The Winds of Tepr

The desert remembers. It remembers the old Khan. And it remembers Noga, a man whose laughter could quiet a sandstorm and whose wrath could petrify a river. It remembers the silence that followed his death—a silence not of peace, but of a breath held too long. And in that silence, it watched Nemeh, begin his long, deliberate transformation into a monument.

One year passes.

The sun over the Yohazatz dunes is a merciless, white-hot eye. Nemeh stands alone in a basin of scorched sand, stripped to the waist. His body, once that of a princely commander, is now a landscape of straining sinew and re-knitted bone. He is not merely training; he is sculpting himself with a fanatic's patience. Lashed to his back and legs are bags of sand, so that even his shadow is heavy. In each hand, he holds a stone the size of a newborn lamb. His arms are raised, holding a full draw on a war bow that would break a lesser man, the string trembling with pent-up lightning. He holds it. And holds it. Sweat carves canyons through the dust caked on his skin. His muscles scream in a language of fire, but his face is a mask of serene, terrifying concentration. The set of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders—he is chasing the ghost of his brother's silhouette, hammering his own body until it fits the shadow Noga left behind.

A young retainer, barely more than a boy, approaches with a water skin. "My Lord, you will burn out your heart."

Nemeh does not release the draw. His voice, when it comes, is a dry rasp, but it carries. "A heart is a tool. Like a sword. It must be tempered in its own fire." He finally lets the bowstring down, the release a soft, sighing thrum that seems to disappoint the air. "First Brother could do this until the shadow of that dune moved the width of his foot." He points to a distant ridge. "I am only halfway."

Three years pass.

The air is cold and sharp as a knife blade. A hundred war-camels, their hides the color of dust and dried blood, shift and grumble, their breath pluming in the pale light. They are not the placid beasts of burden from the caravans; these are tall, ill-tempered creatures, their eyes rolling with ancient malice, their teeth yellow and capable of shearing a man's arm from his body.

Nemeh rides before them on a colossal white bull camel named Jaran, whose bellows sound like stones grinding together. He raises a hand, a simple, fluid gesture. In response, the hundred camels and their riders move as one organism. They wheel, a flowing, disorienting maneuver that seems to defy their ungainly appearance. They split into two columns, cross, and reform, a swirling dance of leather, muscle, and rising dust. The sound is not the thunder of hooves, but a softer, more sinister shush-shush-shush of broad pads on sand, a sound that announces an approach you cannot hear until it is too late.

A grizzled captain, his face a roadmap of old battles, watches, his expression a mixture of awe and unease. "They move like wind over dune-crests. No army can brace for that."

Nemeh guides Jaran in a tight circle, the beast responding to the pressure of his knees as if they shared a single nervous system. "The Moukopl expect horses. They prepare for the hammer. We are the scimitar. We do not break their line. We flow around it and cut their throat from behind."

Five years pass.

The rumor is a weed, but Nemeh is the soil in which it grows. It begins in the smoky confines of a clan chief's ger, where Nemeh shares a skin of airag. He does not speak the accusation aloud. He simply listens, his face a mask of grieving fortitude, as an old chief, his eyes clouded by drink and disappointment, mutters, "The Khanfather would never have taxed the salt routes. He understood the old ways. It is a shame… a shame how he was taken from us. So… suddenly. If only Noga Khanzadeh did not follow."

Nemeh looks into the fire, his jaw tight. A single, perfect tear traces a path through the grime on his cheek. He says nothing. He does not need to. The silence is his confirmation. The tear is his indictment. The story writes itself: the clever, effete younger brother's attack, the lost arrow, the convenient ascent. All know now who slew the Khanfather; all know who did not.

Later that year, under a moonless sky, the first real attempt comes. An arrow, fletched with owl feathers for silence, slices through the darkness of Nemeh's personal chamber. It does not find his heart but his hand. The point digs deep through the flesh. But his mind awakens with a slow, cold clarity. He plucks the arrow studying it as if it were a curious insect. There is no fury, only a grim satisfaction. The attempt is proof of his brother's fear. He breaks the arrow and tosses the pieces into the brazier, before bandaging his hand. The smell of burning glue and wood is a petty incense to his continued existence.

Six years pass.

The air is thick with the smells of roasting mutton and spilled drink. Nemeh is in his element, a feast to celebrate a minor victory over a rival clan. He is laughing, arm-wrestling, the very image of his father's robust legacy. A servant, his hands trembling slightly, presents him with a beautifully carved horsehide flask, a gift, he says, from a loyal chieftain from the western dunes.

