By Sarah Pauling
From Goblins & Galaxies #0 Summer 2025
I will tell you the story. The champion and I had ridden three days through the salt flats before his death appeared to me.
He slept on, heedless, curled toward the choking fire we’d struck from horse dung. His death crawled towards me, salt sticking to her knees. Her skirts whipped in a vicious wind.
“Brave boy,” she called out to me, mocking. “Hardly a man, and already you’ve journeyed so far.”
I flinched back from her, speech lost to terror. I’d thought the champion mad to believe himself haunted. I’d known him only a fortnight.
His death wore a circlet of sparrow bones. She laughed like a sweet thrush. “You cling to us like a cowbird, new travelling companion: a coward seeking strong arms to hide behind in the wilds. Fine, then. Expect fair exchange.”
Her features shifted strangely: one moment half-wild, the next the pleasing configuration of mouth and eye and tongue that boys my age would boast about conquering when they thought their sisters couldn’t hear.
“You are alone in the world,” she told me, gloating. “But he will never be alone again.”
Then she crawled back to the champion’s pile of rags, and lowered herself to embrace him, and watched me with black-kohled eyes. She vanished as dawn came.
*~*~*
Understand: it doesn’t matter why I was there. My business is my own. I left Amatrid, left my brothers and our house in the spires, with great urgency. I could never have crossed the flats alone, and the champion—Urstar by name—allowed my company so long as I agreed to keep watch at night and tend to his horses and barter for supplies when we came upon a village. He disliked going among people.
I was born too weak to wield a blade myself. The world, therefore, is dangerous. This is what I have always been told.
Urstar did not disagree. “You’ve the arm of a woman,” he laughed the following night, having drunk down the last of his grain spirits. “It’s a wonder you lived long enough to find me.”
My ears burned. I stared at our struggling fire, the sole point of light in the vastness of the flats. By day, the salt reflected light as a cracked mirror would, burning my eyes and doubling my vision. We sometimes found artifacts preserved by the salt—Urstar was hunting some great treasure here—and I could hardly tell what was real until I held it in my hand.
The flats were once a sea. The gods made war with one another in fierce galley ships, drying the salt with the heat of their slaughter.
By night, the air became cold.
“I saw her,” I said finally.
Urstar broke into a wide grin. “My death. My woman and my master. I see her by my side even now.”
The space beside him was empty, but I no longer disbelieved.
“Is she dangerous?”
He slapped his knee with a broad laugh. “Dangerous! Of course she is. My woman was once a priestess of birds, commanding the will of great flocks. When I died as her champion, she buried me with a token so that I may fly from death. So that I may return to her.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. It was one thing for a man to be haunted. A man returning from the deadlands seemed an idea so heretical that no religious text would think to forbid it.
“But she didn’t expect me to take so long finding the road. I wandered the eternal for many years. She died of old age!” He cackled, choking a moment on his spit. “Do not pity us; we were soon reunited. When I at last found my escape, my death took my woman’s shape to follow me. A possessive mistress!”
He leaned over the fire toward me. His throat was lit from below, muscled and grotesque. “Pass time with me, boy! Speak! Did you find her beautiful?”
My stomach sank. The question seemed a trap. In truth, she was beautiful, but in the way a drunkard’s lusty dream is beautiful. The way a man thinks about a woman, rather than the person of flesh he claimed she once was—I had been close with many women, seen their faults and virtues, and could think of none like her.
I was rescued by a sound rising from under Urstar’s tunic: a hoarse, wordless voice that wasn’t his own. It seemed to resonate from his breastbone. He treated it as a watchman’s warning cry, standing at once to scan the horizon.
He cursed. “We are followed. The cultists who waylaid us in Brayresha. Persistent, for fools without horses.”
Urstar had many enemies, moving as he did from place to place with no respect for others’ power. I wished that I’d guessed this before throwing in my lot with him, but by now we were far away from people, and the horses belonged to him.
I moved to put out the fire. He grinned down at me on my knees. “Would you like to see the token she gave to me? The one that guided me out from the grave?”
He opened his tunic without waiting for an answer. A lapwing was half-sunken into his chest, spread flat, beak protruding from his sternum. Its wings stretched the width of his breast, feathers stuck in the skin.
