Occlusion. Safety is occluded by tension, by the sudden absence. Certainty is occluded by questions, doubts, the most dependable part of their morning ripped away. Clear thinking is occluded by the vestigial fingers of poor sleep pressing against their mind.
For Awelah, though, those fingers slip away as a thrill of urgency and motivation comes, a problem to solve, a new hunt beginning.
“Look around. Let’s see what tracks we can find.” A vesperbane would be trained to avoid leaving tracks in a way a direbeast would not. Her next fear, after the diamond-shaped prints, would be three sets of distinct tarsus-tracks.
Eyes darken and focus as a closer search unfolds. Despite the dark occlusion of their moods, the sky above them is pock-marked with breaks in that days-long overcast that had shadowed them. Shafts of dawn light shine as the sun rises. In uncaring contrast, today is bright.
Maybe it’ll be easier to find her, then, Awelah thinks.
Makuja is a light step, but her weight falls on muddy soil, so her tracks remain. In face of the evidence, an oddly dreaded third possibility fits where others have failed.
She left alone. Of, one assumes, her own will.
“She didn’t say anything to you?” Awelah says.
Ooliri shakes his head.
“I know her scent. Follow me.” Her messy antennae uncurl, extending out and sampling the air. Feeling the ghost of an old gradient that agrees with the footprints, the pursuit advances.
“I’m… surprised. Tracking is a bit of a… masculine thing, isn’t it? No um, no offense.”
Ooliri, even at this instar, isn’t quite yet all that different from the girls. His antennae are longer already, though. While length isn’t all that matters, his sense of smell surely outsteps her own in sensitivity.
Physical sensitivity isn’t all that matters, either, though. Olfaction isn’t just given to you. A certain skill lives in how Awelah moves her antennae, learned from observation and correction. A certain kind of focus in probing apart scents, and a theory of wind and diffusion to make sense of them. Ooliri, it’s quite possible, has never tried or learned.
“I don’t think it’s too masculine to know how to hunt,” is her reply.
Ooliri nods — since speaking, his face had been a little bit scrunched up, worried his words had been too careless.
By scent and by sight they are led to the creek-ravine. There’s two large dents in the ground at the edge and the trail led right to them. Awelah, without yesterday’s headache addling her thoughts, puts two together with this one.
“That’s how she did it.”
Makuja had been so evasive, so agile in that fight, and seemed to be preparing a spell she never cast.
“What did she do?”
“Did you catch it yesterday? I hated that she cast that spell at me — so much I didn’t think about how. She used her middle legs.”
Ooliri nods slowly with a frown, not unappreciative of the knowledge, but failing to see the relevance. Then he looks back at the dents in the ground. “Explosive force. If directed under her… clever. But we can’t cross that gap.”
Awelah knows that. She’s looking from this edge to the other side. At a loss, but knowing the answer would be found. She wouldn’t fail.
Ooliri looks too, but his thoughts stray outside the confines of what lies in front of them. They still have rope, after all. Could they—
Then Awelah jumps. “Feel that?”
“No?”
“The wind changed. It’s coming from…” Awelah looks down the creek. “That way.”
“What do you smell?”
“Makuja smells… heavy. And she’s been exerting — running, maybe.”
“Or, or fighting. Do you think…”
“I don’t smell the mutt. I would. I don’t smell any hemolymph either. I don’t expect violence.”
“But you sound so…”
“She wasn’t in a good mood yesterday. You sense that? It’s worse. It’s… Let’s go.”
Awelah, anxious to move, closes the distance the only way available, even as Ooliri looks back to the creek, wants to remind her that maybe they should close that gap first — but the pale nymph is already quickening to a jog, and needs to catch up.
The word on the tip of her palps, that she refused to say, was ‘familiar.’ You couldn’t read all the nuances of a mantis off of pheromones, but sadness had an odor, an aroma. Bitter, or spicy, or… there is a certain twist to it, a scent unpleasant, yet very much not aversive, like lead.
Awelah wouldn’t be running if she hadn’t felt despair of this depth, this pungency, before. Years ago, it was a stale autumn day in the Asetari compound. She’d learned that mommy wasn’t going to be a vesperbane anymore — she learned it from a distant pair of cousins, from the rumor mill, instead of directly. She couldn’t find her mom, only her dad. She confronted him, he told her where to look. She found her taking a deep bath, and only the sound of her daughter calling brought her out.
Ooliri knows none of this, only that he can’t keep pace with Awelah, nor what would have her concerned if she can’t smell an enemy.
The wind had come from down the creek, but it is only down as the water far below flows. The hills get higher. At least the vegetation is clearing. The gorge gets wider, deeper as they go. Above, the peak of the incline lies on the other side.
Ooliri only catches up when Awelah stops. Awelah stopped because she spotted Makuja. She’d be hard to miss, now.
The sun rises in the east, and the creek runs east. She’s shadowed there, alone on the highest point around.
“What is she doing?”
