Excerpt from ‘Daughters of the Desert’, written by Sora Fabre

  Most of the sand-skinned townsfolk wore thick and sturdy sandals under the scorching midday sun—as they should if they wanted to keep the skin on their feet—but Marisol was barefoot, twirling and dancing atop the edge of a narrow dune. The desert was a cruel mistress. She felt the desert was cruel to everyone, really, but no one more than a Sand-Dancer. One misstep and she’d land hard on her spine, never to walk again.

  Her mama always told her sand-dancing would kill her one day, but if she couldn’t entertain enough people and earn sixty Scales to pay for her trip today, her mama would die.

  “Do a double spin jump, Mari!” a little boy shouted from the crowd, all the way at the bottom of the dune she was dancing on. Her ears perked. Fulfilling a specific request meant certain donations, and the tougher the request, the more coins tossed into her basket.

  Whipping her arms back, she leaped into the air with her legs crossed, teeth gritted—landing on her tiptoes after a graceful double spin in the air.

  The little boy who’d requested her spin laughed and clapped, and now the small crowd of about fifty passersby below her were to go. She couldn’t resist an adoring grin as a drop of sweat beaded down her forehead. Each request was at least one copper coin on the ground, so, at most, she only had fifty-nine more requests to fulfil.

  “Do an edge jump for my kid!” a man yelled.

  “Do a backflip when you loop up again!” another man shouted.

  “Do a double spin jump and a backflip when you loop up again!” yet another man shouted, right as she backflipped onto the edge of the dune.

  Over and over again, she jumped until her legs were sore, danced until strain reached even the tips of her fingers, but she counted everyone’s requests one by one. Soon, she was down to three requests. Just three more jumps until she could collapse and fall on her knees.

  “Mari! Here, here!” a little girl shouted, the first man’s daughter jumping and waving as she did. “Do a double spin jump, then an edge jump, and a backflip!”

  Marisol suppressed a nervous laugh in her chest. That was three requests in one. Dangerous or not, it was bound to earn her a lot of Scales.

  So she launched, spun twice, jumped quickly again, and threw in a backflip at the end of the sequence—landing on the very tip of her toes, arms spread apart with perfect balance.

  The crowd cheered and whooped and became a sparkling blur in her eyes. Truth be told, she’d already spun her head completely dizzy with that backflip, but now she began skating down the dune with a brilliant grin from ear-to-ear—she’d fulfilled sixty requests, so now, she could end her routine.

  Swinging her arms to build momentum, she narrowed her eyes on the ridiculously tall wooden sign she’d stabbed into the sand below. Everyone immediately knew what she was trying to do. The elders shook their heads, the adults couldn’t resist a series of sharp gasps, but the children were fired up like never before. They to see her end her routine properly, because even if she doing this for money, she still had her pride as a Sand-Dancer.

  She recalled the first time she saw true tenacity. Ten-year-old Marisol watched in awe, lying on her stomach, as her mama outran a sandstorm while twirling and dancing atop a shaky dune to appease the desert god. It was a beautiful dance. It was graceful, it was elegant, and… it was beyond belief.

  It was the moment that made her want to be a Sand-Dancer.

  So, right before she reached the base of the dune, she reached into her cloak and pulled out a blindfold, quickly wrapping it around her eyes.

  Biting her tongue, visualizing the invisible crowd beneath her, she leaped and did a double spin mid-air before kicking her right leg out, holding her breath—and something under her incredible speed.

  The crowd was deathly quiet as she skidded to a halt, kicking up a thin cloud of sand in the process.

  … Then theyinto a hurrah as she yanked her blindfold off, brushing sand out of her hair. She panted and gasped for breath at first, sweaty all over, but then pure joy took hold of her as she realized she’d done it.

  She’d kicked straight through the center of the board to snap it in half.

  As the crowd tossed more coins into her basket and clapped, she crossed one leg behind the other and bowed, lifting the hem of her skirt. Eventually the crowd dispersed, and she remained bowing under the sweltering midday sun until every last one of them was gone. It was poor manners to leave before her audience, so it was only once she was there were no more requests that she finally lifted her head, biting her lips as she stared into her donation basket.

