The shocked, strangled howl choking out of Seymour’s mouth as he gaped at his blown-off hand didn’t sound human. It didn’t feel human, either. At that moment, he couldn’t possibly conceive of himself as a person anymore. It would have been too painful; the damage too irreversible. Instead, it was as if he’d suddenly become a prop in a movie about this horrible, disfiguring accident that had happened to a fictional character called Seymour Little. He could only cope with it all by turning into a cardboard cutout of himself.

  But cardboard wouldn’t have been spurting blood from its mangled stump like this. Wet, hot blood, dragging him down to his knees. Bright red blood, streaming down his forearm as he held the amputation site up before his own tear-filled eyes to fixate helplessly upon it – despite wishing he could look anywhere else. And then he began to tremble and seize, and he fell on his side next to the now-scorched treant carcass he’d been sent out here by Ridley to harvest.

  The jungle around him shifted to grayscale as all the color drained out of the world, same as the desanguinating exodus spurting from his gory stump simultaneously emptied his own body.

  And as everything faded to black, all Seymour felt in those last moments was relief. Relief that he would no longer need to exist as this mutilated meat-bag named Seymour Little.

  He whispered a prayer and a curse: “I’m coming to see you, old man.”

  “Drink this, Sir, if you wish to live.”

  The voice belonged to a girl.

  She held a small, round-bottomed flask to Seymour’s lips. It looked like something from Walter White’s motorhome, filled with a bubbling, turquoise-colored concoction. This pure-magic drink dazzled his eyes and its mere proximity seemed to be soothing his panicked mind.

  But then again, the girl was something to behold, too: an angel hovering over him with this bright red explosion of tight, red curls hanging down and tickling his cheeks; her skin pale as a freckle-kissed cloud and her eyes a deep, jade green below a forehead creased with concern.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “No, Sir. You have lost your hand and you are dying.” She touched the open flask to his lips. It smelled like coconut, if he had to name the scent. “And I am once again asking you to drink of this potion if you might prefer to remain living, instead.”

  Seymour finally parted his lips then and the girl slowly poured the potion into his mouth. He swallowed it all in a series of gulps and it tasted unlike anything he had ever known before: savory and sour and cold and hot all at the same time, and all the way down.

  The effect happened nearly instantly. A high-pitched hum momentarily deafened him and then the stump at his wrist began to tingle and itch. As he watched, the bleeding ceased and liquified flesh bubbled out of the wound, instead, and then bones thrusted out as well and quickly formed a skeletal hand. Sticky strands of sinew and muscle and nerves engulfed the pearly-white bones and the wadded, gummy flesh crawled up and encased the horrible sight. Suddenly he had a new hand, grown fresh from the stump. Even the Silver Ring of Diplomacy he wore had been reconstructed. And turning his new hand over, he saw that the Sigil of Greed had been redrawn, as well.

  He looked from the now-empty flask to the girl and then back again, painfully aware of how wide-eyed he was in that moment.

  “Thank you,” he gasped, “I’m Seymour.”

  “Do you think you can walk?” The girl kept her head on a swivel. Her curls swung as she scanned the surrounding graveyard. “It is unwise to linger here any longer. The Directors will have already dispatched their henchmen this way, of that I am most certain. They will desire to recover your corpse for its constituent parts, to further their ghastly experiments in humanoid artificery.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I must ask that you refrain from expressing indecipherable utterances at this time and focus your attention on making our escape.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She frowned and scolded him. “My name is irrelevant. And I repeat to you my prior query: can you walk, Sir?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He pushed himself up and she gave him room so he could get to his feet. “But I’d still like to know your name, even if you say it’s irrelevant.”

  “Fine, I’m Penny.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Penny.” He felt drunk both in body and mind and somehow even in his soul. “And uh, thanks for saving my life just now. Means a lot.”

  “Can. You. Walk?” Her eyes blazed intensely as she enunciated each word. “We must leave this place before I undertake the creation of a portal to elsewhere. Doing so here would too easily allow the Directors to scry our destination.”

  After briefly testing out his legs by taking a few practice steps in place, Seymour nodded and said, “lead the way.”

