Sunset the Shimmerian

I.

The stillness of the air made the sun ever hotter, as no breeze blew past to take the sweat off the neck of the traveller. She was a young girl, short in stature and red of hair, streaks of yellow inlaid within her locks like veins of gold along a mountainside. Looking upon her, the folk of the Walled City would have branded her a barbarian by the look of her tattered clothes, though she did not have the blackish hair or sunken eyes of such.

In truth, she was a traveller from a distant land, one so far and estranged from ours it bears little need to describe, for this traveller would never return to it, to the knowledge of all who knew her.

The Walled City’s shadow loomed in the distance but welcomed the traveller with its respite from the sun. On her waist, a belt of chain fastened tight around a weathered cotton dress torn short at the knees, where it was met by reptilian leather boots.

A short sword, reforged from a shattered warblade so that its handle was nearly the length of the blade, rested in its sheath on the traveller’s hip as she rode on the back of her zilard strider. Oh, such great beasts, those zilards. Many riders of the desert plains called the feather-headed raptors their friend. And so too did the traveller.

Her strider trampled the sand with stagger steps until they came by a fountain just outside the walled city. There, women drew up water in buckets from its endless basin as their children soaked their tired heads in its gift. The traveller did not think herself so desperate as to drink from this fountain but was soon beside her zilard sucking water through parched lips.

From the corners of her eye the traveller watched as a man in a poor, but well maintained, woven tunic and trousers walked up to her. “Nothing is free here, traveller,” he scolded. “You’re not allowed to drink here.”

“I’m not allowed to drink water?” she asked in return.

“I just said so, didn’t I?” The man retorted, his accent unfamiliar to the traveller but his mockery still clearly heard in his voice.

“Your first act upon meeting a stranger is to be unkind?” The traveller stood up, her lips now whetted, even if she only had drawn a meagre few sips.

“My first act upon meeting anyone is to be unkind,” the man laughed, spreading his arms wide like the wings of a soaring vulture and turning around to gaze at the walls of the city. “This is the great jewel of the desert! The Walled City! No man can live here unless he is unkind.”

“The Walled City? Are there no other cities with walls?”

“There certainly are,” he said, “you would find them if you travelled a year north to meet the Aesir and their frozen palaces, or west to the vast Ituru and her god-kings of stone and slaves, or east to the monkey princess of Lemuria. Oh, but here in the desert, the Walled City is a jewel indeed. Clearly you have travelled, haven’t you seen how the other cities merely imitate these ancient walls?”

The traveller shook her head. “I haven’t seen any city,” she admitted, “only wandering villages and lonely oasis cottages.”

She looked up to the walls again, staring closer at its reddish walls, its bricks cut from the plateaus and pillars that cropped out of the sand like jagged bones.

“You’ve seen no cities?” the man then asked. “Where have you come from? You must have passed by Oruk or Akaad, or anywhere, to have come by here.”

“My land is far from here and has no name, none that anyone would know,” the traveller said, “and its people are much too different from your own. I doubt you would even recognize them as people.”

Upon hearing this the man combed his beard, a curly tuft of black hair on a canvas of sun-dried skin, giving the traveller a thoughtful look. “You must have travelled a strange road then, to have become recognizable to me. And you say you know of no other city? No other people to be loyal to?”

“Loyalty isn’t the problem,” the traveller answered tersely. “I am simply travelling in search of something. Until I have found it, I belong nowhere.”

“Ha-ha!” the man jumped and exclaimed. “Yes! Then you will do, you will do indeed!” He slapped the traveller on her back and produced a wineskin, which had been tied around his neck and hidden beneath his tunic, for her. “I will provide you with food and a drink, and in return, you can make me a very rich man. What is your name then, traveller?”

“Shimmer,” she answered, recoiling from the man’s embrace, for his sun-dried skin was as rough as the sand. “But why would I help a man who rudely tells a traveller she cannot drink after a journey through the desert?”

“You should not. But I will tell you who I am over a bite of bread and then we shall see.” Through the gates of the stone walls, Shimmer followed with her strider behind her, guided by rows of flagstaffs along the noisy streets.

A phoenix on a cross, its wings and legs spread on over a wooden “X” and impaled up the middle, adorned each waving flag. And the traveller thought it best to stalk a little closer to the man.

His name was Khauri, and he guided the traveller Shimmer towards the awful din of a clamouring, cantankerous alehouse. The lurid lights and drunken revelry captured her eyes, while the stench of sweat and ale repulsed her nose. Shimmer learned many things about Khauri as he brought her a meal of spiced meat over hard bread.

First, she learned he was a man of great charm, though not great wealth. He haggled and spoke much to the old barkeep, a man red-faced from years at the heat of a fire. In the end, no coin was exchanged for the meal.

Second, that he had a reputation among the many folks sequestered in the alehouse. They spied him with careful eyes and kept their bodies safely away.

Thirdly, and the only piece of information he shared willingly, he was a former governor of the Walled City.

