Anwei had never seen the spirits kill before. Era had been asleep when Anwei had plucked her from her bed, her eyes wide and bewildered as he carried her away. She hadn’t known yet their parents were dead. Anwei had seen them burst, their bodies bursting like dandelion seeds to reveal an olivine glow at their core.

Now, all was quiet. Anwei had gotten his little sister safely to the valley. The green lights of the dead haunted the mountains of Anwei’s village, staining the distant mists a dingy, sickly color. He turned away and noticed Era had been studying the green-stippled peaks as well.

“Don’t look at them,” Anwei chided. He put a hand to her chin and nudged her away.

She swatted his hand away, but obeyed, looking distrustfully to the eastern horizon instead. There was a sea, there where the sun was rising, and another village. The Seafarers lived there, only a few days’ walk. Anwei still knew the way.

“Why did nobody listen to the warnings?” Era asked while they walked. He was proud she looked only at him and did not try to sneak a glance at the mountains. He could see their glow reflected in the corners of her eyes.

“The Seafarers thought our seers’ warnings of the spirits’ growing anger was exaggerated. Their own seers were either blind or dumb.”

Anwei said nothing, listening to the shuffle of his sandaled feet, as Era put together a new question in her head. She furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. Anwei knew it must be difficult for her to understand their tribe’s apathy--to understand how so few people could lift a finger to prevent tragedy because they had either buried their heads or didn’t believe the tragedy existed at all. Era believed in action.

When the sky had brightened from the blue of a deep lake to a tint like Era’s eyes, she spoke again. “Did our tribe try to stop the Seafarers?”

Anwei shook his head. “Not hard enough.”

“Not hard enough,” she agreed grimly.

---

The sun was looking at the top of their heads when they arrived at the canyon. The green lights were too far away to be seen, now that the day was bright. The mountains looked normal, but nightfall would reveal green motes in the peaks as clear as stars in the sky. They were still too close.

“We have to cross here,” Anwei said.

“Okay.”

“Have you seen the canyon before?”

“No.”

“It is like… it is like if you were to jab a stick in the dirt, not very deep, so that it doesn’t break when you drag it through the sand and dust. Then, if an ant came along and saw this gash you made, he would see something like the canyon.”

“Okay.”

Anwei looked at Era, wondering at her silence. Her eyes were glazed over, no doubt from exhaustion and stress. “It’s very deep,” he added. “It is okay to be frightened. But you do not need to be.”

“Is it a god?” she asked.

“What?”

“It should be respected, but not feared. So, it is like a god… or a spirit. Right?”

“I guess you’re right,” Anwei said. As they neared the great tear, Anwei hoped the canyon was nothing like a spirit.

---

The stone ladder hid itself against the canyon’s wall like a lizard. It moved left and right down the cliff face, hidden unless you knew where to look. It seemed to watch them with amusement. So, now you see me, it seemed to say, but you won’t get the better of me.

Gusts of wind blew at their faces from deep in the crevice. Anwei squinted, remembering how much hotter the barren valleys were from the mountains where they lived, even with the intermittent winds. Hotter, and drier, like the breath of the village’s clay ovens. He usually had a hunting pack with him when he traveled this far; he had little more than a water skin and his bone knife now.

Anwei was not thankful he traveled light; the large beasts that roamed the valleys were too savage to fight off with a knife, and he had neither time nor tools to build a proper shelter before nightfall.

“It’s very tall,” Era said, looking down into the canyon.

“We are very tall, now,” Anwei corrected. “The canyon goes deep.”

“Are we going down? Deep?”

“Yes,” Anwei said, “but not to the very bottom. The bridge we will use to cross to the other side of the canyon is hidden from above, so we have to descend into the canyon to reach it.”

“Are you scared?”

“No. Remember what I told you. You do not need to be frightened.” Anwei glanced down at his little sister and saw her jaw jut out in defiance of the chasm, her lips pressed into a flat line. She was brave. He had felt that same determination when he had first climbed into the canyon years ago, but then it was different. He did not have Era to care for then.

“I will go first,” he said.

