Mane-of-Night And The Dark Child's Descent - Chapter 1

...I think we made it.

I think I managed to get at least one of the pass-keys Turah gave us to work, just as the Huntress was going down - at least I'm somewhere else, and not scattered to atoms by a reactor blow-out...

I open my eyes, and even though I can see a blue sky with unthreatening wisps of misty cloud strewn across it, something doesn't seem right - it takes an unusual effort to look straight ahead, and when I try to get up, I can't manage to prop myself up, as my arms don't seem to work properly...

...and that's because I don't have arms. Instead, I have another pair of legs - legs with hooves.

Eyes on the sides of my head... ears that swivel, moving independently... a tail - for some unfathomable reason, I'm back in that horse form I wore briefly on Wyridaen. Not for...

...long?

I... I can't change back.

"Asor...?", I call out - but I produce sounds, not the telepathic impulses I'd intended. Sweet Goddess, my powers - I'm as "mind-blunt" as a rock, or a tree.

I struggle to my... feet, and I'm shakier than I was when I first tried walking with four legs. Scanning my surroundings, I see trees, hills - my clothes and boots, undamaged, strewn around me, snagged on bushes or dangling from branches...

I'm out in the wilderness, with no idea what world I'm on. I'm powerless... alone...

I have every right to be scared...

Medaa Lus-B'Haaka of the Gara-Morsa adjusted the sights of his hunter's energy-lance one more time, but instead of making his target clearer, that action only served to make the waters muddier. he wasn't sure what he was about to kill - the black creature on the slope wasn't like any Cursed he'd seen before, with no horns, and a tail that seemed to be just a length of hair...

The hunter laid his weapon to one side, to the surprise of his two companions, and smoothed his unruly, sweat-caked hair back from his grey-scaled forehead. Kaduress, his partner of nearly a hundred moon-passes, brought his own weapon up to his shoulder, preparing to fire, but Medaa gestured anxiously to him to wait. "This feels wrong", Medaa replied when Kaduress asked him the reason for the delay. "I want to take a closer look - we have to be sure..."

"Be sure of what?", growled Sterrmas, the third and most senior of the hunting party, with four hundred moon-passes of experience under his skin.

"Sure we're not about to shoot one of our own", answered Medaa - it sounded so wrong, coming from his own mouth. To even think such a thing was verging on insulting the Great Spirits... Gara-Morsa never suffered The Curse. The world was changing; there was now a lucrative trade in the preserved heads of those of the Cursed "foolish enough" to "stray too close" to Gara-Morsa territory - false-talk for "whenever you get them in your sights" - and although the authorities stayed mouth-still on the matter, unpleasant discoveries were being made out in the wilderness, and rumours of a new kind of Cursed were the hardest things to kill in hunting circles.

Of course, Medaa would have been proud to cleanse the wild-lands of another kind of abomination, but he reached not for his weapon, but for hand-held long-distance viewing lenses...

"It seems to be struggling to stand", he observed as the dark, and strange beautiful creature came into close, calculomatic focus. "Must be a new one - wait, what's that? In the bushes - are those clothes...?"

Kaduress climbed up onto the articulated shooting platform, with long-distance lenses of his own. "Yeah, I think so - but they look too small for a Cursed..."

"The monster ate someone - just as the stories are telling", muttered Sterrmas. "The Cursed are hunting us - now stop this madness, and kill the damn thing!"

"I don't think so", replied Medaa, increasingly convinced of the unspeakable truth. "Those clothes - girl's clothes - they're undamaged, and I don't see any blood, on them or on the creature. I'm going to move in closer - Kaduress, come with me. Sterrmas, you stay here, and man the tower. If I signal you, or it attacks us, take the shot - but not before."

Medaa swung down to the ground, Kaduress following him, and almost being pushed off the extendible gantry by an irritated Sterrmas. "Stupid kids...", growled the older hunter. "Stick their heads in a rip-biter's mouth if the mood took 'em..."

