katytowell

"Hello, Sister," said the other pig. "This is a trick!" said Pyg, but deep within her, she knew the Master was Dawnsong, the brother taken in her stead on the night of their birth. But how did he know her? "This is a trick!" she repeated as if to convince herself. "My mother said Dawnsong was dead!" "Dawnsong? Is that what I was to be named?" said the Master. "I am named Strangeborn, but no one calls me that anymore. Your mother - that is, our mother - never took the trouble to find out what became of me. For that I can't blame her. Who is a pig against the wolves?" The Master's voice dripped with sarcasm. Who, indeed, was a pig amongst t

The Unspeakable Oath. When the living make a deal with the dead. All who commit such dealings are doomed to serve the Ghosts of Men for a thousand years. For the dead men can claim the bodies of the living, but never their souls... without permission. Such permission Leap granted the spirits when he spoke in the ancient tongue aboard the black ship. In exchange, he asked for safe passage into the Elephant Lands and for the life of his friend. All this Estruthia had seen in the young wolf's eyes, but it was far too late for the priestess' magic to save him. Now the dead had claimed their prize and left a wound in Pyg's heart among so many othe

All was quiet in the elephant graveyard. Here, the bones of the ancients lay scattered, huge and broken, like ruins of a once great city. "Is it really all right for us to be here?" Pyg whispered to the ostrich priestess. "It is an honor," the priestess answered. "An elephant's invitation to a graveyard is their way of introducing you to their ancestors as a friend. Her majesty is not only paying homage to the ancients but asking them to protect us." Pyg nodded and watched as the queen and her soldiers wandered wordlessly among the bones, picking them up, curling their trunks around them. Weeks ago, Pyg would have thought it a peculiar cus

The soldiers had prepared for an attack from the skies, but they had not prepared for so many foes. Foes who were better armed and organized than they. Foes who were certainly better fed. In the end, it was the rhinoceros king and elephant queen who won, but not without terrible loss. Pyg could not feel sad for all the death around her now. She could only feel anger. "It just keeps happening!" she said to Leap. "No matter what we do or where we go, trouble is always close behind!" "You can't look at it like that," Leap told her. "You've lived through all of it so far, haven't you? You were meant for something important, Pyg. Like Father Lo

And so it was war. And though it was war, Pyg felt safer than she had since leaving her mother's home with her poor, unfortunate brothers. The rhinoceros king's army was twenty thousand strong with beasts of every fur, scale, and feather. Soon, they were joined by the elephant queen and her forces whose shortage of soldiers was made up for in the sheer size of those tusked fighters. Pyg liked the elephant queen. She was as fierce as the horned king but to Pyg and Leap she was as gentle as Pyg's own mother. "My daughter would have been your age, I think, had she not been taken from this world by evildoers," the queen told her. Often, Pyg's