Before the fog.
Before the blood and the broken staff and the field soaked in mud and the enemies who would not fall.
Before all of it — there was an egg.
It was small.
Not unusually small for a lizardman egg, but small enough that the other eggs in the clutch made it look like a mistake by comparison — like something that had been included without being fully decided on. Its shell was the wrong color too. Lizardman eggs came in the deep sandy browns and muted greens of things that were meant to be hidden, meant to survive by being indistinguishable from the earth around them.
This one was pale. Almost white at the top, fading into a faint grey-green toward the base, the coloration uneven in a way that made it look less like a natural pattern and more like something that hadn't finished deciding what it wanted to be.
The other mothers noticed.
They always noticed things like that.
"It's a bad omen," one of them said, not quietly, not bothering to be quiet, the way people said things they wanted heard while maintaining the appearance of not directing them. "An egg that color. My mother's mother said she saw one once. Nothing good came of it."
The others murmured agreement.
The egg's mother said nothing.
She sat beside it the way she sat beside all of them — close, present, her body curved slightly toward the pale egg specifically in the way that bodies curved toward the things they were worried about. She looked at it with the particular expression that only existed on the faces of mothers looking at things that other people had already decided were wrong.
She saw something different.
She couldn't have explained what. It wasn't visible, wasn't something that could be pointed to or described in terms that would satisfy anyone asking. It was the thing that existed between a mother and the life she was responsible for — the particular knowledge that came from proximity and care and the specific attention of someone who had decided, before the evidence was in, that this thing mattered.
She kept that to herself.
She kept it close, the way she kept the egg close, and waited.
The morning it hatched, the rest of the clutch had already been open for two days.
The other hatchlings were already moving — already finding their feet, already starting the process of becoming the small, scaled, loud creatures that lizardman children were in their early weeks. The pale egg sat among the empty shells and said nothing, did nothing, gave no indication that anything inside it was preparing to do anything.
Then it cracked.
Not from the top, the way the others had — from the side, a single line running horizontal around the circumference, the shell separating into two clean halves that fell away from each other with the particular decisiveness of something that had been building to this and had finally arrived.
He was small.
His scales were the same pale grey-white of the shell — not fully colored yet, the pigmentation still working itself out, the pattern of it uneven and strange. His head was broader than the other hatchlings. His eyes, when they opened, were a yellow that sat closer to gold than the standard amber of the tribe.
He looked at his mother.
She looked at him.
Someone nearby asked — not unkindly, just the reflexive question of someone encountering something they didn't have a name for — "What is that?"
His mother looked at the questioner.
Then back at her hatchling.
"Slann," she said.
He did not make friends easily.
This was partly because of the scales — the pale color of them that never quite darkened to the proper shade no matter how much time passed, remaining always slightly wrong, slightly off, the kind of difference that children identified immediately and without mercy. And partly because of the head, which was broader than standard. And partly because of the eyes.
Children had a way of cataloguing difference and converting it into distance without needing to be taught how.
He tried anyway.
There was a morning — he was perhaps four seasons old, still small, his tail not yet fully coordinated — when a group of children from his cluster were playing in the clearing near the water. He had watched them from the edge for a while, long enough to understand the game they were playing, long enough to want to be part of it.
He walked toward them.
One of them saw him coming and said something to the others. The group shifted — not dramatically, not rudely in a way that could be reported to a parent — just enough. Repositioning so that the natural flow of the game moved away from where he was approaching rather than toward it. By the time he reached the clearing's center, the game had migrated to the other side.
He stood in the empty center for a moment.
Then a boy his age turned and looked at him directly — the only one to make the acknowledgment explicit — and said, with the flat certainty of a child repeating something heard at home and not yet understanding why it might be unkind: "My mother says you're a defect."
He went home.
His mother was there. She looked at his face and knew without asking.
She sat beside him the way she had sat beside the pale egg — close, curved toward him, present.
"You are not a defect," she said.
He didn't answer.
She put her hand on the top of his broad head. "You are different," she said. "Different is not the same as wrong. Remember that."
He wanted to believe her.
He was not yet sure he did.
The shaman came in the dry season of his seventh year.
He came from a larger tribe, traveling with two assistants and the particular unhurried authority of someone who did not need to announce his importance because it preceded him. His appearance was unlike any lizardman in the village — his scales darker, his build more compact, his face shorter and rounder, with eyes that sat higher on the skull and a crest of rigid scales running from his crown to the base of his neck that no one in the village had a name for. He was a different kind entirely — not from their lands, not from their line, carrying the particular strangeness of something that had come from very far away and had not lost the distance in its manner.
He walked through the village and the village watched him and he paid the watching no particular attention.
The children were assembled in the central clearing — every child of appropriate age, lined up with the self-conscious posture of young things being evaluated. The shaman moved down the line slowly, his eyes moving from face to face with the particular attention of someone reading something that was not visible on the surface.
He passed the children who stood straightest.
He passed the children with the best coloring, the most standard proportions, the ones who had been told since birth that they were the ones to watch.
He stopped.