"You better be right about this", Kaduress whispered to his partner, once they were both on the ground again. "Sterrmas has a reputation - if he turns his back on us, we'll have a real struggle to find another like him!"

"I'm not doing this to show off", Medaa assured him. "We're going to go up to that creature, and see how it reacts. If it stands its ground, and talks to us, in our words, then it's one of us - if it attacks, or runs, then... well, then Sterrmas gets the kill..."

I have no idea what to do.

Just one sign of civilisation, and I'd have something to head towards - right now, I don't even know if there is a civilisation on this world. I could very easily be the only intelligent being on the planet, heading in any direction and finding only more hills, more forest, mountains, desert, ocean shore...

"Don't be stupid", I snap at myself. "That was Asor's slip-way pass you activated. It could only take you to his world, Gara-Laras - and that means there are other people here, including Asor..."

I shiver - and not because my clothes are scattered all over the place. Asor's people aren't the only intelligent beings on his world; there are the others, the Gara-Morsa - and just before the Conclave arrived, my friend had been telling me that the Gara-Morsa have started hunting his people, when they're in their "Cursed" forms.

What do I do? I stay here, hoping Asor will find me, and hunters could find me first. I move from here, I risk getting lost in this wilderness...

"I have no psi-powers", I tell myself, "but I must have my magic, otherwise how did I change into this shape?"

I try to reach inside myself, to see what magic I can call forth, but almost straight away, I find it's something of a struggle. I'm having to pit my intellect against something more primal, something more along the lines of pure, animal instinct - something inside me is trying to tell me I should be on my guards...

My equine ears catch it first - movement in the undergrowth, just out of sight; had "instinct" not alerted me to it, I'm sure I wouldn't have heard it. Quickly, I scan my surroundings for the best and quickest escape route, one best suited to my change of form - this is nothing like the desert, and one wrong step could be disastrous, a hidden animal's burrow snapping my leg...

"Malsu nayal? Malsu nayal aturr...?"

A voice calls out softly, and a figure moves into my field of vision, from behind a clump of bushes, a short way down the slope I've found myself on; a bipedal being, dressed for the outdoors, but in a style that's suggestive of the military. The creature seems essentially humanoid, although his face seems blunt, unfinished, and is tinged with grey on the cheeks, nose and forehead - similar to Asor's natural features, in many respects. This one must be a Gara-Morsa, about six feet tall, if I'm judging sizes and distances correctly from my unexpectedly altered view-point, and he doesn't appear to be armed...

I can't understand him immediately - I only understood Asor when we first met because the Keepers had a low-level psionic network in place around Wyridaen to ensure we Guests could allcommunicate, between ourselves and with the "locals", and I subsequently "downloaded" Asor's language into my mind to make sure we could talk, should that system fail somehow. Telepathy knows few boundaries, language-wise - thought is thought, with only cultural and extreme biological differences getting in the way - but I'm rather lacking in telepathy right now. I can either to try and use my knowledge of Asor's language to attempt to piece together an understanding of what the... I'm guessing this is a Gara-Morsa male, or I'll have to use magic...

Voices of the wind, grant me understanding...

It comes out as a single whispered word of Mystalornan, but its effect is immediate. "Malsu nayrstand me? What did you just say?"

I take a tentative step forward. "I understand", I say to the Gara-Morsa. "Well, I understand what you're saying - the rest... try me again later."

The Gara-Morsa reaches into a pocket inside his jacket, and takes out a small device. He squeezes it, it beeps, then a voice can be heard, though some kind of microphone: "Medaa, that you?"

The hunter places the device, clearly some kind of communicator, to his ear. "Yeah, Sterrmas. We're here, we're okay. Lances up, friend, lances up - I... I think this one is one of us."

I hadn't intended to pass myself off as Gara-Morsa, but for now, deception is a defence I'm not about to cast aside when I need every bit of help I can get. I'm certainly in need of some kind of advantage, as a second man in outdoor gear steps into view, emerging from the same line of bushes as "Medaa", and the so far unseen "Sterrmas" means I'm outnumbered three to one. Medaa's companion is carrying a metal staff of some kind, divided into several distinct segments, and I have to presume that is some kind of weapon - maybe the "lance" to which Medaa referred...

