifting sure and steady despite her wobbling upper half, just as she was taught.

  "One foot after the other," she heaved.

  The river, mostly mud after many moons of the dry season, was a mile away. Then it was five miles upstream to the nearest village. Whether she made it or not hardly mattered now. She'd promised her teacher to keep going, and put his last words into practice.

  Wild grass parted quietly for her thanks to her Wood qi training, yet she was far from her teacher's skill. He had dashed atop the grass stalks as easily as a stone road, outrunning khrett and antelope with ease.

  But now he would never again...

  Her breathing threatened to falter. Tears tried to spring free. Zhaleh fought them back with the focus earned from years of self-mastery.

  She was alive. For her teacher's sake, for her fellow disciples, for all their attendants, she had to survive. To carry on the last memories and embers of their sect. So she half walked, half ran, one painful step at a time. She strode plains once so free and inviting, but now menacing and vile, while those hyenas barked and cackled ever closer.

  Zhaleh burst into a small clearing next to a few large stones and thorny scrub bushes and heard a sound that sent her crest feathers sticking out in all directions.

  Something rustled through the grass behind her, the unmistakable sound of a charge upon two feet instead of four.

  Zhaleh drew her sword and whirled about—realizing as a masked man burst from the tall grass that her right arm was no more, the sensation of her sword in hand entirely imagined. The blade remained on her left hip, in its scabbard tied onto her teacher's bloodied and tattered sash. She hadn't noticed it was a problem until now. Same side sword draws were a skill she'd never practiced.

  The masked pursuer kept his hand off the curved sword he carried, leaving it in a many colored scabbard as he jumped the brush and towards her. A bright, blue and gold tassel dangled from the weapon’s hilt.

  He landed with barely a sound, yet didn't rush to strike her right away.

  Instead he stalked around the small clearing, his blue and red painted mask twisted in a mouthless frown of bronze. The eyes were too big and cast in a mournful expression, the nose pointed and cruel, while the lower half was unsettlingly blank. It was just a flat and featureless curve free from paint and hammer marks, smooth but not polished.

  "There you are," he said happily, voice at odds with his mask and the horrors his ilk had inflicted upon Zhaleh's world. Dozens of masked monsters like him had swarmed the sect, slaughtering and torturing with glee. "I was worried you'd bleed out before I found you. I owe you for what you did to my brother."

  Zhaleh scowled, not that she expected him to know that with her beak. To him she must look half as angry as she felt.

  "Was he one I gutted like a fish?" she tried not to pant or shiver despite the pain and haze edging into her sight. "Or the one I left screaming and not a man anymore?"

  "Pretend to be brave all you want," the man chuckled, moving his head to make it clear how he leered at her, "terror colors your eyes beautifully."

  She scarcely repressed a revolted shudder. The man's intentions for her couldn't be more obvious, the screams of the dying Zhaleh had heard upon the mountain still gnawing at her soul.

  The fortunate had died in battle, the rest were mortally wounded in vile rituals performed for all to see. Blood profanely anointed her home. These masked monsters were known far and wide in the plains, though few seemed to really believe in them. But they were real, as all of Ngnun, the sect she called home, had learned before the sun reached noon.

  Blood-Drinkers, the monsters were called by the people of the plains, though she knew they had a different name for themselves. Something cruel only they knew, a secret name unfit for those without corroded souls.

  She glared defiantly at this one that found her, all while guilt pressed coldly against her sword wound.

  “When your leader realizes you're gone," she nearly spat, "what will he cut off of you?"

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  "He'll forgive all when I bring him that sword on your pretty hip." The frowning mask tilted down, his empty hand wagging a finger for her to come closer. "Let's not make this nasty. We can be kind, even towards a gzgigi."

  The insult, calling her a cast off pleasure woman after his kind slaughtered her sect, hurt as much as her missing arm. She'd never let it show.

  Zhaleh took half a step towards him, instead of back as her instincts screamed, and snapped her sword from its scabbard. The bloodbronze weapon's weight felt strange in her left hand, but not unfamiliar. A few of her techniques involved switching sword hands, but she was only exceptional with her now severed right arm. Against a fresh, uninjured masked monster, what chance did she have? Instead of lunging at the masked man and into the blade he was prepared to quickdraw and cut with, Zhaleh acted as if she fumbled her weapon.

  He stayed put, even when she actually came close to dropping it. She recovered, held it out, balancing the blade on the flat on her palm.

  Her dear teacher's wisdom whispered in her ear, a lesson he tried to etch into her heart over and over. 'A tool isn't your life, Zhaleh. Break a sword and it's cast anew.'

  "Wise," the masked man shifted closer, a chill deeper than lost blood shivering down her back. "I want a prize, and you want to live, little gzgigi."

  Metal hissed from a wooden scabbard. Dirt scrapped, the masked man snapping forward in an upward cut that would take her remaining arm, his bloodbronze saber maddeningly fast. An instinctive step back, begun soon as she heard him move, saved Zhaleh, but not her sword.

  Its hilt rang against his weapon, spinning away as he stepped into his failed cut.

  He was quicker than she expected, but about the same as the raiders on the mountains. She'd wanted him to get closer.

