K’esil sighed. The weight of the world was tied to her talons, and she wasn’t sure she could stay aloft much longer. As she gently applied the salve to the scout sister’s talons, or what was left of them anyway, she tried her best to think through the problem.

  “The slime’s potent, I’ll give it that,” she said aloud. Thinking out loud, even when no one else was around to hear, had always helped her process. It didn’t matter that her patient was unconscious and the slime in the basin wasn’t smart enough to answer. It was mostly for her benefit, anyway. “It could make a good component, but what for?”

  In all her many seasons, she’d never been presented with such a crisis. Even as an apprentice to the blood singers, there had never been anything remotely as dire as the colony’s present circumstances. Yet, it all fell on her as the colony’s Blood Sister to bring them all salvation.

  She sighed. “Not much more to do for this talon, Sister.” She set the bowl aside and began wrapping the wound in strips of leather.

  The bandage was clumsy, but it was far better than the treatment she’d have received in any other colony. Harpies didn’t have hands, which made delicate tasks difficult. Talons were more dexterous, with the ability to grab and manipulate things, but that came with its own challenges. The truth was that most colonies didn’t even have bandages, and most Blood Sisters would have left the poultice exposed to the air.

  K’esil, however, had the benefit of her husband’s efforts. He was not a harpy, having been rescued from his former life nearly twelve seasons ago. With his quick hands, he’d made the bandages, as well as much of the more delicate tools that helped K’esil with her work. Any other day, and she’d have asked him to wrap the talon tightly and neatly. Unfortunately, he was away working on preparations for the next Hatching ritual.

  What she wouldn’t have given to have her Tei’lian here. He was wise beyond words. Had he been born a member of the colony, he might have even challenged her for her position as the colony’s spiritual leader. She liked that challenge. He kept her on her toes, but she knew that if she were truly backed against a wall, he’d come to her aid in a flash.

  Maybe he would have had some insights as to how she was meant to use the slime to save the colony. As it stood, all she knew was that it could. The stars, the winds, and the entrails had all agreed for the first time in K’esil’s tenure as a Harpy Shaman. Yet, they entirely failed to instruct her as to how it was meant to achieve this.

  Tying off the last of the bandage, K’esil stood and yanked a dead rabbit from where they hung from the wall and moved to her workbench. She tossed the creature down and took a deep breath.

  “Great Mother, I request your wisdom. Guide the colony through my hand, teach me how to protect them.”

  A wing claw split the rabbit’s soft fur, and the harpy began to root around inside the creature’s corpse. As with all offerings to the Great Mother, it had been caught that morning and slain by snapping its neck, leaving the insides clear for reading the portents. K’esil examined every inch with a practiced eye.

  It had eaten the leaves of a cava berry bush before it died, which wasn’t particularly enlightening. However, like all creatures she’d examined in the last moon cycle, the flesh of the stomach was graying and sick. It was the first symptoms of the sickness that turned healthy harpies into death walkers. Every creature in the forest was at risk, and she was not foolish enough to think that she and every other harpy in the colony wasn't already infected to some degree.

  “But a slime cannot be infected,” she mused. “How does that help us?”

  Focusing her magic, she called upon one of the spells that made her a shaman: Read it in Blood. Crimson tendrils swirled around her wing claws as the edges of her visions became tinted with blood. The magic guided her touch, sifting through the corpse until it came upon something peculiar: a rock. It was big enough to have choked the rabbit, yet somehow it had made its way all the way into the intestinal tract. That was no normal rock, K’esil was sure of it. There was her sign.

  She pulled the rock from the corpse and examined it. Using the remains of the water she’d drawn for the poultice, she cleaned off the blood, revealing a mossy stone. It was almost perfectly round, and about the size of a human eye.

  “It kind of looks like your core,” K’esil said with a laugh, looking over at the covered basin.

  That was when she noticed the hole. Panic sent her heart into her throat and she practically flew across the room, abandoning the entrails entirely to throw aside the leather. The basin held only water. Not a single trace of the emerald slime remained.

  “Goddess help me,” she muttered as she raced for the door. “If that slime escapes, the colony will be-”

  Before she could finish the thought, her talon slid out from under her, and she fell with a startled squawk and a flurry of feathers. As K’esil’s head slammed into the ground, the crimson from her spell engulfed her entire vision.

  An image of the slime creeping behind her as she tended to E’rina’s wounds flashed across her sight. She watched as it ducked out the flap, and to her surprise, extended a small tendril to look around the corner of the tent before squeezing itself into the wall.

  The vision faded as quickly as it had arrived, leaving K’esil staring at the bones dangling from the ceiling. She hadn’t even realized that she’d never dismissed her spell. Reaching behind her head, she felt at the base of her braids. Sure enough, she was bleeding. The cut was shallow, but she knew well that Read it in Blood worked best with the blood of living creatures. She avoided using it in all but the most dire situations. That was how she’d divined that the slime was involved in the first place, using the blood of three live birds and a half dozen ground squirrels, but she’d never used harpy blood before.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  She was left reeling. The image had been so vivid, likely due to the magic reagent she’d accidentally provided, but just as jarring as the clarity of the image was what it contained. The slime had looked. Before taking any action, it had looked for danger. In any other creature, even the squirrels that were too stupid to flee the trees nearest the colony cliffs, that would have been normal, expected even.

  But a slime? Slimes didn’t look for danger. They weren’t smart enough to avoid it. They were the bottom rung of the monster hierarchy, and were known to be creatures of barest instinct and hunger, without thought or language to bind them to their fellows.