The warning voice we’d heard was its birdsong. Its little white breast fluttered.
*~*~*
You are asking: why didn’t I leave.
I ask myself the same, sometimes. But Urstar had raised his sword to protect me more than once. I travelled alone before I met him, and the thought frightened me more than his death’s too-perfect fingernails on my back at night. More than the dark way he spoke of whatever treasure they sought. More than watching her catch wheatears by the wing, sobbing in rage when they didn’t die at her touch (she was, after all, no longer their priestess—just the death of one man).
Enough. I will tell you what happened at the caravan.
We saw the nomads’ cooking fires from a long way off on the flats. Urstar wanted food for the horses, so he sent me to barter alone. I came among their strange tents, their laughing children, and found to my dismay that none of us shared a language.
Their men watched me with suspicion as I mimed for hay, face burning. I didn’t know how to walk like them; to stand with authority.
An auntie finally took pity on me, waving me into a tent smelling of peppercorn tea. I heard the laughter of women inside and my shoulders slumped with relief. They sat on goatskin cushions and smoked pipes together. They treated me as a foreigner, but unlike the men, their curiosity did not burn.
I drank what they handed me. The peppercorn spice was so intoxicating in the dry heat of the flats that I thought for a moment to stay with them: to part ways with Urstar and travel the world with kind people I couldn’t understand.
I was tired. I didn’t notice my hosts’ sudden fright until a knife trembled against my throat.
The intruder smelled of incense. “Outside, boy.”
She hooked an arm around my chest. She stilled when she touched me there, as though in surprise—then she shook herself. “Boy,” she repeated, dragging me through the flap. No one dared to stop her.
She threw me to the ground. The sun seared my eyes. My attacker wore the colors of the cult in Brayresha: they must have pursued us with horses after all. The glaive strapped across her back was too large for her, and she squinted in the sun.
“Where is your master?”
“He isn’t here!” I squawked, terrified. “He isn’t here, he’s gone ahead—”
I hadn’t meant to lie to her. I didn’t think Urstar would come. But his lapwing shrieked behind me, and I remembered that the token in his chest warned him of danger.
“Carrion hag!” he bellowed. His shirt was open, a frightening display. “You follow me like a bitch in heat.”
The cultist drew the glaive from her back, stumbling with its weight. “Urstar, you’re mine to give to the hells!”
“Yours? Ha! Only one woman may kill me.”
She seemed for a moment stuck dumb. Then she gave a cry of frustration, or of disbelief. “You’ve always had the wit of a sun-addled goat!”
Urstar stepped forward. His death flew out ahead of him.
It was worse to see his death by daylight. I don’t know how to explain it to you.
Here: imagine your family’s house in flames. The reflection is blinding against the city’s silver spires, but you don’t know how to look away. Then imagine the High Judge and his slaves coming to your eldest brother as he weeps over your father’s body. It is broad daylight, and the Judge is smiling and his teeth are white, and he says: Now you will reconsider. Now I will marry your sister. And he doesn’t have to hide in the shadows to do any of this. If you stay in Amatrid, if you don’t cut your hair and don a man’s tunic and flee, you will have to marry him.
That is a little like how it was.
Her reflection burned against the salt, fractals of wings. She laughed, a lovely sound, and her black hair feathered outward. It twined around me and around the cultist’s glaive and around the nomads standing horrified in their tent flaps. She grew.
The cultist who’d accosted me fought to free her weapon, cursing. She swung it wildly, lurching after its weight. The moment the black hair lost its hold, she turned to run—her hood fell. Her own hair was grey and her face was lined.
As the cultist escaped onto the flats, the bird in Urstar’s chest seemed to lunge forward; to struggle to reach her. He did not allow it to move him. Still, its beady eyes followed her and her alone.
His death paid none of this any mind. Deprived of her victim, she instead wound her hair around the nomad who’d invited me into her tent. The strands fluttered like wingbeats, then stilled. They smothered my host’s breathing, and she fell to her knees.
The champion’s death killed her, the way she couldn’t kill the wheatears just a few scant nights ago.
