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.”

Sukegei listened to the blessing, chin tilted down, eyes half-lidded like a man being fitted for armor he hadn’t asked for but knew he’d wear anyway. When she took her fingers from his brow, he blew out a slow breath and rolled his shoulders, settling the weight of the kïjil at his hip. The usual grin crept back in, crooked and shameless. “Alright then,” he said. “Your wrath, your eyes, your ears. I’ve got it. I’ll go find your missing dead, sniff out whatever filth is chewing on the road, and try very hard not to end up as a skull-cup for scorpions.”

He dipped his head to her, an irreverent half-bow that still somehow counted as respect. “Big Lady Zubaida, patron saint of throwing me at impossible problems. Consider your charge accepted.” He turned toward the gate, the desert heat hitting him full in the face, then glanced back over his shoulder, smirk widening. “As for the giantess,” he added, “I’ll be good. I’ll just admire her. From a polite distance. Like a gentleman.”

A beat. “Unless,” he went on, “she decides she wants a taste of my legendary Shaitan dominance. Then it’d be rude and uncivilized to say no, wouldn’t it? Bad diplomacy. Terrible manners. Can’t have that.” He tapped two fingers against his chest, where her hand had rested a moment before. “Besides,” he snorted, “your Lord of Light seems to have a thing for martyrs. If I die under a giant pair of tits while saving the world, that’s practically a holy day.”

With that he gave her one last, lopsided grin, all teeth and trouble. “Stay safe, holy woman,” he said. “I’ll bring you news. With luck, it’ll be about Defiled and soul-roads, not about how I got turned into a rug.” He adjusted his sword on his hip, squared his shoulders like a man walking into a bar fight he fully expected to win, and strode off toward the gate and the waiting sand, whistling under his breath like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Zubaida pressed the heel of her palm to her brow, as though she might smooth the ache back into the horizon where it belonged. The lanterns along the corridor burned too brightly. Each flame felt like a miniature sun boring through her skull, a corona of white heat pulsing behind her eyes. Her fingers moved in slow, circular passes over her temple, the practiced benediction of a woman who had known too many battles of the spirit and too many sleepless vigils at the altar of worry.

“In the Lord of Light’s exalted name,” Zubaida sighed, her voice rich with indulgent affection, “I must remember to hurl a sandal at that man upon his return.” The corners of her mouth softened despite the throb behind her eyes. “He is a torment. Yet one of those rare headaches worth enduring. On occasion.” Her gaze drifted toward some distant, unseen north where frost and hoarfrosted queens reigned. “He belongs to Ixqueya now. Let Lady Winter carry that particular storm. My desert has enough mirages to shepherd.”

For a moment she simply inhaled, drawing the corridor’s heat into her lungs and letting it leave her as something tempered and serene. The pain receded a fraction. Not vanquished, but tamed. Zubaida lowered her hand and turned on her heel. The motion coaxed a slow, luminous grin across her features, the kind of smile that could bless or condemn with equal grace. It lit her face like sunrise spilling over a sea of dunes.

“Well then,” she murmured, tone turning conspiratorial and almost girlish beneath its matronly warmth. “Now it is time to go liberate Lut’s lamp from his custody.”

Her bracelets chimed like tiny votive bells as she gathered her robes. Sand-coloured fabric fluttered around her ankles in soft, swirling eddies. With the unhurried levity of a mother sliding from sermon into mischief, Zubaida set off down the hall. Her steps became a light, playful skip, each footfall a quiet hymn on stone, as she moved away beneath the all-seeing gaze of the Lord of Light and into whatever small blasphemy the evening still owed her.

Onto the next scene

The pleasure house crouched at the edge of the bazaar like a suppurating wound on the hide of the city. Blistered swathes of turquoise and vermilion peeled from its walls in diseased curls. Balconies sagged under the fatigue of rotten beams. Their splintered balustrades wore moth-eaten tapestries that stirred only when the wind felt cruel. Curtains of overripe plum clung to crooked rods. Their fabric was threadbare. Their stains were old and intimate.

Heat exhaled from the structure in slow, oppressive breaths. The White Sand Empire’s furnace spirit pressed itself against every surface. Stone sweated. Flesh sweated. Even the air seemed to bead and run. Spices tried to dominate the reek and failed. Pungent cumin. Rancid wine soured into vinegar. Acrid smoke from incense braziers that had burned too long and too often. Beneath it all lay the true foundation. A mephitic undertone of fish and shellfish abandoned to the sun. Brine gone corpse-stale. It pooled at the threshold like a polluted tide. It had soaked the lintel and the sill. It slithered up Ixqueya’s nostrils with obscene familiarity.

She halted at the doorway. Her colossal shadow drowned the entrance. She chose not to cross it.