He showed Era how to sit at the edge of the cliff, and then twist until she could lower herself along the wall.

“Just go slow,” Anwei cautioned, lowering himself down. “Feel for the next hold with your feet.”

“I can do it.”

Anwei stayed a few steps below her as they descended, keeping a watchful eye on Era’s progress. He was close enough that he could reach up and guide her foot to the next hold if she became unsure.

The trees below Anwei rustled, and before Anwei could look a sudden rushing wind buffeted him, his skirts and hair flapping as the gust blew past like the breath of an ancient giant.

“Hold on!” he shouted. He pressed himself against the dirt and abrasive stone, tilting his head up at Era.

“I’m okay!” she yelled, her voice suddenly loud as the wind ceased. “That felt goo—”

She screamed, and Anwei called out to her. She tilted backwards, her arms pinwheeling in the air. Anwei rammed his hand deep into the crevice, knuckles wedging into the sharp, saw-like rock, and thrust out his free arm.

He caught her with a grunt and swung her against his body in a tight hug. His arm trembled from exertion as he set her down next to him on the ladder. He shuffled to make room for her feet next to his. They went down together, sharing the same holds when they could.

“I saw a snake,” she said when they reached the bottom. “It came out of its hole to look at me, but I didn’t know its name.”

She turned and looked up at him, grinning. Anwei wasn’t sure why. He knew of the canyon’s snakes, and that the reptile could have killed her. Many foolhardy hunters had died attempting to harvest their valuable venom. If Era had known of its worth, if she had considered capturing the serpent, it would have struck. Anwei knew how to capture them safely, but she did not.

“Let’s keep going,” he said.

He looked down at his hand, gritting his teeth against the throbbing pain as blood trickled through his knuckles like the rivers at the bottom of the canyon. He could barely close his fist. When they reached the Seafarer’s village, he would have to rely on only one hand to avenge his family against the men and women that provoked the spirits.

He would have to be quick, or like the hesitating snake his victims would escape him.

---

“What will we do when we get there?” Era asked. She plodded down the side of the rocky canyon trail, letting her full weight down with each footfall in a loud, stamping stride. She swung her arms so forcefully Anwei imagined they might be thrown from her shoulders.

“We will steal a boat, and you will hide aboard it. Then, I will go into the village to gather supplies for us.” He did not tell her his other plans. She wouldn’t understand. He knew bringing her was a risk, but he couldn’t leave any Seafarers to follow them across the sea. Their magic could be strong, enough to turn the winds against them, or call up leviathans from the sea floor to drown them.

The trail bottomed out, rounding a wall, and opened out into a wide chasm. They were halfway to the bottom of the canyon, the river a long fall below them. Anwei’s ancestors had build a bridge here, where they could cross the chasm to the trail that would bring them safely to the other side.

The bridge spanned a narrow point across the gap, where two outcroppings of earth and stone held several gnarled, twiggy trees and bushes the color of pale lichen. The bridge was little more than a trio of ropes tied between several of the trees on the far side; on Anwei and Era’s side, the upper two balance ropes wrapped around two rectangular stone posts like the tails of tree monkeys gripping a branch.

On the opposite side stood a woman only a few years older than Anwei. She was dressed in shimmering, scaled animal skins, unlike Era and Anwei’s furred ones. Her arms and midriff were left free to breath in the hot sun. Her skirt was long and narrow in the back, like a serpent’s tail. She held a fighting knife in each of her sun-darkened fists.

“Seafarer,” Anwei hissed. The word tasted sharp as he said it, like a curse. He put a hand in front of Era and pushed her behind him, his free hand retrieving his hunting knife.

“Maybe she’ll let us pass if we tell her we – “

No

The woman stood her ground, half a stride from the edge of the chasm where the ropes lashed themselves to the desert trees. She couldn’t approach without Anwei blocking her, and the same was true in reverse. Anwei had no ranged weapon, though the Seafarer had a blade to spare. There were no other bridges for miles. It was a stalemate.

“Anwei, we didn’t do anything wrong. Why shouldn’t she let us pass?”

“Her people brought calamity to our family once,” Anwei said through bared teeth. “Why shouldn’t she do it again, when we are weak and scattered?”

