Sky Lord by Rowan Erlking (that summer book .txt) 📕

his children, said to be hidden in a cursed mountain of fire. We assume it is floating in a volcano, untouchable and therefore worthless. Whether there really was a Sky Lord, we don’t know. But I think someone must have seen you change from an animal to a human, changing from human to human would have drawn less attention.”

It was the most Tia ever got out of him. Never had he told her anything of her origins before.

“Where is this island?” she asked.

The Underlord replied with a shrug. “I don’t know exactly. I’ve never left Calcumum. The sunken island of the Sky Children is rumored to be not far from the edge of the Rocky Sea. But the Sky Lord’s island is far in the rocks and only pirates and slave ships go through there unscathed. They say it is demon territory.”

Demons. Yes, their world was full of them. No sane human ever went where demons grouped together.

Tia looked around and then down at the ground. Perhaps it would have been better to have flown off to another city and leave the Underlord. She had thought it possible that he would have her shot down if she tried to flee, but now here he was telling her to go on a quest. She wondered what his ulterior motive was. He usually had one.

“So I should seek this out?” she asked him carefully.

The Underlord nodded.

“Seek, find, and know for yourself. Tia, you cannot stay in Calcumum anymore,” he said.

She nodded, knowing that was a command.

 

Chapter Three: The Hunter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But to leave the city was harder than even he knew. The military soldiers were busy looking for her. Many of them were trained in the demon hunting arts. However, Tia knew they were not so cleverly skilled as the government made them out to be. Half of it was propaganda anyway.

Tia had an idea. The police would look for birds if they suspected she had turned into a pigeon. She could not roam the streets. Animals she had touched fled from her as if she was a walking nightmare. Instead, Tia did what she hated. She touched a hapless man on the street. Taking his form, she strode down the narrow city streets then out of the city walls, past the guards without even a flutter of an eyelash from them, unsuspected and unnoticed. Once more on the skirts, she faced wide fields of grain. Those would be watched, so she stuck to the roads until she was out of sight from the city. When her three hours were up, Tia groaned with a detour into the grass, regaining her original form complete with her bright orange jumpsuit.

The fields around the city of Calcumum grew tall, swishing in the flow of the wind. A prominent farmer owned this land, paying paid high tribute to the patriarch of Calcumum to maintain it. The land stretched for miles. Beyond his land were other farms. Their crops grew in smaller green patches, fenced in with houses and trees nearby, some with large livestock and others with only chickens.

Tia liked to walk through the grasses. She let the silence of the wind in the grass pass over her as she crossed the farmland into the lower valley. She headed south, closer to the coast yet not so close to where the main roads ran, keeping track always of where she had to go. The roads would be the easiest places for the police to watch so she didn’t dare cross them. Tia also avoided going too far inland, remembering her mistress’s home was further west. That woman, she did not want to see again.

Walking for hours, the sun was high on her back and head. Her clothes stood out among the grain despite the sun’s bleaching effect. Bright orange prison suits were too obvious, but in the tall grass she didn’t care. Rarely had there been an escaped prisoner. In fact, she figured she was probably the first. She had witnessed enough of the swift justice of Brein Amon to know that.

She climbed over a fence, entering grazing land where several cows were chewing on the green. Some of them lifted their heads as she climbed in, looking up at this stranger that intruded upon their territory. The bull also fixed his eyes on her, digging his hoof in the ground, lowering its head. Tia continued her walk through the land without giving attention to the large creature. She walked up to the nearest cow and patted it.

The bull snuffed, starting his charge.

But then he stopped. Peering at her, he saw that there was no longer a girl standing there, but two cows, one faint and the other mildly chewing its cud. The faint one collapsed. The other started to casually walk across the large field. The other cows stared but did not move. Tia-the-cow crossed the grazing land in a slow walk, reaching the other side by the setting of the sun.

She climbed over the fence once more as a girl.

Tia slept in the high grass that night in a far neighboring field. Her prison uniform was now stained with dark soil and stuck all over with burrs. The early sun was already rising over the eastern horizon when she opened her eyes. Matted from the dirt as she had slept, her hair stuck out. She sat up, stretching. Tia had started her sleep as a dog, a herdsman’s animal. But after three hours the dog was gone and she was cold from the autumn frost. Times like these, she had wished she always had a coat of fur to keep her warm. She stretched, scratching the itch of several bites. Looking down, she saw she was sitting in an anthill. She frowned.

Trying to ignore the gurgles in her stomach, Tia bent the other direction, stretching out her achy muscles. She looked up.

