Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Winter and the Desert. (Sukegei X Ixqueya)

Sukegei tipped his head back against the pillar and laughed, low and lazy. “Lechery?” he echoed. “You make it sound like a sin, Zubaida. I thought appreciating the Lord’s handiwork was a form of worship.” He let his gaze follow the line where Ixqueya had gone, then drifted back to Zubaida with a crooked smirk. “And yes,” he added, “I found her attractive. Hard thing to miss. Like a siege tower wandering into your courtyard. Frosty, towering, looks like she could snap me in half and not notice. Some of us have a type.”

Her talk of trauma and mothers earned her a snort. “Easy now,” he said. “My mother was five foot nothing and mean as a scorpion. If I had ‘mommy issues,’ I’d be chasing tiny women with knives, not glacier queens with shoulders like city walls.” He uncrossed his arms, hands spreading in a mock-helpless gesture. “I like tall, dangerous, and likely to kill me if I say the wrong thing. That is taste, not childhood damage.”

The grin sharpened, eyes glinting. “Besides,” he went on, voice dropping into a conspiratorial drawl, “give me a good sturdy stool and a blessing from your Lord, and I’d happily impregnate the foreigner. For diplomacy, of course. Bridge our nations. Very pious work.” He chuckled at his own joke, then rolled one shoulder, some of the swagger easing off as he looked at her more squarely. “But you are right about one thing,” he conceded. “I am thinking. That woman is… wrong for this place. In the way a sword is wrong in a cradle. She walks like she owns her dead swamp and half expects our sand to remember it.” He glanced at the mosaics, then back to her.

“Jorgenskull do not cross half a world to sip tea and kiss pretty Shaitān in side chapels. She is here for something sharp. And whatever it is, it is big enough that she smiles while standing in another god’s house.” He blew out a slow breath. “So yes. I am looking. I am admiring. I am also counting how many ways this could all go to shit if we are not careful.” His mouth quirked again. “You asked what burns in me. Little of everything. Lust, curiosity, and that prickling feeling in my neck that says ‘Sukegei, this is either the start of glory or the start of a very stupid death.’” He tipped his chin at her, eyes warm with familiar irreverence.

“Lucky for me, I have a holy woman to keep my soul from wandering too far. You tell me, Zubaida. Is the Lord of Light smiling at this, or is He sharpening a bolt for my backside as we speak?”

Zubaida let his talk of stools and diplomacy finish without interruption, watching him the way one watched a child stacking oil lamps too close to a curtain.

When he fell quiet, she clicked her tongue softly.

“Mm. There it is,” she murmured. “The famous Sukegei tact. As subtle as a bonfire in a broom closet.”

Her eyes were warm, but the warmth had a core of steel. She shifted her weight, one hand settling on the soft curve of her hip, bangles whispering together.

“Keep your curved sword sheathed, little flame,” she said at last, voice low but firm. “At least while you stand on holy stone.”

She raised a finger before he could retort, a small, admonishing gesture that somehow felt like both a jest and a commandment.

“Ixqueya walks under our roof as a guest,” she continued. “By our customs, that makes her fireproof to certain… impulses. No man of the Lord of Light draws steel, steel or otherwise, on a woman under covenant hospitality. Not even in jest. Not even in his thoughts, when he can help it.”

Her gaze softened a touch, gentling the rebuke. “You may admire. You may notice that the Lord has been… extravagant with His clay.” A faint smile curved her lips. “I am not blind. I have eyes, not polished stones. But there is a line between reverence and turning a woman into a walking womb in your imagination.”

She inclined her head toward the distant doors where Ixqueya had vanished.

“She is more than a set of hips that make you want to negotiate trade agreements,” Zubaida went on. “She commands the dead. She walks out of a land where corpses stand when called. She carries the weight of a house, a tribe, perhaps a nation, on those shoulders you admire. If you must think of putting a child in her, think also of what else you invite into our world with that union.”

Her honey-brown eyes lifted briefly to the nearest mosaic. The Lord of Light’s radiant figure blazed there, sword raised over a sea of indistinct shapes. Sun-gold glass caught in her lashes when she looked back to him.

