The sun was rising. One of the moons was still in the sky, only half its face visible, but its light was put to shame by the ball of fire that now sent rays across the heavens. Down in the clearing, they were still in shadow and would continue to be so for a while, but that didn't mean they couldn't see the effects of the sunrise.
Dominic yawned widely as he woke himself up fully. He had had a good sleep during the dark hours, but now that the dawn was here, it was the signal that his next task was due to take place. The kesh needed to be dealt with and, with the sun rising, should now be stirring. Certainly, the kesh leader had indicated that they couldn’t see very well in the dark and would therefore be rather inactive during those hours.
To be honest, Dominic suspected that they would already know the outcome of the battle. It made sense that they would have sent a couple of quiet scouts to keep an eye on the situation; even if a kesh’s night vision was poor, it wasn’t like they’d been quiet about it. It’s what Dominic would have done, and the kesh leader had seemed too canny to not have thought of it.
After all, the changeover of leader was as much a potential threat as it was an opportunity. Surely the Tier 2 Dominic had spoken to knew that?
As a result, Dominic was not too surprised when, a few moments after he entered the treeline, three kesh swung into view.
‘Tell your leader that, as the victor in our fight with the centre guardians, I invite him to come for a renegotiation of the current arrangement,’ Dominic told the kesh levelly. ‘He, and whosoever he feels should be present for the renegotiation, are welcome to come. I expect him at the foot of the big tree in the centre of the clearing before the sun reaches its peak. If he does not come by that time, I will assume that he is uninterested in any sort of negotiation and will consider even the current arrangements void. That would result in serious consequences.’
Dominic didn’t specify exactly what so that, in the event that the kesh suddenly decided to play hookey, they wouldn’t know exactly what Dominic would do and take preventative measures.
‘Can you convey the whole of that message?’ he checked, abruptly realising that it had turned into something rather more complicated than he had initially intended.
‘Yes,’ he heard, surprising him a little. Its shortness was expected, but that it was actually a thought condensed into a word was more curious by what it implied than its actual content. There’s a surprising number of Tier twos around these parts….
‘Good,’ replied Dominic shortly, then turned to go. He didn't think that the kesh were likely to attack him, but he kept his ears pricked just in case. While that had always been figurative when he’d been human, as a lion it took on a whole new meaning. He found it a little odd how he didn’t find it strange anymore to feel his ears swivelling backwards and the sounds from behind being amplified.
‘I still think we should just attack them,’ Leo grumbled in the back of his mind. ‘We’re giving up all the advantages of an ambush here.’
Dominic left the treeline and headed towards the massive tree at the centre of the clearing and the group of amesheks and lionesses lying beneath it. The two groups were still distinct, but they weren’t completely separate. Apparently, consuming each other’s dead and then having the ameshek officially join the Pride meant that the two groups were starting to tentatively let down their guards, just a little.
‘No we’re not,’ Dominic sighed. Leo knew the plan – he just disagreed with it and kept grumbling and annoying the former-human. ‘Besides, you think we should attack and kill anyone who’s not a female lion, so your opinion doesn’t count,’ Dominic rebutted.
‘For good reason,’ Leo continued loftily, completely ignoring Dominic’s final words. ‘Killing all rivals, lion or not, means less competition for females, less competition for resources. And now we even grow stronger for every creature we kill. Why should we not declare ourselves king and demonstrate it by wiping out all of the lesser species?’
‘That’s a bit hypocritical considering how you’ve complained about humans doing the same thing,’ Dominic accused him pointedly.
‘That’s different,’ Leo argued.
‘Uh, how? Humans destroyed the habitats of millions of creatures because they were in the way, or contained resources the humans wanted. How can you say that us wiping out all the biodiversity in the local area is any different?’
‘Because they were humans, and we’re a lion,’ Leo answered, as if that explained everything.
Dominic took a moment just to breathe, pushing away his automatic responses since they’d just create even more of an argument. On the one hand, he understood Leo’s point of view – how could he not when he’d grown up with the idea that humans were simply superior to all others and had the right to decide the fate of every other species on earth because of it?
However, now as one of those ‘other species’, he found that the concept wasn’t so obvious as it had once been. What used to be unthinkable – or rather simply not thought about – was now a burning question in the back of his mind. After all, he fully intended on searching out other humans as soon as he could – he’d have to deal with all that then. If he managed to get close enough without being shot at, of course.
‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘your glaringly obvious species-centric hypocrisy aside, the point is that it won’t work. Not in the long term. Remember what happened after we took over the second pride’s territory? We stripped it bare. Humans were doing the same on a wider scale when the System arrived. Just like then, this method isn’t sustainable.’
‘It was your method,’ Leo told him snippily. ‘I’m not the one who encouraged the females to go hunting at every chance they got. You may recall that I wanted to just sleep and mate after a hunt.’
Dominic breathed slowly in and out again, wondering whether Leo was being intentionally more irritating than normal, or whether it was just him. Perhaps he was upset about not having had as much input on recent decisions as he was used to. Or perhaps he was just getting blue balls. Dominic didn’t know.
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Either way, he’d really prefer if the lion would just stop it.
‘It was a method driven by the need to compete with other predators in a System which threatens to become more and more unbalanced,’ Dominic replied with forced patience.
‘Which was my point at the start of this discussion,’ Leo pointed out. Dominic cast his eyes up to the heavens and pleaded with them for strength. By this point, he didn’t care too much if his current pain-in-the-butt heard him or not.
‘It was,’ he conceded after counting to ten. ‘And my point is that we need to change the method.’
‘Change it how?’ demanded Leo.