“I thought the Seafarers were our friends? That word you use for when you trade with people and don’t kill their hunters. Allies.”

“No.” Anwei spat into the dust. He locked eyes with the woman as he did, and she returned the insult. “That was before they angered the spirits. Before they stopped listening to reason. They brought doom on us. Now we are enemies.”

“But if we don’t make friends with her then none of us can get where we need to go!”

“She won’t make friends with us.”

“How do you know?”

“Quiet.”

Anwei set his jaw. He heard Era huff behind him and shuffle on her feet, but he ignored her. He needed to think. He couldn’t stand here and outlast the enemy warrior, not with the risk of other Seafarers arriving with javelins or slings. But he would be disadvantaged if he attacked.

They couldn’t go back – she would cross the bridge and hunt them. The canyon provided no other paths.

“Era,” Anwei murmured, careful to keep his lips from moving. “You go hide. You stay hidden until I get you. If I don’t, you stay there until the moon is high in the night sky, and then you sneak across when you’re certain she has gone.”

“Anw—“

“Now.”

He heard her running back the way they came. He trusted her to hide well, like in their games. He knew Era was too young to survive alone, but he had no other choice. He wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do.

For now, he just needed to hope the spirits hated this demon more than they hated him.

He gripped the knife tight in his fighting hand – the hand he had not injured from the rocky crag. He dashed forward, taking the bridge recklessly, trusting in the rope and in his balance. He did not use the guide-ropes at his shoulder, but his injured hand still hovered there should he need to catch himself. He knew he wouldn’t make it across entirely; he just needed to get as far as he could.

The enemy’s eyes lit aflame as her lips split into a devil’s grin. Anwei shot forward, all but leaping along the rope, traversing as much of the bridge as he could before she realized she could send him plummeting into the ravine below.

Anwei was nearly halfway across before he lost balance. The Seafarer was already bending down to cut the rope at his feet. He was two spears’ lengths away.

Her knife sawed through, Anwei’s weight snapping the rope before she had cut through the last half of its thickness.

But Anwei was ready. He fell, his damaged hand gripping the left guide-rope, fresh scabs ripping open as the skin of his knuckles pulled taut. He dipped and bounced on the rope like a hare hanging by its leg from a hunter’s trap.

The enemy warrior still had a hellish gleam in her eyes as she straightened and brought her knife to the next rope.

Anwei was faster, his own well-maintained blade slicing through the rope just behind where he held. He swung down into the canyon, tucking his shoulders as he hung from the severed rope like a seer’s pendulum. He collided with the canyon wall directly beneath the Seafarer.

Anwei did not wait for his enemy to realize what had happened. He abandoned the rope, pinching his blade between his teeth and latching onto the dry chasm wall. The roots of the trees above twisted out from the dirt and clay like maggots from mud, and he pulled himself upward and sideways, ignoring the pain from his bleeding hand.

The warrior’s face appeared over the lip of the canyon to Anwei’s left, her beaded hair hanging like so many ropes from her stunned face. Hungry asps, reaching for their prey. But Anwei was almost to the top. Between them stood one of the brush-like trees, tangled with sharp, dried twigs and coarse, needle-like leaves.

The Seafarer yelled and tried to force herself through the vegetation towards him as Anwei reached the ravine’s lip. He pulled himself out of the chasm just as his foe stumbled through the barrier, her legs and forearms shredded by the plants.

Anwei was already on his feet when a knife plunged down at his shoulder. He stepped deftly aside, but he was too slow to knock aside the other blade as it punched forward. The dagger sliced at his midsection, the gash quickly overflowing with his blood.

“It. Wasn’t. Enough. For you?” she hissed, her words punctuated by the fight’s tempo. “Not enough…to set… the spirits… on us… from afar?”

Anwei dodged left, right, under, trying to maneuver his blade past her defenses as she struck at him with blades like twin fangs. He ignored her lies, teeth clamped shut as sweat beaded on his brow. His wounded hand throbbed like he was beating it with a pestle in a shaman’s mortar. She drew blood again and again, Anwei too slow to fend off both knives with his one. The brush had done more damage to her than he had.