Nine feet of winter incarnate stood in the alley. Her bronze skin did not shine with human perspiration. It gleamed with the austere luster of metal quarried from an ice-locked cavern. The turquoise strip that masqueraded as a garment stretched to its limits across the proud arches of her chest. It labored to contain the twin, perky mounds of flesh that rose and settled with slow, ritual gravity. No coquettish bounce. No girlish frivolity. Each movement resembled the measured swing of sanctified pendulums that kept the hours of harsher gods.

Her waist narrowed with almost sculptural cruelty. A chisel’s vision had bitten there. The torso tapered into a cusp before flaring outward in a sumptuous proclamation of hip. At her back, a stingy ribbon of cloth offered the barest nod toward modesty. It brushed the apex of her callipygian grandeur and nothing more. The full, rounded swell of her gluteal magnificence stood revealed. A living throne carved in flesh. A sovereign’s dais that had never known defeat.

Long legs poured down from that opulent junction. Powerful thighs carried the dense strength of living marble. Every flex drew shadows along cords of muscle. They narrowed into calves wound tight as bowstrings. Her heels were tall enough to humiliate the pride of lesser women. Sky-piercing spires of leather and carved wood. Each step she would take would be an ascension. Rigid straps clasped her ankles. Beaded anklets traced luminous rings over sinew and bone. The interplay of rough leather and polished stone coerced the gaze upward in a slow, involuntary pilgrimage.

Her face belonged to a season that loved nothing it could not freeze. High cheekbones rose like glaciated ridges. Light and shadow broke along them in sharp, merciless facets. Her brow swept above them in a clean, severe arc. It had the quiet weight of a storm front. Her nose descended in a straight, unbending column. Patrician. Unapologetic. Her mouth completed the verdict. Full lips in the shade of sun-baked terracotta shaped themselves into a perpetual, deliberate disdain. Any smile would come only after interrogation. Perhaps not even then.

Her eyes held the true authority. Almond-shaped. Luminous. Their irises burned with glacial turquoise. A darker ring encircled each one like a frozen shoreline around a deep, secret sea. They did not simply look. They audited. They assessed. They recorded. Lashes black as obsidian fronds cast intricate lattices of shadow across her cheeks. A single increment of brow could unmake an argument before it dared to breathe.

Above it all rose her crown. Feathers unfurled around her skull in a savage nimbus. Ivory. Teal. Rust-red. Each quill shimmered with the faint, uncanny lustre of Necro Ice. Not enough to frost the air. Enough to make it remember winter. Her hair poured from beneath this barbaric diadem in restless black waves. Threads of electric blue and cold fire streaked through it. They flashed like lightning trapped and frozen mid-fork. The mane tumbled over one sculpted shoulder and down the disciplined curve of her back. It framed the proud swell of her bosom and the broad, imperial slope of her shoulders the way night frames a brewing storm.

Around her, the city attempted pageantry. On either side of the alley, mushroom villas reared up. Bulbous domes of pale plaster squatted atop carved stone stalks. The buildings looked less constructed than germinated. Fungoid palaces that had thrust themselves from the exhausted earth overnight. Their caps sagged at the edges. Watermarks bled downward in tiered stains. The plaster exfoliated in chalky glyphs. Each flake carried away another pretense of dignity.

Beneath the new plaster lay the city’s older skin. Chisel marks, half-erased. Gouges from riots that had long since burned out. Claw-like scratches made by hands that had not yet learned to wash blood away properly. Every surface bore the palimpsest of iconoclasm and vengeance. Their ancestors had howled in this very dust. They had shrieked at idols. They had hurled excrement at stone effigies and at one another. Now their descendants inhabited petrified fungi and called it culture. The domes thrust upward in stiff, round-shouldered yearning. They resembled supplicants who had knelt too long before a sky that never answered.

Ixqueya regarded them with a detached curiosity that very nearly curdled into amusement.

Her thoughts slipped back to the conclave with Zubaida. The memory rose with the clarity of ice. Polished obsidian floors. Stained-glass windows that bled molten color across incense-thick air. Coils of smoke climbed like pale serpents. They wound themselves around columns carved with sermons in stone.

Zubaida had waited there. High Lantern of the Lord of Light. Holy Mother. Warden of the Sacred Flame. Her titles accumulated on the tongue like ceremonial dust. Impressive in volume. Weightless upon inspection.

Ixqueya had laid the ledgers between them. Pages of meticulous script. Columns of names. Souls destined for Hextor’s frozen archives. Pilgrims who should have slipped into the ice at the foot of the Undying Tree and settled there forever. Stones cast into a bottomless, silent well. Yet gaps yawned within the lists. Lines ended mid-breath. Names that should have been inscribed in frost had vanished. Something had taken bites out of the account.

The inquisitor had pointed to those absences. Here. Here. Here. Proof that someone had reached into the passage between life and death. Proof that the traffic of souls had been diverted.

Zubaida had listened with grave, luminous eyes. Her voice had moved like smoke. Soft. Careful. Evasive. She spoke of mysteries beyond mortal calculus. Of providence that sometimes altered the course of souls for reasons no book could capture. Of ineffable design.