“The Lord has a plan for all,” she said softly. “Even for those who do not know His name. Even for the icy daughters of bone palaces who speak to ghosts instead of flames.”

She touched her chest lightly. “He planned me. He planned you. He planned the moment you leaned against that pillar and thought with your loins instead of your head.” Her mouth twitched, amused. “He also planned for me to be here to swat your ears when you say such things out loud.”

She stepped a half pace closer, so that the scent of spice and smoke wrapped around his edges.

“You see a tall, dangerous beauty who might break you in half,” she said. “I see a torch carried into a dark room we do not yet understand. Perhaps she will help us see. Perhaps she will set the curtains ablaze. Either way, we do not paw at the torch while we still need the light.”

Her hand lifted as if to touch his cheek, then settled instead on his shoulder, giving it a firm, maternal squeeze.

“I do not say you are wrong to feel what you feel,” Zubaida admitted. “The body is honest. The eyes are honest. Even prophets were men. But you are not some tavern boy with his first cup of wine. You are a servant of the Lord, a sword in His hand. You do not let your blade swing just because it aches to move.”

Her thumb tapped once against his shoulder, punctuating the next words.

“Honor the guest. Respect the custom. Let the foreign giantess breathe in our house without you measuring her for a crib.”

The rebuke settled, she let the edge ease, her smile blooming again, half playful, half proud.

“Besides,” she added, head tilting, “if the Lord of Light wishes a child born of frost and sand, do you really think He needs your stool to arrange it? He has moved greater mountains than your ego.”

A soft laugh slipped from her, rich and musical, taking any sting from the words.

“Trust His plan. For her. For you. For this strange dance between dead swamp and living desert.” Her fingers slid from his shoulder, palm turning up in a small, open gesture. “Watch her with clear eyes, Sukegei. Listen. Learn. If the time ever comes when she is more than a guest, when she stands not under my protection but under His banner… you will know it. Until then.”

She gave him a look that mixed affection and warning in equal measure.

“Keep your sword sheathed. Curse under your breath if you must. Pray a little longer at night. That is what men do when beauty walks past them and keeps walking.”

She glanced once more to the mosaics, then back to him, eyes glowing like coals banked for the long night.

“The Lord of Light is not sharpening a bolt for your backside,” she concluded gently. “Not yet. He is watching to see whether you are ruled by the fire between your legs or the fire in your chest. Do not disappoint Him, hm?”

Her smile turned tender, almost indulgent.

“Now. Walk with me. Tell me what you noticed about her that is not hanging off her chest. I promise you, it exists.”

Sukegei fell into step beside her without needing to be asked. The silk of her robes whispered. His boots rang soft on stone. Where her hands folded with the grace of a priestess, his right settled on the curve of his kïjil’s hilt, thumb hooked easy over the guard. Casual to anyone watching. Protective if you knew him.

“Keep my sword sheathed, walk the holy lady home,” he muttered, half to himself, half to her. “Look at me. Almost respectable.” He glanced sideways at her, catching the warmth in her eyes, and snorted. “You want the truth?” he said. “I do not believe in your Lord of Light. Not yet. I believe in sharp steel, a good shield, and getting out of the way when something big falls.” They passed under a spill of colored glass. Sunfire ran over her gold, over his scars. He blew out a breath.

“But…” He rolled the word in his mouth like a stone. “After seeing that tits-on-stilts giantess of yours, I am starting to think your god might be real. If He carved that, He has a sense of humor. And taste.” The corner of his mouth tugged up. “She is a mountain I would not mind trying to climb,” he added, voice dropping into a wicked drawl. “Big, strong, beautiful. The sort of woman you look at and think, ‘Aye, there is someone you could make proper heirs with.’”He lifted his free hand, sketching a vague outline in the air. “Imagine it. Children who could bench-press the palace. Half swamp, half sand. All trouble.”

Her look told him exactly what she thought of that. He barked a laugh. “Oh, do not give me that face,” Sukegei said. “You make it sound like I am talking romance. I am talking blood. Line. Any fool can tumble in the dark. Warriors think about what comes after. Strong house, strong heirs, strong back to hold the banner when we are bones.”