“You had to come… see if there were… any of us… left… to murder…yourself?”

Anwei found an opening and slammed his elbow into her clavicle. She grunted, and Anwei twisted low, bringing his heel around to trip her. She fell backwards into a roll, using her momentum to pitch herself back onto her feet in a crouch.

“It was your people who ignored our seers’ warnings,” Anwei rasped, head dizzy. “You who pushed the spirits’ patience until they were ready to kill!”

The Seafarer’s knives dipped an inch to the ground, her brows knitting together in confusion. “Is that what they told –“

A rock landed with a dull thump in the dust between them. The warrior whipped her head towards the rock’s origin on the far side of the canyon, but Anwei didn’t need to look.

Era.

Anwei didn’t waste the opportunity. He rushed his adversary, closing the distance before she realized he was moving. Her attention snapped back to him, eyes wide and knives crossing protectively in front of her, but Anwei was already kicking a spray of gravel and sand at her face. She turned aside, blindly trying to ward him off with her weapons, but Anwei knocked them both aside.

His knife found her heart before the dust could return to earth. He let the Seafarer crumple at his feet, then looked out across the chasm.

“Era!” Anwei called, “you—”

He paused. She had disobeyed him, endangering herself. But they had won. She saved his life.

He sighed. “Good throw.”

She had already gathered two more rocks in her hands, and she catapulted them as far as she could into the canyon with a wild yell. Then, she swung along the remaining rope quicker than Anwei could get through the thicket. When he emerged, he saw Era on hands and knees, peering over the lip of the ravine.

“It’s so tall!” she squealed.

Anwei smiled. "Deep.”

---

“What do we do?” Era whispered.

Anwei squinted through the tall grass, waiting for the moon to reappear from behind a wispy cloud overhead. He could see its light reflecting off distant waves over deep water, but the shore was dark.

Dark, except for scattered green lights.

“Anwei.”

“Sh-shh,” Anwei answered. He had planned to sneak Era through a sleeping village, not a haunted one. Anwei remembered the warrior’s confused words.

“What do we do?” Era asked again.

“I don’t know.”

They were too far away for Era to see the bodies, but there was no hiding the lights glowing inside them. Each pea-green mote of ugly light was a grave marker, though from here they appeared to be no more than will-o-wisps. The village had grown many times in size since last Anwei had visited, yet now it was a cemetery.

Anwei’s eyes narrowed. Two strangers stalked the darkened ghost town.

Seafarers.

Anwei pulled his knife from its sheath on his thigh. “You wait here. I’m going to investigate.”

“No!”

He crept forward through the grass, but Era stopped him with a hand clamped onto his forearm. “What if something hurts you again?” she breathed.

“It was not your fault that my hand got hurt, or that the Seafarer attacked me,” Anwei said.

“It does not matter if it is my fault or not! If I let you follow a bad idea, then it is just as bad as helping you do it. It is the same as my fault.”

Anwei hung his head. He remembered her question from earlier, when she had asked him if anyone had tried to stop the Seafarers from doing what everyone in the village knew was wrong--if anyone had tried to stop the Seafarers from overfishing their waters, from cutting down too much of the surrounding forests for their boats, from wasteful killing of the valley’s beasts.

But that would have hurt trade, so they didn’t, even as his people’s seers cried their warnings. Greed had touched the hearts of everyone in the village, and the spirits’ wrath spared no one.

“Okay,” Anwei said at last. She hadn’t spoken against him directly, but even if she had, Anwei had to nurture the instinct to do what she believed was right.

Okay,” he said again. “Keep away from the green lights. Don’t look at them. Stay close to me, and step quietly. The lights mark the dead, but the living give no such warnings.”

---

Anwei counted six ghostly lights as he guided Era through the fields toward the coastal village. Six rotten, green, glowing lights, each at the center of a corpse frozen in space where it had burst. Suspended in the air, in time, by the spirits’ eldritch magic.