  She hurried off into the jungle without another word and Seymour followed. From behind, he realized she was dressed like some sort of burglar, all in black: black slacks, black blouse, and even a black cape and flat-soled shoes. All of it loose-fitting and made from light materials. After what he guessed was something like five minutes of traveling in silence and at close to a half-jog, she stopped and surveyed their surroundings. To Seymour, this portion of the jungle wilderness was no different than the rest, but she quickly identified a tree of interest and went to it.

  She found a small hollow on the tree like a squirrel would nest in and she reached inside to pull out what appeared to be a pinecone. But Seymour quickly realized it was no accidental discovery. The pinecone obviously didn’t belong to the towering jungle palm she’d just extracted it from, and it was wrapped in a thin, intricate web of what looked like spider’s thread but made of gold instead of silk. She had clearly stashed it there at some point earlier.

  “What is that?” he wondered.

  But the girl didn’t reply except by cocking her head like she had heard something other than his voice.

  “Curses,” she whispered, “they are near.”

  “Who?”

  “The Brothers Stuczi, I assume, judging by their brutish lack of stealth.” She frowned and slipped the pinecone-thing into her pocket. “The Directors have favored them lately for tasks which might involve violence.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “‘The Brothers Stuczi’?” Seymour repeated. His mind raced in a circle so swiftly that he became physically dizzy. “Gaspar and Janez Stuczi? Is that who you mean?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You know these Riftborn?”

  A familiar but indeterminable Eastern European accent he hadn’t heard in weeks came echoing out of the jungle: “come out, come out, little Little. We is here to help you – no need to hide.”

  “How in the fu—”

  “Hide,” the girl demanded, shoving him behind the same tree she’d recovered the pinecone from. “I will deal with these thugs.”

  The idea that this girl could deal with the Stuczi Brothers felt laughable but Seymour didn’t have the will to argue. She had magic, of course, but these dudes were straight up gangsters from Latvia or Moldova or some other far-flung gangster spawn-point back on Earth that would have taken Seymour way too long to find on a map.

  They had always been hanging around this one bar where Seymour had gone to play cards in the backroom, and everyone knew they ran a sportsbook. In the weeks before Seymour was somehow ripped away from Earth and deposited on Heschia, he’d been on a hellacious hot streak and had taken them for close to ten grand. And they always paid up, but there was something about them. The way they looked at him while peeling off hundred dollar bills from their stacks made him nervous. Too nervous to keep using their book or to even return to the bar for poker night.

  And now they had somehow joined him on another world, and were stalking him out in a jungle—in a treant graveyard—at the behest of The Directors, as the girl called them. Seymour could only assume these were the directors of the Guild of Artificers, who had been featuring so prominently in his life of late, operating from the shadows through intermediaries like Dathon and Ridley and—

  And the girl? Seymour suddenly worried as she left him to go confront the gangsters. Is she in on whatever they’re up to, too?

  He pressed his back against the trunk of the massive tree from which she’d retrieved her magical-looking pinecone from a moment earlier. That pinecone – she’d stashed it out here at some earlier point in time. Whatever it was for, she’d known she’d need it.

  But how? he wondered, how could she have known Ridley would be sending me out here today unless she was working with him,too?

  And that wasn’t even mentioning the potion she’d fed him to repair his severed hand. What were the odds she had just happened to be strolling through the jungle with some kind of powerful healing elixir just when he desperately needed one? The whole situation suddenly felt like some kind of intricate setup, with Seymour stuck inextricably at the center – a feeling which only intensified as he listened to the girl's confrontation with the Stuczis:

  “Stop right there,” she demanded. It didn’t sound like she had gotten very far from Seymour's hiding spot before encountering them.

  “Miss Amberwine,” said the unmistakable voice of Janez Stuczi, “what brings you to weird graveyard in middle of weird jungle?”

  Seymour couldn’t help himself, he had to try to get a look in order to confirm that these were the same Stuczi Brothers he’d known on Earth, even though it seemed obvious they were. That accent – he hadn’t heard anything like it since coming to Heshcia. And that fact suddenly struck him as more than merely odd, but rather oddly funny: everyone he’d met on Heschia spoke perfect English in what to him sounded like a regular, American accent. Eusebio’s distinctive vocal fry, for instance, might have indicated he was from Malibu, if Seymour didn’t know better.