Words. Perfume poured over rot.

Ixqueya had left with dust on her tongue. In the dominion of bone and frost there were no sacred oversights. A soul either lay entombed in the ice. Or it did not. If it did not, it had been taken. Somewhere beneath this starved sky. Somewhere among these bazaars and minarets. Beneath these mushroom domes and vulgar lamps. A hand had thrust itself into the grave and stolen what belonged to her queen.

Her bracelets clinked as she flexed her fingers. Tiny shards of Necro Ice nestled amid bone beads and turquoise discs. They rang with a brittle, crystalline timbre. The sound resembled a very delicate threat. She imagined the missing souls as snowflakes in transit. Each flake falling toward the eternal drift at the roots of the Undying Tree. Each one snatched mid-descent by an invisible predator. Swallowed by a darkness that dared to call itself sovereign.

The thought disgusted her more deeply than the brothel’s fish rot.

Worse. She would not pursue this blasphemy alone.

Sukegei.

Her gaze slid toward the mouth of the alley. The bazaar sprawled beyond it in a cataract of color and sound. Sunlight struck copper, fabric, knives, bare teeth. Somewhere within that moving chaos the Lord of Light’s favored hound threaded his way toward her. She could already conjure him in her mind. The swaggering stride. The lazy, lethal grin. The irreverent quips that treated martyrdom as a tavern jest. The eyes that would roam over her body with ribald appreciation and utterly insufficient comprehension.

She considered his bones. Sun-hardened. Battle tested. Riddled with old fractures that had never fully learned their lesson. She knew, as intimately as she knew her own breath, that she could unmake him. One vertebra at a time. Desert piety crushed beneath polar inevitability. She could feel his spine flex already in the theatre of her mind.

Providence required otherwise. For the moment.

Besides. A man whose first instinct was lechery rather than awe did not qualify for her more esoteric mercies. The true gospel of her flesh was not written for the casually curious. The liturgy inscribed between her thighs was a sacrament. It demanded devotions he had not yet imagined. It demanded terror as well as desire.

The brothel door jerked open. A spill of patrons lurched into the alley. Their bodies glistened with perfume and sweat. Their laughter had the thin, cracked quality of clay cups chipped at the rim. It faltered when they saw her.

Their gazes climbed by increments. Ankles. Straps. The long architecture of her legs. The dramatic swell of hip and haunch. The disciplined curve of her back. The luxurious slopes of her chest. At last, the ascent reached her face. Her eyes met theirs. Winter met lantern flame.

Silence radiated outward in ripples. The crowd broke around her. Men slipped sideways, giving her a berth as wide as fear and superstition could measure. Some muttered prayers. Others simply stared at the ground, as if the dust might intercede on their behalf.

Ixqueya tilted her head back. The sky above was a merciless blue vault. Not a cloud. Not a mercy. The sun hammered the Necro Ice crystals braided into her ornaments. They answered with miniature auroras. Tiny ghosts of polar lights flickered around her throat and hair. No desert eye could interpret them. The empire understood only fire.

Far beyond that brightness, in the true cold, the Undying Tree waited. Roots delved through strata of bone and forgotten centuries. Branches held up a cosmos of frozen memory. There, the ledgers of death remained pristine. They expected restitution.

Sukegei would arrive. The hunt would begin. This spore-city of mushroom palaces and rancid pleasure dens would yield its thief. Or it would crack beneath the collision of frost and flame.

Until that hour, the giantess remained at the threshold. Still. Self-possessed. A glacier poised at the lip of the desert. All sculpted splendor and lethal composure. A femme fatale forged in winter’s most unforgiving heart. She waited with patient, predatory intent before a house that trafficked in rented heat, certain that when she finally moved, something in this city would never move again.

Sukegei moved through the bazaar in that loose, rolling stride of a man who had seen too many wars to be impressed by a crowd. Vendors shouted. Flies worried at meat. Somewhere a woman laughed too loud for this heat. He heard all of it and cared for none of it. His thoughts were busy with winter and conquest. Not the northern kind. The walking kind. The one with legs like siege towers and an arse that could start a religion. Ixqueya. Frost-made-flesh. A fortress with hips. He had spent the last hour wondering whether a man laid siege to a woman like that, or whether he simply surrendered early and tried to enjoy the occupation.

He smirked to himself and kept walking. The stink of the brothel hit him first. Old incense. Cheaper perfume. Sweat that had given up. And under it, that same reek of fish that every port and pleasure den seemed to share, whether they were near the sea or not. He wrinkled his nose.
"Smells like someone tried to drown a whorehouse in a fish barrel," he muttered, mostly to himself.

He meant to step around the doorway. Meant to look up, find the feathered crown, say something clever before she could freeze him with that stare. Instead he walked straight into her. One step. Heat. Noise. The next. His face crashed into a wall of firm, perfect flesh. His nose mashed against the deep curve of her backside. His cheek spread across the generous swell of it before his brain caught up. For a heartbeat he was just there. Buried in bronze. The brothel, the bazaar, the whole world reduced to the feel of that callipygian monument under his face.

