Heat from their fire and shelter from the old tree had kept it from them, but after days now of unbroken sunless overcast, a chill is rising in the land, while drizzle and damp air is falling. As Awelah departs into the woods, she wonders if the fog is gathered thickly enough for her spear to stab through it.
Proximity to the creek couldn’t have helped, when it comes to how bad the fog got. As she walks Awelah hears it rush over rocks and slam into mud. The waters are dark, and it isn’t just shadows. The creekwater isn’t safe to drink, not so soon after a wispfall. A wispfall in the mountains behind them, where all this water is runoff from? Still, enervate is sensitive to temperature — it didn’t get hot, not in the way matter does, but it nonetheless didn’t stick around after boiling.
Ooliri had remarked that it’s odd the water remained so enervated. Black nerve seeks denser matter, and sand is preferable to water. Emusa, it turns out, had noticed the same thing. She'd determined it was an excess of water-affine enervate in the wisps. Something like that. It’s far beyond the lessons Awelah had thus far retained. Affinities were a distraction, anyway. That much she knew — the Asetari are above such things. Were above such things. Will be above. Ugh.
Awelah is reprieved from distracting thoughts soon after, when the taxites clear and in their absence, moss thickly overtakes the ground. Soft and growing, it didn’t keep tracks as well as mud, and she gives up following through, and starts fanning out, checking the perimeter of the clearing, and then any mud patches within, for anything to follow. The haphazard search pattern means that when she feels the relief of at last finding more tracks, it’s dashed seconds later as she realizes they are her own.
Doesn’t matter, she thinks, I don’t need this to be so easy. She is a hunter. The mantis uncurls her antennae, short things from which locks of gray-purple setae curl off. She runs dactyls through them, combing away dirt and dead hair.
When she extends them again, she lets her eyes pale as she focuses on the world in scent.
Diamantids had eyes better than any other kind, so it’s just efficient for Awelah to focus on what she sees. But as a nymph, Awelah had spent so long playing with her family’s roaches. There was a type of game played in basement rooms with none of the torches lit. Noble roaches had longer, more sensitive antennae than diamantids, and even with all her experience, Awelah had been a handicap on any team that had her. (Once, Awelah had asked her dad to have her antennae cut in a way to make them more sensitive — he had pat young Awelah and told her how pretty her antennae were, and how it’d be unbecoming for a bane line Asetari to look like a roach on top of all the things the clan already says about us. She didn’t get many chances to play with the roaches after that.)
She’d learned enough, though. To your antennae, everyone is a bright lamp, illuminating the world in 'light' that traveled like something thrown instead of instantly. Your antennae didn’t have lenses like the dewdrops on mantid eyes, so everything was mixed together and unfocused. Lingering, too — as if everywhere you held your antennae, it gazed upon photographing chemicals that’d sat exposed for too long. You have two antennae, though, and so much length. It’s like a string of these photographs, each subtly different.
The image of scent had foremost the expected elements — of wet vegetation and mosses crushed or split open by her steps, of trace enervate which seemed to sting even when so faint, and the pheromones of lesser insects — but behind them all was the putrid, metallic, unnatural scent she seeks. She doesn’t think anything could mask it — direbeasts and bloodbanes didn’t always stink so strongly, not when resting, but active ichor metabolism did. Those erotyles had fought back, it seems, and the dog had doubtless licked the blood in its wounds.
Awelah waves her antennae through the air, and the world seems to gain new a depth. She feels the diffusion of the oldest scents, and aligns her antennae right along that gradient. Her surety only grows in her next steps. Her hopes were unfounded, and her fears hold true.
Her prey is still here.
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Far to the west, and earlier that day, Makuja leaves the camp in the opposite direction, and she too walks along the banks of the creek, distracted in the depths of her thoughts.
She hears Awelah call out — to Ooliri, perhaps, who trusted her more. Attention, not alarm, and what would Awelah want attention for? To brag about another successful hunt?
