The Unmaker

The sun dawned on the Sharaji Oasis Town for the first time since Dahlia awakened on the surface, but it was neither a peaceful dawn nor a quiet one.

The townsfolk’s common consensus for the poor lady’s time of death was five minutes past midnight, mere moments after the first scream was heard. Dried blood bloomed from her dried husk where her chest had been gouged, where her insides had been sucked out and strewn across the sands. It was hard for anyone to look at her properly, but with Alice and Safi’s help, the townsfolk eventually managed to clean up the small alley in the northernmost end of town—now, eight hours past midnight, the sun was up and most everyone who’d not caught a wink of sleep throughout the night were sleeping their fears away.

There were still people who had to get up and work, of course. Stalls were beginning to open, the circular bazaar was turning into a melting pot of hushed whispers, rumours, and exaggerated naysay. Water riders climbed onto their camels and began making their rounds, spreading the word to every corner of the town, leaving no household unvisited, no elder uninformed. The morning was as rowdy and boisterous as she remembered it yesterday, but with a quiet, teeming tension in the air underpinning it all; men whispered the name ‘Madamaron, the Destroyer’, and women prayed for the poor lady who’d been taken in the middle of the night.

Dahlia might’ve been the centre of attention yesterday, but now she was sitting on the flat sandstone roof adjacent to the alley where she’d first discovered the body, and nobody was coming around to tell her to leave.

The death had been all too sudden.

“... I’m sure your bed’s more comfortable than this hard floor, with all the sand blowing into your eyes and whatnot,” Alice said, climbing onto the roof to sit down next to her; the young Hasharana gave her a mischievous smirk as their legs dangled over the edge. “If it’s too hot for you in your room, you can ask your Altered Swarmsteel System to inject a bit of coolant into your spine. It helps… a little bit. You’ll get used to the heat soon enough–”

“I saw it, Alice,” she whispered. “The shadow of a man.”

Alice pursed her lips—Dahlia’s lips, for the Hasharana was still wearing her face.

“It was no man,” Alice said plainly. “Was it a giant man? Over two metres tall, sprouting extra arms from his back, twin horns curled like a Dynastinae beetle?”

“I didn’t see it clearly–”

“Here. Breakfast. It’s pita bread served with a dip of creamy toum and ground cicada flakes.”

The slab of puffy bread Alice pulled out from her billowing red cloak was nothing short of cheesy, and the instant Dahlia had one shoved into her hands, Alice reached into her cloak and pulled out a small corked bottle. The smooth white sauce inside the bottle smelled even cheesier. Alice popped the cork and turned it upside down, slathering a generous amount of the sauce onto her bread before holding it out for Dahlia to do the same—and despite the suspicious second ingredient, Dahlia couldn’t really afford to refuse it right now.

Her stomach was still in knots, and she was hungry.

“... Uncle Safi made this,” Alice mumbled between bites, more focused on eating than she was at talking. “I’ve been travelling with him for about a decade, and since I took the exam to become a Hasharana about… uh, a few years ago, I receive about five or six job requests a year from my boss, the Worm God of the Genesis Glade Front. I’ve already told you this, right?”

Dahlia nodded slowly as she dipped a little toum onto her bread, not wanting to go too overboard with it in case she didn’t like it. “Yesterday in your uncle’s tavern. And you told me you came to the Sharaji Oasis Town to carry out three duties: the first is to track down the cocoons, the second is to find the source of the ‘system disruption’, that being me–”

“And the last is to investigate and exterminate ‘Madamaron, the Destroyer’ of the Sharaji Desert,” Alice finished, pointing out at the edge of the town while taking an especially large chomp of her bread. “Look there. Look at the houses on the outermost edge of the town. What do you… what do you not see?”

Dahlia frowned at the unusual question. She followed the Hasharana’s finger and looked, but past the alley, past the northernmost edge of the town, there was nothing but an endless sea of golden sand—the houses bordering the edge were just normal houses, were they not?