Nemeh takes the flask, hefts it, and smiles. He makes a show of unstopping it, bringing it to his nose. The smell of fermented mare's milk is strong, but beneath it, a faint, bitter tang, like almonds left to rot. He looks across the fire-lit faces, his gaze lingering for a fraction of a second on the servant, who looks ready to vomit.

Instead of drinking, Nemeh laughs, a great, booming sound that echoes his father's. "Such a fine gift should not be hoarded!" he declares. He strides to the edge of the feast and, before anyone can react, pours the entire contents of the flask onto the sand at the feet of his white camel, Jaran.

The great beast sniffs at the darkening patch, then lets out a furious, guttural roar, backing away and foaming at the mouth, its eyes wide with revulsion. The bitter almond smell suddenly intensifies, a deadly perfume rising from the ground.

The feast falls silent. All eyes are on the poisoned sand and on Nemeh, who stands with the empty flask, his expression now one of profound, terrifying sadness. He looks at the servant. "It seems the kumis was not to Jaran's taste," he says, his voice quiet but carrying to every ear. "Find out who taught the camels to betray their master." The servant is dragged away, screaming. Nemeh does not watch. He has already turned back to the feast, the unkillable Khan, his legend growing another, darker ring.

Seven years pass.

The stables are warm, smelling of hay, dung, and animal sweat. A groom, new to Nemeh's personal retinue, approaches Jaran with a handful of sweetened grain. His pockets are heavy with Moukopl silver, enough to buy a small herd of his own. His plan is simple: a needle, tipped with a toxin distilled from the venom of a dune-scorpion, hidden in his palm. A quick prick on the camel's leg as he feeds it. The beast would sicken and die in a day, a mysterious illness, stripping Nemeh of his famed mount and a potent symbol of his power.

He coos to the great white bull, offering the grain. Jaran lowers his head, his lips nibbling at the treat. The groom's hand, holding the needle, moves stealthily towards the camel's thick hide.

But camels are creatures of profound and ancient instinct. Jaran, who had borne Nemeh through a dozen battles, who had saved his life from a sand viper by crushing it under his pad, who sensed water three days' ride away, also senses the treachery in the man's heartbeat. Before the needle can touch him, Jaran lets out a shriek of pure, intelligent betrayal. He lunges to pin, his massive head slamming the groom against the stable wall.

The commotion brings guards. They find the groom, broken and sobbing, the needle and the silver spilling from his pockets. When Nemeh is summoned, he does not question the man. He simply looks at Jaran, who is now calmly eating the spilled grain, and then at the terrified groom.

"The desert provides all tests," Nemeh says, his voice soft. "Loyalty. Strength. And now, the discernment of my allies." He nods to the guards. "The silver is yours. The man is the camels'. They will teach him the price of betrayal." The groom's screams had lasted until sunset.

Eight years pass.

Nemeh is no longer just a man; he is a fact of the landscape, as inherent to the dunes as the wind and the sun. He stands on a high ridge, looking out over the thousands of tents that now fly his banner—a stark, black scimitar on a field of sun-bleached white. These are the clans bruised by Puripal's taxes, the traditionalists who distrust the new ways, the warriors who yearn for the old, uncomplicated strength Noga represented and that Nemeh has so painstakingly embodied.

He has trained his body into a mirror of his brother's. He has forged a weapon of war that is uniquely his own. He has survived every attempt on his life, his survival weaving a tapestry of divine favor and unshakeable destiny. The rumor of his brother's guilt is now accepted as steppe gospel, a dark, foundational myth for his own ascension.

He turns from the view, his face, once merely handsome, now carved into something monumental and severe. The eight years have etched their history upon him not as lines of age, but as the facets of a gem cut for a single, terrible purpose: to reclaim what he sees as his birthright, and to break the brother who stole it. The wind, his constant companion, whispers the refrain that has become his truth, the truth the whole steppe now knows: All know now who slew the Khanfather; all know who did not. And in that knowing, Nemeh has built a power that is, for now, as unkillable as he is.

The night is a vast, black bowl over the Golden-Sand Flats, pierced by a spray of cold, sharp stars. Nemeh's field pavilion is an island of muted light in the darkness, its horsehair-felt walls sighing with the wind. He sits not on a cushion that was his brother's, his posture that of a resting predator, all coiled potential. Before him, a map of the desert and steppe and its bordering waters is weighted down at its corners by a dagger.

The silence is broken by the softest of sounds: the whisper of a curtain being drawn aside. Kan enters as she always does, like a shadow given purpose. She is dusted with the fine, pale grime of the long ride, her travel clothes practical and dark, but there is a sharp, urban crispness to her bearing that the desert has not been able to erase. Her eyes, the color of dark honey, miss nothing, taking in the map, the spent bullet, the man.

