The child’s mother can barely stand to look upon the tiny thing, and who can blame her, when her other children are already slithering about, foraging for their own food? The occasional two-legs can be useful, they can run and climb better than some others, but this girl has barely any serpent nature. No. For the good of the settlement, she must die. At least she will serve as a meal of the anathema. And I’ll have no more of this talk of destiny. We are barely surviving, hardly able to maintain our devotions to Zehir. I can’t have you stirring up discord and false hope among the others. Or questioning me either. The anathema is not above eating blasphemers, as you well know.”

Scitheron bowed his head. “As you will, most low. I will make the sacrifice at the midday feeding.”

“Mmm,” the low priest said. “No. Better to do it now.” She showed her fangs. “Not that I expect you to disobey-you have always been obedient-but I can see it troubles your mind. Finish the task then, and you can move on. Besides, it’s an act for the shadows, as all gifts for Zehir must be.”

Scitheron flickered his tongue in assent and slithered to one of the low buildings, a rare structure that still had portions of its roof. It was the nursery, where the youngest yuan-ti slithered and wrestled and twined, and where one child mewled and waved her brownish, soft, unscaled limbs around, gazing about her with disturbingly round-pupiled eyes in her strange flat face. He picked her up, and she cooed at him. Her skin, at least, was not as delectably warm as the furred creatures of the jungle-she resembled a human, apart from a few patches of scale here and there, but she still had a serpent’s blood.

“Forgive me, child,” he said. “Forgive me, Zehir.” Cradling the girl in his arms, he emerged from the low building and slithered across the plaza toward the pit of their sole remaining anathema, the last living god-touched member of their sect. The other yuan-ti watched him as he went, some making the sign of the fangs when he passed.