So she looked closer.

And listened harder.

And soon she realised there was something off about them compared to the houses in the rest of the town.

“They’re… quiet,” she whispered.

“That’s because people started disappearing around two weeks ago, when the cocoons were first reported to have fallen into the Sharaji Desert,” Alice said, clicking her tongue. “It began with a Miss Unam living in that house furthest away from the oasis, an old lady without family to watch over her in the middle of the night. The chief tells me the guards patrolling the town at night didn’t see anyone leaving through any front door, but when people noticed she was missing the next day, they barged into her house and found nobody. Six hours later, her dried husk was all we found out in the desert when we organised a search party to look for her.”

“...”

“A week ago, the same thing happened to a Mister Leban living in the house next door. The guards were extra alert. They claimed nobody left anywhere at night, but when he was reported missing the next morning, we found him a few hours later as a dried husk. Out by the oasis this time,” she continued. “And, just last night, you saw the third victim, a Miss Reshi—both of them lived right next to Miss Unam as well. You wanna know what’s the strangest thing about this chain of deaths, though?”

Dahlia felt it was a rhetorical question, so she didn’t answer and bit down on her bread instead, the creamy and flaky sauce making her tongue melt in her mouth.

Alice sighed and finished her bread, swallowing a huge gulp as she leaned backwards. “If it weren’t for previous Hasharana coming across this town and realising exactly three people die strange deaths every year, the townsfolks most likely wouldn’t have reported the deaths to any bug-slaying organisation by themselves.”

“Why?” Dahlia asked in a muffled voice; she struggled to chew more than what was already in her mouth. “If people have been dying mysteriously for… years… then why not ask for help?”

“Because the people here are mystics,” Alice replied, shrugging slightly. “They believe in fate and… spirits and demons and djinns and the like. Sandstorms are attributed to the work of a hungry sand spirit, and poor rainfall is attributed to the jealousy of the oasis reed god. When it comes to the three mysterious deaths, they believe it is the work of the ‘Destroyer’—a wind spirit who, across three weekend nights every same month of every year, would whisk three people away before flinging them back into the town as dried husks. By letting Madamaron do as it pleases, the townsfolk claim they receive less frequent sandstorms throughout the rest of the year, and thus the Oasis Town isn’t buried in the sand.”

The soft bleats of camels came trodding up behind them, as well as the sounds of the rest of the town coming alive in the morning. For a few more moments Dahlia didn’t say anything—the bread in her hands was delicious despite the cicada flakes, after all.

“... That’s not true, is it?” she eventually said in a low, quiet voice. “People are allowed to die in this town because… apparently, sandstorms are weaker when they do?”

Alice licked her fingers, cleaning up the leftover sauce. “Oh, but that part’s true, though. I’ve been here for three weeks, and the sandstorms do seem to get a lot less frequent for a few days after someone dies.”

“Then, you mean the wind spirit–”

“Lots of small towns and villages attribute natural disasters to gods and spirits, but we are Hasharana.” Alice flicked her forehead with an invisible thread, making her wince and reel back as the young bug hunter laughed. “We travel the continent and slay bugs with strange abilities and mutations mystics will easily call ‘gods’. Does that mean they are gods? Nonsense. They don’t exist. The Sharaji Desert isn’t the first place I’ve visited that claims something is the work of a god when, really, it’s just another Mutant pretending to be a god—so aren’t I just glad that you already have some experience with Mutants!”

Like ripples of water spreading in a still pond, the cold, tingling feeling that’d been stinging her nape jolted down the rest of her spine. A gnawing fear filled her chest and she looked away; Alice continued watching her with curiosity and fascination.

“I mean, you already have a system, and you were the one who took down that Mutant firefly in your undertown, right?” Alice chirped, her lips—Dahlia’s own lips—twisting into a smile that seemed wholly unnatural on her face. “You’ll be of great help to me. I was worried I had to face it alone in unfamiliar territory, so having a child of the desert on my side makes my job much easier. Much, muchhhh easier.”