  Eyes aglow, she picked up the basket and the broken sign before rushing straight home. Merchants and caravaneers had already set up their stalls across the main streets, but she knew all the secret routes through the desert town. She flung herself onto low sandstone roofs, swung across palm trees between tight alleys, and skipped and jumped between mundane pathways until she reached the small squatter house at the edge of town.

  She burst through the thick curtain flaps for doors, and the first thing she saw was her mama staring out the window next to her bed. The lady the villagers called ‘Old Miss Vellamira’ was afflicted with an illness that weakened her legs and lungs, so she’d stayed bedridden for the better part of the past decade. Marisol was the only one who could go out and work for scraps for the two of them.

  Damn if some of the elders pitied her for having to sand-dance daily just to put food on the table, though—she sand-dancing, and there was nothing else she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing.

  “... Marisol,” her mama said, turning to look as she skipped over to the table and started filling the last empty pouch with the coins she’d just brought back. “I told you not to work so early in the day, didn’t I? You need lunch first—no, breakfast. Breakfast lunch. Skip out on any one of the two, and—”

  “‘Your bones will start groaning when you’re twenty-five’, yes, yes,” she finished, tilting her head left and right as she glanced back at her mama, squinting softly. “And you promised you’d sleep until noon. Why’s the letterer here again?”

  Her mama feigned ignorance with sucked-in cheeks. “Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The letterer? I don’t—”

  Marisol darted over, pulled back the curtains, and standing shamefully with his hands covering his face was the town’s one and only letterer. The fourteen-year-old boy refused to look either ladies of the household in the eye.

  Marisol planted her fists on her hips, scowling at her mama.

  “Mamaaaa. I said—”

  “Yes, yes, ‘don’t call Lucas over until he’s let out of school’, but if I hadn’t called him over while you were out, he wouldn’t have finished writing my book for me.” Her mama waggled a finger, waving the boy out through the window and giving the letterer a loaf of bread for his time. “We both broke our promises. Fair trade. Let’s call it even and just pretend it never happened, eh?”

  Marisol grumbled as she turned back around, waddling around the one-room house as she rummaged through the closet, picking out her travelling clothes. “I don’t know what sort of ‘book’ you’ve been having him write for you, but is it really worth waking up early for? You’ve yanked him out of morning school, like, every day for the past month? What do you think his mama would say if she knew her son ain’t attending morning school?”

  “Oh, please. His mother and I go way back. I’m sure Lucas likes getting lettering practice in as well.”

  “Not for a pittance! You ain’t even paying him—”

  “All a boy his age needs is hard bread and a loving auntie—”

  “Bah.” Marisol sighed, grabbing all of her travel clothes—beige cloak, beige scarf, and beige everything else—before stuffing them into her satchel. “So? What’s he really been writing for you? What’s this book I’m being left out of?”

  Her mama sent her a dry smile as she turned around briefly, searching for her comb. “It’s a book on job prospects. I thought you’d like to know about all the opportunities you have in this boring, little old town of ours, instead of leaving to sail to some water city in the middle of nowhere.”

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  Marisol paused. She wasn’t oblivious—the hurt and disappointment in her mama’s voice was more than palpable, and it made her chest ache. It didn’t help that Captain Antonio chose that moment to duck in through the curtain flaps, holding his wide-brimmed feather cap in one human hand, carrying a leather rucksack in the other crab pincer hand. He’d come to collect his payment. It was costly to travel to the Whirlpool City, after all, and she’d promised him—when he’d first stopped by the town four years ago and she realized he was a captain who ferried travelers back and forth from the city—that she’d have enough money saved up for her trip by today.

  But her mama, who’d always been lukewarm supportive of her decision, was disappointed

  “... I don’t need a different job, mama.” She sighed, slamming a cabinet closed as she found her first comb. “I even worked construction in the afternoon and manned the bread ovens at night, so I’ll have you know I , in fact, perfectly fine with sand-dancing—”

  “You shouldn’t be,” her mama said, lips puckered, eyes sunken. “There’s no future in sand-dancing anymore, Marisol. Times have changed. It doesn’t have the same flair it once had. You see men flying on their moth wings and leaping across mountains with their cricket legs, slaughtering hordes of giant monsters with their bare hands, and you think people will want to pay to see a barefoot desert girl dance pretty on the sands?”