"Maybe so", says Sterrmas, my equine ears just managing to catch his response, "but I'm stayin' lance-ready - I got movement, in the direction of the ridge, about four hundred paces, and advancing on your vicinity..."

The second hunter unhooks my jacket from the low branch above him, and looks at me. "This gear yours?", he asks.

"Yes", I reply, lifting my nose up to the higher branches of the same tree, where one of my boots dangles, infuriatingly out of reach, the foot caught between two almost leafless limbs. "I... I don't know how any of this happened. I just woke up here..."

Medaa crouches next to a low bush, and picks up a jewel-like object that sparkles in the sun - a large jewel at the centre of a web of straps and chains, seemingly innocent, but in the wrong hands... "Be careful with that", I warn him as he examines my energy-whip generator, holding the jewel up to the light, fingers dangerously near to the activation node. "It's... rare - my sister gave it to me..."

"...three hundred paces, heading down the slope now", continues the voice on Medaa's comm-pod. "Trying to get a visual - think you better get ready to head back here..."

"Kaduress - leave that", Medaa says to his fellow hunter, who is a third of the way up the tree, trying to use his staff-weapon to dislodge my boot from the branches. "Sterrmas thinks we may have trouble."

He then turns to me, placing the energy-whip jewel on a rock, on top of my rescued jacket. "Did you see anything else out here?", he asks me. "One of... them, perhaps?"

"Two hundred - still no visual", says Sterrmas, the gap between his reports decreasing every time. "Maybe turning in my direction... 's okay, that means it'll have to come out into the open eventually..."

Kaduress drops to the ground, shrugging apologetically when I look at him, then he twists a central section of his staff, and a humming sound rises from it - it is a weapon, apparently energy-based. "I don't see anything", says the Gara-Morsa man, looking and sounding as though he's the youngest of the group.

Sterrmas, on the other hand, sounds as though he's the oldest, by a good few years. "One hundred paces, definitely heading for me", he reports, interrupting my thoughts as I try to answer Medaa's question in a way that helps to convince him I'm a Gara-Morsa. "I'm taking the shot when I get it..."

"I see it!", shouts Kaduress. "Must be a big one, moving fast!"

"Is... is it white?", I ask. "I think I saw something white, moving through the trees, when I woke up..." Please, don't let it be Asor, doing something stupid...

Kaduress shakes his head. "Nah, dark - maybe as black as you..."

Even I can see something now, galloping through the undergrowth, down the slope near the floor of the shallow valley. A quickly decreasing distance further away, I glimpse glints of metal, evidence of the presence of something that's plainly not native to the wilderness, possibly a vehicle..

"By the Spirits...", mutters Sterrmas. Less than a heartbeat later, there's a sharp, electrical crack sound, a flash visible from here - and a roaring sound that, to my ears, includes a sound that rather disturbingly bears a very strong resemblance to the Gara-Laserma word for "Die!"

Medaa's comms-pod gives off a piercing shriek of feedback, then the connection is severed. He deactivates the device, and returns it to his pocket, then his hand goes down to a pouch on his belt, and comes up with a smaller, one-handed version of Kaduress's weapon, thumb and forefinger rotating a raised ring midway along the device's length, most likely adjusting it to fire at maximum power. Kaduress performs a similar adjustment, and not a moment too soon, for something large is now moving through the undergrowth below us, moving swiftly in our direction...

...to be continued...

Posted at 14:49 on 20.04.2009


~ o O o ~


Previously...
Mane-of-Night And The Watcher From Beyond - Chapter 1 - 21.06.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Dark Child's Descent - Chapter 14 - 17.05.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Dark Child's Descent - Chapter 13 - 15.05.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Dark Child's Descent - Chapter 12 - 13.05.2009
Mane-of-Night And The Dark Child's Descent - Chapter 11 - 11.05.2009