She laughed to see her growing power: a sound like a sweet wren. She spun to look at Urstar, beaming like a girl on her wedding day. Like a woman, a hard man’s cruel dream of a woman, given a present by her lover.
Urstar embraced her with strong arms. The nomads wailed and fled. They left their tents empty, crusted with salt and silence. We were alone.
You are asking: why didn’t I leave. But where would I go?
We took their grain.
*~*~*
We rode through a lightning storm that night, hoping to shake the cultists. Light arced around us, needles from the same gods that had once sailed these flats to slaughter one another. It never rained on the flats, and that night was no exception: strange, perhaps, for land that had once been a sea.
Strange, perhaps, that we had seen only one pursuer. Strange that Urstar would flee.
“We’ll find our treasure soon,” he called out to me over hoofbeats. He seemed in a cheerful mood. “It is hidden, but she guides me.”
“And after—” The words failed me; I tried again. “And after, we’ll continue on toward Nemedia.” What I meant was: After, we will finish crossing the flats. We will go among people, where I can escape you.
I suppose I can tell you: I meant to make a home in Nemedia, beyond the reach of the High Judge. I could throw myself on the mercy of a distant cousin. Grow my hair again; wear soft clothes that didn’t need to hide my body. Be matched with a steady man—if I were very fortunate, a kind one.
“Nemedia? Certainly, if the whim takes my mistress.” He laughed at the look on my face. “Peace, boy! Of course we’ll leave this place. Do you expect us to live on lizard flesh?”
Lightning wreathed the skyline, standing the hair of my arms on end. The salt was broken into honeycomb pieces on the ground.
“Did you ever look for her?” I asked him. “When you came back from the deadlands.”
“Look for—who the devil would I look for?”
“Your…woman. You said she was once a mortal priestess. Your death may have taken her shape, but—”
“Why would I? That was many years ago. She’s surely passed on.”
“Except she knew how to escape death,” I pressed him. I don’t know where I found the courage, except I thought about how his death had killed that woman. I thought about the both of them following me to Nemedia, where defenseless people thronged the streets.
He flicked his reins sullenly. “Enough! My woman is perfect. She is ever-cunning and ever-beautiful. She is devoted to me above all others.”
“Devoted,” I said quietly, “so you will never be alone.”
He looked away from me. His clothes were ragged with rough wear. His sword was polished and shining, as were the javelins hanging from his pack saddle. His weapons were his constant companions, and well-loved. Who else would follow him?
A surge of pity broke through my fear. “The woman who found us at the caravan. She knew you. Do you know much of her cult? Is she, perhaps, a priestess of birds—”
He shoved me, hard. I fell from my moving horse. Only years of genteel riding lessons saved me: I curled into a tight ball. Pain shattered my shoulder, then I rolled.
I’d never broken a bone before. I cursed Urstar with every filthy trader’s curse I’d ever heard. Salt crusted on my cheek; tore the skin of the lips the High Judge had praised in his poetry.
Urstar laughed above me. His death rode behind him, now, her skirts hooked high on her knees.
My fury grew. What a coward he was, choosing the mere shell of his woman. Her hair would never silver; she would never argue or leave him. He had preserved her in salt, and now something lived in her skin.
She was only one man’s death, when I met her. But she wanted to grow.
Urstar lifted me roughly and set me on my horse. I should have been afraid, then—should have asked why they wanted to keep me—but I felt all over empty. The storm staggered on.
*~*~*
I rode in an aching haze, Urstar leading my horse. How can I describe a numbness that comes with terror? I smoked a sandflower on my fifteenth nameday. My brothers said it would temper my fear of people; allow me to take pleasure more freely. But instead I hid in my rooms, thinking how easy it would be for an intruder to kill me. It was a bit like that.
It has always been a bit like that.
Dawn came.
I could see Urstar’s death all the time, now. She danced ahead of us, arms contorting in mad ways that somehow never made her unlovely. Urstar clearly had no appetite for a demure bride: he’d called her mistress and master both. But he’d still chosen an echo of her, shaped by his own desire.
