“Listen,” the breath rasped, heavy like fur pelts under humidity, “carefully.” The zikwa heaved her words through her parched throat, past her blood filling mouth, and into the air with little pause. She did not have time to lose.

“You must steal its bones, Warden, and bury them deep.” She smiled – red spread across her mouth in a macabre split of her face – at the stalwart eaglehound before turning her nose towards the companion bat that still clung to her quickly cooling hide. “And you, Harvest, must plant a seed that will deter anyone from digging the bones up.” It sounded so simple, as the air within her lungs shuddered, sputtered like a suffocated flame. She let her head drop and felt her cheek sink into the warmwet ground. Just like in her naming dreams.

Its head is far larger than her chest. The harsh sound of breath pulled through its nostril is alarming, even as the rush of warmth from an exhale is comforting. She has the bizarre urge to curl up like a newborn and let the warmth drown her. Indeed she feels the warm salt waters – a soothing balm to a life torn hide that no longer exists – rush upupup over her skin, touch her throat and snake into mouthnoseears. She screams herself to death. And then she sees.

She is angry. She has been pushed – no, pulled – from the ocean’s depths. She fights until her skin fissures, until life is corrupted by unwieldy magics. She is long dead, this ancient water beast, and miserable in servitude. Even with the life’s blood of her master fresh against her tongue, she remains undead. Killkillkillhelpmekillkillkill.

The beast is naught but bones. It lies unguarded in a clearing and seems, for a time, to be still. It does not move as the eaglehound crouches at the edge, crawls forward in slow small increments. Even when the dog takes a single bone between its teeth the beast remains idle – the sun beats down in waves of harsh heat – and it easily makes off with its prize.

She sees the eaglehound bury the bone. The bat comes and drops a seed into the freshly turned soil. And the Motherfather coaxes it to grow. A tiny shoot of green at first; ages later, a ferocious strangling vine covered in sharp needle thorns. It deters the curious, puts the magics to slumber. All the pieces lead to this end.

The last breath came and the zikwa – “with ending breath, begin the grand design” – passed on, surrounded by eaglehound and bat.