Then he jerked back with a grunt, half choking, half laughing. His hand snapped to his sword by habit. His eyes went up by degrees. Ankles. Straps. Long calves that did not know the meaning of mercy. Thighs that looked like they could crack stone, or a man, without breaking stride. The outrageous curve he had just greeted with his nose. The tight pinch of her waist. The proud weight of her chest. The spill of black and blue hair. The crown of feathers. The eyes like cold knives.

She was looking down at him like the world’s tallest mistake. He wiped a bit of grit from his mouth, then grinned up at her, shameless. "Saints above," he said. "If you wanted my head between your cheeks, ice-queen, you could have warned a man. I would have at least taken my boots off. Sacred ground and all." A couple of brothel patrons on the steps barked ugly laughter. One slurred something about desert boys and giant women. Another snickered loud enough to be brave.

Sukegei did not bother to look at them. He flicked his hand as if shooing flies. "Clear off," he called. "Street is closed. City work. Go back inside and pay someone to pretend they like you." One of them puffed himself up, ready to protest. Sukegei shifted his cloak just enough to show the hilt at his hip and the easy, bored set of a man very used to killing for less. The bravado bled out of the fellow at once. The little knot of drunks peeled away into the bazaar, swearing under their breath and still stealing hungry glances at Ixqueya’s legs.

When they were gone, Sukegei dusted his chest with exaggerated care. "That backside of yours should come with a warning marker," he said, still grinning. "Hardest thing I have hit all month. And I ran into a city gate yesterday. Truth told, if I die on campaign, I would not complain if that was the last thing I saw." He let his gaze roam up and down her again. Open. Appreciative. Utterly unrepentant.

"Could have been worse," he added. "My nose has met uglier places. If the gods want to break it, better there than a stone wall." He stepped in just enough to lower his voice, though he made no real effort to be discreet. "Next time you park a whole fortress in the street, at least give me a sign. ‘Mind your step. Holy cheeks ahead.’ Something like that."

He took a slow, deliberate breath. The reek of fish and incense tried to crowd in, but there was something else under it. Cold. Clean. A sharp, strange scent like snow over metal. He snorted, amused. "Filthy city. Filthy street. Filthy door." His grin crooked wider. "You, though. You smell damn good."

Before the first syllable of his startled exclamation had time to form, Ixqueya felt him. A compact, almost comical jolt. A mortal skull striking the bubble-smooth arc of her rear. The impact rippled through the velvet swell of her flesh. A small, secret tremor ran along the full curve of her callipygian majesty. Pale motion spiraled outward in concentric rings. Each delicate wave shimmered across her backside like a dewdrop skipping over a glassy, moonlit pond.

For a single suspended breath, the alley forgot to live.

Sallow lantern light pooled against moss-black stone. Halos fluttered over slick cobbles. Sour steam rose from rotting refuse and braided itself into the humid air. Farther down the lane, drunken laughter dragged itself over broken syllables. All of that retreated. The city’s noise and filth and breath sank to the edge of her awareness. Only that absurdly intimate contact remained. Only the glacial certainty that this was the closest his foolish face would ever come to that private sanctum. A fleeting knock upon a gate he had no key to open.

She did not flinch. Giants did not quiver when gnats bruised their hide.

Her weight shifted upon the uneven stones. The adjustment moved through her frame with such discipline it seemed like sculpture rather than motion. One hip eased outward in a languid, sovereign curve. Her vertebrae slid into flawless alignment. A column of onyx crowned by frost. She inhaled once. The faint vibration passed through her like a wave striking a cliff of basalt. It rose. It died. It left nothing changed.

Then she turned.

She moved as a glacier moves. Slow. Inexorable. Indifferent to anything that stood in its path. Each small angle of shoulder and spine carved winter into the dusk. The air thickened. Frost took shape in the silence between heartbeats. The alley felt narrower. Its walls leaned inward with the hesitant awe of commoners in a throne room.

Her gaze found him.

Cold. Hard. Luminous. A shard of turquoise ice held up against a polar firmament.

He sprawled on the cobbles. Dust smeared across his jaw like crude, unearned war paint. His lips clung to a half-mad grin. Bravado flickered in his eyes. The light in them wavered like candle flame in a draft. His chest rose in shallow, ragged pulls. Each breath betrayed by surprise and pride in equal measure. She regarded him as a priestess studies a crack in a sanctified idol. An imperfection to be noted. Possibly exploited. Never repaired.

When she spoke, her voice slipped into the thick air like polished steel descending into dark oil. "Imp."

The single word dropped between them. Clean. Final. Echoes crawled along the stone and then obeyed.

"You have just introduced your face to the rear bastion of a foreign inquisitor." Her tone remained serene. Almost conversational. The cruelty sat beneath the calm like a blade under velvet. "It trembled not because some capricious providence chose to bless you. It trembled because flesh is obedient to force. Any flesh. Even mine."

