Chapter 6
The Bad Place
Hamal knew he was asleep. Based on his breathing, heart rate, the way the blood moved through his body, and several other signs, he knew he was unconscious. That meant this had to be a dream. It existed but not the way the inn existed or the way the dirty town of Redsprin existed.
And yet, as he turned around in a slow circle and gaped, his mouth open, the land around him seemed oddly…real. This was possibly the most realistic dream he’d ever had.
He could smell the smoky air and feel the sand shifting under his boots as he turned. The sky was a strange shade of brown, almost like cinnamon, and the sun was a dull, orangey globe above his head. He didn’t need to squint or shade his eyes as he peered up at it, because the brightness that should have been there wasn’t.
He was standing on top of a sand dune. As far as he could see in any direction lay other sand dunes and, in the small valleys in between them, large puddles of black wetness. They sort of reminded him of a swamp he’d seen once, but they didn’t appear to be filled with water or mud. He thought it might be tar. There was so much smoke in the air that his head was starting to feel tight. He lifted the collar of his tunic and held it over his nose. This dream was turning out to be stranger and stranger. Now it was trying to give him a headache, and it was very hard for most things to give him headaches.
He stood there for a long time and waited for something to happen. That was usually how dreams began—someone came along, or something changed, or you realized you had to be somewhere.
But nothing changed. The land around him stayed exactly the way it was, and Hamal’s head remained tight and achy, and he barely cast a shadow because the sky acted like it was trying to cover the sun with blankets.
Shel Galen, his grandfather, had much to say about dreams and how the gods sometimes spoke through them. Hamal lifted his brows. Well, if this dream was a message from a god, it couldn’t be a good one.
He froze.
Rosy. The oracle.
The little girl was asleep in the room with him, and she had a powerful gift that could peer into the realm where the gods lived and see what they were doing. Was this a Rosy dream? Did this place look and seem real to him not because of him—but because of her?
Oh, you poor child. Was this horrible place what she saw whenever she used her gift? Hamal’s heart began to hurt. He almost reached up and rubbed his chest. This place was not a good place. No child should live here—or even visit here. It wasn’t safe and it wasn’t healthy. He had to find her.
He took a deep breath, hoping the fabric of his tunic would help filter it, and then lowered his tunic and called out, “Where are you, Rosy? Where are you?”
She did not appear. The land lay empty and still.
He had no idea where he would find a small child in this smoke-filled place filled with rolling dunes, but he couldn’t just stand here and do nothing. Eventually he picked a direction and started walking. Really, there weren’t many directions he could go. He had to pick his way around the tar puddles.
He climbed down the sandy slope and then clambered up the slope on the other side, the sand sucking on his boots with each step. Once on the ridge of the second slope, he looked around again and saw only the same things—rolling dunes, puddles of black stuff, brown sky, quiet sun. A hot wind came by and told him more about this place and how it wasn’t good for children. Something had died nearby. The smoke mixed with the eerie stench of decay and death.
He kept walking. Up and down. Hill after hill. One time he paused and cocked his head, listening as an animal howled somewhere in the distance. He didn’t recognize the cry and—considering the rest of the dream so far—thought he probably wouldn’t like the animal, whatever it happened to be.
Step after sandy step. He repeatedly called Rosy’s name and wondered what his grandfather would say about the dark, sticky-looking puddles that lay like dozens and dozens of traps in his path.
“Oh, Rosy,” he murmured as the dry, fiery wind swept over him, blowing sand. “I am so sorry about all of this. This is not a good place, and this is not the work of a good god. I promise you. I promise, Rosy—I am going to show you what a good god looks like. You will get to see what a good god is doing, and you will get to be a child again.”
He sighed deeply and then continued trudging, trapped in a little girl’s nightmare.
Tracking through the brown sky, the sun shifted in color, darkening to red-brown as it approached the horizon. Evening was approaching—night. Hamal could not imagine being in a place like this after dark. Who knew what prowled these slopes when the sun was gone?
How many times had Rosy been to this place?
What horrors had she seen here?
The wind began to change. The stench of something dead returned, stronger this time, until Hamal doubled up his tunic so he could keep breathing. He was used to dead things and dead smells. All healers were. But this wind carried despair he could feel pushing against his skin. He tripped as he climbed up the next dune, landing on his knees, one hand, and one elbow. Struggling up to his feet again, he completed the climb and stopped at the top of the rise, every muscle in his body going still.
On the other side of the dune was a long, wide area that was sandy and completely flat, with more dunes rising on the far side. A large black desk stood in the exact center of the clearing. It was the size of the king’s dining table. Stacks of coins covered the desk’s surface—it was a towering forest of coins—and someone was counting them. The man seated behind the desk matched the desk length for length. His bare shoulders were like the shoulders of a mountain, and his arms were twice as long as Hamal’s entire body. A black crown encircled his bald head, and his skin changed colors, washing gray and then black-purple, then a sickly kind of yellow, like an old bruise no one had bothered to heal.
Hamal dropped into a crouch, his heart thundering.
He watched as the man counted the wealth on his desk. He would pick up a coin, hold it in his palm, and then move it to the next pile. Every ten coins, he picked up a quill pen and scribbled something in a huge ledger in front of him. Then he would lay the quill aside and resume counting.
Hamal released his breath slowly. Something was wrong with those coins. Those looked like real coins, but even from this distance, he could feel them, the same way he could feel another healer.
Why, he thought desperately, is this terrible thing in Rosy’s dream?
He knew he hadn’t spoken aloud. But the large head with the black crown lifted, and a dark, vile gaze met Hamal’s. The man—no, Hamal didn’t think this was a man. This was a disease that had taken human form.