Anwei avoided looking at the corpses’ eyes, fearing what he might see if he locked gazes with the dead. He did not have time to close their eyes, nor did he want to get that close. Their mouths were open; they’d all screamed as they died. They’d all screamed as they ripped open from the inside to reveal the spirits’ horrible witch-fire.

“Anwei,” Era whispered.

He flapped a hand behind him to silence her. His eyes were busy scanning the moonlit huts for signs of movement.

“Over there,” Era whispered again. “Look. The beach.”

Anwei squinted toward the black waves. “I see them. Come.”

They veered away from the village, stooped low, sneaking toward the pair of figures at the edge of the huts. They were carrying something between them.

Anwei stopped at the edge of the beach, where the grassy dunes began to flatten. He looked to Era. Her eyes were determined; she was not scared. Maybe she was old enough for a knife of her own.

Yet she did not have the same look of defiance as she had at the canyon. She was not eager for what came next.

“We don’t know if these are the villagers, or their warriors,” he reminded her.

“I know.”

Anwei straightened and stepped onto the sand, his knife gripped in his good hand. Era stalked beside him, ready to aid him however she could. Anwei didn’t like the risk, but if he was to get her safely on the boat and away from this haunted land, he would need all the help he could get to defeat the foes in their way.

The Seafarers had a sea-faring vessel big enough for as many as ten pulled onto the shore. Anwei wasn’t sure he could sail it, but that was a problem for later.

One of the figures saw him coming. They motioned to their companion, and the two set down their burden.

Anwei saw the glint of sharpened metal in one’s hand and stopped. Era did not. He reached out with his bandaged hand too late to catch her before she slipped away from his protective reach. His stiffened fingers caught only the air at her back. She marched forward.

“Why do you pull out your blade at us?” she demanded. Her tone was reproachful, scolding.

“Stay,” the one with the knife commanded her. A man. His voice had the wobbling lilt of the coast-peoples’ accent.

Era kept walking forward. “A disaster has happened,” she said. “Anyone who is not an enemy should be a friend. Allies.”

The enemy blade wavered, tip pointing from Era to the dunes. Anwei waited, tense and ready to spring forward if they moved against her.

The unarmed one, a woman of many more years than Anwei, spoke. “The consequences of your peoples’ actions have spread far beyond your village, little one, hurting many. We are enemies.”

“She is young,” Anwei interjected at last. “She had no part in what happened.”

“But you did,” said the man with the knife. The blade remembered its purpose and jumped into the air again. Anwei growled, and reached again for his little sister. This was not how he imagined his revenge would go.

She slipped from his reach once more. “This is stupid!” she shouted, causing the adults to flinch as her voice cracked against the silence of the shore. “This is stupid! Our seers said your people were angering the spirits, but yours said the same of ours. The earth was in pain, but nobody did anything but wait for the other to perish! We’ve lost everything now, and so we’ve come here to leave this land, and we need help, so stop pretending we don’t all have ourselves to blame!”

Anwei looked away from the knife for the first time since it had been turned on his sister. He looked at Era, who stood quivering with anger in the sand. She was so young, so exhausted, yet she seemed taller than when last he looked at her. She had hidden her rage until she knew Anwei would be forced to listen.

They all stood silent on the sand as the waves lapped at the resting boat. Era looked from one to the other, and when her eyes met Anwei’s, he saw they glistened with restrained tears.

“Okay,” said the man with the knife.

Anwei sighed as tension and anger fell away and melted into the cold sand.

“Please, could you help us carry her?” the Seafarer woman asked gently, motioning to the bundle at her feet.

They had been carrying the body of a woman. She was intact. No green glow, no exposed skeleton. She had died recently, and the spirits had let her do so peacefully.

Anwei dug his hands under the small of the woman’s back, with the Seafarers at her shoulders and heels. Together, they lifted her from the damp shore.

Anwei watched Era step ahead of them into the water and then climb onto the boat, wondering if the revenge he had wanted would have felt better than the forgiveness she had orchestrated. Era had not known the name for “canyon,” nor the name of the snake. Anwei knew the names of many things, yet now he envied Era. She knew that dangerous things were to be respected.

As they sailed away from the shores of green lanterns, Anwei realized Era did not know the name for revenge.