Her lips curved. The expression mimicked a smile in the way a knife mimics an embrace.

"That ripple is as near as you will ever come to such a prize. Fix it in your memory. Call it almsgiving."

Her gaze drifted over him again. Boots scarred by travel and neglect. A cloak stained by old roads and older mistakes. A sword with just enough age to pretend at lineage. The lazy set of his shoulders. The posture of a man who had survived long enough to mistake familiarity with danger for mastery of it. A man who had forgotten the scale of things.

"You speak of my body as if it were a breached fortress." Her words fell one by one. Each carried its own frost. "You speak as though you grasp the magnitude of what you choose to toy with."

A breath of cold left her lips. The air around them contracted as though it remembered winter.

"You know nothing of my capacities, little flame-hound. You have not watched a city fall silent at a single gesture. You have not seen a living army discover that every breath they draw has already been tallied and inked in another sovereign’s ledger. You have not stood beneath a sky that understands you only as a future corpse and a present statistic."

She lifted her chin. The alley stones seemed to lean closer. The walls listened.

"Remain in your gutter thoughts if that is the depth of your ambition. The gutter resembles the ditch where most of your kind lie content until the worms inherit them. Yet hear me. If you persist in craving what you cannot bear, I will indulge you."

Her eyes darkened. The turquoise deepened toward the color of drowned light. "I will grant you intimacy."

The next words descended with the slow, merciless certainty of fresh snow falling on a graveyard.

"You will stand in my hall as a thrall. Your body encased within the ice of my palace walls. Your soul pinned like an insect in an anatomist’s cabinet. Your tongue rendered useless. Your scream arrested behind perfect crystal. Your eyelids forced open to witness winter’s art as it takes the world apart and arranges it correctly. You will lie nearer to my flesh than any lover who has ever dared to lay a hand upon it. You will never again move so much as a fingertip toward me."

She held him there. Caught in her stare and in the future she painted. The image settled into him. Frost seeking bone.

Then she laughed.

The sound emerged as a low, resonant chortle. No warmth cloaked it. Only indulgence. The rich amusement of a queen who has just watched a jester fall on his face and finds the spectacle adequate.

"Yet," she said, her tone slipping into sardonic cadence, "you were very fearsome with those unarmed drunks."

Her attention slid past him. Lantern light picked out the shambling silhouettes stumbling away. Ragged men with sour breath and emptier purses. Her mouth twitched. The hint of a smile sharpened, then disciplined itself into something colder.

"You scattered ragamuffins who could scarcely stand upright. You cowed men whose most dangerous weapons were rancid belches and frayed lute strings. Astonishing." She inclined her head a fraction. The gesture looked like homage and tasted like mockery. "Clearly I walk beside a terror of legend. One of the storied Shaitan champions. The very sword your Lord of Light cast into the world."

The title hung in the air. Beautiful. Brittle. Frost laid delicately on glass. One harsh breath away from fracture.

Ixqueya leaned forward. Lantern glow slipped across the planes of her face and burned in the turquoise depths of her eyes. Her voice dropped into a softer register. The gentleness made it more lethal.

"Tell me," she murmured. "Has your sky-father granted you anything beyond a mouth full of gutter jests and the stubborn stupidity required to ram your skull into my backside."

Her eyes narrowed. Frost and mordant mirth tangled in their depths. Frost tightened its grip.

"Sniff if you wish, imp." Her tone settled into quiet verdict. "Candles do not own winter. Winter devours them."

Sukegei lay there a heartbeat longer than he needed to. Flat on his back. Staring up at nine feet of frost and contempt. His nose still tingled where it had bounced off her. His pride a little less. Worth it. He let her whole sermon wash over him. Ice. Ledgers. pinned souls. Palace walls. The words were sharp enough. The voice colder than most steel he had carried. He listened the way a man listens to a storm on the other side of the tent. Noted it. Did not move.

When she finished, he snorted and pushed himself upright. Boots scraping stone. Knees popping a little in protest. He dusted off his chest. His shoulders. His cheek where her backside had left its brief, blessed imprint. His palm lingered there a moment. He looked at his hand as if it might have picked up holy oil. "Imp, is it," he said. "That is a new one. Usually they go with bastard. Or dog."

He looked up at her and let his grin turn wicked. "As for rear bastion. I have taken worse blows in worse places. If I have to ram my head into a wall, I prefer it be that one. Solid construction. Good give. I could die on that hill happy." He rolled his neck until it cracked, then gave her a little half bow of the shoulders.

"So. Thank you for the charitable ripple," he went on. "Most men pay good coin to get their face that close. I trip and get it for free. I call that a blessing. Frostbitten one or not." Her threats about ice and walls and pinned souls seemed to amuse him more than terrify him. His eyes glittered with something wary and stubborn, but his mouth stayed loose.