‘Oh, so even though you don’t feel my method worked in the past, you still want me to come up with another one, do you?’ Dominic couldn’t help needling his companion, though regretted it a moment later. Leo growled at him, this time genuine annoyance in his voice.
‘Well you are the lead male at the moment, are you not?’ he asked. Dominic briefly wondered whether that was meant as a threat, but the lion quickly moved on before he managed to decide either way. ‘So stop being a porcupine. If you’ve got an idea, then spit it out,’ he rumbled.
‘I don’t have an idea as such,’ Dominic said, as calmly as he could. Sensing Leo about to speak, probably to say something else infuriating, Dominic reacted instinctively. He mentally snarled at the lion as if they were standing face to face.
His automatic reaction surprised them both enough that they were silent for a heartbeat, long enough for Dominic to realise that he’d had enough – and that he probably shouldn’t let it continue any further. Dominic knew it was risky, but he had had more than his fill of Leo’s…Leoness. He knew only one way of dealing with it, and it wasn’t through words.
‘Sekhmet,’ he warned, ‘I’m going to be temporarily uncontactable. I’ll be back in a moment, but please watch out for me in the meantime. I’ll pretend to sleep for anyone else.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Leo asked warily. Dominic ignored him, putting his head on his paws and closing his eyes.
Entering his mental space was easy enough to do and he quickly assumed his lion form before padding out of the room and into the surrounding savannah. There he saw Leo sunning himself on a large rock – that was new. The other lion barely managed to make it to his feet before Dominic was on him with a snarl.
Dominic got in one bite before Leo could respond. They fought, using both claws and teeth, their blows barely pulled – just enough that they weren’t drawing blood but they would leave bruises. Assuming it was possible to leave bruises in this space at all.
Both lions gave as good as they got, taking out their frustration at each other in physical violence.
It was fortunately brief – Leo was as aware as Dominic about their limited time before the kesh were likely to appear. But by the end, they both backed off in a mutual wordless decision that they had fought enough. They stood staring at each other for a long moment, then Leo walked towards Dominic.
The former-human tensed in preparation for a continuation of the fight, but Leo didn’t leap at him. Instead, he came to rub his head and body against Dominic’s, sighing loudly. Dominic abruptly wished that they could lay against each other as they had when they had last wrestled, but time was pressing.
Shifting from their mental room to conscious control, Dominic opened his eyes and quickly paid attention to his senses to work out what was going on around. Fortunately, everything seemed quiet. He guessed that the kesh hadn’t arrived yet.
A quick, private check-in with Sekhmet confirmed his guess. Trying to appear very natural, Dominic yawned, stretched, and then pushed himself to a sitting position.
‘It’s just that there are a lot of tier twos here.’ Dominic picked up the thread of their previous discussion. ‘Consider it: we’ve been working practically flat-out and so have the lionesses. They’ve been going out in groups, hunting when they would normally have been resting to help them level up. Yet still, look at the results in comparison to the amesheks. We are a lower level than Nyx, and the lionesses of our original pride, though they’re all tier two now, are still lower than the seventeen or eighteen that the rest of the amesheks are at. How does that make sense?’
Dominic didn’t allow Leo the chance to speak before he continued.
‘And then there’s the kesh. They don’t seem like the kind of creatures who would be ahead of the curve, but yet there are already at least two confirmed tier twos among the ones we’ve interacted with and probably at least a couple more. Think about where the hyenas were not that long ago – the kesh’s relatively high levels seem improbable.’
‘You think the Place of Power might have something to do with it?’ Leo asked, finally back on the same wavelength.
‘That’s what I’m wondering,’ agreed Dominic. ‘It would make sense for the System to have some alternative way of progressing rather than just wiping out all the local wildlife –unless the objective of the System is to produce only a few powerful creatures and a barren planet, of course,’ he mused.
‘Well, why don’t you ask your new vassal?’ suggested Leo. Hearing the faint traces of irritation in the last word despite the lion’s new relaxation made Dominic wonder whether he’d accidentally stumbled upon the very reason for Leo’s previous extra-irritating behaviour. Though why the lion still had a bee in his bonnet over the amesheks when he’d been part of encouraging them to join the pride, Dominic didn’t know. He promptly decided to ignore it.
‘Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do,’ agreed Dominic brightly, heading over in the mountainous ameshek’s direction.
Before he could get to her, though, movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. He turned quickly to see kesh after kesh dropping out of the trees to the ground. At first, they lingered near the trees themselves.
Dominic could understand it – the trees were their home, their refuge, their battleground. On the ground, they were as vulnerable as Dominic had been when he’d leapt into the treetops to fight.
But that was exactly how Dominic wanted them. He’d learned his lesson when the hyenas had ambushed them – it was his turn to set up the ambush. If the kesh proved as intransigent as he suspected they would be, that was.
The thing was that this wasn’t exactly a covert ambush. The kesh knew the power of the ameshek, presumably, and would know that the lions were powerful too if they had won against the reigning champions. The question was whether they wanted a deal enough to bring themselves into such a vulnerable situation.
Dominic moved towards the kesh, and lay down a few body lengths closer to the kesh than the closest of the lionesses or amesheks. It was an olive branch – a message of ‘I just want to talk’. He waited to see if they would take it.
A nervous tension filled the air and made his mane itch a little. Still, Dominic had learned patience from Leo and he didn’t move a hair.
The situation teetered on a knife’s edge. Will they, will they not?
And then, with an odd kind of hesitant lollop that involved all of their limbs, they started approaching the large group of predators.
‘Looks like negotiations are on,’ Dominic said to Leo with a mixture of nerves and anticipation.