He shrugged, fingers idly tapping the kïjil’s pommel. “You would not understand,” he went on, teasing but not unkind. “You think in souls and scriptures. We think in steel and sons who can swing it. Or daughters,” he corrected himself, thinking of Ixqueya’s shoulders. “Gods know those would come out swinging.” He looked ahead again, towards the open doors and the hard white light beyond.

“You keep your plans and your prophecies,” he said. “I will keep my sword and my jokes. If your Lord truly has a plan, He can weave it around a man who likes his women like he likes his fortresses. Big. Dangerous. Hard to take.” His hand tightened a fraction on the hilt as they approached the steps, eyes sweeping the courtyard out of habit. “For now,” he added, glancing back at her with a lopsided grin, “my blade stays sheathed. Just like you asked. But if anything comes for you or our guest, pious or not, I will be the first fool between them. That much you can write in your holy book.”

The sun struck her first.

As they walked, light poured through the high arches of the cathedral and shattered over Zubaida’s body in rivers of molten gold. Her black silk clung like shadow made obedient, cinched beneath the fullness of her chest by a broad girdle of hammered sun-metal. Jeweled chains spilled from her waist like a net of captured dawn, each step setting crystal and diamond to chiming, a soft music like prayer-beads against stone. Slits in the robe flashed warm, bronzed thigh, as if the desert itself walked beside him draped in temple finery.

Her white-streaked hair fell down her back like a ribbon of pale fire. A circlet of gold and gemstone sat upon her brow, not as a queen’s crown, but as a priestess’s halo, catching every stray beam and bending it to the Lord’s service.

She listened to him. To his jokes about mountains and heirs. To his stubborn disbelief.

Then she smiled, slow and knowing.

“The dune does not need the grain to believe in wind,” she said gently. “It shifts him where it wills, whether he understands or not.”

Honey-brown eyes lifted toward the blazing sky beyond the threshold. “So it is with the Lord of Light. You may not bend your knee to Him yet, Sukegei, but He has already set you in His landscape. A spark in His great desert. Whether you call it fate or accident, you burn where He has placed you.”

Her gaze slid back to him, warm as coals banked for the night. “I am confident He will use you for the good of our people. Faith is a river that sometimes comes late to the wadi. Service can flow even in a dry bed.”

They descended the steps together into the white glare of afternoon. The dunes beyond the city shimmered like an ocean of crushed bone and bronze. Wind licked at the edges of her robes, sending her jeweled curtains swaying, so that she sounded like a walking censer, all chime and incense and quiet authority.

“You asked what she wanted,” Zubaida said, voice lowering, as if the desert itself were eavesdropping. “Why a daughter of grave-ice came to our little tongue of sand.”

She placed a hand over her heart, fingers splayed against the gold there. “She told me her ledger is unbalanced. The tally of the dead and the tally of the departed no longer match. Souls that should cross the horizon have gone missing from the sky.”

Her eyes drifted outward, toward the dunes.

“Imagine,” she murmured, “a caravan leaving one side of the desert and never reaching the other. No bones. No tracks. Just absence. That is what she described. The road of the dead has a sandstorm in it, and something in that storm is eating travelers.”

She let the image sit between them like a mirage that refused to fade.

“If this is true,” she continued, “then every tribe under the sun has a stake in it. Flame, frost, swamp, stone. When death’s road is broken, it is not only their ghosts who wander. One day our fathers will step onto that path. Our children. Us. If some unseen maw waits there, then we cannot pretend it is a foreign god’s problem.”

She touched his forearm, a brief, grounding pressure. “We have a moral obligation, little flame. When a lamb goes missing, a decent shepherd searches. When whole flocks vanish into the dark between dunes, a faithful one runs.”

Her hand fell away. Her steps never faltered. Black silk and gold moved with her like a mobile altar.

“So I listened,” she said. “I weighed her words like dates in the palm. I watched her eyes when she spoke of lost souls. I did not see hunger for power there. I saw an accountant whose numbers no longer add. A warden whose gate no longer answers her touch.”

