“So. What were those giant things?” Isaka asked as she sat in the shade of a small tree and chewed the jerky she had been given from her backpack. “Or, you know. You all? Where did you guys come from, anyway?”
The young hunter who was sitting next to her growled and turned his back to her, chewing on his own hunk of meat.
“Forgive the pup.” The Alpha said. In the light of day, she could see gray was etching its way onto his snout. He was an old hunter, among brash, bold, and foolish youths. “They do not yet know how to show respect to an enemy. Even one who is prey. You killed three giant apes from what I saw before Swift Claw captured you.”
“Five actually. I got two to fight each other to the death by pissing them off. That was kind of fun.” The hyena man let out a set of soft happy yipping noises that Isaka was sure was laughing.
“Turning one of the Giant Apes against themselves is always fun. I remember doing so myself, when the world was young, and I was much, much younger.”
A thousand questions rattled in Isaka’s mind then, but only one bubbled to the surface. “If you guys have been asleep for a long time, I’ve gotten that much just by listening to you. Then, how are you speaking English right now?”
Another set of amused yips came from not just the alpha, but the other younger hunters as well. “I am not speaking English.”
“Then how—?”
The alpha raised a single claw, and gently touched Isaka on the forehead, then did the same to himself. “When the world was young, magic was plentiful. As the world grew, it drifted away from the realms of magic and the fae. The wars of the iron-kin, you humans that is, pushed the fae away. They were the one, final tether of wild magic to this world.
“With the fae went our magic. So, many of us creatures used our magic to transform ourselves, giving ourselves as many natural abilities as we could, that would mimic the magic we were forced to abandon. We Gnolls, like many others, gave ourselves the ability to speak and be understood. You hear us barking or yipping, but you understand us as if we are speaking to you as clearly as you can understand.”
Isaka mulled over the awner for a moment. As she sat there, contemplating, she saw other smaller groups of Gnolls arrive. They stayed clear of the main group Isaka saw, but it was clear that they had no hostile intent. Most carried other hostages tied up and hauled over their shoulders, or simply dragged on the ground like she had been. Those were in pretty rough shape.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Your magic was going away. So you gave yourselves telepathy? How?”
“You have a word for it. Amusing. Yes, telepathy. We grew an organ that some types of birds have that can read the skies, seasons, and direction. Then, our flesh shapers gave that organ the ability to generate what the birds could read. Humans once tried to learn this trick, but your gods grew furious at your actions, and threw your great civilizations of that age down to dust. And broke that effort.”
“Wait. You’re not talking about the tower of babble, are you?”
“Babble? No. Babylon was the name of one of those long forgotten kingdoms. If I remember correctly, they forced their flesh shapers and magicians to extract what little magic was left in the blood of their people in order to fuel the effort. It was a great abomination, blood magic on an industrial scale. Not of self sacrifice, which is the proper path for such things. But of extraction, greed, and hubris. A desperate reach for power beyond the iron-kins rightful path.”
“And now?” Isaka asked, concerned about what she was hearing. Humanity, it seemed, had not been alone in those early eons of civilization. It gave all new meaning to the pictures that archaeologists once thought were gods, angels or demons. Perhaps those had been actual creatures, beings that ancient human civilizations had had dealings with.
“The Iron-kin had their age of industry. Of wheels, and fire, and captured lightning. It is the wilds turn now. Mother earth, revitalized by magic, woke us from our slumber. A slumber the last fae gifted us, that one day they might return, and we would be of use to them again. But the fae did not return, and instead we heard our mother’s call. Even so, the Iron-Kin reach for too much.”
The alpha let loose an angry growl from deep within his throat, and the younger hunters all gave him a weary look.
Her heart beat as fast as a jackrabbit, and sweat beaded down her back at an almost instinctual fear bread into humanity from those dark and primordial days, when things like this creature sitting next to her hunted her kind under blood moons for the sport of their eldritch fae master’s amusement. “Why did you attack us? We didn’t even know you existed until you, and those giant ape things, showed up helping those asshat warlords.”
“This, war lord to the north, the one who smells of fear and hate whose soldiers we helped attack you with their iron moving cages? He found us as we woke. Caged my mate and our children. He has our entire clan held like animals in pens for the slaughter. If we retrieve you, and other useful ones for him, he will spare them.”
Isaka was about to say something, to negotiate with this strangely reasonable hyena-man hybrid who had called himself a Gnoll. She knew the Rangers and the other special forces groups the Fortress had on hand were excellent at hostage rescue.
But before she could, the sound of a backfiring truck echoed around them, and six flatbed trucks, with wooden cages in the back holding soldiers, and two that were empty, trundled into view.