The creature spoke, not through words, but with a complicated medley of pheromones and something other. Had I not already previously been exposed to such communications while my ‘Blessings’ had been active and growing, particularly my Mind stat, I very likely would have failed to understand any of it.

I shuddered to think how relations would have gone, should I have been unable to communicate with the mikuya… queen?

Said the creature.

I stood trembling and gaping like a fool.

I would have liked to blame my fatigue, my weakness, but that was not all the case. This creature was fundamentally different. No gender could describe them, but they reminded me of a hive queen. The remainder of the mikuya acted as subservient drones to the creature’s will.

I castigated myself for getting hung up on the creature’s gender. It was just, nothing I had met or seen previously compared. Even their language, if language it could be called, came across alien and foreign, lacking grammar and syntax, and instead composed of smells and position.

It was simply too much.

And hence, my position. Trembling. Uncertain. Afraid.

For example, they did not say ‘in safety,’ so much as broadcast an idea of it while simultaneously laying each of those other ideas, one atop each other.

It was elegant.

It was efficient.

And it should have been impossible for me to parse. Most minds were ill adapted to carrying multiple conversations at once in parallel. I caught myself marveling at my own ability, and reigned back the ego.

“Why?” I asked simply. There were many other questions I might have asked, and I might have clarified the first question further. But this way, I could discover more about my ‘savior’ with less risk of alienation.

Unfortunately, my decision to take a careful, measured approach, failed. It was due to my own failing body.

At that moment my traitorous legs chose to give out. The weeks worth of exhaustion catching up.

The creature, they, I decided, caught me with a gelatinous and warm surface. I never hit the rocky ichor covered ground.

There was no room for negotiation there. They were already wrapping me in their tentacle-like arms. They felt like the softest warmest tempurpedic. And through the clear gelatinous material, I could see coiling tendrils, animating their flesh.

As they carried me, without any outward signal being given, the other, lesser, mikuya parted to make way. The warmth and steady jostle poured through me, diffusing through my skin, in perhaps more than a metaphorical manner.

I drifted off, resting my eyes.

At some point, we must have left the canyon-gorge system, because when I next drifted to, we were back up on the windswept ridgelines overlooking the shattered wastes. Along the ground, there was a great abundance of lichen and gastropods. I saw no birds, nor marmots, but then considering the company I was currently in, that did not surprise me.

They were still holding me. Their giant size and pillow-soft flesh left me feeling like I floated on clouds.

“Yes.” I answered.

I relied on Imperial, and attempted to also use the scent markers, but I found it very, very difficult. I might have been able to pass along crude messages with scent, but they would be slow and ungainly, more akin to smoke signals than actual conversation.

There were other nuances passed along that message, but they all boiled down to that. Could they sense my confusion? I wondered. I had to assume so. But if they gave me open reign to bother them with questions, then who was I to refuse?

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

I glanced and saw one of the guards from the caravan had been infested, and currently flanked just behind the creature. Other than him, and a few hundeor, but otherwise, most of the invested creatures appeared lower on the food-chain. Like those marmots that were missing from the surroundings.

That did not narrow my question down. Perhaps my confusion came through. Unintentional communications would be a problem until I learned to control that exactly.

“You and the other mikuya then?”

They might have recoiled, though their physical behavior did not change. It was a shift in bitterness, carried by their scent.

“Sorry.”

They seemed to accept it. Afterall, how was I to have known? I doubted many mikuya apologists existed among either the Kaiva or the humans. Though, that begged the question of what term I should use to refer to them.

As I thought, they continued their explanation, not that their explanation clarified much.

With their other limb, they waved at themselves, the creature. I realized then that they were referring to themselves as a plurality.

A wash of emotions, a mixture of them, swept through me. At once, I felt sorry for the creature, as they were by some definitions alone in a hostile territory. I could emphasize there. But on the other hand, misery loves company, and if they were truly alone, then my own bargaining power was increased.

“You’re by yourself?” I asked, trying to keep any sense of pleasure off my mind, lest the creature detect it and misconstrue my intentions. Instead, I kept a firm picture in mind of how alone I had been, with only the wind and hunger to keep company.

Both of those answers were sent in parallel, leaving me thinking that I must have made some mistake, or perhaps they did not wish to reveal a potential weakness.

I realized then, and not for the sole time, that communicating with a hivemind would be tediously ambiguous.

“You helped me earlier,” I said instead, changing the subject to something immediately more useful. “Did you have my satchel?” Because there had been several supplies, at least if my feverish memory had not betrayed me.

“But why?” This was a solid tactic to leave a person coming up with reasons to aid, which helped shift their mindset, if only by a minute amount.

All their ideas clamored over each other, muddling together, becoming difficult to separate. They had an earnestness about them, though that did not mean that no deception was forthright. But to throw all those ideas out at once, so genuinely, as though the idea of not answering had ever occurred, did help me evaluate them.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I would be a fool to trust though. Not so easily. I needed to know them, which meant exploring their behaviors, how they responded when prompted.

“Why attack the caravan then?” I asked.

Another jumble, even messier than before.

“You attacked them to free me then?” I asked, not entirely believing them, but lacking context to claim otherwise.

A mark in favor of genuine behaviors, and a mark against them attacking to free me.

But what other reason could there have been?

I decided to ask further. I was already at their mercy, but if I got them to the point that they were justifying my existence by answering certain questions, then I would only improve my own chances of survival. For, I feared they were merely humoring my existence.