Her lips curved, wry and fond, as she glanced at him sidelong.

“I told her I would not send quills and ink-pots. Our people do not answer a threat to the dead with scribes.” The smile deepened. “I told her I would send my wrath.”

Her jewelry chimed as she gave his arm a small, affectionate squeeze.

“I want you to go with her, Sukegei,” she said. “To walk at the side of this ‘tits on stilts’ mountain you are so eager to scale. To listen when she speaks of the dead. To look where she points and see whether the sand holds any tracks of this thing that swallows souls.”

She lifted her chin, eyes bright as sun on polished brass. “You will be my sword where I cannot tread. My eyes in the shadow of her frost. If there is truly a storm devouring the departed, I want you to stand in its wind and tell me what you feel on your skin.”

A hint of laughter curled at the edge of her mouth. “Given your… enthusiastic admiration, I doubt proximity will be a hardship,” she teased. “But remember. You go as my wrath, not my rut. You are there to mend a broken road, not to sow little giants in every snowbank.”

The jest softened, revealing the steady heat beneath.

“He may not yet be your god,” Zubaida finished, voice deepening with quiet conviction, “but you are still the blade I lift when the dunes darken. Strong heirs and strong houses have their place. For now, I ask for something simpler. Walk with her. Guard her. Learn what hunts our dead. Bring that knowledge back to me like a waterskin from a distant well.”

She stopped, turning so the light framed her like an icon, gold and black and sun-fire.

“The Lord of Light will judge me for how I cared for the souls entrusted to this sand,” she said softly. “I choose to send you in my name. Will you let Him use you for that, at least, even if you refuse to use His?”

Sukegei walked on in silence for a few paces. Sand whispered under his boots. Her jewels chimed at his side. The cathedral fell behind them and the desert opened ahead, all blinding white and shimmering heat that made the far dunes look like ghosts trying to remember they were mountains. He let her words sit. Ledger. Missing souls. Broken road. Her wrath. Not the sort of thing a sane man volunteered for. Unfortunately, he had never been accused of excessive sanity. He slowed, then stopped outright, weight settling back on one heel. The dark-skinned elf turned his face toward her, studying her profile in the hard light. The gold at her brow. The conviction in her eyes. The way she looked at him like she already saw him walking into whatever storm she had just described.

“Saints and sand,” he muttered under his breath. “You do not aim low, do you.” His fingers tightened a little on the kïjil at his hip. Not a threat, just an old habit, like checking the edge before a fight. “You know me,” he said aloud. “I like my problems simple. Bandits on the road. Raiders at the well. Someone trying to stab you in an alley. You hit them first and you go home. Easy sums.” He jerked his chin slightly toward the sky. “Whatever you just painted is not an easy sum.” For a heartbeat he looked past her, out where the dunes blurred into glare. Old stories moved at the edge of his thoughts. Rot that walked. Things that wore human faces wrong. Whispers about souls twisted so badly even the desert would not take their bones. His jaw worked.

Then he looked back to her, eyes a little narrower now, the joking edge dulled by something harder. “Tell me straight, Zubaida,” he said, voice quieter. “This storm in the road of the dead. These souls that go missing.” He held her gaze, no grin now, only a soldier who had finally heard the part that mattered. “Is it the Defiled?”

Zubaida stilled, as if the question had brushed a nerve that ran from the soles of her feet to the crown circlet on her brow.

For a heartbeat she only breathed, drawing in the dry air of the courtyard. The desert sprawled ahead in white, shimmering undulation, an ocean of bone-pale waves beneath the glaring eye of the sun. It felt, in that moment, like standing in the open palm of the Lord of Light Himself.

“I believe so,” she answered at last, voice low, mellow, and grave. “In my heart beneath my ribs, I do.”

Her gaze drifted out over the dunes, eyes half-lidded, as if reading scripture written in heat-haze. “The Defiled are to death what rot is to a date-palm. Corruption not from outside, but from within. When the road of the dead no longer carries its caravans to the far horizon, when souls step onto the sand and leave no print, that is not accident. That is a tooth in the dark. That is something gnawing at the very order the Lord set between life and ash.”