I thought of our pursuer’s wizened arms; her squint. She looked, if anything, like a library keeper. Perhaps dark priestesses did less dancing naked under a furious sun than Urstar had realized. Perhaps he’d been disappointed. I giggled at the thought.
The salt reflections summoned illusionary figures on the horizon. I knew better: even if the cultist—the priestess—found us again, she was clearly no warrior. No one would save me.
“Here,” Urstar’s death said.
The flats stretched around us, unchanging.
Urstar stopped the horses. “Where? I see nothing.”
“My unbroken blade,” she addressed him fondly. “It is because I shield you from it. You are my anchor to this world; in return I keep you living. But gods once slaughtered each other, here, when the flats were a sea. To take power from their death, we must offer death in return.”
She turned fast as a banking falcon. Her hair wrapped around me, flinging me again from my horse.
Urstar did not hesitate. He dismounted; drew his sword. I hardly felt the steel tearing through my bowels. Pinning me to the ground to die slowly. The stench was worse than the pain.
Delirious, I felt I had fulfilled some great and mundane destiny: I was always meant to be speared through. All the world had ever expected of me was to lie still.
“I told you to expect fair exchange,” Death mocked me. She was everywhere at once: cradling my face, twining her body around Urstar’s, dancing on the dizzy horizon. Death grew tall. She was Death—my death. She would become others’ death, too.
Above me, the ruins of a great galley ship swam into view. Salt crusted its wooden beams, preserving them. It shadowed me from the sun.
I knew I was dreaming. Yet I knew, in the way of dreams, that this treasure was real: it had run aground when the sea dried. Gods had used it to kill other gods. It could, perhaps, serve a new Death. It could kill many things.
I swooned for a small eternity. When I next opened my eyes, Death and her champion stood on the stern above me. He mouthed at her neck, desperate. I could not tell their limbs from one another. She subsumed him. She was nothing at all.
The thought made me so lonely.
A hawk flew overhead. Urstar’s lapwing cried, gave warning, but he didn’t seem to hear, caught up as he was in his mistress. He had, after all, chosen the shell of his lover over the truth of her.
You see it, don’t you? How I mistook the lapwing’s purpose; its watchful call. It was not meant to warn him of danger. It was a gift from a lover. It was meant to guide him home.
The hawk streaked down behind him, onto the deck of the ship. Our pursuer took human form, then crept out from behind the mainmast. Her hood was down, grey hair cascading. She held the heavy glaive.
As I watched her, a finch landed on my stomach. It picked at Urstar’s sword.
Urstar’s lapwing strained toward its priestess, screaming, and still he paid it no mind. She was climbing the steps of the stern, now. She raised the glaive to run him through—but then Death’s hair shot out to grasp it, and the mortal priestess lost her grip easily. The unwieldy thing clattered to the deck.
Finally roused, Urstar leapt from the ship. He landed heavily beside me; ripped his sword from my bowels as I screamed.
“Wasting woman!” he cursed her. “You think I would want you as you are?”
The priestess followed him down, wielding the black knife she’d held to my neck in the caravan. “Crowing idiot. I’ve come to fix my mistake.”
The curious finch had fled my body when Urstar took his sword. Now it returned, and two others followed. They stared into my wound, little heads cocking.
The priestess lunged at Urstar. Death did not allow it: from the stern above us, her hair burst forth like grasping arms. The priestess was forced to flee, changing from sparrow to falcon to hummingbird. She barely escaped each strike of the clutching strands.
What mortal woman could escape Death forever?
My stomach swarmed with finches, now. They burrowed into my wound, small beaks digging through the ruins of me. Their wings filled me up; stoppered me. They climbed through my bowels and found perch between my ribs. They pushed against my broken shoulder, forcing it into place.
Their little heartbeats were strong and fast against mine. My pulse sped to match theirs.
A javelin struck the priestess’ wing. She tumbled to the deck of the ship above us. Urstar hefted another, his broad legs planted before me. He did not look behind him. He did not see my arms shuddering; my back arching. He did not see the priestess’s knife lying abandoned between his feet.
Death could have killed the priestess quickly, but she was not that kind of Death. Instead, she strode down the stairs of the stern toward the bird’s broken body. Sultry and slow.