  But as he stole a glance around the side of the tree, he saw a couple of actual Californians.

  Janez Stuczi stood around five foot ten with dusty blond hair and cold blue eyes. He looked paler than Seymour remembered and for a split second he wondered if Janez had spent a lot of time at the beach back home or if maybe he had just been hooked on tanning beds. And instead of the slick, designer suits which Seymour was used to seeing him in, both of the gangsters were dressed in dark red freaking wizard robes with alien letters embroidered down the chest and sleeves in glowing, gold thread.

  The other brother, Gaspar, towered over the girl at an easy six-five and probably two-hundred fifty pounds. He wore his dark hair parted in the middle and Seymour had always clocked him as a roid freak. The dude was built like a goddamn linebacker or tight end or something.

  An enforcer, actually. Like if you looked up ‘the mob’ in an encyclopedia and scrolled down to ‘the Muscle’, you’d see his picture.

  The girl—Penny, she’d said her name was—had planted herself defiantly in their way.

  “I will not explain my presence to the likes of you two,” she scolded. “All you must know is that I have captured the Riftborn whose body you were sent to recover, and he belongs to me now.”

  “We don’t want make trouble with you, Miss Amberwine, but my brother and I can’t go back to Ghizo’s Crossing empty-handed.” Janez did the talking while Gaspar hung back a few steps and menaced. “I don’t think Melvina be too happy with us if return with no body, no?”

  “That is your problem, not mine.”

  “It going to be yours, too, when we tell her you took body.”

  “There is no body, you fool. The Riftborn survived the explosion.”

  “There is no body,” Janez began, a straight up evil grin spreading across his face, “yet.”

  The girl drew a sculpting wand from her belt and held it aloft and suddenly Seymour put it all together:

  She said her name was Penny and Janez keeps calling her Miss Amberwine. His mind flashed back to Ridley’s workshop, when the artificer had maneuvered him into helping him craft a sculpting wand imprinted with a suddenly familiar mana signature: Penelope June Amberwine.

  Penny stirred the air above her head using a wand which Seymour assumed was identical to the one he’d been tricked into making, if not the very same one.

  “We don’t want trouble with you—”

  “You won’t be any trouble at all.” The tip of her wand began to glow with a pale green light. “Return to the guildhall and inform Melvina that you found nothing here.”

  “We don’t take orders from little girl,” Gaspar finally chimed in. “You not our boss.”

  Seymour stifled a laugh as he watched Janez—the default brains of the Stuczi duo—cringe at his brother’s interjection.

  “Gaspar,” he scolded. “Shut it up. Please, Miss Amberwine, allow me to apologize on my brother’s behalf. We know your position in the guild is being above ours. But we can’t tell Melvina we found nothing, and you got to knows that. She will put us in refinery again. It is like dungeon down there. Please, don’t force us to go back empty handed.”

  “Then tell her exactly what happened. Tell her it was me who thwarted her plan. I want her to know.”

  Janez looked at Penny Amberwine with disbelief written all over his face. “You do not fear the directors?”

  “Not anymore,” Penny replied.

  “Because of Seymour Little? What so special about him, anyway?”

  Seymour leaned in, listening so intently to their conversation that he didn’t even notice that someone else was with him in the jungle until she suddenly spoke, close behind him:

  “It’s so impossibly difficult to find decent help these days.”

  Seymour whirled around to find a woman dressed in robes the same as the Stuczis were wearing – but fancier; embroidered all over in the same, glowing golden thread. She stood near enough that he could have reached out and touched her, but somehow he hadn’t heard her arrive on the scene. Her razor-sharp features reminded him of a wicked witch on a Halloween decoration – an aesthetic her pointed hat matched perfectly. But her skin wasn’t green, and her auburn hair reminded him of his own mother’s. She might have been about the same age as Lana Little, actually.

  “Who are you?”

  “You truly can’t guess?” She drew a sculpting wand from her belt. “Fine, then, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Melvina Malveau, co-director of the Ghizo’s Crossing Guild of Artificers. And you are the Riftborn, Seymour Little.” She grinned and pointed the suddenly-glowing tip of her wand at him. The light issuing forth from it was toxic green. “Or perhaps more accurately: you were.”

  And that was the exact moment when he vanished from her sight.