“I was exiled from the palace,” he said as he placed his hands upon their table. Shimmer saw, under the light of a luminous crystal, that though he was middle-aged his hands looked like they belonged to a man twice his age. “For taking a haul of taxes and provisions for myself, but reporting the full amount to the king.”

“And did you?”

Khauri smiled. “I admit that I did. But, I stole only from the king, a man who eats enough for five men and beds enough wives for ten. I worked half my life away governing the Walled City, saving up enough to leave for the west sea.”

He paused and held up his hands. “I thought I’d be spared punishment for the crime, as most governors are. Alas, most governors do not cross the king. The price for thieving is to flay the offending hands with a red-hot knife, and the king spared no expense to find the cruellest lawmen to make an example of me.”

Khauri’s pained expression broke through the charm that he wore like a second skin. His wide smile faded and his eyes grew sullen as he clutched, trembling, his hands together. Shimmer focused through the turgid cacophony of drinkers and revellers, listening closer to Khauri’s plan.

“The king’s vault is a rushing current that turns the water wheels of labour, protected by a changing patrol of guards. But you carry a blade and have survived the desert alone. Such a barrier should not be a challenge.”

Now fervid with excitement, Khauri bent over and produced a tattered roll of vellum from his pockets. Unfurled, it exposed a crude drawing of the palace grounds, a massive round structure encircling the city’s oasis. The heart of the palace, the vault and the king’s chambers, sat upon what looked to be a small island at the centre of that oasis.

“The soldiers change just before dawn and dusk, so you must enter the palace and make for the vault before they do. The king abhors the look of soldiers, so you will find nought but servants within the palace walls. Take all that you desire, I need only a paltry sack of silver and jewels to be on my way.”

He then handed Shimmer a pouch sewn from eclectic patches of leather. Shimmer wondered at the man’s intentions, why had he come to her?

“Because you have no loyalties,” he answered when she asked. “Any other man or woman in this city would sell knowledge of my plans for as little as a silver piece.”

Satisfied with this answer, the two of them parted after some repeated instructions of where they would meet after Shimmer’s success. There was a stable not too far from the gates they had entered, and it was there Khauri would wait no more than two days for the traveller’s return.

Shortly after Khauri left the alehouse where Shimmer quietly ate and planned her next steps, a procession came along through the streets. Like a storm, they were, the wild crashing and clattering of pottery and other tools drew Shimmer’s attention away from her meal, now nearly finished. Not wanting to be surprised by yet another thing in the Walled City, Shimmer hastily rolled the scheme of the palace up and wedged it tightly under her chain belt before quickly leaving to find her strider.

She took the bridle of her zilard and held it tightly, mounting to leave for the palace at the centre of the city, but had her attention caught by the ruckus of the marching procession. All women, they were, dressed in either thin cotton sheets, dyed in such a variety of colours Shimmer could scarcely name them all, or light flowing silks. Both were so thin as to cling to the body or flutter in the hot desert breeze that trickled through the city, leaving terribly little of their bodies to the imagination.

Shimmer peered and wondered how so many women could be so shaped. Each one was a lithe, fluid, and slender body, with the contours of their hips, backs, and shoulders accentuated by the glistening of oils that had been rubbed across their skin.

Their march flared through the street, the women taking slow but long strides along the paved brick road, passing by stalls and shops only to knock aside anything or anyone even marginally in their way. Thirty women in total, Shimmer counted, walked and carried fifteen banners of the impaled phoenix until they came to a stop just outside the alehouse.

The pair at the front of the process stepped away, placing themselves in the eyes of all the people they had passed. One held the banner high as the other lowered her silk veil to speak. Though she stood easily a hundred feet from the alehouse Shimmer could still hear the woman as if she whispered in her ear.

“Heed and listen well,” the woman spoke firmly, but not any louder than a casual voice, “for the palace has need for new servants to be graced by the presence of the king. Offer your daughters, your sisters, your girls with pure, untouched souls, and we will take them kindly into our arms.”

Just then, a woman cried as a man, most likely her husband, pulled her daughter from her hands and offered the young girl to the speaker. The daughter looked no older than Shimmer. The mother scrambled to her knees in prayer and begging, throwing baskets of cactus fruit at the ground as an offering in place of the girl.

The silk-dressed woman merely inspected the girl, pinching her face and her arms the way one would inspect the health of livestock, before nodding contently. The one who bore the banner beside her then lowered the symbol of the phoenix, waving it in a circle over the ground before pulling it up to suddenly reveal a fist-sized pouch. Opening its contents, the husband pinched a shining gold coin, gazing upon its lustre in the sun.

A throng of girls was brought forward, some in much the same way as the first, though Shimmer even saw skinny young girls throw themselves at the speaker in return for gold which they gave to their parents. They were picked from and selected, though it seemed not for their health or vigour. Half-starved peasant girls numbered among the chosen, while others, healthy and beautiful in all regards, were pushed back into the peering crowd.

The desperation and joy to be chosen and taken away from home and family seemed so terrible and pathetic that a strange burning grew inside Shimmer. These girls were so eager to leave their homes but they did not know how painful the ache of longing would be when they finally wished to return.

