Jory Strong: Ghostland

ZURAEL shimmered into existence in the exact spot he’d abruptly and involuntarily left moments earlier. The wings and talons were gone, as was the blood, but the rage remained, deadly and focused.

Desert winds streamed through windows hung with a thin, gauzy fabric. Rather than soothe and calm him, the breeze made him think of the woman who’d whispered his name on the spirit winds, who’d dared to summon a Djinn prince and command him.

She would pay with her life. Such magic could not be allowed to rise again.

A knock sounded at the door. It was his father’s advisor. Zurael could feel the signature energy. He’d known it wouldn’t take long for the knowledge of what had happened to reach The Prince.

Zurael went to the door and opened it. Miizan en Rumjal stepped back, the tilt of his head indicating Zurael was to follow him. His features gave no hint of his thoughts, and Zurael had no intention of asking for them. Though Miizan was bound to the House of the Scorpion and not the House of the Serpent, his loyalty to The Prince was forged in a time thousands of years earlier, when there were no ghostlands, no Kingdom of the Djinn to serve as both paradise and prison, when there was only the place that had been defiled by the humans and stolen from the Djinn by bloody conquest and foul, enslaving magic.

Zurael stepped into the velvety darkness of the night and followed his father’s advisor in silence as they moved through courtyards and beneath elegant arches. Pastel window coverings made him think of night-blooming flowers, their color revealed by the soft glow of candlelight. Though they could have taken any number of forms and traveled faster, they walked until Miizan stopped in front of a door few entered. “He waits below.”

Zurael’s lips curved in a grim smile as he opened the door and began descending the long staircase to the Hall of History. He didn’t need to wonder what his father’s mood was. It was always at its darkest when The Prince thought of the past.

It was pitch-black, but Zurael navigated the steps with the ease of someone who’d done so for centuries. As was fitting for a people created from fire at the very beginning-when the Earth seethed and boiled, molten rock and unconscious desire to bring forth life-the air around Zurael grew hotter the deeper he went and the closer he came to where his father waited.

At the bottom of the stairs, muted colors began their fight against the blackness in a sardonic metaphor for the history of the Djinn-fire and memory and angel blood. Zurael ducked through an archway and into the Hall itself.

His father stood in front of a mural depicting the first summoning and binding. But unlike the Djinn in the mural, who appeared much as Zurael did-bare-chested and barefooted, a long black braid trailing between his shoulder blades and ending at his hips-The Prince had taken the form of a nightmare, the demon he’d been named when the god cursed him and twisted his shape into something hideous as a lesson to all Djinn.

His fingers were curled talons. Leathery, batlike wings emerged from his back, their edges draped elegantly over his forearms. A snake-like tail coiled around his leg.

The humans believed they were formed in the image of their god. In truth they were formed in the image of the Djinn-not because the Djinn willed it, but because the god who amused himself with an experiment had settled on a form already proven efficient.

“You were summoned,” The Prince said. His voice was barely more than a hiss, but it echoed in the hall. It resonated through Zurael’s mind like a curse hurtled at the past.

“Yes. I will kill her if you’ll grant permission for me to pass through the gates.”

The Prince’s tongue flicked out, forked in keeping with the image he’d chosen to project, though he’d long since broken the curse that had once trapped him into an abomination of Djinn and beast.

Slowly, demon-red eyes turned to fathomless black. The tail uncoiled, and like the wings and talons, it faded as his father turned to study the mural once again.

Zurael looked at the mural and the depiction of the first Djinn not only summoned but bound to a vessel in order to serve one of the creatures created from mud. Though he would never admit to fear, an icy finger traced down his spine as he viewed Jetrel’s fate and flashed to those moments when he himself had been summoned. If the two of them were standing side by side, few would be able to tell the difference between his father’s firstborn son and his father’s eldest living son, so close was the resemblance.

His father had lost dozens of sons and daughters before he, along with the most powerful of the ancients, had created the Kingdom of the Djinn deep within the ghostlands. Afterward there had been few born to any of their race, even The Prince.

Silence reigned, heavy and full of dark memories in the Hall where The Prince was said to have painted the history of the Djinn using angel blood and the colors of the world that had once been theirs to rule.

His father tilted his head as if listening to voices only he could hear, or perhaps he was glimpsing a sliver of the future, as it was said he could do. “There are few old enough to remember, but this is the moment when even those who belonged to the House of the Dove realized there would be no compromise with the god who came here from a place beyond our understanding and claimed our lands as his own playground. We, who were created of Earth’s fire, were ordered to kneel down to the creatures of mud and submit to their will. When we refused, preferring to fight to the death rather than yield, they were given an incantation allowing them to summon and bind us to a vessel so we could be used as unwilling familiars.”

The Prince’s hand lifted to hover over the image of Jetrel. “This is the moment when we learned what would happen to us if we killed a human who held us enslaved. This is when we learned what it meant to become ifrit, soul-tainted, one whose name can no longer be spoken out loud, one whose spirit can’t be guided back and reborn into a new life.”

His father lowered his hand. Zurael fought the urge to repeat his question, to point out what his father already knew, that he hadn’t yet been bound and so he could kill the one who’d summoned him without becoming ifrit.

“Though few remember it and those who do won’t speak of it,” his father said, “before this moment when we knew we must create a separate kingdom for ourselves, there were Djinn who found the humans alluring. The son whose loss is a deep scar on my heart was one of those. Our women were plentiful then and our children easily conceived. Yet he became obsessed with a human woman, refused to give her up when I demanded it. She became his weakness, the bait used to trap him. Her blood was used in the first spell cast to summon and bind a Djinn.”

Zurael’s spine stiffened at what his father implied. “I have no interest in the human female other than killing her.”

“Walk with me,” his father said. “Tell me of the summoning.”

Zurael’s earlier rage returned in a heartbeat. The pictures in the Hall faded from his awareness. “There was no warning,” he said, “nothing to hint I was about to be taken. I heard my name and with it a command to end a ceremony before a sacrifice could be made. As we have all been trained to do since childhood, I took the form the humans call demon. There were black-robed figures gathered in a candlelit room and chanting around an altar. Their dark priest had an athame raised and was about to drive it into the heart of a woman. I killed them and would have killed the one who summoned me, but she was protected. When I drew near, a circle flared to life around her and I couldn’t cross it. I left before she could command me further or bind me.”