“... Can’t you hunt the Mutant yourself?” Dahlia whispered, her breaths hitching, her heart pounding in her ears, her claws fidgeting and scraping against sandstone; it was like lightning was crackling down her spine and she couldn’t do anything to rip it out of her body, to stop it from electrifying her muscles. “I don’t really… I’m not… I’m not that strong. I don’t think I can help much in a fight if you're the only one who's professionally trained–”

“The townsfolk here, you see, don’t seem to trust me much,” Alice interrupted, waving her hand casually. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they know I’m a Hasharana trying to disrupt the natural state of things, but who cares about that—they might be wary of you now, but I bet they’ll open up to you sooner or later as a child of the desert, and when they do, ask them about Madamaron. They don’t tell me much about the ‘wind spirit’ that’s apparently been plaguing them for a decade. If I just have more information on the pattern of its appearances, how it lures people out of their homes, and how it turns them into dried husks, I can take it out alone. You wouldn’t even have to fight.”

“Even still… I don’t think… I–”

“You killed the Mutant firefly, didn’t you?”

Alice stared at her quite expectedly, and Dahlia couldn’t answer the question readily.

After all, was she the one who’d killed the firefly?

Or was it everyone else who gave their lives for her?

[... But you did kill the firefly, though?] Issam said, two hands resting on her shoulder from behind. [We all contributed, sure, but nobody can claim to have plunged their hands into the firefly’s chest. That was you. Nobody even got close to reaching the heights that you did.]

[Speak for yourself,] Raya muttered, somewhere a little bit off to Issam’s side. [If the girl doesn’t want the credit, I’ll take it. It’s only natural that the ‘Godsent Talent’ was the one who took down the Mutant–]

She heard a loud whack. A loud groan of pain. While Amula and Jerie scuffled with Raya and kicked up a small cloud of sand, Ayla and Aylee each placed a hand on her head, rubbing her hair softly.

Dahlia leaned into their rubbing, squeezing her eyes shut and clenching her jaw as she did.

[You killed the firefly, Dahlia,] Aylee whispered.

[Have a bit more confidence in yourself, yeah?] Ayla continued.

[So help Alice out however you can,] Issam finished, his voice so close to her ear that she shivered and gulped in one; she could only hope her cheeks weren’t flushed beet red. [If not for us, then… for the people of the Sharaji Oasis Town. They’re dealing with a bug problem. Didn’t we wish back then that someone outside Alshifa would come in and solve all our problems for us?

[Even if Alice is that ‘someone’, why not be that second someone for the Oasis Town?]

…

So Dahlia sucked in a slow, heavy breath with her mouth—her throat itching a little as she drew in coarse grains of sand in the process—before exhaling with her eyes opening slowly.

Her heart was still pounding in her ears, but her stomach was no longer tied in knots; the pita bread she’d been given for breakfast was surprisingly filling.

… Okay.

If that’s what you guys want, then I… I’ll do it.

“I’ll cooperate,” she whispered, much to Alice’s visible delight; the Hasharana clapped and reached into her cloak for another slab of bread. She held up a hand and refused the second offering. “I… as I said, I don’t think I’ll be much of any help in a fight, but… if it’s just general information gathering and trying to help you figure out what species of insect the Mutant might be, I think I can be a little bit useful. Is that alright with you?”

Alice smiled like it was the sun. “Of course! But I don’t really have anything planned for the moment, so feel free to just kick back and rest for a little while longer. I’ll come by for you when I need you.”

“And… what will you be doing until then?” she asked slowly, looking down at the cleaned alley with her lips thinned into a line. “If Madamaron really, really only kills three people a year, then that means nobody should be murdered for the rest of the year… but that doesn’t mean we can relax and spend an entire year looking for it, right?”

“That’s right. Preferably, we kill it as soon as possible,” Alice said. “So I have a plan.”