"You talk very pretty about ruining a man," he said. "Freeze him. Mount him. Keep him close to you and never let him touch. You know what that sounds like where I come from. Marriage." He lifted his hands and counted off on his fingers as if reciting a catechism. "She keeps you in her house. She looks divine. You are always near her. You never get what you want. You scream a lot and nobody listens. Only difference is your version comes with nicer walls."

He chuckled, low and rude. "Still closer to you than most will ever get. So even your threat sounds like a compliment. I will take it. Nice to know I made that strong an impression. All from one little kiss on your holy cheeks." Her sarcasm about the drunks earned a proper laugh. He glanced down the alley at the fleeing shapes and spread his arms.

"Aye. You saw that," he said. "Terrifying work. Men so drunk they could not piss straight. I looked at them. They ran." He shrugged. "I take the victories I can get. You freeze armies. I clear vermin. Someone has to shoo the flies off your road so you do not step in something unfortunate." She named him Shaitan champion and Sword of the Lord of Light. He tipped two fingers against his temple in a lazy mock salute.

"I like that," he said. "Shaitan warrior. Sword of the shining sky-father. Next tavern I walk into, I will have the bard write it into a song. Leave out the part where I headbutt your backside, of course. That part is mine." Her question about his god drew a snort. He rubbed the bridge of his nose again, then winked up at her. "Has he given me anything," he repeated. "Oh, plenty. A dirty mind. A hard head. Good hands. Shameful ideas about tall women. Talent for staying alive when I ought to be buried. And today he gave me the miracle of all miracles."

He pointed at her rear with obscene cheer. "He arranged the whole world so that my face landed there instead of the gutter. That is better than most prayers get answered." He stepped in closer. Not enough to provoke. Just enough to speak without the whole street hearing. "You can talk of worms and ditches and how small I am," he said. "You can freeze me and hang me on your wall if it pleases you. Until that day I will keep doing what I do. Swing steel. Talk filth. Chase trouble. Walk straight into things I should not. Apparently that includes your backside."

His grin softened for a breath into something almost appreciative. "And for all your cold sermons, you chose to notice me," he added. "Could have walked past. Instead I have a title, a threat, and a memory." He drew in a slow breath. The mix of brothel stench and her unnaturally clean chill filled his lungs. He made a show of savoring it.

"So write what you like in your ledger, winter-queen," he finished. "Call me imp. Call me sword. Call me idiot. But you cannot change one holy truth." He tapped the side of his nose with one finger, smug. "My head has already been where your high priests would faint to imagine. They can pray in your halls all their lives and never get as close as I did in one stupid step. You can turn me to ice tomorrow and that will still be true."

He gave her a last, unabashed once-over and laughed under his breath. "And say what you will about candles and winter," he added. "You smell very good. Like the sort of trouble no sensible man walks away from." He jerked his chin toward the street. "Come on then," he said. "Let us hunt your stolen souls. If I am going to end up as your frozen wall art, I would like to at least earn the frame."

Ixqueya watched him rise. Dust himself off. Smirk as if the alley had applauded.

Heat clung to the stones. The brothel breathed out its rancid perfume of sweat and fish and stale incense. His scent threaded through it. Male musk. Iron. Road dust. The sharp, cocky tang of a man who walked too easily with his own mortality. He shook himself like a dog out of water and rattled off his little inventory of so-called blessings. Scars. Knees. Cock. Tongue. Holy good fortune and a faceful of her flesh.

Her expression did not alter. Her eyes remained like glacier glass. Clear. Depthless. Utterly unimpressed.

"You mistake a great deal, imp."

Her voice cut through the heat as cleanly as a knife through silk. No haste. No raise in pitch. Only precision.

"You mistake an accident for triumph. You mistake condescension for favor. You mistake a warning for courtship." She let the words fall one by one. "You tripped on a filthy street. Your skull collided with my body. That is all. A beggar stumbled against a locked gate and now wanders about claiming he owns the temple."

Her head inclined a fraction. Feathers rustled, a soft, icy susurrus.

"That brief touch means nothing. It is not a rite. It is not a sign. It is not the world turning for your benefit. It is a misstep, and a foolish one. The gods did not guide your face to my flesh. Your clumsiness did."

Her gaze traveled over him. Measured. Clinical. The look an accountant gives a damaged coin.

"You compare my sentence to marriage." The corner of her mouth moved, almost but not quite a smile. "In Hextor we do not waste palace walls on husbands. We reserve them for those who have earned a silence that is useful. Thralls do not complain. Their value is fixed. That alone places them above most spouses."

She shifted her weight and the alley seemed to lean with her.

"You boast that your head has been where my priests would faint to imagine." Her tone sharpened. "They do not faint because their imagination is weak. They refrain because their discipline is strong. They know that pressing one’s face against a door is not the same as entering the sanctum behind it. They understand that proximity without sanction is not privilege. It is trespass. The act of a dog leaping at the altar rail."

Her eyes narrowed. A slow, glacial narrowing that carried more threat than any shout.