The sky was still summer blue despite being autumn already, but she knew the clouds that rested on the southern mountains meant rain. They would reach where she was by nightfall. The mountains were in her way, if she did not go by the coast. Of all the memories she had acquired after being so many people, she had a good view of what lie ahead. There was a valley southwest of there that would allow her to pass through to the southern part of the land. She would still be in Brein Amon, but just barely. The border with Maldos was just south of the mountain range, though she didn’t really know how far south it was. Hoping she could pass over the border before government officers could find her, Tia figured she just might be able to make her way to the island of her birth.

Listening to the air, Tia carefully got to her feet.

She could hear pheasants feeding in the grass. Had she been a cat, she might have gotten breakfast. Across the farm she heard the dog she had touched the night before, barking madly. The owner shouted back at it. “Shut up, ya crazy mutt!”

Tia turned, deciding that it was best she find food in some other field.

Crossing through the slough where she discovered a breach in the fence, Tia carefully climbed through to the adjoining field. This one grew cabbages, large ones that were high up to her knees.

“Out of me yard, you!” a large man with a wooden pitchfork called across the garden, waving it at her.

Tia jumped back to the fence, turning to look for another way across the land. There was no path or any other route away from the thick grass on the other side. The other farmer was coming over his fields with his suddenly skittish pet. The dog was now on a leash, snapping in fear at everything.

“I said, git!” The farmer was nearly upon her.

Cringing, Tia jumped back down in the cabbages, extending a hand to him. “I am sorry. I need to cut through.”

“No! You git off me land! No trompin’ around me cabbages!” he shouted.

Tia placed her hand on his fist, the one that clenched the pitchfork.

His face immediately went white. The farmer dropped to his knees, staring up at her as he suddenly saw himself. She took his pitchfork from his hands, bracing him as he collapsed. Tia-the-farmer tucked the man into the fence just below the high grass, getting up just in time to meet his neighbor.

“Hey! Omri, have ya seen a stranger comin’ round these parts?” the farmer asked her.

Tia the farmer propped herself up with her fork to give the neighbor the man’s characteristic no-nonsense stare. “Nope. I can’t say I have. What’s the probl’m?”

Thumbing back over the field, the neighbor replied, “Me cows are spooked, and gentle Besse has been acting mighty strange today. A pass’n trav’ler says that a demon is walking these fields. He’s look’n fer it.”

The farmer’s memories of demons walking the land like the one his neighbor had described flooded through Tia’s thoughts. According to him, she really was a demon.

She said, “I ain’t seen nothin’ out of ‘ordinary. M’be a trespasser came by this mornin’ though. Look at me cabbages.”

And the neighbor did look. He shook his head.

“It looks ter me,” the neighbor said, “that the demon is still in me field. Only a corner’s tromped. Sorry about yer crop.”

“I’ll get ‘im fer it,” Tia-the-farmer replied.

The neighbor raised his hand. “’Later, y’all.”

“Ya, too.” Tia watched him as he left.

She turned with a surveying look over the land, then walked away from the real farmer’s hidden body in the grass, going across his land, using his knowledge of how to tread among the growing plants. He had several acres, growing mostly green leafy vegetables.

Meandering through, Tia stopped once at the farmhouse for a quick meal from the food out of his cupboard. His wife didn’t even notice that Tia-the-farmer was not her husband. She stared at the farmer that was Tia, shaking her head and muttering that he was going to spoil his lunch, but Tia gave back an answer that the farmer often had given his wife before.

“I need me energy fer work now. I’ll be hungry come lunch, so help me.”

The farmer’s wife just shook her head and went back to kneading bread. “Don’t blame me fer yer belly ache then.”

Tia took out a bit of cheese and bread and stuck it into the pockets of his pants. When the wife saw her take a strip of smoked meat, she stuck her hands on her hips and snapped, “Are ya takin’ lunch outside today? Ya have enough!”

The farmer Tia flushed a bit, glancing at the clock. Her time would be up soon and the real farmer would wake. It had taken an hour just to get to the house. “It ain’t fer me. I’m feedin’ the demon within.”

The wife snorted and punched her expanding dough, shaking her head.

Tia-the-farmer hurried outside. She jogged down the road path until she met the border of the property. Walking along it as the morning sun rose, she looked for another field to cross into, one with high grass. Sweaty from the long journey, she climbed in, taking the food out of her pockets and holding it in her hands.

Shaking off the transformation of a human was uncomfortable.