  Zhaleh kicked, not at his leading leg that stomped forward to finish her with a sword thrust, but to throw dirt and dust at his mask. Anger sputtered out of him, head shaking as grit got through tiny, hidden slits that let him see.

  His blade still cut true, staying on the path and whistling so close she felt it shave fluff from a few feathers from her neck. Saved by the sway of her kick, and nothing more.

  Head hazy and swimming, Zhaleh pulled upon all her strength and qi remaining in her vessel. She leaped over the killer, legs bursting with supple power.

  Her talons hit dirt behind him and she whirled into a kick, hand clutching her wound so hard it bled, all of her focus going into what might be her final technique. The masked man turned, sword going high as he expected her to attack with The Eclipse's Crescent, a high kick that her fellow disciples killed several of these Blood-Drinkers with.

  She instead struck with First Dawn, which started from the same footwork as The Eclipse's Crescent, but was a much more direct blow. Sudden and forceful as the moment of the day's first light, giving the move its name, but hers was different. It thrummed with the power of Wood qi. Her knee and ankle whipped out parallel to the ground in the twisting back kick, like a green sapling snapping back into place, thousands of days of practice smashing the flat of her foot into the masked monster's ribs.

  Qi struck qi, his power shifting reflexively from his arms where he'd thought she'd strike from above to crack his skull.

  It didn't stop her 'First Dawn'.

  A wheezing, crunching sound erupted from his mask, and the man shaped monster flew backwards from the blow. His legs crashed into the nearby rocky outcropping and flipped him into it. His spine and head cracked against stone, his arms flopping out and twitching.

  Her foe groaned, curved sword falling from his fingers. Blood welled up from behind that mask still affixed to his face, drooling down his throat.

  Zhaleh’s raised leg trembled. She'd killed a charging buffalo with that technique, without being moved back an inch, but that was at her full strength.

  That one blow took too much of her dwindling strength. She lowered her shaking limb, vision speckled and darkening at the edges. Fighting back against the haze, she staggered towards her foe as he tried to rise, racing to end him before he managed to get back up.

  A wounded animal was still dangerous.

  The masked monster turned, grabbing for his fallen sword, and collapsed off the edge of the flat boulder. His legs slumped at awkward angles, unmoving as his arms scrabbled through the dirt for his weapon. Zhaleh wobbled closer, watching as her foe hacked up more blood.

  His inner wounds sounded fatal, but his injuries could be a trick. One last mockery. Zhaleh would put nothing past her enemies after all she'd seen.

  Drawing on strength she shouldn't waste, Zhaleh leaped over him. Landing softly, she swept around and kicked his curved sword into the grass.

  The wounded monster glanced up at her, eyes hidden by dirtied bronze. She stamped at his wrist before he could lunge for her, but his fist struck the ground and threw him away before she could hit him.

  He collapsed on his back in a gasp of true pain, lifting his hands to plead for mercy as wet coughs overtook him.

  The smell of burning flesh and screams of her fellow disciples boiled in Zhaleh's head.

  Mercy was for mistakes.

  Not monsters.

  Leg snapping up high, talons above her head, Zhaleh swung an axe kick down. There was no real technique, no flow of qi, no special preparation. Just the feeling of already broken ribs splintering underfoot and the sounds of limbs spasming in the dirt. Blood splattered from the edges of his mask, trickling down with his sweat to water the dry land.

  The grasses would endure, unlike her home slaughtered root and branch.

  Grief turned to fury, Zhaleh swinging kick after kick into the wretched thing shaped like a man.

  Only when her beak hung open and tongue lolled out panting did Zhaleh finally stop. Her foe had long since settled into death's stillness, his crushed chest starting to buzz with flies. Nothing went to waste, even in the dry season.

  She stood over his body, wavering in the wind like the grass.

  Everything felt so cold.

  Zhaleh stared up at the clouds the sun tried to hide behind and choked back tears.

  How could there be any more warmth without her noisy brother and sister disciples to keep away the frightful silence of the night? Without Sironka to compete against, Tam to tease, Naen to bicker with, and Tovu to scheme with? Most of all, how was there a world for her without a teacher to guide her?

  Zhaleh wondered if she'd died up on the mounting and her soul simply remained as a forlorn spirit.

  Then she gasped and shivered against the cold creeping through her. The chill ate at even her agonized thoughts.

  She just wanted to lie down on those boulders soaked in the day's warmth and go to sleep, to wake up at dawn from this nightmare—or not at all.

  Would she see her sect, the closest she'd had to family, again? Did their souls wait in the Gods' halls for her, or had they moved on?

  Her remaining hand brushed against the unfamiliar sash on her waist. Sickening guilt and a jolt of grieving fury, hot enough to cut through the chill grasping her, forced the bird to move.

  Slow and stumbling all the way, Zhaleh hunted through the encroaching dark that had nothing to do with the midday sun in search of her sword.

  If those masked monsters wanted it then she'd deny them for as long as she still drew breath. The blade didn't matter. What her teacher gave her with his sash on her waist, what she had left of her home, that needed to live. Even if it was only a few breaths longer, she had to try.

  "One foot," she uttered lifelessly, talons bumping her fallen blade, "after the other..."