Her fingers folded together at her waist, gold and crystal catching the sun like a scatter of captive embers. “But belief is not yet revelation. A shepherd who smells carrion on the wind does not accuse the jackal before he finds the tracks. We are still blind. That blindness is our greatest peril. Not the jackal. Not yet.”

She turned back to him, her honey-brown eyes suffused with a soft, steady glow, like lamp-oil catching flame. “This is why my Wrath cannot be only an arm that cleaves,” she said. “You must be my eyes and ears as well as my blade. A sword that only strikes is a blunt instrument. I need a sword that looks, that listens, that learns the shape of the shadow before he steps into it.”

Her hand rose and settled lightly on his forearm, just above the kïjil’s hilt. The touch was warm, anchoring, maternal. “Right now we walk in a sandstorm of ignorance,” she murmured. “Grains of rumor in our teeth. No clear horizon. Ixqueya brings us the scent of something wrong, but not its form. We do not yet know where the road breaks. We do not know what hunts on it. We do not know if this is a single wound in the world, or many small ones festering beneath the same bandage.”

She let her hand fall, black silk whispering around her curves as she shifted her stance. Jewels chimed at her hips like a distant prayer-bell. “If she speaks true, then something is brewing beneath the crust of all our graves. A buried fire, working its way up through the stone. It is always better to walk toward such heat with open eyes, while it is still a tremor beneath the feet, rather than wait for it to explode like a sun under our houses.”

Her smile returned, gentle and unwavering, the smile of a woman who had watched many boys march out and fewer march home. “So you will go,” she said. “You will walk beside this frost-born warden and hear what the dead murmur through her. You will watch the edges of things. Where bodies fall. Where they do not rise. Where the air feels wrong against your skin.”

The light caught in her lashes as she held his gaze, her voice softening into something almost like a blessing. “Bring me back more than severed heads and broken curses,” she finished. “Bring me back knowledge. Footprints in the unseen. The outline of the storm, not just the mark your blade makes in it. If the Defiled coil at the heart of this, I would rather we meet them as hunters across the sand, not as startled mourners at our own pyres.”

Her eyes shone, warm and proud. “The Lord of Light will judge me on how I guarded the souls entrusted to this desert. I choose you as the spear I cast into that unseen dark. Whether or not you speak His name, He can still wield you. Let us not leave Him blind.”

Sukegei let out a low whistle and rolled his shoulders, as if she’d just asked him to fetch water instead of stroll into a spiritual meat grinder. “Eyes, ears, wrath, gutting whores in the dark,” he said. “You really know how to sweet-talk a man.”

He pushed off the empty air a little, falling into step beside her with an easy swagger, like he was heading to a tavern instead of an investigation about missing souls. One hand stayed hooked over the kïjil’s hilt. The other swung loose at his side, fingers tapping his thigh in some lazy rhythm only he heard. His whole body read as relaxed and cocky, like nothing in the world could actually stick to him. “Fine,” he went on. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch. I’ll listen. I’ll remember more than the size of her tits. I’ll even try not to stab the first thing that looks at me funny.” He gave her a sideways grin. “No promises, but I’ll try.”

He snorted, flicking a bit of sand off his sleeve like that settled it. “And if it is the Defiled behind this?” His smile went sharp. “Then I’ll happily track down whatever bastards are chewing on our dead and turn them inside out for you. Nice and slow. Give your Lord of Light a proper show. Maybe He’ll finally admit I’m His favorite sinner.”

He walked a few more paces, whistling under his breath, then tilted his head toward her. “Only one little detail, holy mother,” he said. “This grand partnership. Me, you, the frost mountain with the walking altar-body.” He wrinkled his nose. “Does Ixqueya actually know I’m part of this? Or did you forget to mention you were sending your dirtiest knife along with her?” He barked a laugh. “Because I didn’t exactly feel the love. That bubbly ass and tits with a mouth looked at me like I was a stain on the floor. Barely a glance. No flutter. No blush. Nothing. Honestly rude.”