There’s a briskness to her pace, and a tension in her tightened raptorials. She doesn’t want to go back to the camp, to talk to either of them. She’s felt this before, when another pawn had done something to get a satisfied nod out of master and so she killed something or gathered some rare poisonous flower, and reminded her who the most useful was.
In a practiced motion, the red nymph tosses up a stone, and casts it into the dark waters of the creek with vespertine force. It feels like she let out more than just the black nerve that fuels the spell. She wants to do it again, see the stone smash apart against the streambed.
A technique she’d discovered — not invented, such a simple permutation of signs had to be something well known for centuries. There’s more to getting it right than just the order of the signs, though. She’d spent hours to figure that out, getting it down to consistency, and then —
“Why would I need to fling rocks? I have better techniques.”
And the Asetari did. Throwing rocks, and creating an autonomous projection — who would choose what Makuja could do? It’s simply a worse tool.
What did she have that could compare to what the Asetari could do? (She knows exactly what the answer is, and that makes it worse. “Do you know the tarsigns for the wretched raptorials?” she’d asked Ooliri. And the boy had no idea.)
The creek isn’t a straight thing. It curved when it ran into the old tree they camped in, and here, upstream of that, it’s winding to the north. The metataxites have grown more numerous around the red nymph as she walks on.
Makuja is in the middle of imbuing the next stone to cast when she hears the sound of branches bending, sees the movement in between thick trunks.
The Asetari wasn’t lying or embellishing, then.
Ahead of her stands a cicindela — a wild tiger beetle.
If I can catch this…
She wants to see that look on the Asetari’s face even more than she wants to see this rock crack open against the earth. A glance down finds the near-forgotten thing already splitting and liqued from partial imbuement. Hmm.
She knows tarsigns aren’t needed. Nervecasting with or without them is the difference between digging with a shovel and clawing at the ground. She doesn’t want to do anything big, though, and doesn’t know if there's a sign for what she wants.
Whatever discharged enervate into her palm… can it go the other way? Can she un-imbue?
She knows what it feels like for black nerve to flow into her tarsi. Maybe if she focuses on that sensation, or imagines some kind of pull.
It doesn’t all come back, but she sees — and feels — the enervate escaping the rock, and new coldness seeping into her, slithering up her forelegs. She doesn’t know the right word — pulling, pumping — but she draws the stuff further up her arms, as if to return it all the way back to her abdominal core. But the farther it gets from her hands, the more her control frays, and by the time it’s descending her thorax, she’s not sure if gravity isn’t doing most of the work. No matter — perhaps this way, it’d be quicker to expel later.
Makuja shakes her head and looks up. The cicindela is still there, long legs lifting it up where it licks the algae from a metataxite’s shelf-like limbs.
Makuja is patient. She would watch, poised for the right moment to strike.
When the beetle’s head turns, and its forward-facing compound eyes would no longer catch the red nymph, she slips into motion. Swiftly lunging across the ground, she feels the returned enervate in her thorax. It feels different from that which had not yet left her. Then, as if gravity continued its work, the enervate flows into her legs as they bend and straighten, and it settles there.
Makuja stalks the cicindela as it trots directly away from the creek. She is silent, unseen, and by all rights, the tiger beetle should be hers to capture.
She didn’t do anything wrong. She’s sure there could have been no error on her part. And yet it all goes wrong anyway.
The tiger beetle spooks. Its antennae flare straight up, and then it bolts to the west.
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Making tarsigns took time, Awelah is learning. The fight with Klepé had been sobering, in that regard. She’d applied the lesson in her next fight, but even though she’d won, she’d sat up reflecting, and decided she had learned the wrong lesson. Making tarsigns took time, yes, and knowing that, you have to adapt your tactics to that momentary time commitment — or did you?
Umbral body projection isn’t like the other spells that they had in their arsenal. Why should Awelah take the time in a fight to cast her projection — why, when she could have it out before the fight even began?