“Loneliness made a coward of you,” she mocked her. “You called him back from the deadlands, and still you are alone.”
The priestess changed back into a woman. Death stepped on her knee, and she cried out.
Wings rushed all through me.
I crawled to the priestess’ knife where it lay at Urstar’s feet. I don’t know how to tell you how badly it hurt. My body was broken. The finches’ feet were sharp inside of me, even as they stoppered my bleeding and strained to lift my weight with their wingbeats.
I reached between Urstar’s legs. I took the knife in both hands. The world seemed to wind and unwind at its tip like a spinning bead.
Above me, the priestess screamed again.
I heaved my body upright. I teetered on my knees, then fell forward. In this way, I drove the knife into the small of Urstar’s back.
He struck me across the face. I fell hard to the ground, bird bones breaking inside of me.
Death cried out, furious. She leapt from the galley toward me.
Behind her, the priestess lurched upright, stumbling to scoop up the glaive. She cried Urstar’s name, ragged.
The lapwing in his chest surged forward with more force than I’d ever seen it: enough to send him stumbling toward her. Enough that when she let herself fall from the galley’s deck, the glaive plunged into his chest as though drawn to it. As though he were drawn to her.
She pierced his heart, above the bird’s wing. She ran him through.
Death screamed. Before darkness took me, I saw her crumble inward and vanish. Like a ruin in a storm. Like salt on the wind, fading.
*~*~*
I woke with salt crusting my hair. I was very thirsty.
The great galley ship was gone. No wingbeats stirred in my body. Perhaps finch corpses lined my stomach; I will never know.
The priestess sat on the ground beside me, cleaning her knife, her injured leg sprawled out before her. She gave me a disapproving look. “Quit squirming, girl, unless you mean to waste the little time you have left. I can’t heal you, nor carry you when I fly. Your horses have fled. You will die here, alone.”
I touched the cloth wrapped tight around my stomach. It was already red with blood.
“Why…” I said.
Why did you bandage me, if I will die? Why did you love a man like Urstar?
The priestess shifted where she sat, and I saw the bloodied lapwing lying spread across her thighs. Some of its tail feathers were missing. They must have stuck in Urstar’s skin when she’d cut the body free.
It was breathing.
She ran a reddened finger down its beak, choosing her words carefully. “You will die here. It need not be a permanent condition.”
My head ached. The sun was bright and beautiful. There were many cities beyond Amatrid and Nemedia, and many wild places between.
The priestess grasped my wrist where I lay. “I came to fix my mistakes. Urstar caused this; I offer recompense. But it would not be an easy road to find. And the bird would bind you, in its way: you would be drawn, always, to something you love.” She made a terrible face, and corrected herself: “To something you could love.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I breathed. “I can’t wait to find this something.”
The crow’s feet along her eyes softened. She moved closer to me, crawling over the glaive that had lain beside her: a weapon of Urstar’s, perhaps. Something he’d left with her, long ago. Something he might have loved.
She helped me to sit up. The pain was terrible, but I’d begun to accept it. I’d been speared through; I wouldn’t be the same. I would keep a lapwing on my chest where I had once bound my breasts too tightly. I would not stop in Nemedia to be wed. I would go among people, and away from them.
I might, sometimes, be alone. It is often a little like that.
“My name is Nhumad,” the priestess told me, holding the bird to my lips. “We will not meet again.”
I bit down. The blood slaked my thirst.
She did not lie: the road from death was hard and lonely. It has been many years since I tasted peppercorn tea. If you permit me to ride with your caravan until we take leave of the flats, I will tell you many stories more.
*~*~*
*~*~*
Sarah Pauling spent several years sending other people to distant places for a living as a study abroad advisor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s now in Seattle, graciously sharing her home with two cats and a husband. A graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop, her stories have appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Clarkesworld. If approached without sudden movement, she can be found at her website: sarahpauling.com.”
*~*~*
Illustration:
Maxwell Marais is an illustrator and author of all things horror currently living in Montreal, Canada. Their work is often featured in the pages of CHM, and their stories can be found in such publications as Thuggish Itch and The NoSleep podcast. Find their art at www.instagram.com/insanity_inc/
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