"You amuse yourself by speaking of my flesh in the same breath as your god. You think that clever. It is simply vulgar." Her voice cooled further. "Try it again. I will have your tongue cut out. Your Lord of Light may still hear you in your head. I will no longer be obliged to hear you at all."

Her gaze drifted to the scars that crossed his chest. The set of his shoulders. The easy way he stood in danger as if danger were an old friend with bad manners.

"Your sky father has given you many things. A hard skull. A filthy wit. An inconvenient refusal to die. These are not marks of favor. They are the traits of a tool he intends to spend. Candles burn brightest as they near their end. You brag that the greatest miracle of your god is that your head happened to strike my rear instead of the gutter." She shook her head once. A queen dismissing poor tribute. "The Undying Tree does not traffic in such miracles. It traffics in value. In weight. In what can be counted."

She lifted her chin. The crystals threaded through her ornaments chimed with the faintest ring of ice.

"You call yourself a sword. You flatter yourself. At best you are the current hand that grips whatever blade your clergy are waving this season. Steel outlives the hand that swings it. Faith outlives the men who shout its name. When your usefulness ends, your Lord of Light will let you gutter in the sand. My queen does not waste what she takes. She preserves it. There is the difference."

She closed the distance by a step. Not enough to touch. Enough that his world became feather, frost and the cold geometry of her face.

"You claim you will keep burning as you please. In gutters. In palaces. In my shadow, if that is where the road runs." Her eyes did not leave his. "Understand me. A flame that wanders too close to the roots of the Tree does not scorch anything. It leaves a small black mark on the ledger. Then it is gone."

Her gaze flicked, almost lazily, to the place where his face had struck her. The velvet curve of flesh. The memory of that small, involuntary quiver.

"This city will forget that moment before sunrise," she said. "The brothel will forget. The alley will forget. Your priests will pretend it never occurred. The only soul who will clutch it like a relic is you. That is the true measure of its importance."

She straightened. The air between them seemed to cool by instinct.

"You call yourself an imp. A sword. An idiot." Her tone remained flat. "For once, you are accurate. So I will treat you accordingly."

She turned half away. The brothel lurked at her side. A diseased wound on the street. The mushroom domes loomed beyond, pale and stupid against the sky.

"Walk, imp." The command was soft. It carried more weight than a shouted order. "Keep your gutter talk for men who mistake noise for power. Keep your worship for your sky phantom. Keep your courage for the moment you finally see what I am actually capable of."

She glanced back over her shoulder. The look cut as neatly as a sword stroke.

"And stop congratulating yourself for where your head has been. The lowest frost-stained stone in my palace has known more glory than that."

She stepped forward. The chill of her presence moved with her, a slow tide rolling over hot stone.

"Come. We have stolen souls to reclaim. You may yet manage to be useful. Even a cheap candle has its hour before it is swallowed by the dark."

Sukegei walked at her side for a few steps. Quiet. Head tilted, as if listening to the echo of her words bouncing off the alley walls. Then he snorted a short laugh and rubbed at his jaw where dust still clung. "Imp," he repeated. "You keep calling me that. Cute little pet name." He glanced up at her. Eyes bright. Mouth crooked in that lazy, half-drunk smile that always looked one thought ahead of trouble.

"Careful, winter-priestess. You keep saying it and people will talk. They will say I am growing on you. Little candle in the corner whose light you secretly enjoy." He lifted his hand. Wiggled his fingers as if miming the flicker of a flame. "Even a candle has its uses. Gives a bit of warmth. Throws a bit of light. Sometimes you put it on the bedside table. Sometimes you bring it closer. For the body. For the heart, if you have one. Maybe even for the bed."

His grin widened a fraction at that. Cheerfully wicked. He held her gaze just long enough to make the suggestion clear. Just short enough to avoid daring her to make good on her threats. Then he let his eyes roam the alley. The brothel doorway gaped, empty and sullen. No patrons lingered. No curious faces peered from the mushroom houses. The crowd had bled away while winter and fire traded scripture. Only heat and stone and the two of them remained. The silence felt thick. He seemed to notice it for the first time.

"Look at that," he said. "Cleared the whole bloody street without trying. You with your frost. Me with my charming personality. We make a fine plague." He rolled his shoulders and fell half a step behind her. Hands loose. Gait loose. Always moving as if the ground might shift but he would ride it anyway. "Now then," he went on. "You say we have stolen souls to reclaim. That means you and me are partners. Equals in this little pilgrimage. For now."

He let the word "equals" hang just long enough to be cheeky. Not long enough to sound like a challenge. "So. Partner," he said. "What happens next." He tapped the side of his head. "I was given a blessing. A name or two. A warning to keep my hands off what walks in ice and feathers. Not much else. No map. No list. Certainly no magic ledger of the dead that tells me whose ghosts went missing and which alley they preferred."
He made a show of looking around again. As if a ghost might be hiding behind a barrel.

