Private Anima

[Marhukules]

"...Okay, look. There is only so much I can tell you."

Mahdihj as a slimy motherfucker, known in the underbelly of city-states across the Kaikias and among certain tribes as a smuggler of illicit goods, some which were more unsavory than others. He had bulbous eyes and a gaunt face. Always looked as though he was afraid of something or that there was a Djinn at his back. Maybe because there was. Or maybe it was because sitting across from him was a mountain of a man who would take no issue smearing his useless entrails across the tavern they both sat in. Marhukules paid attention to how his large eyes darted to the club leaning against the table. How the candle between them caught the quiver in his nearly non-existent bottom lip. The Unassailable took a long pull from the weed in his pipe and blinked slowly.

"Does it look to you like I flew all this way to play games with you, Mahdihj?" he asks, his voice gravel and smoke as he sat ever still, one leg setting still across the other. His free and was as dangerous as any blade edge. It rested on the wood of the table between the two of them. His muscles were coiled. Gods only knew he wanted to reach across the table with his bare hands and crush this deserter's skull. He who stained the desert itself with his presence and cowardly deeds.
"Trifle with me and I'll pull your fucking guts through your asshole. The little girl. Tell me who took her."

Children went missing in the Kaikias all the time. None were safe from Takoumba's maw, it seemed. Hardened men and women were swallowed just as easily as the weak ones. Children were the most vulnerable of them all, but little Nisha? Her mother always kept her close. He remembered how her mother with graying hair and trembling hands grabbed on to his own and begged for him to find her. He'd just stumbled out of a tavern in Miraj'Dah when she'd found him. He upended his poison of choice in a nearby alley, drank some water, and set to asking around about her little girl. A few inquiries and an Ornithopter ride full of Dunubu's madness later, he found himself in some small village by the river. So close to the Deadlands and so close to their sons that he hated almost as much as he hated the Empire...

Mahdihj gulped down the last of the contents of his pewter cup and pushed it away. He looked to be calculating his chance of survival, his gaze shifting between Marhukules and the door and the barkeep he saw fit to mind his business. The old man had clearly seen enough summers to know when to mind his business when the Machine Princes came on their own.

"O-one of my associates might have sold the girl off to this tribe in the desert," he surrendered finally. Marhukules could taste the poison of his lies dropped into the truth. Enough of both would save his hide, he had to know. "The Rahk'na come shopping every once in a while... They follow a shadow in some hole in the desert. Or a machine... I don't know. I haven't seen it, I swear. But I hear they take their merchandise to feed it. And they keep to themselves..."

"...Get out of my sight. If I see you again anytime soon, you'll die for a long time. Go..."

The sound that came from Mahdihj's lips was almost comical. He rose from his seat, the turban on his head almost lopsided as he ran out of the dimly lit tavern. Marhukules watches him go with a scowl on his face. "Fucking dickhead..."

 

[Thea Seydou]

The sky above was painted in the same bruised yellow of a fading bruise. Heat clung to the clay walls like a curse, and the wind carried the coppery taste of warm metal. Somewhere deeper in the tighter back alleyways, a stringed instrument was dying slowly under the hands of a shaeir.

From the door of the tavern, Mahdihj exploded into the alley like a kicked dog, sweat-slicked and wild-eyed. He staggered out on the street, muttering curses under his breath and gripping the side of his stomach like he’d just been stabbed ...with words.

“Get out of my sight. If I see you again anytime soon, you'll die for a long time. Go.”

Mahdihj didn’t look where he was going. Something hissed before he crashed into a hairy creature. The spider was big. Goat-sized, bigger maybe, with a bloated abdomen wrapped in cactus-leather harnesses with vials clinking against its carapace. Each bottle held a different color, milky whites, green like bile, black and blue bottles with something inky and twitching. Startled and with a screech that sounded like tearing parchment and snapping bones, the spider reared up, its front limbs curling like hooked scimitars as Mahdihj yelped and fell backward onto his ass. The spider launched itself sideways, kicking sand and pebbles and smashing two vials against the wall. One sizzled on impact, hissing acid and biting into the sandstone. The other burst in a cloud of something that smelled like vinegar and scorched hair.

They called its kind Qal’zarin; “The Traveling Apothecary.”

The Qal’zarin tore free from its tether. It bolted straight through the open tavern door behind Mahdihj. Spitting a blast of sticky webbing that caught Mahdihj's ankle and yanked him half a foot before tearing loose. The spider was massive and all segmented, rust-red armor and twitching, bristle-lined limbs. Wearing the bizarre rig of glass vials and leather straps slung over its abdomen.

Inside, chaos bloomed like wildfire.

Patrons screamed. Tables flipped. One man fell backward into a brazier, howling as sparks caught in his robes. The spider, half-blind with panic, scuttled across the walls and then up, scrambled into the ceiling beams, trailing a netlike secretion behind it in frantic spurts. The threads smoked where they landed, gluing tankards to hands, pinning a woman’s sleeve to her chest, half-cocooning a mercenary’s swordarm as he tried to draw his saber. The Qal’zarin did not stop shrieking.

A heartbeat later, Thea slammed into view. "Not again..." Dust in her teeth. The torn leash in her hand. Her boots thudded over shattered glass and splintered chair legs. She ducked under a web-strand that still twitched. Her eyes locked on the eight-legged creature above, its breathing was frantic and its legs tapping the rafters like drumsticks.

 

[Marhukules]

There wasn't much in the world that scared him in life. After all, he had killed a great many men and women and all manner of creatures outside and in between. It was a hard thing to not think of when they haunted his dreams. When things that were written eternally upon his mind carried the smells and sounds of the moment. When their voices and presence vibrated through his very bones the same way an ornothopter's hum might. When the hairy spider crashed into the tavern, it made his massive for jump in his seat, though. He cursed to himself as he looked up and watched it stay still on the ceiling... Menacingly? No, there was no menace there. That was fear. A thing he'd seen all too many times. And a thing that was quite apparently contagious as many of the people present were clearly frightened by its presence, sudden or not.

Marhukules downed his drink and stood up, looking at the eight-legged creature. Puzzled more now than he was afraid. When he was a boy, he used to pluck spiders and watch them fly across the desert stands. They were broken and weak as men were when he touched them with his malice.

"Again, is it?" he asked, he voice granite on the air as he looked over at the newcomer. Apparently this spider belonged to her. His eyes fell upon her form and then back on the creature.
"How often is it you lose control of your beast? What the fuck frightened it?"