Having seen enough, she pulled at her strider’s bridle and rode the other way through the still-growing crowd of onlookers hoping to paw some meagre gold payment in return for fresh bodies.

The streets of the Walled City were long, and within them, Shimmer grew weary by the sounds of silken women, for they had not just travelled to one alehouse to collect the king some new girls, but to every public place and every street. She thought the streets like veins, but as the day waned and as she grew used to the disorder of the passing citizens, she came to see the order in it.

The Walled City was divided by the roads neatly into dozens of even square sections. Below the streets, in some places at least, Shimmer could hear the sound of rushing water beneath her zilard’s feet, though the sound was muffled and distant. In some places, the city’s sections were sullied with the sick and squalid, the richest among them being only the potter and mason, whose skill and craft went on to maintain the structures of the city. In other places, markets of spices and silks passed exotic goods that tickled Shimmer’s nose and pleased her eyes.

Men from every corner of the world seemed to pass their goods through those opulent places. Pale-skinned giants, seven or eight feet tall and with lustrous gold hair, passed shining steel knives to short, dark-haired men with round noses and rounder ears. Shimmer wondered from where these people came from, for they looked nothing like the people who dwelled in the desert, and brought goods that could not have come from the ceaseless sun and heat. And why, if such merchants made trades every day, did Khauri believe the king to be the only man in the city worth stealing from?

At last, she came to a wall that split the road apart like a fork in a river. The streets twisted around and gave way to the presence of the palace and its carved ivory walls. Shimmer gazed bewildered as she came closer, for afar she believed she had spied a palace built of marble and limestone, only to find her grave mistake: a mistaken grave.

The bricks were skulls and bones laid side by side, set into alabaster mortar and stacked higher than three houses. A hundred, no a thousand, no a hundred thousand, Shimmer trembled at the notion of the death one would need to build such a thing. No mass grave, this was. Someone worked on it, spent time with it. They treated it like art. Each arm and leg were precisely locked in place around a skull so that even without the mortar between them, Shimmer imagined the structure would hold itself up just by its sheer weight.

She cursed herself. Khauri was a madman if he believed she would steal from a king who built his palace from bones! His years as a governor must have dulled his senses to it, she thought, but it would not change the truth of the horrid palace. Shimmer pulled her strider to turn at once but she stopped before it could take off down the road and leave the grim wall behind. She could not explain it but there was a sensation, like hot ashes sparking up from a fire and dancing on the nape of her neck. The sensation worsened as her zilard took its first steps so she quickly stopped it and returned to the walls. Some power, she knew not what, was pulling her back. It was a sensation she had never felt before, not in this land nor the one she had come from. And that, despite all her sense and hesitation, was worth an investigation.

II.

By the time the sun extinguished itself below the horizon, Shimmer had scaled the heights of the skeleton wall and clamoured down within the palace grounds. Her hands were slick with the sweat of fear, but the sockets of the skulls along the wall made easy purchases for her small and nimble hands.

She stole in before the soldiers changed their post, when those who had been there throughout the day had become haggard and tired by the heat. Within the palace, just as Khauri had promised, not a single soldier could be found. Servants tended to the gardens that encircled the oasis, drawing up its water into a ring of grassy pastures and red flowers. She crossed the gardens easily for the servants were unattentive to anything but their flowers, and entered the walls of a temple carved from rust-red stone.

Hidden in a corner where none of the passing women would notice, Shimmer reminded herself of the palace’s scheme. Six temples surrounded the oasis, with small rafts for servants to go to and from the king’s chambers in the centre. Between each temple were smaller buildings for the palace’s other needs, including a workshop, a kitchen, kennels for hounds, and even apiaries for desert bees. Only one temple, by the look of the schematic, stood close enough to the king’s chambers to build a short bridge over the oasis, and it was the furthest across from where Shimmer was.

Like a fox stalking mice across a silent desert night, Shimmer crept out of one temple to the next, avoiding servants and gardeners by the shadows of thick bushes and trees.

She was unsurprised that, apart from a few slaves that swept the garden paths, all those who worked in the palace were women, though only the ones within the temples were dressed in thin cotton sheets. There in their red abodes, young girls flocked around older women, following their actions just as mirror images would. They practised walking in gentle strides, speaking with confidence and strength, or reading long vellum scrolls under the light of glowing white crystals. It wasn’t the students and their unwavering loyalty that disturbed Shimmer the most, however. It was the teachers.

Like the women in the streets, the teachers were birds of a feather. They dressed in golden silks that wrapped tightly against their body, holding close the sway of their hips with every motion. Their veils pressed against their faces to show only a hint of their lips while their eyes were red coals, glaring in observation of every mistake and failure made by their charges. Only in hair did they differ. Some were women of jet-black hair, others had locks of brown or auburn.

But in her observation of the women, Shimmer fell into a kind of relaxed stupor until she could hardly notice the tall woman in red silks staring at her through the bushes. The woman’s motion was what set her off, and her eyes fixed back on the slender figure.

