Read book one before this.
She ducks left and right, huffing sweet and minty air, in her sprint through the white cactus jungle, finally approaching it. Refracting the sunset back through its orange, fleshy depths, the massive carved pumpkin lies in several still-unified, cracked segments. Three hours ago, it dropped into existence, like a hurricane-shredded circus tent. For the last half hour, she and her unlikely companion have been running along the brown, dying vine that birthed it, a great ridged rope with perfectly straight trenches.
The vine grew up to the top of the tallest cliff in the world. There it spawned its gargantuan, golden cup of a flower, which in seconds ballooned into a live-growing fruit, half the size of the castle it was invading. Then, the bulbous gourd’s weight tumbled it all back down, taking several acres of open-air bathhouse and the hundred Harem Maidens of Princess Orla. Now, shaded under curling, black spines bigger than themselves, the two have nearly arrived at the wreckage.
Many amazons in the Castle who saw the tragedy were certain The Prince had returned; his toothy maw, rounded head, and plant-like body the first fiery sign of End Times. Jin, the woman sent to investigate the collapsed pumpkin, is an atheist on such things, but even she feels the impression of this tragedy. She has no time to grieve, and neither will anyone else. With any luck, the attack on the Castle will lead to something more.
Finding out what, and smashing it, is up to her: a Chevalier amazon in a chain-mail hauberk, legs free under a matching chain miniskirt, and of course a backward-barbed glim-steel baton in either hand. Her long and heavy weapons were ideal for defending her territory from a barricaded position. Running from the Castle to the site of the pumpkin’s fall with her new compatriot, it was all she could do to keep up. The gourd’s height and breadth are fully in view, now.
They have to stop on a chunk of bathhouse brick, for lack of solid ground elsewhere. As she gasps to recover, the air still smells of bathhouse soap, but not blood or shit, nothing of the death pits from her training. A hundred women falling would leave bodies, so where? Jin’s pounding heart, yearning to bring peace to the tragically fallen Maidens, calms itself on instinct. The wind fails to nudge her single, thickly braided rope of hair, bound at the top well out of the way, but still it moves, as she scans left and right.
“At call!” Jin bellows, hands formed into a cone at her lips. “Is anyone there?” Pink birds rush by her head, flight disrupted by the countless other flights of many-colored birds, circling relentlessly like a halo over the crash site. They do not squawk and chirp, only floating in sequence with the ring of conjoined flocks.
In the quiet void of answers, the new dominant stench takes over, viscous and unfamiliar. Rotting stringy soup forms a pond around the fallen orange construct, a gelatinous mire along the sandy basin of a great tidal plain. Jin glances across it, and the clouds of black specks enjoying its non-sweet starchiness.
Jin’s companion on this mission is a head and a half taller, and several amazons wider. When being assigned to investigate the wreckage of the invader plant with him, he was completely still, annoyingly so. It’s as if this possible loss to Princess Orla, all her lovers accosted by creatures not of Fearful Canes, is rote or unimportant to him.
“It’s quite possibly the Castle Maidens are all deceased. You don’t need to see it for yourself.”
He has stated clearly, several times, that he is called a Man. The word is so different from she, so drained of life. He equated himself to an amazon, but with some important differences over which they need not go into discussion.
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