He was looking at the end of the line.
At the pale-scaled child with the broad head and the gold eyes who had not stood straight because he had not been sure he was supposed to be there and had arrived at the last moment and not had time to prepare a posture.
The shaman pointed.
"That one."
The clearing went quiet.
"He is chosen by the spirit of the great behemoth." The shaman's voice carried the specific weight of someone who was not making an argument but stating a fact that the world had already decided. "He shall be my apprentice."
Slann stood at the end of the line and felt something happen inside him.
It started deep — below the chest, below the place where breath lived, somewhere more fundamental than either. It rose through him slowly, warming as it came, arriving at the surface as something he did not have a word for because he had not felt it before.
Pride.
For the first time in his life, the things that made him different were not being named as flaws.
He looked at the boy who had called him a defect.
The boy was not looking back. He was looking at the shaman. His expression was the expression of someone who had been told his whole life that he was the kind of thing that got chosen, encountering the moment where that turned out not to be true.
Slann looked at his own hands.
His pale scales.
He straightened his posture.
The staff came on the third year of his apprenticeship.
The shaman presented it with the ceremony that the gift deserved — not elaborate, not theatrical, but deliberate. He held it out with both hands and waited for Slann to take it with both hands, the exchange having a formality that communicated its importance without needing to state it.
"A shaman's staff," the master said, "is not a tool. It is not a weapon. It is the second body of a shaman — the vessel through which the spirit speaks when the shaman's own form is insufficient. Treat it accordingly."
Slann held it.
Felt the weight of it — the wood dense and old, the carved mouth at the top open and waiting, the whole thing carrying the particular gravity of an object that had been made with intention.
He looked at his master.
"I will," he said.
The other apprentices were also different.
This was the first thing Slann noticed when he arrived at the training ground and found them already assembled — a collection of young lizardmen from different tribes, different regions, none of them standard, all of them carrying the particular mark of something slightly outside the expected range. Broader heads. Unusual coloring. Eyes the wrong shade or the wrong shape or sitting slightly differently on the skull than they were supposed to.
He looked at them.
They looked at him.
One of them — a girl with scales the color of deep river clay — smiled and moved to make space beside her.
"You can stand here if you want," she said. "I'm Vesh."
Slann looked at the space.
At her.
(They're different,) he thought. (Just like me.)
The feeling that arrived was complicated. Something that wanted to be warmth — recognition, the relief of finding others who understood the particular experience of being catalogued as wrong. It was there. He felt it.
Then he thought of the shaman pointing at him specifically. Of the words chosen by the spirit of the great behemoth. Of the clearing and the boy who had not been selected.
(No,) he decided. (They are like the others in the village. Slightly different, perhaps. But I am the one who was chosen. I am not the same as them.)
He stepped away from the space she had made.
"I prefer to stand alone," he said.
Vesh looked at him for a moment.
Then nodded, and turned away.
His summon came in the fifth year.
His scales had gained their red coloring by then.
Not from training — from somewhere older, the skill arriving fully formed in a moment of desperation during a particularly difficult exercise, the first green lizard materializing from nothing in his palm with the particular pop of something crossing the boundary between existing and not existing.
His master stared at it.
The green lizard blinked.
"Summon Minor Reptile," the master said quietly, reading something in the casting that Slann couldn't see yet. He looked at Slann with an expression Slann had not seen on his face before. "You are truly something special."
The pride rose again — fuller this time, settled, the pride of confirmation rather than surprise.
But the other apprentices kept training.
Kept progressing.
Their skills arriving, accumulating, the gap between Slann and the others closing and then reversing — the others moving ahead while Slann's development plateaued in the particular frustrating way of talent that had found its ceiling before it expected to.
He told himself it didn't matter.
He told himself this repeatedly, with increasing conviction, in the specific way that things requiring increasing conviction to believe were believed.
The master stopped calling on him first.
Then stopped calling on him specifically.
Then, one morning, looked at him across the training ground with the particular expression of someone who had revised an earlier assessment and found the revision painful.
He never said it directly.
He didn't have to.
His village received him as their shaman.
Except he wasn't one.
He had failed. The master had never formally granted him the title — had never spoken the words, never performed the ceremony, never handed him the recognition that the years of training were supposed to culminate in. He had simply stopped being called upon. Simply been allowed to drift back to his village with his staff and his summon and the particular silence of someone who had been let go without being told they were being let go.
He had told no one this.
He had walked back into the village with his staff held at the right angle and his posture carrying the right weight and he had let them see what they wanted to see. A shaman returning. Their shaman. The thing they had been waiting for.
They believed him immediately.
This was the part that stayed with him — how easily it had happened, how little it had taken, how the village had assembled the story from the pieces he gave them without needing him to construct it fully. Their first shaman. A thing the village had wanted for generations. They cheered. They made the sounds of celebration and he stood in the center of it and felt the warmth of it and told himself it was real.
His mother's house was quiet.
She was on her mat when he came in, her breathing slow, her scales dull with the particular dullness of age and illness settling in together. The hut smelled of dried herbs and old wood and the specific stillness of a space that had been waiting for someone to return to it.
