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The world spread out before the nekfehr, the slight curve of the horizon partially obscured by hazy clouds. Unlike the flat plains directly before the possessed vessel—a raven, black, sleek, and intelligent—this horizon rose in a nubbled, broken line.

South.

They would go south.

It hadn't worked out well, last time; so many years, spent just in recovery. The hill folk had been waiting and ready, forewarned by their seers . . . seers once grown thickly in that nurturing land.

The Annekteh had lost that fight—but they had made sure the next generations of the hills had no such guidance. They had burned the seers' painstaking records—generations of wisdom, lore, and observations—every one. They'd ransacked houses, stripping all charms, all the protections that could be copied and used even without a seer's understanding.

Every one.

And the seers themselves . . . dead. Or fled.

The raven's wings caught a thermal; the bird adjusted—a shift of feather, a tilt of wing—and the annektehr within barely noticed. That was what the nekfehr, the vessels, were for; to do the things the Annekteh could not. To see, to fly . . . to feel. The annektehr—one of many, so consumed by the Annekteh whole it didn't even understand the concept of individuality—stared at that bare hint of the mountains, letting the bird mind control their flight. Yes. It shared the image among the whole, among the Annekteh, even as it maintained awareness of each of its fellow annektehr at work in other vessels. Human bodies, mostly, supervising the insignificant, unTaken individuals that served the Annekteh.

Yes.

South. Where the lumber was not only abundant, but was imbued with the natural magic of the mountains—the same subtle magic of the plains, distilled and amplified and then submerged to run deep along the ridges. Magic that would protect the Annekteh, so deep that the humans barely knew it was there.

But the Annekteh knew.

And the Annekteh intended to have that magic, and that land, for their own.

 

 

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Framed