  “You’re one to talk,” Marisol muttered, slamming a second cabinet closed. “You were the steel-toed queen of the desert. People travelled from halfway across the continent just to catch a glimpse of you doing a camel spin in a sandstorm with one hand tied behind your back. If it ain’t for your ailment, you’d still be—”

  “And that’s why you cannot make sand-dancing your life,” her mama said, clicking her tongue irritably as she pointed at her crooked legs, lips twisted. “You're twenty-four. You have energy. You have pride. The Great Makers know you love what you do and you’re all the more beautiful for it, but the desert is a cruel mistress. It in your heart when you think you can outrun it, and then it’ll swallow the ground beneath you, just like it did when I made my final jump. You wanna live the rest of your life on a bed?"

  Marisol groaned, slamming a third cabinet closed. “Your legs healed in a month. You were just… it was just pure misfortune you caught an ailment on of that injury.”

  “That ‘misfortune’ befalls all Sand-Dancers who live on the edge of their feet sooner or later,” her mama muttered. “There’s a reason why no lady does this job past thirty. It’s a child’s dream, Marisol. Why do you insist on sand-dancing so much?”

  “It's a noble job. One you apparently had no problem doing for years since you could entertain the crowd put food on the table.

  “There are plenty of other noble, long-term jobs in town that’d appreciate how fast and acrobatic you are, you know? I heard from Lucas that the letterer’s guild is looking for people to dance on their ink presses so ink settles on their parchment quicker, so I’m sure—”

  “What’s this about, mama?” she said, slamming the final cabinet closed. That was all four of her combs found. “You could’ve stopped me at any time. Kidnapped me and forced me to go to school. Told people not to come and watch my routines. Why ”

  A pause.

  Marisol didn’t stop packing up. She really didn’t have much time to waste; Captain Antonio would leave if she made him wait too long.

  “... I mean, who knows how long you’ll be gone for?” her mama said softly. “It’s a long trip, ain’t it? First you’ll ride to the far western shore, then you’ll sail for a few months across the great blue, and you don’t even know if you’ll be allowed into the city. You don't even know how long it'll take you to buy that vial of healing seawater. Not accounting for mishaps on the way, it’d easily be a year or two before I see you back here again. Who knows when you’ll show your face in front of me again?”

  Biting her lip, Marisol started rushing around the house, stuffing the rest of her necessities into her satchel: mostly combs, spare sandals, and sand-dried snacks for the road. While she did that, she tossed Captain Antonio the key to their household chest in front of the bed, and he flung the lid open to start counting the full coin pouches one by one.

  “It ain’t gonna be that long, mama,” she mumbled, watching him stuff the pouches into his rucksack slowly. “It’ll probably just be a few months there and a few months back. Barely even a year, right?”

  “It be long,” her mama said, a sad smile twisting her lips, and with it, Marisol’s heart. “Is it really worth it, Marisol? You’ve never been out of town, and your first trip is to somewhere so far away, where nobody can help you if you get in trouble? You don't even have one of those ‘bioarcanic system’ things, because only the Great Makers know how difficult and rare it is for people like us to get one. You really, really have no idea what’s waiting for you out the—”

  Marisol whirled, knelt, and clasped her mama’s hand in her own. “I be back, mama,” she said firmly. “The legendary ‘Whirlpool City’ in the middle of the Deepwater Legion Front, and its healing seawater at the very bottom of the whirlpool that is said to be able to mend all wounds and cure all ailments in the blink of an eye… You think it's a dangerous city because you ran from it back when it was being attacked by the Swarm, but it’s different now, right?”

  Her mama rolled her eyes—Marisol been yammering about the Whirlpool City for years, after all—but then she looked at Marisol in a way she’d never looked before.

  Marisol couldn’t for the life of her form a conclusion as to what that expression was trying to convey. Dilated pupils, mouth slightly parted; ‘haunted’ was the closest Marisol could come to the memories that hid behind her mama's gaze. And her mama was scared of the city, given the Vellamira family had run from that place during the old war, but… there no other choice now.

  Marisol squeezed her hands in comfort, nodding with resolution.