"You have your Tree. Your accounts. Your numbers carved in frost. I have sand in my boots and a sword on my hip. If we are to hunt thieves of souls, you will have to do more than call me a candle and hope I burn in the right direction." His tone softened a breath. Still rough. Still edged with humor. Yet carrying the weight of a man who had done this kind of work in too many places. "So tell me how you see it," he said. "Who is missing. Who gains from it. Where you would hide if you were bold enough to steal from your death-queen and clever enough to vanish in this hive."
He flashed her one more crooked smile.

"You lead, frost. I follow. I will keep the road clear. Scare the drunks. Swing at whatever crawls out of the dark." He lifted his shoulders in a small, careless shrug. "And if I annoy you along the way, you can comfort yourself with this." He patted his chest with a slow, mocking solemnity. "I am your imp now. Your little candle. Try not to enjoy it too much." He jeered.

"Imp."

The word left her lips again. Flat. Final.

"It is not a pet name. It is a measurement."

Her gaze slipped down to him. No warmth. Only appraisal.

"You are a small thing. Irritating. Noisy. Occasionally useful. Like a knife that rusts yet still cuts. Do not mistake that for affection. I do not keep candles for company. I keep them for light. Then I let them burn out."

She regarded his little pantomime of a flickering flame. The wagging fingers. The suggestion of warmth. Of bed. Of heart.

"You flatter yourself," she said. Each syllable fell with a separate weight. "Any heat you provide belongs to your own fever. Not to me. Winter does not require a desert candle to warm its body. As for my heart. If that organ offends you by existing, console yourself. It is not soft. It is not lonely. It is not waiting for your spark."

Her eyes swept the empty alley. The open doorway. The vanished patrons. The abandoned windows of the mushroom houses.

"You notice they have all gone," she observed. "Of course they have. Even drunkards know to clear the field when predators begin to circle. They felt the cold. They heard your jokes. They understood that nothing good lingers where I stand long."

She returned her attention to him. The faintest tilt of her head acknowledged the rest.

"A nettlesome fly clings to my side. I would prefer to be rid of it. I am not permitted that luxury. Fate has a poor sense of humor. It ties you to this inquiry. It stitches you to my shadow. We must endure one another."

Her tone did not soften. It simply shifted from scorn to business.

"You are correct about your ignorance," she said. "You were given names. Warnings. No structure. No keys. That is the habit of priests who want a weapon but not a partner."

She tapped a knuckle against her own temple.

"I have a ledger. Not on parchment. In here. The Ossuary Dominion does not misplace souls. We map every passage. Who died. Where. Under which rites. To what end the flesh and spirit were spent. The names that trouble us are not vague phantoms. They are precise entries. Missing from corridors that should be sealed."

Her gaze shifted toward the brothel door. The sagging curtains. The chipped paint.

"We begin where the trail is thickest. With commerce. Flesh moves through this house in both directions. Bodies. Coin. Secrets. If someone has learned to lift souls from the stream, they will anchor their work in a place where no one looks too closely at absence. A brothel. A gambling den. A caravanserai. Somewhere men already forget themselves."

She stepped closer to the doorway. Frost seemed to creep into the frame.

"The madam of this place keeps records," Ixqueya said. "Not of souls. Of hours. Of regulars. Of women who fail to return from a job. Of men who stop coming without notice. We will see her ledger. We will compare it to mine. We will find who disappeared on the same nights my accounts tore open."

She glanced back at him. A cool inspection.

"You have no magic ledger. No. You have something else. You know your own kind. You can read the sweat on a man’s neck when he lies. You can hear when fear crawls under his tongue. You can speak in the tone that makes a pimp talk and a guard forget his orders. That is why fate has cursed me with you."

She took another slow breath. The air frosted in the space between them.

"Do not call us equals," she said. "I am an inquisitor of a sovereign realm. You are a contracted blade on loan from a jealous god. We stand side by side because the wound demands two hands. Not because the hands match."

Her eyes narrowed a fraction.

"You will go inside that pleasure house. You will let them see your familiar face and your vulgar smile. You will ease their shoulders. I will follow. I will ask the questions that matter. You will watch for the twitch that betrays guilt. The glance that seeks an unseen door. The silence that lasts a heartbeat too long."

She straightened. Her silhouette filled the alley again.

"That is what comes next, imp. We pull at this thread until it bleeds. We follow it from brothel to banker. From street preacher to caravan master. From the lowest gutter to whatever altar dares to feed on my queen’s tithe."

Her mouth curved. Not in fondness. In something colder.

"Call yourself a candle if it comforts you. I see a fly caught in the same web as I am. We will move together until the web leads us to the spider. After that. Perhaps. I will finally be rid of you."

She turned fully toward the door. One hand lifted to push the curtain aside.

"Walk," she said without looking back. "Buzz in my ear if you must. Just keep your eyes open. If the thief we hunt hears you before he feels me, I will be displeased. And you do not want to discover how little warmth winter has to spare when it is displeased."