The monster-god did not rise from his chair. He didn’t see an intruder and move to attack. Instead, his lips pulled back, revealing multiple rows of teeth, and the creature reached over to a random stack and picked up a single coin from the desk’s vast treasure. Between powerful-looking fingers, he lifted the coin and turned it so Hamal could see its face.
Hamal was a long distance away, still crouched on top of the sand dune. But somehow in Rosy’s dream, distance didn’t matter. He could easily see the image embedded in the coin’s surface.
A crown on top of a jewel.
Confusion rushed through Hamal’s system as he looked at the coin and tried to understand. A crown and a jewel? This was Rosy’s dream—did that mean this was her coin? Did it represent her in some way? He couldn’t understand how either of those two images might go with an oracle. She was not a jeweler. Nor was she a queen, a princess, or any other type of ruler. She was just a little girl without any family.
The wicked smile widened. Hamal had the stomach-turning sense that he had given the monster-god exactly what he wanted, though what that was Hamal couldn’t imagine.
The monster-god set the coin back on its towering stack and resumed counting, marking the ledger every ten coins. He did not look up again.
The acidic wind grew more severe, sweeping over the dunes and across the flat land. The monster-god’s stench became choking. All breathable air disappeared from Rosy’s dream, and Hamal jerked backward and—
—and sat straight up on the bed.
The old frame creaked beneath the sudden change in his position. His heart was shouting in his chest and in his ears. A fire gleamed on the hearth, and a lamp burned on the small table next to the bed, but the light barely reached beyond the corners of the bed. It wasn’t enough light. The room remained horribly dark.
A hand landed on Hamal’s arm. A strong grip held him. “Hamal.” Cale’s voice. “Are you all right?”
Gasping for breath, Hamal told his heart to calm, and it obeyed. His breathing quieted, and he scanned the room again, searching for a small pair of fire-filled eyes gleaming in the darkness. He did not find them. “Where’s Rosy?”
“Peace, Hamal,” Cale said. “She’s fine. She’s in the next room with Chestirad, who seems to think he’s good with children.” Cale shook his head like he did not fully trust this assessment.
Hamal felt the seer’s eyes.
Cale’s voice grew tight. “What happened? We could not wake you, no matter what we tried. Rosy awakened easily, but you we could not bring back to consciousness. It is now the evening of the second day. What happened?” he repeated.
Hamal groaned and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I saw the god Rosy is shadowing.”
Cale grew still. “Yes?”
Hamal nodded sadly. “Oh, Cale. This is not a god we want in King’s Barrow. This is a bad god. I don’t know who it is, but I think it might be the one in charge of diseases. Plagues and horrible things like that. It had a desk full of coins—hundreds of coins—and I think they’re all people who are sick. He was proud of his coins, and he was counting them. He showed me one, and I thought it might be Rosy’s coin, but…that doesn’t make any sense. She isn’t a jeweler.”
Cale slowly leaned back in his chair. He stared at Hamal and did not speak. A log cracked on the hearth. A small cloud of sparks rose up around the base of the chimney.
“You were wise, I think,” Hamal said at last, “to sleep in a different room last night! Was this what you foresaw, that she would dream?”
Cale grimaced slightly. “I saw there would be complications and that we wouldn’t be able to leave in the morning, the way we intended. I didn’t know what the complications would be.”
“I want to see Rosy. I want to make sure she’s all right.” Hamal felt like the dream still stood in the room with him, holding on. He wanted the image of that strange, terrible god to leave him, but more than this, he wanted to go and comfort Rosy, if she would let him. He wanted to hold this little girl who had known only pain and found herself shadowing a god of disease. After that dream, he knew more about Rosy than even what her bones had told him, and he wanted to comfort all the fear from her.
The chair scraped across the floor as Cale stood. “Let us go now.”
They stepped out into the hallway and crossed to the next room, which held a few more people than was naturally comfortable for such a small space. Chestirad was pacing back and forth by the fireplace; Masly Hawl was pacing by the window. Lord Rhyan, seated on one of the two beds, was trying to read a book, but it didn’t seem to be going very well. He was scowling.
Gregory Almes was seated on the edge of the other bed, writing a slew of words in his notebook. Hamal could hear the pencil as it scraped the page, and this gave him an idea, a good idea, but it needed to wait for a few minutes. Right now, there was a little girl who needed kindness.
Voices erupted as the men saw Cale with Hamal right behind him, but at a gesture from the seer, they all fell silent.
Hamal saw the one he sought. Rosy was sitting on the floor in the corner. Again she had returned to the corner, Hamal noticed with sorrow. She watched him with dark eyes as he walked up to her slowly and crouched down.
He wanted to touch her, but he remembered what her bones had felt like and every detail of the place he’d seen in her dream. So he just squatted there and didn’t try to lay his hands on her. “Rosy.”
If possible, the room grew even quieter.
“I know what you see when you use your gift,” Hamal said, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t scare her more than she was. “You see a large, terrible land filled with sand and smoke and a monster-god who sits at a desk and counts coins.”
When he heard her heart jump, he wanted to put his arms around her even more. She was used to hiding, to revealing nothing to those who might cause her pain, but her heartbeat gave her away.
“There, there, Rosy,” he said, lifting his hand in what he hoped was a soothing gesture. “It is going to be all right. I don’t know how to do this yet, but I am going to find a way to save you. One day, I promise, you will never have to see that horrible god again.”
She didn’t move.
He waited, giving her time to respond. When she did nothing, he nodded and stood up. He turned around and looked at Gregory, who was also staring at him.
Hamal pointed to Gregory’s notebook. “May I borrow that?”
– H –
Author’s note:
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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.