  “Those bug-slayers with biomagic and mutations sealed the strongest leviathans away at the very bottom of the whirlpool, nine thousand meters deep, and then they stabilized the rest of the city, right?” she said. “It’s safe now, you know. Ain’t nothing’s gonna happen. Once I get into the city, it’ll be even more safe with all the Guards and Imperators around—I’d sooner trip on a cactus and land on my neck than get attacked by a leviathan!”

  Captain Antonio dipped his head and pulled the brim of his hat down at her poor choice of words. Her mama frowned, and for a brief second she felt like wincing herself—maybe she could’ve made her point without alluding to an accident like that—but just as quickly, she shook her head and clenched her jaw. She right, and she knew it.

  “... Ten years I’ve been saving up for this trip,” she whispered. “Since I was fourteen, I’ve danced and danced and danced—under teachings, mama—all so I could pay for this once-in-a-lifetime trip to the city. Ten years. And I ain’t coming back until I have a bottle of healing seawater with me.”

  Her mama still had her pinned under a worried gaze, so she had to make herself look away, else she might lose her resolve and start fighting Captain Antonio for her money back… but just as she picked up her satchel and slung it over her shoulder, nodding at the captain to take her away, she felt a warm hand snapping around her wrist.

  She froze, throat clenching painfully.

  “Wait,” her mama breathed, and she heard the blanket rustling behind her. “Take this with you. I… I’m serious, you little rascal. It help you.”

  Marisol glanced around slightly to see her mama holding out a leather-bound book. “My satchel ain’t like that Worm God’s endless wormholes, mama. And I ain’t gonna be looking for any jobs while I’m—”

  “It contains the secret techniques of sand-dancing I never managed to teach you,” her mama interrupted, grunting as she swiveled off the bed so she could stuff the entire thing into Marisol’s satchel.

  Marisol looked at the spine of the book, noticing no title.

  “A child dances carefree, without a worry in the world,” her mama said, “and a teen starts to realize how inadequate their skills really are. As an adult, they start frantically looking to improve, so their movements become more refined, more controlled, and their dance changes.” Then she looked up at Marisol, smiling wistfully. “Even I have my own dance that only I can do, bedridden as I am, so open the book until you’re bored out of your mind on the great blue. You're a fast learner. You'll read each technique once or twice, and then you'll have nothing to entertain yourself with.”

  “... And how many chapters are there?” Marisol asked, sending a sly grin back. “It’s a pretty thick book. How long did you—”

  Her mama pulled her back into a tight hug, and she was left breathless.

  Wordless.

  She felt she’d done so well keeping them in, but she couldn’t hold them back anymore. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “... Take care, Marisol,” her mama whispered, rubbing the back of her head softly as she teared up quietly. “Do not forget: you are ‘Mar’, of the far western seas we came from, and ‘Sol’, of the far eastern sun we live in. A Sand-Dancer looks behind her, because we ladies of the Vellamira household hold ourselves to the utmost standard. We are graceful, we are infallible, and we—”

  “Dance with lightning snapping at our heels,” she finished the household phrase and pulled away from the hug, sniffling, wiping her tears and doing her best to throw a brilliant smile onto her face. “I’ll be back with a vial of healing seawater before you know it, mama. Love you.”

  Her mama fixed her braid above her ear, smiling brilliantly in return. “Love you too, you little rascal.”

  Marisol took a step back and bowed—to both her mama and the house—before turning to face the broad-shouldered Captain Antonio.

  She sucked in a breath, shoulders straight, and followed the man out onto the streets.

  “Mister Antonio,” she said, placing the satchel on her back, hands clasped around the straps as she walked alongside him. “It really ain’t gonna be that long before we reach the Whirlpool City, right? What are we riding to reach the harbor anyways?”

  Captain Antonio grunted, pulling down the brim of his hat with his crab pincer hand. “If we're the luckiest bastards in the entire world, it’ll take just three months to get there and three months to get back. And we’ll be taking giant coastal ants to the harbor. Ever rode one before, Miss Vellamira?”

  “What do you think?” she grumbled. “No, I’ve never ridden a giant coastal ant before. You know you’re the only outsider here who’s ever sailed across the great blue, right? As a biomagic-wielding bug-slayer captain of a mighty fleet, no less! You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?”