The technique had many more tarsigns than bane blast or apparently the spell Makuja had invented. (Why is Makuja of all mantids inventing spells! Awelah had been a bane for longer — hours longer, but still. Is she falling behind this soon? Why couldn’t Awelah invent spells? “Why aren’t you as quick as your cousins, Awelah dear?”)
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
She felt the projection growing inside of her, the spellform taking shape and she reached the sign which seemed to push it further, making that cold sensation envelop her body. She tries holding it for longer — that’s the sort of thing Makuja did, isn’t it? But after a second it starts to feel almost painful, and she stops.
When the voluminous shadow of her projection is flowing out of her, she sees it waver before it fully fills out. Is that new, or had she never paid attention to it before?
The pale nymph gestures to her shadow, and when she aligns her antennae to her quarry’s scent-gradient, her projection is hunting beside her. (Asetari are never alone, they said. She feels alone.)
She catches two very similar scents, both faint, both putrid ichor. One is the old trail she’d followed until now, and the other is new, as if it had drifted to her on fortunate winds. She decides this is a good sign for how close she’s getting.
The trail goes north, now, and takes her uphill. She hears the bubbling of a rill. A new stream is rolling down this hill to meet the creek she’d followed.
She breathes deep, and becomes aware of her pounding heart. The smell of blood had gotten so strong as she nears the crest. There is no doubt.
At the top of the hill waits a pond, textured with ripples from the subtle drizzle. There’s something else putting waves on the surface, though. Fog-hidden on the far side.
A muzzle kisses the water’s edge, and a tongue laps greedily. Then stops.
Awelah again stands face to face, eye to eye, with the dread that had haunted them for half a black moon’s phase. The bone spurs are no less sharp, the muscles no less sculpted mechanisms of death, and those eyes… Unodha had trained these things — they could learn. Is there enough of a mind staring back to take pleasure and satisfaction in the hunt? To face them with malice?
She will not be paralyzed. A gesture, and the projection seeks toward the hound. The head lifts and it’s barking. Awelah starts moving, circling the pond. She goes right. The direhound looks to her. It barks again. Her spear, her safety, is tight in her grip.
The projection drifts to the left, the goal to flank the hound. There’s an obvious problem, though.
The direhound gazes at the approaching projection, chill coming with it. The water below is drawn up toward it.
The direhound takes a step back. Then it looks back at her, as if it understands that the pale nymph is the source.
Awelah is halfway around the pond by now. The hound runs away from her, not the projection. Once it’s gone below the hilltop, Awelah can’t send her spell blindly after it.
And she had told Ooliri she wasn’t hunting it, just making sure they were safe. So she sighs, folds up her spear, and starts walking south, back down the hill, toward the creek.
The direhound, meanwhile, flees west.
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Ooliri has looped a long piece of rope twice through the harness he’d earlier tied around his barrel. At the far end of the rope, he is making a similar knot, the rope twice looped around either end of a log he found that isn’t yet rotted.
His idea is coming together. Hopefully, it’d all be set up by the time everyone gets back. Then he could at last demonstrate it. He hoped they’d want a demonstration — it would be time not spent traveling or training, and maybe after so much curiosity and secrecy, the truth will just be disappointing, boring, and they won’t care. Awelah would go back to practicing, and Makuja back to finding new ways to use her powers, and his work wouldn’t matter.
Ooliri didn’t have clan abilities or so much skill and experience. He hadn’t had Oocid’s raw genius or Fihra’s determination. At best, he had some ideas. He hopes it will be enough.
Finished with the log, he looks at the barrel. Now for the next step. The obvious way to do it would be to empty his waterskin and use that… but so many trips back and forth to the creek daunted him. Could there be another way?
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Having lost the tiger beetle, Makuja settled for easier prey. The first thing she found was a stinkbug. Its offensive stench wouldn’t be a problem after cooking it… but she wonders if it’s worth bothering at all.