He spread his free hand in mock outrage. “I flash my best smile, and she acts like I’m furniture. A bench, even. Foreigners, I swear. They can march with undead hordes, but they can’t handle a bit of Shaitan masculinity without pretending it’s not there.” His grin turned wicked. “Still, if she agreed knowing I’m coming, she’s worried. Worry makes people flexible. Flexible people make deals. And I’m very good at… negotiations.”

He gave her a lazy wink, then looked back toward the dunes, walking as if the whole thing were a mild inconvenience between drinks. “Alright then,” he said. “You’ve got my blade, my eyes, and my ears. I’ll go play nice with the giant icicle, find out who’s messing with the dead, and if I can’t fix it with talking, I’ll see how they like a Shaitan sword in their guts instead. You get your answers. I get a good story. Everyone’s happy. Except the Defiled.”

He flashed another grin, broad and unbothered. “They’ll be very unhappy. And, with any luck, I'll seduce our foreign friend. Put some babes in her. For diplomacy sake and duty. All that dribble. If it happens, you should thank me. I am a martyr for the lord of light and our people. Doing his work one thrust at a time for Shaitan kind, maybe all kind. The great clappening they'll call it in the history books.” He ended, with a sniffle. Maybe he is allergic to his own beetleshit?

Zubaida let his swagger unspool ahead of them, watching it with the faint, indulgent smile one reserves for a particularly incorrigible son.

Sunlight lacquered her in gold as they walked. The black silk of her gown clung and flowed in measured counterpoint, a disciplined tide about the architecture of her body. Broad bands of worked gold cinched her waist and framed the rise of her breasts, while chains of crystal and diamond draped from hip and collar like trapped fragments of dawn. Each step set those jewels to a soft chiming, so that she moved through the courtyard as a walking reliquary of light in a city of sand.

“You were born without the organ that governs modesty,” she observed at last, voice mellow and amused. “If arrogance were water, you could drown the whole caravan route from here to the sea.”

Her eyes, warm and honey-dark, softened rather than sharpened. “Still, the desert has more patience for the bold than for the craven. I would sooner cast a loud, laughing spear into the unknown than a quivering reed. A man who jokes at the edge of the abyss is at least looking at it.”

She reached up and brushed an invisible grain of dust from his shoulder with the edge of her fingers. The touch was light, almost absent-minded, but carried the unspoken weight of years spent straightening armor and smoothing collars before battle.

“Yet remember this,” she went on, tone gentling. “A torch that flares too bright and too hungry is nothing but ash before dawn. Let your bravado walk beside your caution, not charge ahead of it like a drunk camel. The Lord of Light made you a flame, not a firework.”

They passed beyond the cathedral’s shadow. Before them the dunes rolled outward in blinding tiers of white, each crest a frozen wave beneath the merciless sun. Zubaida regarded that horizon for a heartbeat, as if listening for the pulse of her god beneath the skin of the world.

“You go as more than my wrath, Sukegei,” she said. “You go as a moving ember from our altar. Wherever you set your feet, you will carry a little of our sun into places that stink of cold and stagnant bone. You may not name it prayer, but it is. A man who walks in darkness with a drawn blade is one kind of offering. A man who walks there with his eyes open, on behalf of his people, is another.”

Her gaze slid back to him. The humor returned, threaded now with steel.

“As for Ixqueya,” she continued, “do not bruise your ego over her frost. A woman who spends her life reading ledgers of corpses does not scatter smiles like rose petals. She has learned to lock her warmth away. You arrive speaking of stools and heirs and try to climb her with your eyes, and you expect her to melt on the spot.”

She clicked her tongue, a soft, chiding sound. “Believe me. Foreigners can endure your Shaitān masculinity. They simply exercise the spiritual discipline to ignore it. That is not an inability. That is restraint.”

A corner of her mouth tugged upward. “Besides, a giantess who flirted easily, in a strange land and a foreign temple, would worry me far more than one who looks through you as if you are part of the architecture. Furniture can surprise you. The ones who smile too quickly already know exactly where they plan to seat you.”