Neither spoke, both holding their breath until the woman wheeled around quickly with a panicked gasp and made the first motion to run before recoiling as Shimmer’s blade gleamed in the starlight.

“You’re no assassin,” the woman said with a surprised expression on her face. “You looked more frightening from behind the bushes.”

“I can still cut you open,” Shimmer hissed in a careful whisper.

“You must be new,” the woman looked curiously up and down at her clothes.

Shimmer slunk back by a half-step at the sensation of her inspection. The woman’s eyes were a pair of glowing coals like the others, and she felt as if she was being undressed just by being looked at.

“Well, go on then and tell it,” the woman put a hand on her hip, “what’s your sob story? Orphan? Given away?”

Shimmer put her blade away. This woman thought she was one of the taken girls? A quick look to the right and left showed her gardeners in the distance, trimming red flowers around the temples. She doubted they would notice if she killed the woman, but they were close enough that they might stumble across the signs of blood before she could escape with the king’s treasure.

“Taken,” Shimmer answered slowly. “I don’t remember my parents. But I ran from those who stole me away, and now I am here.”

The woman smiled and then took Shimmer by the hand. By all the gods and heavens above! Her skin was supple beyond imagination. Shimmer swore she could melt into the woman’s tender body, her mind completely enraptured by her warmth. Luckily the woman’s keen voice drew Shimmer from her amazement with quick instructions.

“You’re late enough as it is. We can skip the dress fitting, but you haven’t even washed and groomed. The high priestess will not be pleased.” She whisked Shimmer into the nearby temple, guiding her directly to the bathhouses.

Steam flushed Shimmer’s face with a different kind of heat, one she had never felt on her journey through the arid desert. The heat hung, the steam stung, and her skin felt on fire. Water bubbled up from copper pipes in the middle of a vast basin, filling up as the woman began to pull at Shimmer’s clothes. She protested, but the woman’s hands were unnaturally quick, stripping her and wrapping her in a towel before Shimmer gathered her senses. And then she was nudged into the basin. The hot water continued filling, crawling up her leg until the bubbling finally stopped and the water rested against her thigh.

With the silence, Shimmer’s senses returned to her and she scrambled for the edge of the pool where her sword had been dropped. The water weighed her down, however, and the woman easily snatched the weapon out of her reach.

“Normally I’d dispose of this, but there is no time,” she chided, clicking her tongue disapprovingly. “For now, I won’t tell if you won’t. Clean yourself until I return with proper clothes.” She looked at the weathered dress in her arms. “A fitting size should not be so hard to find.”

The red-silked woman left, and Shimmer had nought but the towel around her waist. She soaked in the water, forced to adjust to the scalding steam, which now did not seem so bad as it opened and cleared the pores of her skin, and wondered what she could do next. Take her weapon and run when the woman returns? Yes, perhaps, but she would be dressed as the other girls were and be expected to act as they did.

Shimmer scrubbed the dust and dirt off from her arms, then her legs, then her neck and body. So many days had she been without water or succour that at once she felt relieved by the bath, and slowly a satisfying exhaustion crept into her body, invading every corner of her muscles and bones until she lifted her legs and simply drifted along the water.

The shrivelling discomfort of her fingers roused Shimmer sometime later, though she knew not exactly when. A quick scan of the bathhouse showed no sign of the woman in red, nor of any new clothes. Had she dosed for only a minute or many? Either way, she decided not to wait for the question to be answered for her. Reluctantly, Shimmer rose from the bath, its water still considerably warm, and grabbed a fresh towel from a shelf nearby, wrapping herself around the chest. She faltered only briefly, feeling her hair now freed from the burden of dust and sand.

The temple outside was shadowy and quiet, emptied of all its women. Perhaps the red-dressed woman left as well. Shimmer moved quickly through the temple halls, searching first for a weapon of some sort before pressing on further. The gloom of the temple was dimmer than she remembered, but across the temple, on the side opposite of the bathhouse, the crack of a door cast a long ray of firelight across the dim hallway. Shimmer followed it, listening carefully as she went.

“Rise!” A voice cried from the room, shrill and fervent like vultures over a freshly fallen carcass. “No longer are you the girls born from mortal loins. Let fire and flame bring you new life! Rise! Rise!”

The screams of agony that followed shook Shimmer’s body with fright, as blood-curdling screams echoed through the halls of the temple. She stood trembling and frightened, but fixated by some morbid curiosity to witness what act the women could have committed. Some desire to survive, to know the dangers surrounding her, compelled Shimmer to look through that crack in the door and to see the fires engulfing a host of young women.

They were not girls, not the ones brought from the streets, but even as their skin blistered and their naked flesh melted into black ashes, Shimmer saw that they were younger than most of the women in fine dresses, the priestesses of the palace. The young sacrifices were lashed to wooden crosses, human-sized “X’s” that held them over a coal pit as fresh oil and wood was thrown in by the other women while the lead priestess chanted.