There’s only an answer to give because, at that moment, she does something. Perhaps she saw them.
“Running.”
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Makuja is observant. Makuja is patient.
She’s been to the edge of the gorge. She’s calculated the extent. She’s not going to make it.
She doesn’t calculate the way the gray nymph does it. She feels. She’s done the boosted leaps enough times now to know how far she goes. She had picked just the right part of the ravine to cross over, where it was thin enough she landed. The gorge in front of her is not that. She’s not going to make it even with a boost. Unless her calculations are wrong.
Makuja is patient. She stares at the wide gap below her, where the incline of the hill abruptly drops off. She’s eyeing the distance one more time. Sometimes she doesn’t feel the success or failure, not immediately. She’s patient, and can wait for her calculations to reach unoccluded certainty.
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Makuja has killed. So many times, she’s stood poised, knife ready, but not feeling if she was going to make the cut. To be sure it would kill, to be sure they wouldn’t struggle, retaliate, raise the alarm, she could wait. She is patient.
She had done the same to Awelah — waiting, and not knowing even as she moved the knife if she was going to make the cut. Why, then?
“There’s not a best time to fire an arrow,” she recalls her master telling her, not long into her apprenticeship. “You can wait on the wind, wait on the target, wait on your own damn nerves. You wait for a better time, and there’s no best time — but there is a worst time to fire an arrow.”
“When?” Her voice had been higher, then. Her mind slower, too, not catching that she’d been all but given the answer.
Unodha had sharp teeth, and even palps that looked fit to bite.
“Too late,” she says.
Makuja starts running.
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“She’s heading for the edge. Is she going to jump?”
Awelah’s face is set hard, even as her antennae continue to move. “What do we do?”
They are far from the opposite edge themselves, and even if they weren’t… it’s a long way down. How could they catch or stop her from this side of the gorge?
“My technique is all we have,” Awelah says.
“How? Do you even know it can move fast enough to get to her in time? If you do… can it push with enough force? What would you accomplish — you might kill her yourself! We don’t use techniques like that on allies.”
“We have to do something.”
“I don’t even know if it’s safe for you to try. Remember — remember how you screamed yesterday?”
Awelah puts her forelegs together and Ooliri snaps a tarsus out to pull them apart.
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Her heart is beating faster, faster. Her blood is stirring in her every extreme. It is alive, her capillaries like the tendrils of some greater thing.
Her heart is beating faster, the resting rate feeling like the tides in their agonizing slowness. Now, her blood can move, and each pulse, each thunderous impact of her legs, feels things speed closer to how they should be.
She is so close.
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Across the gulf, they see the red nymph running faster and faster, gravity accelerating her. Then she moves even faster than that — it must be her technique.
When she reaches the edge, she jumps with no tarsigns. Their eyes are magnetized to her form as she sails through the air — for fear of where they’d go if they traced their trajectory.
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Not all of her is occluded by the overwhelming sensation of blood flow. Her eyes are in front of her, still eyeing that gap, calculating even as her legs bend.
She’s not going to make it. Not with her momentum, not with the power of her leap.
It still feels like flying. The other edge is so far away. She wonders if birds feel always like they are falling.
She looks down. It’s so far. Vesperbanes heal fast, but puddles don’t.
She remembers things. So many things come to her so quickly.
She remembers asking Ooliri a question.
She remembers the night this all began. Appraisal. Investment. The power she felt, from somewhere deep within, somewhere beyond, somewhere vespertine. Her blood lived almost as it does now, but more. That night, she had felt so much like her master. She was dead, but Makuja would be a worthy heir. Wouldn’t she?
She remembers her master. The first time she thought she had lost her, only for Unodha to rise from the ashes. Bow gone, dogs dead, she still had weapons. How must she have felt, then? She doesn’t know. She must have no idea. She isn’t worthy. Her master is dead and she’s a useless tool. How must it have felt to fight her, killing fear spilling forth, death unstoppable? She knows that better, in this moment, the ground coming up closer, inch by inch. Her true worth would be evident, in the end.
She remembers asking Ooliri a question he didn’t have the answer to, as she approaches the other edge, and sees that edge get lower. She goes below, and she is going to slam against the ravine wall and die.
She remembers asking Ooliri a question and then, she doesn’t need the answer.
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Gravity works fast, and at this point, Awelah would not finish the tarsigns in time.
Makuja had tried to kill Awelah, and then did it again. Why did she care?
“I don’t — I don’t know why.” It’s Ooliri.
“Do you know what I said, the day we had our first fight?” Awelah’s voice is nervous-fast. “That if she wanted vengeance, there’s only one mantis to go after. That in her place, I’d want vengeance.”
Awelah lets the enervate she’d started molding disperse into herself. Makuja hits the top of her arc, and begins to fall. Awelah starts running, anyway, like there’s something she can do.