She looked at him when he entered.
Really looked — the way she had looked at the pale egg, the way she had looked at him every time he had come home from something that had not gone the way it was supposed to. The look that had never required him to explain himself because it already knew.
"I knew it," she said.
Her voice was smaller than it had ever been. Thinner. The voice of someone spending what they had left carefully, choosing what to use it on.
"I knew you were special."
He sat beside her.
The lie sat between them — not visible, not speakable, just present in the space between his silence and her certainty. She had believed in the pale egg before it hatched. She had believed in him before he had given her any reason to. She had kept believing through the years of distance and failed training and the quiet accumulation of evidence that argued against it.
And now she was dying believing in something that wasn't true.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
What would he say. That the master had turned away from him. That the title was borrowed, the ceremony performed only in the village's imagination, the shaman standing before her a construction of posture and timing and the willingness of people to see what they needed to see. That every year she had spent believing in him had been spent believing in a lie he had not corrected because correcting it would have meant becoming the thing the village had always suspected — the pale egg that should never have hatched.
He said nothing.
He held her hand.
He let her believe.
She closed her eyes.
He stayed until her breathing stopped. Then he stayed a little longer, in the quiet of the hut, in the smell of herbs and old wood, in the specific silence of a space that had just changed its nature permanently.
Then he stood up.
He picked up his staff.
He walked out.
They were waiting.
The whole village — gathered in the space outside his mother's hut, assembled in the way that communities assembled when they understood something had concluded and wanted to mark the transition. Their faces were turned toward him. Some of them held torches. The light of the torches made their scales catch and glow, the whole gathering lit from below in the particular warmth of firelight that made everything look more significant than daylight would allow.
They looked at him.
He looked at them.
At the faces of people who had called the pale egg a bad omen. Who had repositioned during games so he arrived at the empty center. Who had let the boy say my mother says you're a defect and had said nothing. Who had cheered when he returned not because of him but because of what having a shaman meant for their standing.
Who were looking at him now with the open, waiting faces of people who believed in something.
The grief in him was real.
The anger under it was realer.
He raised his staff.
Both hands — high, the carved lizard mouth pointing toward the sky, the wood catching the torchlight and throwing it back. He drew himself up to his full height. His pale scales, which had never darkened to the proper shade, caught the firelight differently from the others — brighter, more present, the wrong color made luminous by the right light.
"I," he said —
His voice came out larger than expected. Larger than he had intended. The particular voice that arrived sometimes when something fundamental had been decided and the body committed to it completely.
"— am your Great Shaman."
The gathering was still.
"Wielder of power. Speaker for the spirits. Your savior." He looked across the assembled faces — every one of them, finding each one and holding it for a half second before moving to the next. "The Great Slann stands before you. And he will not fall."
A moment.
Then someone started.
Then everyone.
"SLANN — SLANN — SLANN—"
His name, in their mouths, filling the space between the huts and rising into the dark above the torches. His name — the name his mother had given him in the moment of his hatching, the name that had meant nothing and now meant this, chanted by the village that had made him feel like a defect and was now looking at him like he was the thing they had been waiting for.
He stood in the center of it.
Basking.
The warmth of it was real. He could not deny that — could not pretend that the sound of his own name spoken with reverence did not reach something in him that had been waiting for exactly this since the clearing, since the empty center of the game, since every moment of distance that had preceded this one.
But underneath the warmth, in the place where the grief still sat fresh and unprocessed —
His mother had died believing a lie.
And he had let her.
And he would carry that — would carry it alongside the pride and the staff and the title he had not earned — because the alternative was becoming the thing the pale egg had always been accused of being.
Something that should never have hatched.
He kept his staff raised.
He kept his face toward the sky.
He kept his name in the air above the village that was chanting it.
The Great Slann, he thought, in the voice his mother had used when she said I knew it.
The Great Slann.
Harvard's men came in the night.
His magic held for the first exchange — mud walls rising, projectiles scattering the lead attackers, the staff channeling everything he had into holding the perimeter. But there were too many. There were always too many when Harvard sent his people, and the raid was organized in the specific way of something that had been planned around the defender's capabilities.
They took him between casts.
The cage closed.
And now the staff — the second body of a shaman, the vessel through which the spirit spoke, the gift from the only person who had ever told him he was truly something — lay in two pieces in the mud of a battlefield that was not his.
He looked at his bleeding palm.
At the fog rising from it.
At the shape emerging within it.
The anger that lived in him was not new. It had been there since the clearing, since the training ground, since the moment his master's expression had changed. It had been there through the cage and the captivity and the string of humiliations that had followed one after another without pause.
But now it had a direction.
His differences — his pale scales, his broad head, his gold eyes, the summon that had come from nowhere and had been the only thing in his life that anyone had called truly special —
They had always been real.
He had always been real.
And what rose now from his blood and his rage and the broken pieces of the only thing his master had ever given him —
That was real too.
His anger.
His summon.
His power.
Something that made him, finally, undeniably —
Special.
To be continued...