The rancid smell of charred bone filled Shimmer’s nose and she gagged, clutching her mouth and stomach to avoid disembowelling from disgust. But as she turned to run, to dive into the bath and imagine the waters could wash her of the memory, the shrill voice spoke again one final time.

“Rise, you Phoenixes of the Cross!”

And in the corner of her eye, Shimmer did see an impossible miracle. As the other priestesses, women dressed in red silks, poured barrels of a sweet-smelling red liquid over the coal pits, the formless black corpses began to expand. Ash fell off their skin, exposing new supple flesh beneath them. The young women, some of them admittedly uglier than the others, all emerged from their corpses with fresh faces and burning yellow eyes.

And Shimmer waited no longer, turning and running the opposite way, fleeing and wishing she had heeded the ill-portent of the skull-ridden wall. She made it to the entrance of the temple before crashing head-first into a recognizably taut and cushioned bosom.

The woman in red silks stumbled back but miraculously managed to keep her balance and catch Shimmer by the arm. Her veil concealed half her face but the anger along her brow and gleaming eyes were all too apparent.

“No need to be so eager,” she said, her soft hands grabbing Shimmer’s arm and pulling her back to the bathhouse. “I know I am late but you were to stay put.” The woman sighed. “The ritual had already begun so the only available dresses were in the other temples.”

Fear trapped Shimmer’s voice and ran her blood cold, even though she returned to the humid vapours of the bathhouse. Shaken by her vision of fire and flesh, the clarity of survival flooded her veins and muscles and she stood as tensely as she ever had before the woman in red. She stiffly took the new dress provided to her, a thin cotton outfit cut open at the sides so that even fully clothed, the entirety of her legs was laid bare to the air. The woman assisted with the veil, placing the wispy cotton sheet, scented with sweet lavender and berries, over her nose and mouth.

“You clean up nicely,” the woman said as she inspected Shimmer’s washed body and ran her fingers through her knotted hair. She frowned. “Well, there isn’t time to fix everything. This will have to do. Hurry along now, you cannot be late for introductions to the king.”

“I am to meet the king?” Shimmer asked. Her eyes and head followed the woman as she walked out, but her feet remained planted.

“You won’t if you take any longer.” The woman looked out a small window along the hallway’s side. “Oh, the moonlight is high. The girls will be crossing the bridge now. Go on!”

Dressed now in the white gowns of their ilk, Shimmer sprinted with all her might, carrying her bare feet across the paved garden paths. The way was well kept by the gardeners and slaves, for not a single barb or twig or errant thorn pricked her sole. In the cold dark desert night, she found that it was a cruel irony that only when she was dressed in a nebulous fluttering dress did the empty sky above sap the heat from the earth until a strong chill fell onto her skin.

Passing the next temple, she ran on until the final one came into sight through the oasis palms and bright red flowers, and Shimmer finally began to breathe deeply. The king’s treasure vault, just there on the other side of a narrow bridge, was so full of luxury that she swore she could smell the metallic tang of silver and gold in the air.

A line of young girls her age and older proceeded across the bridge as the last of them entered the temple. So close to her goal, Shimmer swallowed all fear and imagined the heft of treasure she could be saddled with if she pressed forward.

“You there!” the priestess leading the young girls, a remarkably tall woman with dark hair dressed in golden silks called out to Shimmer. She sauntered closer, glaring with her brazen eyes. “Who are you? From whence have you come?”

Shimmer slowed her gait and caught her breath. “A bathhouse. I required a change of dress.”

The woman quickly whisked her hand through the air like a whip, ending with her pointed nails on Shimmer’s lips. “I see you. Wild, untamed, more an animal than a girl fit for this palace, and yet the fires of the Phoenix burn around you as if your skin was pitched in tar. Go, then. And then we will see about breaking this animal spirit.”

Defiant confidence overtook Shimmer now. The invasive eyes of the priestess she could bear, but the golden priestess looked even further. Shimmer felt her eyes on her spirit, not her body, and intrusion she did not take kindly. For but a brief moment, rage engulfed her and she made a clenched fist around her waist, only to realize her sword had not been returned to her. She let the anger go and permitted the tall woman to stare down at her as she crossed the bridge with the other girls towards the king’s chambers.

III.

His name was Zhamzizel the Great, and his inner palace was a great puzzle of interlocking marble bricks, held together by weight and perfect arrangement rather than mortar. But they were not allowed to see them until they were prepared.

Shimmer, standing now among a brood of young girls all dressed in loose whites, spun fast on her heels and cast her eyes about the king’s chambers. He was locked within his innermost confines, the golden priestess informed them, and would not look upon them until they completed their final preparation. They were taken to a room across from the king’s chamber to a short spire just high enough for two levels, though they stood only on one. The ceiling high above bore the sky in the form of painted constellations with glistening jewels for every star. The other girls drew sharp gasping breaths as they looked up, but Shimmer’s senses were focused on the large goblet placed on a pedestal in the centre of the spire.