She has her antennae out, evaluating the pungent odor, when a new scent reaches her. Ooliri would be scared. Awelah would be on edge. Makuja... Makuja feels nostalgic.
“Vilja?” she calls, as loud as her resonators can manage. She calls again, but doubts it’s needed — he would have no trouble finding her with this stinkbug here.
Is it all a misunderstanding? Or an understanding, rather? Somehow, Vilja had survived the battle. Before, Awelah and Ooliri had been targets. Now they live and master is dead. Is finishing the mission not the logical course? Ooliri and Awelah fear him, rightly, but Makuja had never been a target.
When he bounds in from the east, bone armor rattling, the red nymph is far more at ease than he is. He growls, circling in toward her.
“What’s gotten into you, boy?”
By the time Makuja accepts that something is wrong, it’s too late. She looks into his eyes, and knows she is the target.
Vilja lunges, teeth bared, and Makuja is too surprised to dodge. She does turn, and teeth sink into her foreleg instead, and chitin palpably cracks.
“Viljaaa! I’m the one who used to feed you. Don’t you remember?” She almost feels the bite loosen. (Is she imagining it? Hemolymph loss can’t have gotten to her already.) But he bites down harder, and shakes. She’s jerked like a toy. “Don’t I taste… familiar? Vilja?”
Vilja doesn’t release her, but she can’t die like this. She has to… to… What can she do? Her dominant arm is the one bit. It’s held fast. She can’t make tarsigns. She can’t reach for her knives. Yet she has to free herself.
She starts to pull away, feeling her heart racing. Her legs are bending. And then, something forgotten makes itself known. The enervate that had sunk into her legs sinks further, reaching the extreme of her feet.
At this point, she knows well what it feels like when enervate compresses before a bane blast. She squeezes, pressing down on that coldness. And then, she splays her feet open in a mimickry of the release sign.
Makuja flies. She is thrown up by the force of the blast, and she feels so free. When she lands, it’s clear she hadn’t gone very high or very far — but even these precious two meters feel infinite next to being so close, so tightly held.
Her hand closes around a rock. She throws it up, prepares her spell — but when she looks at Vilja, master's good boy, she still can’t bring herself to point at the head.
Vilja had been knocked back by the force of her unexpected vespertine leap. He’s on the ground, but about to recover.
Her eyes catch on the black tracking tag. In that split second, she takes aim, and the rock blasts out at the tag. It smashes against the bone, close but missing, and cracks start to spread. She can only hope it’s enough for him to get the tag off on his own.
She only had the time for the one spell. Vilja is momentarily knocked back down by the impact, but finds his feet and starts after Makuja again.
The woods around them are thick and it’s not five running strides before Makuja is at a metataxite’s trunk, crouching. Another leap gives her height, and then she’s scrambling up the shelf-like outgrowths.
The red nymph catches her breath even as the direhound below her growls, and scratches the skin. She stares at that maw, so hungry for her. There are sores lining the gums, weeping blood that mixes with the spittle, and she knows that blood is mixing her own in that terrible bite that flows and drips even now. Why should that bother her, though?
She knows what flows in Vilja’s veins, what made him. Master’s blood — and that blood is hers, now. Why should she fear it?
Makuja had seen the signs enough times, and recalls the most basic of hemotechnic arts.
⸢Ichor form: Mending clot!⸥ Her wound closes, the blood turning to gel-like solidity and then crusting into a cicatrix over two long minutes.
Vilja goes nowhere. He stares up at her in the metataxite, knowing she has to come down, sooner or later.
Makuja looks at her legs. Did she?
But how had she managed that leap? Is the regurgitated enervate necessary? How would she consistently get enervate all the way to her legs, if moving it through her torso is so hard?
For that… she has an idea.