She drew a slow breath, then spoke more quietly. “Work alongside her. Let her see you do something other than measure her with your eyes and threaten enemies she has not yet named. Show her the man who dragged bleeding brothers out of ambushes, who has stood between our people and nightfall more often than he admits. If she comes to trust that man, this enterprise will move with far fewer fractures.”

The wind freshened, tugging her hair back from her face, teasing the jeweled curtains at her hips into a bright little storm of sound. Zubaida squinted up into the white blaze overhead for a moment, then nodded to herself and returned her gaze to him.

“The Lord of Light will make of you what He chooses,” she said. “You may call it luck, stubbornness, or your own irresistible charm. I call it providence wearing a Shaitān’s face. Walk straight. Listen more than you talk. Strike when you must, not merely when you itch to. Bring me word of what hunts our dead, and you will have done more liturgy than half the men who kneel all day.”

Then, at last, mischief fully resurfaced. Her eyes brightened; the line of her mouth curved into something wicked and fond.

“And on a more earthly matter,” she added, “regarding your intent to conquer that ‘tits on stilts’ mountain…”

She shook her head, little chains at her temples chiming. “By all means, test your courage. Flirt with the avalanche. Just know this: I have no desire to stand beside a crater in the dunes and explain to the Lord of Light that my finest blade died because he attempted to seduce a frost-tower and was subsequently crushed beneath her very impressive weight.”

She patted his arm once, almost consoling, laughter low and rich in her chest. “So be charming. Be brave. Be as insufferably confident as you please. Only be clever enough not to get flattened. I would much rather welcome you home with scandalous stories than bury you as a cautionary proverb told to young acolytes about the perils of chasing giantesses.”

Sukegei threw his head back and laughed, the sound rough and bright in the hot courtyard air. A few drowsy pigeons startled from the cathedral ledge, wings clapping as they bolted into the white sky. “Oh, listen to you,” he said, flashing her a grin full of teeth. “Talking like I am some brittle reed waiting to snap under a bit of foreign backside.” He rolled his shoulders, loose and lazy, as if she had praised him rather than predicted his death. Muscle moved under sun-browned skin, the faint lines of old scars catching the light where his collar gaped. One hand stayed hooked over the curve of his kïjil, thumb drumming on the pommel. The other spread across his ribs in mock offense, fingers splayed as if to prove there was plenty of solid man under her silk-and-sermon worries.

“You need more faith in me, Zubaida,” he went on. “These are not temple-boy bones. These are strong bones. Good bones. Battle-tested. I have fallen off worse things than a giantess. I have walked away from them too. Give me half a chance and that foreign beauty will be the one trying to catch her breath.” He jerked his chin toward the distant city gate where Ixqueya had vanished, eyes narrowing in something that was half appraisal and half challenge. “You saw her. That is not a woman you treat like glass. That is a siege engine with curves. Exactly my kind of trouble.”

He started walking again with that easy, swaggering gait, hips loose, shoulders relaxed, as if nothing in the world really worried him enough to stiffen his spine. Sand crunched under his boots; heat shimmered off the flagstones. He kicked a small stone out of their path, watching it skitter ahead. “If I have survived this long with you throwing me at every mad thing the desert spits up,” he said, “I doubt I am going out under a big pair of tits and a heavy backside. Funny, yes. Poetic, maybe. But not very dignified. I like my deaths with a bit more style.”

He cut her a sideways look, smirk curling back into place. “You fret too much. ‘Oh, my finest blade, the Lord of Light will scold me if he dies under a giant woman.’ If your god did not want me climbing mountains with long legs and bad ideas, He would not have given me this face, this charm, and this little sense of self-preservation.”

He shrugged, utterly unbothered, like the whole thing was a wager he was already sure he had won. “And if, by some miracle, I do end up flattened under her,” he added, lips twitching, “just carve it proper on my stone. ‘Here lies Sukegei. Crushed by beauty. Died happy. Between two fat rear cheeks and giant thighs.’ The Lord of Light can argue with the method, but He cannot say I lacked enthusiasm.”