The priestess closed the door behind the last girl and Shimmer heard an audible clack of a metal bolt locking them within. Suddenly, the girls began to dip their hands in the goblet and drew out red-stained fingertips. Shimmer followed suit, watching carefully as the others stood in pairs and painted streaks of red on the nape of the other’s neck. She twisted her face as her fingers submerged slowly into the fluid. It was thick and viscous, similar in every way to honey save for its hue of blood red.

Without warning, a hand took her shoulder and spun her around, and Shimmer felt the cold touch of a girl’s finger as she traced the tip of her shaped nail along her neck.

“Hold still.” The girl, sounding about Shimmer’s age but slightly taller, giggled as drew. The red liquid stuck and quickly dried against her neck. “You wouldn’t want to be turned away coming this far.”

“Do you know what will happen when we meet the king?” Shimmer asked.

“Only that we will be allowed to finally begin our learning,” the girl asked. “Who are you to ask? Did you not hear the prioress when we entered the palace?”

Shimmer assumed she meant the women who marched at the head of the processions. “I was uncertain of my fate, and so I hid myself away and must have missed that part.”

The girl gave an amused sigh, “Then you are very lucky that you found your way here. I am called Eya. And you?”

“Shimmer,” she answered tersely.

“The prioress said we are to be as a family now, but even among sisters two may be closer than others. I think we should see each other through future trials, one as lucky as you should be good to have around.”

The girl turned, pulling Shimmer around to return the favour and paint her naked neck. Shimmer saw now that she was tan-skinned with coarse black hair that rolled down to the middle of her back. She was almost certainly of the desert-dwelling natives. Parting in the middle, her curtain of hair revealed a thin, body neck, skin stretched tightly over the spine.

Now turned around, the icon the girls had painted was clearly in view. On the neck of the girl beside her, Shimmer saw the very same phoenix which pervaded the Walled City. They were crude approximations of what might be found on a tapestry or canvas, and each painting was unlike the others. The girls, like Shimmer, were untrained recruits, and she imagined great skill was not required for a passable painting.

Shimmer took the red nectar on her finger and traced the beginning of an “X” on Eya’s neck, stopping with amazement as the liquid dried on contact, turning to a dark shade, not unlike a bruise. She continued with care, not wishing to make some permanent error on this innocent girl’s skin. When they were all done, one of the girls knocked on the door thrice, signalling the golden priestess to open.

Across the white palace, they walked again, the younger girls chattering excitedly among themselves. To be invited to see a king, to live in a palace like royalty, that was often the dream of young girls, was it not? But Shimmer had had her fill of palaces and hidden rituals. She looked down an unlit corridor that intersected between the king’s chambers and the room they had left. It was the only other part of the inner palace, it seemed.

“The vault,” Shimmer murmured to herself so quietly it was incomprehensible. But even as she slowed her pace and lulled behind the group of girls, Eya grabbed her hand and pulled her along to the front.

“Even your luck must run dry,” she said, “stay close, or you’ll be left behind for sure this time.”

Shimmer cursed herself for letting that red priestess take her sword as she tried to let the clamour push her aside. If she were armed, she’d let her beat heart take control and rush off to the vault. The horde of treasure was so near now. She nearly wrested herself from Eya’s control when they arrived back at the king’s chamber, where the door had been opened for their arrival. Still gazing back towards the corridor, Shimmer only ceased her attempts to flee when the massive figure of a man, or rather a man-like figure, appeared in the corner of her eyes.

He was truly giant, ten feet in height was Shimmer’s guess, and such a spectacle that none of the girls marvelled at the embroidered silk pillows piled around the chamber, but only at the man and his crucified form.

His marble skin rested tightly against his sculpted muscles, bulging and as shapely as any specimen could be, as his arms were stretched out across a stone cross, bound to it by heavy gold chains thicker than tree branches. He was stripped bare, save for a single loincloth to preserve his modesty, with a jewelled silver crown across his forehead and a rusted collar around his neck. The collar was jagged and bent, and even from across the bedchamber Shimmer could see spikes along the inside, just barely resting on his skin.

The red disheveled hair that dropped down to his shoulders and covered his face could not hide the grimace his lips had contorted into, nor the taut muscles in his neck that stained against the menacing collar.

But most miraculously of all, and the thing which captured Shimmer’s eyes for the longest time, were his wings. Each one thrice the length of his arm, they were covered in ashy-black feathers that shimmered with rippling orange waves that glowed like the embers of a dying campfire.

Another priestess, dressed in a tapestry of black silk, stood by the king and beckoned for Eya, as she was the first among them, to step forward. Eya let go of Shimmer’s hand cautiously, and for the briefest of moments, Shimmer felt the girl’s hand trembling as she walked with long, graceful steps up to the king on the cross. The black-silked priestess took Eya’s hand, and with an imperceptibly fast flick of her wrist, drew a short claw-shaped knife across her palm. Eya winced, but stood firmly, watching the priestess take her hand and place it below the leg of the man.

