So I went. The first town I reached was built around an oasis, with palms, clay walls, and narrow streets that smelled like sweat, dates, smoke, and lies. I walked in barefoot, sunburned, scarred, wearing animal skins and a belt made of braided cactus fiber. I had a knife made from bone, a pouch full of scorpion tails, and the manners of a starving coyote.
People stared. Children laughed. A guard pointed a spear at me and asked where I came from. I pointed at the desert. He asked who owned me. I thought he meant who had defeated me, so I showed my teeth and growled. That did not help. Within ten minutes of entering my first human town, I was chased through three alleys, hit with a broom, and accused of being a demon, a thief, and a public smell problem.
Only one of those was true at the time. I was absolutely a public smell problem.
The first person who did not scream at me was Tara. She found me crouched behind a water stall with both hands wrapped around a melon I had stolen and no plan for what came after stealing it. Tara had dark hair tied back with wire, oil on her cheek, and the kind of stare that made even adults remember chores they had forgotten.
She looked at the melon, then at me, then at the guards searching the street. I prepared to run. Instead, she tossed me a cracked clay cup and told me to follow her if I wanted to eat without being stabbed. That sounded like a trap, so I followed her from the roof. She knew immediately. She led me to a workshop full of wheels, ropes, broken carts, metal scraps, and desert junk that smelled better than people.
Then she gave me flatbread, water, and a pile of roasted beetles. I ate the beetles first. She watched me with fascination and disgust. Tara was not soft. She did not save me because I looked pitiful. She saved me because she was curious, and curiosity is hunger wearing a smarter face. I understood that, so I trusted her a little.
She asked for my name. I said Dylan, but my voice cracked around it. She asked if I knew how to work. I showed her I could lift a cart axle by myself, climb a wall faster than a cat, track a missing goat through a crowded market, and scare away three drunk men by staring at them while chewing a scorpion shell.
She said I was hired. That was how I joined civilization. Not through kindness. Through being useful. For two weeks I slept under Tara's broken wagon, repaired nets by copying her hands, and learned that humans had strange rules. You could not just take food because you were hungry. You could not hiss at customers. You could not drink directly from the oasis with your whole face in the water while people watched.
You could not solve every insult by throwing sand into someone's eyes and biting their ankle. That last rule felt personal. People still mocked me. They called me sand boy, cactus mouth, fox pup, and other things I did not understand until Tara explained them and then apologized for explaining them. The town guard laughed whenever I passed. Merchants covered their baskets.
Children followed me and dared each other to touch my hair. I pretended not to care. I cared so much it made my teeth hurt. At night I climbed the wall and summoned the spirit blade where no one could see. The huge weapon crashed silently into the air, its weight pressing into my bones. I practiced lifting it one inch, then two.
I practiced beginning a swing while standing, crouching, falling, spinning, and once while hanging upside down from a palm tree. I fell on my head that time. Tara found me in the morning with a palm nut stuck in my hair and asked if desert people had religion or if I was inventing stupidity alone. I told her I was training.
She told me training should make a person better, not more dented.
Then the glass scorpions attacked. They came at noon, when the heat made the horizon shimmer. At first everyone thought the glittering line outside the wall was sunlight on sand. Then the line moved. Hundreds of scorpions, each as big as a dog, with transparent shells that bent light around their bodies.
Their stingers dripped venom that smoked when it hit stone. The town panicked. Guards formed a line at the gate and immediately began regretting every lazy patrol they had ever taken. Merchants dragged children inside. The old and sick were carried to rooftops. Tara grabbed a wrench the size of my arm and told me to stay behind her. Behind her. The boy who had been eating venomous things since childhood.
I stepped past her. A guard shouted that this was not a place for a wild brat. Another said I would die before I reached the first scorpion. The children who used to mock me were crying from the rooftops. The whole town saw me walk barefoot into the street, scratching my cheek like I was thinking about lunch. Inside my chest, the spirit blade woke up.
The scorpions poured through the gate. I summoned the blade. The air ripped open and the massive weapon slammed down across the street, taller than the wall, wider than any cart. Everyone stopped screaming for one beautiful second. Then the nearest scorpion ran around it and stabbed me in the leg. That was less beautiful. I collapsed, the blade half raised, venom burning through my muscles.
The crowd groaned like they had expected nothing else. The guards cursed. Tara shouted my name. But I was not defeated. I was counting. Scorpions were hunters, but they were also greedy. When one smelled blood, more followed. I had seen it in the wild. So I let myself bleed. I let them swarm around me. Their legs clicked over the stones.
Their stingers rose. The guard captain shouted for someone to pull me back, but nobody could reach me without getting stung. I grinned. The blade had not vanished, because I was not done fighting. I had already started the swing before the sting landed. My arms moved slowly, ridiculously slowly. The scorpions climbed closer. One crawled onto my shoulder. Another snapped at my face.
I could hear people sobbing behind me, because to them it looked like I was frozen in fear. I was not frozen. I was aiming. When the swing finally landed, the street became thunder. The spirit blade swept sideways, and every scorpion in front of the gate shattered at once. Glass shells burst into shining dust. Stingers flew like arrows.
The shockwave slammed the gate open so hard it knocked the rest of the swarm backward into the desert. The trench my blade carved filled with twitching scorpion pieces and smoking venom. I fell on my back, shaking, poisoned, and smiling. Tara dragged me away by my hair while yelling that heroes were just idiots who survived long enough to become expensive.