Focus. Release. Black nerve in her hands, she slowly brings her tarsi together. The closer they get, the more conscious she is of a certain pull. Enervate attracts enervate.
Good. She starts to retract, pulling the enervate back — but only in one arm. Her other hand, she brings it over the cold sensation in her arm. Enervate attracts enervate — so like this, she can drag the enervate into her legs.
She was prepared for this to take so long — but the exercise is helped along by her own growing ability to direct enervate within herself. Then, once black nerve lies in both midlegs, Makuja brings her hands together once more.
Louse.
This sign doesn’t act on the enervate in her legs — it always molded its product in her core, which then flowed out when released. But enervate attracts enervate.
Adjusting her position, Makuja splays her midtarsi, and drops the louse sign. No longer being molded, the enervate must flow somewhere — and there is more enervate in her legs.
That’s how Makuja finds herself blasting out of the metataxite. She’s aimed at another, and her forelegs reach out and hug the new taxite, squeezing so she doesn’t fall.
Vilja growls and chases her to the bottom of her new reprieve. But there’s nothing he can do, except hope she messes up and falls. And she might — it’s a new, improvised technique. But if she’s careful, and minimizes her use of it…
The creek is nearby. If she can get to the other side, she’ll be safer. So Makuja starts plotting a path, to climb from taxite to taxite where she can, and to blast-leap where she must. She can do this. Makuuja brings her hands together.
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Awelah returns alone. More alone, with her projection now dispelled. Her antennae are curled up, but having extended them for so long, they suffered a fair amount of the drizzle. The dampness has done awful things to their look.
Ooliri spotted her from high up in their tree. The gray nymph is clambering down the ladder and racing over to her. His excitement is tempered by caution.
“You made it back! Did you… you didn’t encounter it, right?”
“Do you think I wouldn’t survive a run in with that pup? Yeah, I found it. Scared it off.”
Ooliri droops antennae. “But you said you… nevermind. We’re in danger, then, aren’t we?” There’s a disappointment mixed in with the fear.
“Do you think I can’t do it again?” Then Awelah scowls when she doesn’t get an affirming answer. “Look, did you see it come here?”
“No…”
“Good. It didn’t run off in this direction, and if you didn’t see it, it must have went clear. We’ll be leaving soon enough, anyway.”
“About that,” Ooliri starts. “There’s something I had wanted to show you — that I want to do, and it might take some time.”
“You finally revealing what’s up with that barrel?”
“Yeah. But I wanted Makuja here too…”
“If she’s got solitude hunger, let her eat it. Why should we wait for her?”
“Well… I guess it’ll be hard to keep it hidden if you’re here so… well, how much do you know about enervate theory?”
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Makuja slipped. She had managed it twice more, and the last jump before she would have made it, she slips.
No matter. The enervate is still in her legs, and the direhound running at her is excellent motivation.
Makuja had fallen on the wrong side of the creek, and runs to the edge, crouching as she makes the louse sign, and blast-leaps.
It’s a good thing she picked a narrow part of the creek to do this. Her raptorial bites into the dirt at the edge. To her right, the soil is disturbed, made unstable. She starts to slide, before she throws the arm forward again, gaining purchase further up, with the security she needs to start climbing up.
Vilja comes to the edge of the creek. But he doesn’t have any enervate powered leaping techniques — that Makuja knows about. The hound growls, and Makuja has no reason to stay. She starts along the creek, veering away for cover behind foliage.
Several minutes later, when she hasn’t seen the direhound for any of them, Makuja slows, abdomen flaring for breath. Diamantids aren’t creatures of stamina. Arete helped. Some.
Makuja’s heart slows, the danger passed, octapamine and adrenaline both fading. She feels her master’s blood stirring within her. Fading now, as pumping slows.
As she walks back toward the camp, Makuja has only one thought she keeps returning to.
She wants to feel it again. Tension making her muscles burn, her heartbeat faster than she can count, her blood alive.
She needs it.