Timeline of a Fallen Hunter — Part Six
By Gunnar De Winter
Thursday, June 15th
Tally: 1 djinn, (!) upload error.
260 likes, 60 shares
Hi everyone. A lot of you guessed it; I'm in the southern desert. I have to thank DemonSlayer® for the attire they sent me via courier. The silk-smooth sand-colored shirt keeps me cool and I barely notice the chainmail shoulder pads.
The desert seems barren, but that's a mirage. The inhospitableness of the environment attracts a specific group of mythics. They tend to concentrate near the necklace of oases that runs horizontally through the big, dry blotch on the map.
The first oasis was a tourist-infested dud. I could feel the resentment simmer behind the smiles on the wind-scoured faces of the residents whose livelihoods depend on the tourists they wish were gone. I skipped the next two oases on the trail and earlier today I arrived at oasis number four. Too far for the tourists. Too small for travelers to properly refuel. Djinn country.
Most people don't spend enough attention on shadows. Hunters know better. It's difficult to read shadows in the desert, though. All shadows shimmer here. But some shimmer more than others, and one of those led me to the cellar of a dilapidated building that was once a hermit’s library.
A sigh greeted me when I entered, the sigh of someone who had seen too much shit, you know? Books attacked me like angry birds. I had to cut them up with Sybil. When I'd turned the djinn's library into kindling, it revealed itself. Djinn are notoriously immaterial. This one manifested as a man-shaped – it lacked legs, so technically semi-man-shaped – cloud of swirling black smoke. Pretty annoying to follow into a dark cellar. I chased it through a series of vaulted chambers that weren't on any blueprint I found in virtspace. I don't know where the djinn thought it was going because eventually it hit a dead end.
That's when it got weird. Instead of coming at me, the djinn kept pointing at the wall. I took advantage of it to activate the disruptor on Sybil. You can't exactly cut a cloud in half, but the blue Arclight that danced around Sybil's blade broke whatever spell that held the djinn together. Another annoying feature of a fading cloud is that it's hard to photograph, which is probably why I keep getting the effing uploading error.
It was only in the flash of my camera that I saw what the djinn had been pointing at. I don't know what to make of it.
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Alt-text: Stick figures carved into the wall. Some are obviously human, others less so. One of the figures resembles a centaur and a few are only half-complete. Or are they djinn? Lingering lower, there are mermaids, I think. A human-mythic congregation?
This doesn’t make sense. My handheld scanner says the carving is at least a few centuries old. But the Skein began unraveling only decades ago. Unless that’s a lie; unless there have always been holes. Perhaps the stories are true.
What am I doing?
And why did there have to be fucking mermaids?
Gunnar De Winter is a Belgian biologist who works as a science writer and storyteller. He has studied bacteria wars, social spiders, little fish, running lizards, and robot behavior. His fiction has appeared in, among others, Heartlines Spec, Future SF Digest, and The Deadlands.
Copyright © 2025 Gunnar De Winter