  Antonio grunted again. “It’s just four courier ships to ferry people to and from the city, miss. You make it sound like I command a naval fleet.”

  “... I’d rather hear you say you’ll keep me safe with more confidence, but oh well.” She sighed, before a small smile blossomed on her lips—just the thought of leaving the town for the first time in her life made her all giddy like a little girl inside. “Three months there, three months back. Worst case scenario, it'll be a year before I get to come back. The trip can’t be dangerous, right?”

  The seas were stormy.

  Lightning flashed all around. Waves the height of lighthouses rolled across the wooden decks. Sails were burning, the hull was cracking, and the masts were about to snap under their own weight.

  There was also one thing Marisol couldn’t have imagined when she’d first set off from her little desert town in the middle of nowhere.

  Everyone was dead, and the ship was sinking.

  Cowering behind a stack of rum barrels in the captain’s cabin, she jolted when lightning cracked four times in a row, the sky outside the round window flashed white for a brief instant. Right beneath the sea’s surface, a dark shadow slithered about, its forked tail poking out every now and then. All it took was that leviathan to completely destroy their fleet, and now—

  Someone banged on the door to the captain’s cabin and she , whirling out of cover.

  She was certain everyone had already been knocked overboard, cleaved in half by the leviathan’s tail, or killed by the debris that’d been flung onto the deck by the storm. By the skin of her teeth, she’d managed to duck into the captain’s cabin when the chaos started; she didn’t think anyone else had survived.

  So, her eyes snapped wide open when it was Captain Antonio that kicked the door in, bleeding from head to toe, his coat torn and riddled with holes all over.

  “... Fuck,” Antonio breathed, before falling flat on the wet floorboards, landing with a painful . She gasped and slid forward, turning him around as he groaned and reached for his nape. “I killed… all the other ones, though. It’s just that last leviathan left. You gotta… you gotta—”

  “Hold still, cap,” she whispered, looking frantically around for anything she could use as a salve. “Don’t talk. You’re bleeding everywhere. If I can—”

  “I’m sorry, Marisol,” he choked, wincing as he stabbed his crab pincer into his nape and plucked out something small and silvery. She looked down and flinched. He pinched a tiny silver bug in his claws. “I’m a bug-slayer, but… shit. I’m done already. That’s why you… I’m not supposed to do this, but you to eat this.”

  She blinked, and reacted only when lightning cracked outside, the ship rocking hard to the left.

  “You want me to eat the bug?” she snapped, shaking her head furiously. “Now ain’t the time for jokes, cap! You’ve got biomagic and mutations, right? Use them! Heal yourself with your… your bio or whatever those abilities are called—”

  “It’s no bug, Marisol. It’s an ‘Altered Symbiotic System’, and it’s the bug-slayers’ greatest weapon.” He sounded reedy and faint, and she could see the light draining from his eyes. He shoved the little bug between her lips mid-rant and clamped his human hand over her mouth, stopping her from puking it out. Despite how weak he sounded, he was strong enough to silence her.

  She gagged, reeling back, but the bug shot down her throat before she could manage to spit—Captain Antonio nodded only after he was sure she’d swallowed it.

  “It’ll start talking in a bit. It’s gonna be… bloody noisy in your head, I know, but endure it.” He coughed and blood spewed forth, a grimace spread across his face. “When it gives you a class or tells you to choose one, pick something that’ll let you mutate wings and fly back to the harbor. We ain’t… we ain’t that far off from land.”

  Then, his eyes drooped and his hand slumped to the side.

  Breathless, she darted forward, cradling his head and shaking Antonio’s shoulders. She called out his name—but when he breathed his last and his head went limp in her arms, something changed inside.

  She stopped shivering, stopped trembling.

  was burrowing under her skin.

  The bug she’d been forced to swallow was gnawing on her spine, into her nape, and then—

  a metallic voice whispered in her ears, making her freeze.

  And then it happened before she could even blink.

  One second there was nothing, and the next—there was a small, silver bug wiggling atop her left shoulder, trying to catch her attention.

  the bug said, waving one of its legs at her.