"The city sweats fear," she says by way of greeting, her voice a low, cool stream in the warm tent. She does not wait for an invitation, settling onto a cushion opposite him with the familiarity of a fellow strategist. "The Moukopl magistrates have started pricing wood for gibbets. They sense a shift in the wind they cannot name."

Nemeh's eyes, dark and depthless in the lamplight, fix on her. "And have you brought me its name?" He pours a cup of bitter, black tea and pushes it toward her.

Kan accepts the cup, her fingers brushing his. "I have brought you the anatomy of the shift." She takes a sip, her gaze never leaving his. "Your brother courts pirates. He and the Tepr she-wolf have stitched an alliance with the Blood Lotus. They mean to strike the Seop coast."

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Nemeh does not react outwardly, but the air in the pavilion seems to grow denser, as if the news has physical weight. "A bold play. Reckless. How did the Tepr she-wolf convince him? Did she offer him a gesture?"

"It is more than a gesture," Kan counters, setting down the cup. "It is a lever. With Seop in friendly hands, his western flank is secure. He can turn his full attention… inland." The word hangs between them. Inland. Toward the dunes. Toward him.

She leans forward, the lamplight carving the sharp planes of her face. "The Tepr are not just riding along for the plunder. Naci Khan has forged her own new weapon. She calls them Banners. Young warriors, armed with muskets. She drills them not just in killing, but in ruling. And they are all sailing together."

This, finally, draws a reaction. A slow, dark smile spreads across Nemeh's face. It does not reach his eyes. "So, Puripal Khan Regent and Naci Tepr Khan are sailing together in a foreign land with their armies and nobody left behind?"

"Puripal is the key that unlocks the Yohazatz strength for her. But he is a key that worries about its own lock." Kan's voice drops, becoming conspiratorial. "It is a moment of immense vulnerability. All their pieces, concentrated. Far from home."

Nemeh rises, a tower of contained force. He paces the narrow confines of the pavilion, his shadow a giant that dances on the felt walls. He stops, turning to her. "The first true opening."

"The first and perhaps the last," Kan affirms. "Strike there, and you cut the head from the snake. Both of them. You may avenge both your father and brother at the same time."

He moves to her then, not with passion, but with the intensity of a general acknowledging his most valuable spy. He crouches before her, so their eyes are level. "When he falls," Nemeh says, his voice a low, visceral rumble, "you will not just be my maid or spymaster. You will be my consort. The Queen of a united Yohazatz. This I swear on my father's shadow."

Kan does not blush or simper. She meets his gaze with a cool, analytical steadiness, as if assessing the structural integrity of a fortress wall. "Then don't miss," she says, her voice devoid of flirtation, all sharp, pragmatic edges. "A consort to a dead pretender is just another woman waiting for the executioner's blade."

She reaches into a hidden pocket of her tunic and produces a slender scroll, no larger than her finger. "The wavering captains. Men who remember your father fondly and find your brother's taxes… indigestible. Their names, and the locations of their clans." She then places a second, smaller scrap of parchment beside it. "And the supply timings for the Moukopl garrison at Agan-An. A distraction for the Empire, while you deal with family business."

Nemeh takes the scrolls. They are weightless, yet they feel heavier than the stones he lifts each dawn. This is the final piece. The intelligence, the timing, the means. The eight years of preparation have all led to this precipice.

...

The air at Zenyu's Harbor is a taut wire, thrumming with the tension of two worlds forced into proximity. On one side, the immense, serpent-prowed junks of the Moukopl navy lie at anchor, their disciplined silence a stark contrast to the chaotic, vital energy of the steppe forces on the shore. Grand Admiral Bimen stands on the command deck of the Heaven's Mandate, his soft body encased in stiff, ceremonial armor that seems to wear him rather than the other way around. Through a slender, mother-of-pearl telescope, he observes the Tepr contingent with the pinched expression of a man calculating the cost of a disaster.

Naci, Horohan, Borak, and Pomogr stand together, a tableau of feral authority against the backdrop of the grey, choppy sea. Bimen lowers the telescope and turns to his first mate, his voice a sibilant whisper meant only for the man's ear.

"Look at them. The one with the tiger armor postures like a stage performer. The white-haired one has the eyes of a snake assessing a mouse. The giant looks like he combs his hair with a rock, and the limping one… spirits, he probably thinks a battle plan is a type of soup." He sniffs, the scent of horse and open plains an offense to his naval sensibilities. "And they brought so few. This is not an invasion force; it is a delegation for a particularly violent festival."