  This one had looked for danger. That showed more than simple slime instincts, which was to eat first and ask questions never.

  “I’ve missed something...” K’esil said, sitting up and going back to the basin.

  The slime was in a wall, now. She couldn’t get it from here. What she could do was find what she’d missed and apply it to finding their missing savior.

  Looking into the bowl, K’esil was surprised to find little trace of the slime. If she hadn’t seen the wing mother put it in, she’d never suspect it was there. There were no pockets of half-eaten rock, and the water was at the same level it was before.

  “Why didn’t it eat anything?” the shaman raised a wing claw and scratched her head. “It only ate a hole in the top, and only enough to escape.”

  K’esil began pouring through her memories of the last few hours. On the guidance of her divinations, the colony’s best scouts had waited outside the Labyrinth entrance. When the gates had opened, E’rina, the leader of the scouts and K’esil’s less spiritual counterpart, had snatched the slime from the dragonkin, and they’d all flown off. The slime had attacked his captor in self-defense, ruining her talons beyond K’esil’s ability to repair, then fallen.

  L’aera, the wing mother herself, had descended to catch it, with K’esil close behind. She’d intimidated it with words the same way one might growl at a struggling rabbit, and the slime had behaved after that.

  “What am I missing?”

  The shaman paused. When E’rina had first grabbed the slime, what had she heard? The dragonkin said something, a series of syllables that bore no meaning for the harpy blood sister. But what else…

  A scream. There had been a scream. In the haste of the raid, K’esil had barely even noticed it, but thinking back, something had screamed. It was neither the harpy nor the dragonkin, which meant…

  “Great Mother, forgive us,” she breathed.

  K’esil plucked a feather from her wing, wincing a bit as the blood flowed to fuel her spell. She held the bloody feather before her and watched as gleaming threads of crimson raced from the feather to an object on the ground: the stone from the entrails.

  She picked it up. It was scuffed, the moss scraped away in several places, and K’esil suspected that this was the culprit of her rather spectacular fall. How it had gotten on the floor when she distinctly remembered setting it on her table was a mystery only the Great Mother would ever know.

  As she turned the rock in her wing claws, her breath caught. The moss had been scraped off in a pattern, one that was highlighted by the crimson veins of the spell she cast.

  “Vi’yera,” she breathed.

  The symbol was in the old tongue, the ancient language that was shared by all monsters big and small, created by the Great Mother in an age long past. Over generations and generations of harpies, through the births and deaths of colonies across the world, the old tongue had been lost, replaced with the more useful language of humans. But every Blood Sister was required to learn the old tongue for use in the rituals of their people…and for portents such as these.

  K’esil gripped the stone between her claws and ducked past her tent flap. This confirmed her suspicion. Vi’yera wasn’t just any symbol, it was perhaps the most important. The wing mother needed to know immediately. She raced for the cave entrance, forgoing the connecting tunnel in favor of flying straight to the lower cavern where Wing Mother L’aera was no-doubt reassuring the colony of their successes, even as her two lieutenants were notably absent from the celebration.

  “Wing Mother!” K’esil shouted as she landed gracefully in the communal chamber.

  The crowd parted, revealing the tawny-haired harpy with her blue-feathered headdress. K’esil bowed immediately, laying her wings on the ground to either side.

  “What is it, Blood Sister?” the wing mother asked. “Will E’rina recover?”

  K’esil took a deep breath. “I do not know, yet.” That was a small lie, but explaining further would take more time than she had. There were more important subjects than the talon of a single harpy. The whole colony was at stake!

  L’aera narrowed her eyes, peering at the blood staining K’esil’s blond hair. “You did not have that injury when I left you moments ago. Did the slime harm you?”

  “No, Wing Mother. I slipped.” Her cheeks flushed slightly as she admitted her accident, but she quickly moved ahead, hopping to her feet to explain. “But, I’m fine! It was the Great Mother’s will! She has spoken to me! Shown me the way!”

  “By making you slip and hit your head?” the wing mother asked gingerly.

  K’esil’s feathers bristled. L’aera wasn’t one to ignore the spiritual signs like some harpy leaders did, but if she didn’t believe K’esil at this point in her story, she would be hard-pressed to believe the truths revealed to her. Even so, K’esil had a duty, both to the Great Mother and to her colony. She had to report what she’d learned, even if she’d be laughed out of the communal cavern for it.

  “I wasn’t listening, it seems. The Great Mother felt the need to…be more direct in her signs.”

  Sometimes even the Great Mother had to beat a harpy upside the head to get the point across. L’aera seemed to consider the answer, then gestured for her to continue.

  “I found this stone in the entrails,” she explained, showing it to the Wing Mother. “It’s reminiscent of the slime’s core, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “If you say so,” L’aera said, still skeptical.

  K’esil huffed and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. L’aera had been a scout before she became wing mother. If she’d been a blood sister, she’d have understood.

  “I slipped on this stone, and when I did, it carved this pattern.” She turned it over to show the rune etched into the moss. “It’s Vi’yera, the symbol of kinship and family. The slime is meant to be our friend.”

  L’aera frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t follow. It’s a slime. It doesn’t have friends.”

  “L’aera, the slime is intelligent. We imprisoned an innocent, intelligent creature.”

  “What?!” L’aera squawked. Silence reigned in the cavern. The accusation was serious. The Great Mother would punish them for this.

  “We can still correct it, though,” K’esil insisted.

  “How?”

  “The slime has escaped. We must find it before it's too late.”