Then she made a cut inches below the groin, the faintest of gashes which still procured a steaming river of lustrous golden blood. The current streaked and forked down the man’s leg, ending in fine shimmering estuaries along his toes. Shimmer stared at the single drop which pulled itself from the king’s skin and nested in the bloody palm of Eya’s hand. There was silence for a moment, and Eya’s mouth slowly fell open as she touched her palm, wiping the blood away to show no sign of the damage.

“Thou art of the heavens now, child,” the priestess in black said, ushering her away and motioning for Shimmer to take Eya’s place. “You all shall be, with this covenant of the gods.”

But Shimmer stood back. The king was cruel. The king was greedy. Khauri’s scars were proof of that. But this man, this creature above, was not a king but a slave, and the worst kind of all. A pit formed in Shimmer’s chest as she felt her legs take one step closer. Walking under him, she could see the man’s face more clearly.

His high-bridged nose and sharp cheekbones gave him a hard look, but no one could mistake the sunken sockets of his eyes. Exhausted, anguished, but still awake and aware, he looked upon Shimmer as a starving beggar would look upon a happy fat merchant.

When the priestess cut her hand and the golden blood came, the pit in her chest turned to more sorrow than she could stomach. Relinquishing regard for her own safety, she pulled her hand away and held the wound up for the king on the cross to see.

“Is this what you want?” she asked him. “Speak your name, and tell me your wish!”

“Stupid girl!” shrieked the golden-dressed priestess. She stormed across the chamber and pulled Shimmer’s hand away with a surprising vice-like grip despite the buttery softness of her skin. “You are marked for the Phoenix, a blessing from the stars before you were ever born.”

She pinched Shimmer’s face and turned her gaze up to the man. “Look well upon him! Our King bears the fire of the Phoenix, and soon you shall be beholden to him as one of his ilk.”

But above the man, in the darker corners of the bedchamber just beyond the providence of candlelight, lurked a formless shadow that began to seep into the room as a dripping pool. The girls screamed, their white dresses dancing in the air as they frantically ran, followed by the priestesses who were swept away from the king by the lightless flood.

“We speak with confidence now,” whispered the large winged man. His black wings all but vanished into the shadow that now surrounded both him and Shimmer, the only hint of their presence being the slithering slivers of embers along his feathers. “Who are you, to grant a wish to a warden of the stars?”

“I am Shim—” she started, but her voice broke as she considered her words. “My name is Sunset Shimmer of Equestria. And you say you are a warden of the stars?”

The man strained his head, twisting and stretching his neck even as the spikes driven into his skin bled more golden blood across his body just so he could look Shimmer in the eyes.

“Fortunate for us both that you hail from a far world, and that you may understand me. No king or god am I, only a being such as yourself, lost and forgotten. Of the many other worlds beyond this earth and yours, I came from one called Pleroma. On our great wings we carried ourselves across lengths incomprehensible to mortal beasts as we fled our war against another race of star-dwellers. Yet, they harried us to this planet, gave us no peace or rest or mercy, and for aeons our war in the heavens have compelled men to label us as gods and angels.”

His chest heaved as his voice grew gradually drier and raspier as if speaking itself pained him. But his voice did not falter, delivering the same reverberance that echoed through the whole room.

“I am Zhamzizel. I am a warden of the stars. I was tasked with keeping the veil between heaven and earth unpierced, for my kind wish no man or woman would die for what they cannot understand. But in my duty I was felled by a great weapon of the enemy. Thinking I was surely dead, they left my body to fall to earth, where I was found and dragged to this palace in the founding days of this damned city.”

“If you have such power why have you not recovered and escaped? How can the priestesses keep you chained like this?”

He chuckled wistfully at Shimmer’s innocence. “Though no gods are we, my people’s lifetimes are that of mountains and rivers. And the weapon which wounded me was such a terrible device, I can still feel how its barbs sapped my spirit as well as my body. In time I might regain my strength to return to the heavens, but I shall spend many agonizing millennia on this cruel earth before that time comes.”

“Many millennia maybe, but not agonizing, if I can help it.”

“You cannot imagine the longing I have had for those words. But what earthly being would give up their worship for an angel’s peace? If only you had come sooner...” The man shook his head, an act that seemed far more painful than his expression showed, for his golden blood now soaked his skin from neck to pelvis.

“You haven’t the time to save me, not anymore,” his voice began to shake as if he were bearing a massive weight. “The priestesses bring the Nephilim, daughters whose cave-dwelling ancestors once consorted with my kin who explored the earth. More and more of them propagate the earth, and more and more of my blood they have taken.”

He spoke faster with worry and desperation. “My strength fails, I cannot keep us safe for long. I have done so only because you are my sole arbiter of salvation. I have seen the machinations of human civilization. I am branded a divine king so that they may conscript armies and levy taxes, separate mothers from daughters only to prolong their merciless hegemony. I beg of you to take the last of my blood, a treasure beyond measure in this palace, and make me a mortal beast. Leave me to die here, that I may watch their despair as their false god dies and their hegemony crumbles, and know that I at least had a hand in its end.”