On the shore, Naci's smile is a razor-slash. She doesn't need a telescope. "The Admiral is comparing us to his furniture," she murmurs to Horohan. "He is deciding which of us is the ugliest vase."

Borak grunts, crossing his massive arms. "I can break his little boat with my hands. Let him taste the soup."

The first formal meeting is a masterpiece of mutual disdain, conducted on a hastily assembled platform between sea and shore. Bimen, flanked by two rigid guards, begins with bureaucratic poison.

"The Emperor, in his wisdom, has seen fit to… supplement our naval supremacy with your… land-based enthusiasm," Bimen begins, his tone implying the Emperor has suffered a temporary lapse in judgment. "However, naval tradition and… certain hygienic considerations… dictate that we must maintain the sanctity of our vessels." His eyes flicker to Naci and Horohan. "The presence of… unaccommodated women… aboard a warship is historically inauspicious. It invites tempests and poor luck."

A profound silence falls. Pomogr's good leg seems to root deeper into the shingle. Borak's knuckles crack like small thunderclaps.

It is Naci who breaks the silence, her voice flat and clear as a slate. "Admiral. My wife and I are women who share a bed. We have no use for men. In the eyes of the wind and the water, we are therefore men. Probably more man than you, who requires so much silk to feel like one, cannot bed with either kind, and even lacks the proper tool to match the description."

Bimen's jaw goes slack. The two guards' helmets twitch in a barely suppressed reaction. The sheer, unanswerable logic of it, delivered with such lethal calm, leaves him floundering.

Borak seizes the moment. "He worries about our luck?" he booms, his voice carrying to the sailors on the nearest junk, who flinch. "I have walked from a field where the crows were so fat they could not fly. My luck is a mountain. His luck is a puddle."

Pomogr, his voice the dry rasp of stone on stone, adds, "I have seen more men die from bad paperwork than from bad omens. Perhaps the Admiral should fear his scrolls more than our shadows."

Bimen's face flushes a blotchy red. He is being openly mocked by barbarians. He switches tactics, gesturing dismissively towards the eighty Banners standing at crisp attention. "And this is your grand contribution? Forty children with iron sticks? The Seop garrison at Bo'anem numbers five thousand. This is not a spear; it is a toothpick."

"A toothpick can choke a giant if you know where to put it," Naci replies, her gaze unwavering. "You have ships to deliver the toothpick to the throat. We know how to make it stick."

"I see no evidence of this fabled skill," Bimen sniffs. "I see posturing and primitive noise."

Naci's eyes glint. She turns to Borak and gives a single, almost imperceptible nod.

Without a word, Borak bellows, "Banners! Volley target! On my mark!"

The forty warriors move as one, their drill so ingrained it is a single organism breathing. They kneel, prime, level their muskets not at the sea, but at a towering, rotten pine stump on a headland a hundred paces away. The Moukopl sailors watch, a mix of curiosity and derision on their faces.

"Mark!"

The world tears itself apart. The volley is a single, concussive hammer-blow that slams into the headland. The old pine stump ceases to exist. It does not splinter; it vaporizes in a cloud of white smoke, splinters, and pulverized wood. The sound echoes off the cliffs, a rolling wave of pure, destructive force that leaves ears ringing and the very air feeling bruised.

When the smoke clears, there is only a cratered scar where the stump had been.

The derision on the sailors' faces has been replaced by a kind of terrified awe. Bimen himself takes an involuntary step back, his hand clutching at the railing of the platform.

Naci lets the silence linger, allowing the echo of the demonstration to fade into the crash of the waves. "You have five thousand men in Bo'anem, Admiral," she says, her voice soft but carrying like the edge of a knife. "How many of them can unmake a tree from a hundred paces? How many can do it together, as one?" She steps closer, her dragon-scale armor glinting. "You have the sea. We have the thunder. You get us to the walls. We will make a door where there was none."

Bimen stares at the smoldering scar on the headland. He looks at the forty young faces, now resetting their weapons with a calm that is more frightening than the blast itself. He sees the unshakable confidence in Naci's eyes, the primal power in Borak's stance, the cold patience in Horohan's. They are feral, arrogant, and utterly terrifying. And they are, against all his instincts and every ounce of his bureaucratic soul, right. They are the weapon he lacks.

He straightens his armor, a futile attempt to reclaim his dignity. The calculation in his eyes shifts from cost-assessment to grim necessity.

"Very well," he says, the words tasting of gall. "You may board. But any tempests, any ill luck… it is on your head, Khan."

Naci's smile returns, wider this time. "Admiral," she says, "we are the tempest."

