On the shore itself is a sight he has never seen in this holy place: a group of humans, protected by a thick band of fire.
Disbelief washes through him. No humans should be able to cross into this realm. None should be able to, save the marid. He swims closer. The dryness encroaching upon his skin hurts. The fire before him is already changing the atmosphere, sapping the air of its life-giving moisture.
A ripple dances over the lake’s surface when the other marid spot him, and he is pulled forward on a current. As he is embraced, he opens his mind to his people, offering them memories of the rich flood he gifted his humans last season in exchange for the boats and fishermen he devoured.
The visions they offer in return are not as pleasant. Through the eyes of his kin, he sees the mysterious invaders arriving on the beach, crossing over the threshold as though it were nothing. He sees one of them accidentally venture past the fire’s safety and then tastes its flesh when it is dragged into the water, seized by tendrils of seaweed and drowned, its memories consumed for information. What those memories reveal is shocking.
The invaders are not humans. They are daevas.
Such a thing should be impossible. The daevas are supposed to be gone, vanquished by the human prophet-king Suleiman a century earlier. He studies them again from the waterline. Suleiman has changed them, has taken the fire from their skin and left them shadows of the fiends they once were.
One moves. Anger swirls inside him as he recognizes her from the dead daeva’s memories. It is Anahita the thief; a so-called healer who’d spent centuries luring away the marid’s human worshippers. She’s been reduced to a slip of a thing, a ragged young woman with unruly black curls barely checked by the faded shawl draped over her head. As he watches, she lights a stick of cedar from a brass bowl of flames and presses it to the brow of her dead fellow, her lips moving as if in prayer.
Then she stands, her attention turning to the lake. She steps over the protective ring of fire.
Water snakes, his elders and mates, instantly rush at her. They hiss at her bare, mud-splattered feet, twining around her ankles.
Anahita hisses back, “Be still.”
He freezes, along with the rest of his kin. For her words come out in the marid’s tongue, a language no daeva should be able to speak.
Anahita continues. “You know now what we are … trust that I know you as well.” Her eyes burn. “I know the scaled wraiths who caught the feet of wading children in the Euphrates, the ones who swallowed merchant ships as a passing curiosity. I know you … and Suleiman knew you too. Knew what you did.” She raises her small chin. A dark mark stands out on her cheek, a stylized star with eight points. “And he tasked me with bringing you to heel.”
Her arrogance is too much. His kin swarm the shore, churning the lake into waves that flash pointed teeth and sharp silver spines. Creatures from times forgotten, from when the world was simply fire and water. Plated fish and massive snout-nosed crocodiles.
“Fool,” another marid whispers. “We will drag you into our depths and extinguish everything that you are.”
Anahita smiles. “No,” she replies. “You won’t.” The star symbol on her cheek flashes.
The world breaks.
The sky shatters into smoking pieces that dissipate like dust in water as the veil comes falling down, revealing a painfully azure sky from the realm beyond. The mountains groan as dunes of golden sand rush to swallow them, their life snuffed out.
The lake is next, evaporating from around them in a hot mist. He screams as pain wracks his body, and the holiest of their waters vanishes in the blink of an eye. The creatures of their domain—their fish and their snakes and their eels—shriek and die twitching. Sprawled on the cracked mud, he watches Anahita stride towards the lake’s center.
“Here,” Anahita declares as the earth buckles before her, rocks and debris racing to pile upon one another. She climbs them, a path smoothing before her feet. She glances back and the mark on her face abruptly stops glowing. “This is where we will build our city.”
The lake dashes back. The sky and the mountains reassemble. He slips gratefully into the water, longing to fully immerse himself in its depths, to soothe his wounds by burrowing into the cold mud at the