Maybe she can jump off the edge herself, use the force of the bane blast to descend faster, catch her, and then…
She has felt a bit numb, for many days now, everything she cared about, all that grounded her, gone. Being so reminded of her past, old emotions coming back, feelings, has her rawer and off-balanced. She feels the same confused panic a younger Awelah felt.
But little Awelah didn’t pull her mother out of the bath — Mewla had come out herself.
The pale nymph stops, stumbling, because Makuja has wings.
“Ha-ha.” Ooliri’s laugh sounds more like a cough. “One—one of the last things we said, she had asked me. ‘What are the tarsigns for the wretched raptorials?’ and I didn’t know.”
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Her heart is beating faster, faster. It feels like she might burst. She sees the wall getting closer, closer. The pressure of her blood is immense with nowhere to go — would she pop like a fruit when she hits the walls? It all came back to death. All of her plans were literally crashing around her. The outcome she’d calculated when she jumped is being realized — she isn’t going to make it like this.
Her blood is so tight, her death is so close. If only she had the power, if she were worthy, useful.
The pain almost doesn’t register. A red gush bursts from her side, and the spray of blood doesn’t stop. The volume increases, and the droplets are joined in one mass suspended in the air. It’s clotting, the red congealing to solidity, and then transforming as blood does not. Tightening, knitting together like muscle. It happens so fast, it feels so hot.
Her blood is alive. She has control, shaping the form, controlling it, grasping that feeling of death, controlling it. How did Unodha feel, wielding this technique? Certainly not afraid of death.
Her blood, her myxokora, takes the form of those thick claw-arms her master had. Smaller, for her frame and lesser blood volume.
They have the reach to extend, hook around the edge of the gorge. She does hit the ravine still, but she holds steady, and pulls herself up.
She rises to see her two teammates running at her. She rises, her blood exulting, alive, and the world is occluded no more.
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It’s hard not to feel threat, approaching a bane with monstrous limbs of gleaming blood. The unease they feel is palpable, but Makuja does not attack. She pants, and her myxokora flex and bend in the way an idle mantid’s antennae might.
“What were you thinking! You could have died.”
“If I died,” — she looks at her myxokora — “if I could not manifest my master’s myxokora… then what use am I alive?” Her new growths extend out to their full length. “I was thinking I would prove myself. And I did.”
“You were worth something either way.”
“You knew,” Awelah says, stepping closer. “You didn’t expect to die. You could have told us.”
“You would have stopped me.”
“Of course we would have,” Ooliri says.
Something in her phrase triggers a memory. “What happened after you left, yesterday? You started acting different then.”
Makuja looks between them, and her wretched raptorials flex, as if she briefly considers something unsavory. (How often did she consider such things, when there was nothing to give it away?)
“I encountered Vilja. He bit me. His blood — master made him. It was her blood. My blood, now.”
“Why would you keep that secret? It’s important.”
“The direblood must be affecting your mind.”
“No,” Makuja takes a step back, and it’s not clear why until her myxokora lunge. “You don’t feel it. You encountered Vilja. You cast one spell and he runs. I encounter Vilja. I nearly died, nearly didn’t escape with my life. We encounter the centipede. With one spell, you brought it death. The best I could do was nothing, nothing but grant you time. Useless tools are to be discarded.”
“You’re not useless. You just said it — you survived. You helped Awelah! Do you think we could have made it this far without you?” Ooliri looks at Awelah.
“You may as well have thrown all of us off the cliff with you.” Awelah’s voice is low, almost unheard, palps tight.
“I knew. I had these claws on that night, but never drew them again. Against Klepé, against you. I stole this inheritance, but couldn’t use it. Against Vilja, I felt close. I felt it in my blood. I needed something more, to be able to bring it forth.”
“The esoteric component,” Ooliri says, drawing glances. He explains, “Sometimes, a technique takes more than knowing how it works, the formal component, or the signs, the tarsal component. But you must have figured it out, the esoteric component of the myxokora.”
“Phagein,” Awelah says, unbidden, perhaps without meaning to. “My… cousin told me. She couldn’t do it until… it’s like the legends. Mantids stole the vespers from the bats by killing them and eating their entrails. And our first endowments, the technique the bats could never learn, was the wretched raptorials. Mantids are hunters, and the myxokora are the ultimate hunting tools,” she finishes. “But you did it, that night. What were you missing until now?”
“As I fell, I thought about Unodha, and what she had that I lacked. She was… fearless.”
“A predator,” Awelah finishes.
Makuja nods. “Exactly.” At her sides, the red flesh has pulled closer. Inactive, it begins to sink back into her body.
Ooliri is frowning. “While I don’t think this was the best way to figure it out,” he starts, “Well, now that we have, we could, maybe, test it some? Although that might mean…”
Awelah smiles, mandibles almost visible. “Hunting.”
Ooliri almost looks like he wants to change his mind. But they wouldn’t always get lucky, if they encounter something else like a direbeast or erotyle or a sapiovore. At this point, it felt more like when.