She turns and raises a fist. Behind her, the Tepr Banners begin to move towards the waiting imperial transports, a wave of leather, iron, and audacity preparing to crash upon the shores of a fallen kingdom. Bimen watches them come, a man who has just invited wolves onto his ship and can only pray they will bite the enemy first.

...

The wind that sweeps down from the Yohazatz dunes into Qixi-Lo is no longer a mere current of air; it is a herald, carrying the fine, abrasive dust of Nemeh's ascent. The town, still breathing the faint, lemony ghost of Puripal's occupancy, feels the change in its very timbers. It happens not with a siege, but with a silent, inexorable absorption. Nemeh's camel brigades pad through the gates at dawn, their broad feet making no sound on the packed earth, their arrival as subtle and final as a tide coming in.

He does not dismount. Astride the colossal white Jaran, he is a statue of reclaimed legacy, his father's own scimitar resting across his saddle. His face, that carefully sculpted monument to Noga, is graven with a sorrow that looks like righteousness. His herald, a man with a voice like grinding stones, stands in the dusty central square and speaks to a populace that has already chosen fear over loyalty.

"Hear the truth the wind has long whispered!" the herald bellows, his proclamation stripping the titles from his enemies like bark from a dead tree. "The pretender Puripal has fled, coupling with pirates and a Tepr pretender, Naci, who abandons her own people to play at empire across the sea! She forgets the steppe! She forgets the blood oath her forefathers swore to the Khan of Khan Demoz! Nemeh, true heir, has come to reclaim his father's legacy and avenge the broken faith!"

...

In the Tepr camp, the news arrives on the breath of a near-dead scout, his horse foundering beneath him. Tseren receives it in the command ger. The cough that wracks his frame is wetter now, a persistent, muddy sound in his chest, but his eyes are preternaturally lucid, burning with a cold fire.

"He moves," Tseren rasps, the words a condemnation. He turns to Gani, who stands by the brazier, her face a mask of calm over a deep, churning dread. "Naci said he was a minor khan. A nuisance to be swatted. She underestimated the story he has built around himself."

Gani's hands, usually busy with thread or spice, are still. "She saw the man. She did not see the monument. Monuments are harder to break."

A council is summoned, not of the old clan chiefs, but of the new power structure Naci left behind. Kuan and Lanau stand before Tseren, one a jangling instrument of chaos, the other a still point of spiritual order.

"Kuan. Lanau. The home Banners are yours. Rally them. The old oath-bands who remember my face will answer to me."

Kuan's usual smirk is absent, replaced by a sharp, focused intensity. "Interim command? Does this come with a pay raise? Hazardous duty allowance? The right to compose mocking verses about the enemy?"

"It comes with the right to keep your head on your shoulders," Tseren retorts, a flicker of grim humor in his sunken eyes. "Do not let the children with muskets be flanked by his camels."

Lanau places a hand on Kuan's arm, silencing the retort on his lips. Her antlers seem to listen to the wind. "We will hold the line, Uncle."

As they depart to mobilize the defenses, Tseren slumps into a chair, the burst of energy leaving him. He looks at Gani, his partner in all things, now his co-architect in a desperate defense. "He will have numbers. He will have momentum. And he has the most dangerous weapon of all: a story that feels true."

Gani does not answer immediately. She moves to the ger's entrance, pulling the flap aside. Her gaze sweeps past the organized chaos of the preparing camp, past the drill fields, and fixes on the distant, smudged lines of the healing tents—and beyond them, to the designated carrion pits where the fever's victims are burned. The wind, that ever-present entity, tugs at her grey braid.

"Naci gave us a new kind of army," Gani says, her voice so quiet it is almost lost in the sounds of the camp. "But the steppe provides its own answers. Older ones."

Tseren watches her, a cold knot tightening in his gut. "Gani…"

She turns, and her eyes are not those of a healer, but of a strategist reading a terrible map. "The fever is a fact, you said. Like the wind." She steps back inside, her movements precise, her mind clearly racing down a dark and terrible path. "Nemeh comes with the wind at his back. He comes with the dust of his father's memory in his nostrils. What if…" she pauses, the moral abyss of her idea yawning before them, "…we give the wind a new scent to carry?"

The horror of it is immense, silent, and profound. Tseren stares at her, his breath catching in his ravaged lungs. He sees the utter, ruthless logic of it. To fight a man who embodies a glorious past with the vile, indiscriminate reality of the present.

"The carrion pits," he whispers, the words tasting of ash and bile.

Gani's nod is a slow, grim descent. "The wind favors the northwest at this hour. It would be a simple thing. A terrible, simple thing."