Shimmer held up her hand, the blood on her palm now stiff and tenacious. A single flex of her wrist and the skin parted again, renewing the flow of blood.

“But I am not a Nephilim, I cannot be,” she said. “What will happen if I take your blood?”

“I have no theories,” the angel said, “but your spirit is strong. I can see it. Your flesh may not be as the Nephilim are, yet I believe my blood will embolden your mortal spirit more than it ever could for the priestesses. But know that if you kill me, you must take my blood. I fear what the priestesses will do with it when I am gone.”

Nervously, Shimmer nodded and approached the man’s leg. She closed her eyes and tightened her jaws as she thrust a finger into the cut on his thigh. His muscles tensed and the man groaned in pain, but Shimmer stomached it all for his sake and pulled harder, widening the cut further. Blood streamed over her hand, but not like a river. It sought out the wound on her hand, seeping into her skin and burning the mark on the back of her neck.

The man convulsed violently until his marble skin turned snow-pale, and then he did not move at all. Shimmer held her wrist to her face, looking closely at the cut. Her own blood, red and mortal in appearance, continued to trickle and drip as the surge of power dissipated within her. Perhaps he was right, and she was differently affected. But such questions could not find their purchase in Shimmer’s mind, as the shadow surrounding her died alongside the angel that had created it.

She turned now to see Eya standing by the gold and black-dressed women, the only one as the rest of the girls had fled the inner palace. The priestess in black pointed her knife at Shimmer, eyes glowering with a torrent of rage.

“You heathen whore-spawn, you are no child of the heavens! You are of the enemy, a spawn of devils come to shatter our faith and murder our king.” She crouched slowly before suddenly erupting into a wild dash, her black silks whipping like tendrils in the air.

Shimmer dodged the flash of steel as the knife made for her throat, saved only by the great distance the priestess had to cover. Recognizing she was helpless against her speed, she instead picked up one of the pillows decorating the bedchamber and held it up to the priestess as she closed for another cut. The knife caught in the silk, holding fast even as the priestess leaned and pulled with all her might to free it.

Wasting not a second more, Shimmer felt the mark on the nape of her neck flare, pushing foreign thoughts of anger and vengeance into her mind. For a moment her will was not her own, and she forcefully grabbed the priestess by hair. With a thundering roar Shimmer twisted and kicked the woman’s legs from under her, throwing her head onto the marble. The knife clattered across the floor. She dragged her up by the hair again, this time taking her to the edge of the stone cross, and swung with more force than she thought possible. Blood, red and mortal, rushed from the priestess’s head and her arms fell lifelessly to her side.

Shimmer looked up at Zhamzizel, and she swore the dead warden smiled.

The golden priestess held Eya behind her, like a mother protecting her daughter, but they both stood petrified. Shimmer met the eyes of the priestess as she walked across the chamber, and though rage was in her gleaming eyes as well, neither woman nor girl made a move to hinder her departure.

Oh, what could be said of the treasure room now? That it was an ocean of silver and gold and sparkling jewels? That it housed copper and bronze statues so carefully forged they looked as real as Zhamzizel himself?

All true. But Shimmer could no longer covet the sea-green aquamarines and stygian diamonds. She took a fistful of rubies for herself and found a small golden chest, already filled with rings, goblets, necklaces, and all other treasures, to return to Khauri. Let the former governor flee the Walled City, thinking he had escaped a cruel, greedy king.

IV.

The zilard walked lazily towards the stables Khauri had mentioned. This one was not a beast who rose early with the sun, for in the desert the end of the night meant only a torturous day of shade-seeking.

Shimmer rode quietly on her strider’s back, clutching her rubies and resting the chest of treasures in her lap. Khauri emerged from a small tent just beyond the gated fences of the stable, where heavyset zilards bred for work and labour continued to doze.

“Haha! You did it then?” the man cheered. “Oh, my friend, didn’t I say? We are both now,” he paused, turning to see if anyone else was near enough to hear him, “very rich.” The man tittered about in his sandals like a boy whose father had just snuck him his first ale.

“My weapon and my clothes were lost along the way,” Shimmer said, pulling at the cotton fabric of her dress. “And this disguise will not last long in the desert. Which of the markets will have a blacksmith and tailor?”

“Hm,” Khauri held his chin in his scarred hand, pondering over her dress. “I do not even want to know how you came to have a novitiate’s garb. Some questions better left unanswered, yes? But to answer your question, try the streets furthest west, the merchants there might fleece you of your treasures, but the only thing they covet more than wealth is their handiwork. You cannot go wrong there.”

Shimmer nodded, and with a gleeful handshake, Khauri took the chest of treasures from her and strutted towards the stable owner with confidence and a smile. Remembering his charm in the alehouse, she wondered how much he would even have to pay in the end.

The sun turned the purple sky to bright pink, and Shimmer squinted through at the light of a new dawn. She rubbed her faithful strider along the neck, the creature fully unaware of what changes had happened upon her rider.

“Let’s give you a full belly, girl,” Shimmer said softly. “And then get us as far from this city as your legs can go.”