The Skybound Sea by Samuel Sykes

He swallowed and a mess of pulped flesh and poison slid down his throat.
    “I’ve had dreams.”
    His voice was raw with venom when he spoke.
    “When I was young, anyway. I wonder if every tribesman has them. I don’t think I ever asked.”
    His toes twitched, all six pale green digits digging into the soil. He felt connected to this earth, kin to it; poison flowed through it as it did through him.
    “We didn’t ask questions in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. I don’t know. I once asked my uncle if he knew. He looked at me and didn’t say a word. He slid a Spokesman into my hands, patted me on the head, and pointed me toward the humans.
    “I had been alive for … fifteen years?” He scratched his chin, fingers rubbing over the inked scrawl of tattoos that ran from brow to navel. “Fourteen, maybe. Just married at that point. We did that earlier in the south. Maybe it’s different in the Silesrian. My wife was the first person I ever asked. She just looked at me and shook her head.
    “I stopped thinking about it, as much as I could. Time passed. I killed humans. Humans killed my uncles. Humans killed my wife.” He waved a hand. “My son, too. It doesn’t matter. All tribesmen die. They went to the Dark Forest and I continued fighting. We were losing, of course. It’s impossible to fight humans and win … or it was.
    “The dreams … didn’t stop.” He scratched his bald scalp. “I still had them and they didn’t make sense. Maybe that was how I tried to figure it all out and get an answer. They lasted for a while.”
    His ears twitched. He reached up, running a long finger along each length, counting each of the six notches in them, as if to reassure himself that they were still there.
    “It was when I learned why we fight that they finally ended.
    “I found one of them. I couldn’t tell you what nation he belonged to or what god he worshipped. All humans looked alike to me. But I found one, alone. I suppose it would have been smarter to wait for the others, maybe to interrogate him.
    “But I was hungry. And I heard
it
—” he tapped his temple “—right here. And I wanted to hurt him. So I did. We fought for a bit. I struck his head with my stick. He cut me in the thigh with his sharp sword. When our weapons were lost, we fought with fists and teeth.
    “And I don’t know when I had come on top of him, or when I had found his throat with my hands. Everything was just moments, things that happened without me knowing how. One time, my fingers felt the hair on the back of his neck. The next, my thumbs found the hard bump in his throat. I couldn’t remember either when I started to squeeze.
    “I wondered if he knew the human who had killed my wife. Maybe he was. It was unlikely. There are so many humans. But this was one less. And because this was one less, there would be one more of us.”
    Naxiaw looked up and stared across the clearing at the young woman sitting cross-legged at its edge. She stared at him intently. There was no more fear in her green eyes anymore, no more tension in her scrawny, pale body. Her ears rose upright, each one twitching and attentive.
    “And that’s when I knew what it meant to be a shict.”
    She took a long moment before she spoke. When she did, he wasn’t listening; words were something she was too good with, something she used too often. His ears twitched, listening to her other voice.
    She could still speak through the Howling, the wordless language of their people, but in the same way that a child could still speak. The voice of her mind and body, spirit and anger, was a sporadic thing: snarling one moment, spitting the next, then whimpering, then weeping, then roaring.
    She tried to hide it behind words. She tried to distract from it with questions she thought were insightful. But he could hear her Howling. Just barely.
    He said nothing to her spoken words. He stayed silent as she rose up from the earth and offered some excuse