Zubaida regarded him for a long, quiet moment, the corners of her mouth softening into something between exasperation and affection.

“Strong bones,” she repeated, amusement warming her tone. “Yes. I have never doubted the architecture of you, Sukegei. The Lord built you like a dune-storm. Loud. Persistent. Very difficult to get rid of.”

The courtyard baked around them, stone exhaling the day’s heat in slow, shimmering breaths. Above, the sun sat like a molten coin in a cloudless vault, its light catching in every facet of her gold. Black silk traced the curves of her figure, the desert’s own shadow wrapped around a brazier of flesh. Jewels at her hips and throat coruscated with each measured movement, so she seemed to carry a small constellation beneath the Lord’s great fire.

She stepped a little closer, close enough that he could see the faint fan of fine lines at the corners of her honey-brown eyes, the sign of a woman who had laughed often and wept in private. Her gaze, when it settled on him, was steady and luminant, like lamp-flame sheltered by cupped hands.

“Listen well, my incorrigible wrath,” she said softly. “The sands are full of men who trusted in their bones and forgot their purpose. Their skulls make very pretty bowls for scorpions.”

Her hand rose, light and deliberate, and came to rest against his chest, just over his heart. Her palm was warm, calloused by years of sword-hilt and prayer-beads alike.

“You go now as more than a blade looking for ribs,” she continued. “You go as a lantern carried into an untraveled wadi of the dead. Your task is not conquest. It is discernment. You are to be my eyes where the air smells wrong, my ears where the silence feels too heavy, my memory where the road of souls frays like an old rope.”

She withdrew her hand, fingers sketching a small radiant arc in the air between them, the familiar sigil of the Lord of Light’s blessing.

“Look for the places where death does not behave,” she said. “Where corpses refuse to rise or rise crooked. Where prayers fall flat in the mouth. Where the skin on your neck prickles and you cannot say why. All of that is testimony. Scripture written in dust and bone. Bring it back to me intact.”

A faint smile touched her lips when she spoke Ixqueya’s name.

“As for our frost-born emissary,” Zubaida went on, “walk beside her as a comrade, not a climber. She is not a siege-tower for you to scale in the moonlight. She is another sentinel set along a different stretch of the same wall. Let her count; you cut. Let her measure; you move. Two guardians, not one hunter and his quarry.”

Her gaze dipped very pointedly to the kïjil at his hip, then, with unmistakable mischief, a fraction lower before returning to his eyes.

“And since we are speaking of cutting,” she added, tone dry as sun-baked stone, “remember that you carry two curved swords. Only one of them is consecrated for this pilgrimage. If you insist on thinking with steel, let it be the one forged of iron, not the one forged of impulse.”

The rebuke glinted, sharp for a heartbeat, then mellowed again in the warmth of her expression.

“The Lord of Light has a talent for using even the most outrageous men as instruments,” she said. “You may name it luck or arrogance or sheer accident. I call it providence in untidy clothing. He has placed you at the fulcrum of something old and dangerous. Walk into it with more hunger for truth than for thighs, and you may yet come back with both your life and your legends.”

She lifted her hand once more and laid two fingers lightly against his brow, a soldier’s benediction.

“May His fire sit behind your eyes,” she intoned, voice dropping to a reverent murmur. “May His gaze lengthen your shadow farther than your reach. May your feet find firm ground where others sink, and may your blade open only those throats that deserve the dark.”

When she drew back, the solemnity fractured into a slow, wicked smile.

“Now go,” she said, gesturing toward the gate and the burning sea of dunes beyond. “Find our missing dead. Stare down the Defiled. Try very hard not to pick a fight with the first abomination that looks at you sideways.”

Her eyes gleamed with humor. “And if you must pursue your ‘foreign beauty,’ do it with enough sense not to die under her. I have no wish to stand before the Lord of Light and explain that my fiercest wrath perished because he mistook a diplomatic venture for a mating ritual and was subsequently compressed beneath a giantess’s very impressive geometry.”

She chuckled, low and musical. “Bring me reports of souls and storms, not a legend about how loudly the dunes shook when she sat on you. That is all I require, my little flame.”