“You need an ally, why?” I asked.

To my dismay, they did not answer for a while, instead continuing to walk.

Asking that question could backfire, if they suddenly realized that they actually had no need of me. I might have misread the situation, though I hoped not.

I went further out on a limb.

“You are far from home,” I said without prevarication. I belatedly realized that I may have seemed presumptuous, especially given my lack of power in this current situation. So I hastily appended, “At least, if I understood the humans correctly.”

The creature did not respond immediately to this, either. Now, I was worrying. But I steeled myself. I forced myself to think tactically. Either my demise would occur shortly, or not, regardless of what I said. I may as well push for an advantage then.

“They’re connected then. Your need for an ally, and the distance from your home, and perhaps, it has something to do with the humans.”

I was guessing, but by pretending to know more than I did, I thought I could bluff my way into more of an explanation. Unfortunately, my body betrayed me. Or they knew me better than I thought.

I smelled amusement wafting up from their flesh.

They sent. A little later, seemingly musing, they added,

“You’re inviting me over to dinner?” Left unsaid, was that I hoped that they were not planning on having me for dinner. I decided to attempt a joke, to begin gathering a baseline for their sense of humor. “Though generally people jump through fewer hoops when asking for a date.”

It appeared that their sense of humor worked at least. And that they probably were not planning on eating me. I took that as a minor success.

We traveled the rest of that day and night, and by the next morning we arrived at a bowl-like valley, what could almost be called a crater. The stone was covered in cultivated lichen, and several places even had greenery, where soil or other matter had been drawn. Organic weathervanes stood sentinel over each place where plantlife grew, which must have been catching the moisture to grow the plants in the first place, similar to the bandit camp and their water barrel.

The crater was large enough that an entire town could live on the floor of it, with space left for agriculture. Not that they appeared to have built much up, besides the crops and a few subterranean access points.

While the greenery might not have been much, and while the air was just as arid as anywhere else, after so long traveling in the gorges and crevasses, the slight bit of greenery before me was akin to heaven.

They continued carrying down the slopes of the valley edge, into the crater. Meanwhile, I began collecting information once more.

“From what I understand, your people are native to the south of some sort of chasm?”

“How did you cross then?”

The bridge that Sir Kate’s family had been in charge of guarding then. I pushed further.

“I could not imagine that the humans would welcome you across their borders though.”

They had bribed an official or smuggler then.

“That must have been a lot of effort, on top of the hardship of coming and living in these wastes. It begs the question,” I licked my lips, a little nervous to ask this, but unable to stop my curiosity from demanding it. “Why?”

So their reasoning for being here involved others of their species. Interesting. And exploitable.

Before I could ask further, we arrived at a flat stone where they had set a cup and a plate out. There was no chair, but the ‘table’ came up to about my own chest’s height.

“I would do a lot for them,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had little clue as to who my family really was, except for an overbearing, awful, abusive–

I watched the food on the plate. It was a cut of meat, uncooked and raw, still bleeding as though freshly sheared, and with tufts of gristle along the exterior. The cup was filled with water.

“Thanks,” I said. I sipped the water, soothing my parched and desiccated skin.

“No…” I said, not wanting to insult their hospitality, and I truly was hungry. But what would they think if I dived in on what many would consider crude fare? And I questioned myself: why was I able to eat such? I certainly would not have been able to, had I still remained a human.The infested human made a motion. And the creature wobbled back and forth.

It must have been my scent, then, that betrayed my deeper thoughts. But still, I hesitated. Sure, I was hungry. And there was a precedent for eating raw meat.

“When I didn’t have a choice…” I said hesitantly. My stomach rumbled. I really should avoid offending my host.

A lot of that I did not understand.

One question had bothered me, and as I glanced at the infested guardsman, that question turned into a queasy sensation that left me unwilling to eat the raw meat from an unknown and suspect source. It was one that had occurred to me earlier, but I had been unwilling to broach it. Yet, now… I needed to know.

“Is that meat… from a human?” I asked.

“A kaiva?” I winced.

A wave of relief went through me. Larissen’s fate was unknown, and while he had attempted a non-consensual mercy kill, I wished him no harm. He had thought he was doing me a favor after all. Despite my protests. I might have wished him some harm, but certainly not death.

“m…uu…ule” A nearby infested guardsmen croaked. It was the same one that had laid down the dish. It appeared to be attempting to communicate. The hive-queen radiated frustration.

They then sent the scent of a meohr that had been pulling the caravan.

Oh. I realized it was meohr. It was like a steak then, except from a more humanoid cow. I supposed that was understandable. But before I surrendered myself to my base hunger, I needed to confirm Kate’s fate. I just lacked a way to ask about her, as I could not fabricate her scent, nor could I find a way to describe her in a way that I knew the creatures would understand. So instead, I asked generally, “What happened to the humans in the canyon?”

When the creature had been carrying me, I failed to notice any bodies as we left the canyon. Though that did not mean much. The creatures could have easily relocated them at any point in time before I was carried past.

Yet, I held out hope. And I hated myself for even caring about the humans’ fate.

I released tension, my shoulders sagged, my side hurt.

“Why though?” I asked. Not that I was ungrateful, but it would help understand these alien creatures better. I was not expecting such a plain answer, and was subtly surprised.

Their version of study carried connotations of violence, and I got the feeling it would be more of a vivisection.

Perhaps my relief was short lived.

I shrugged. “I don’t want to be a captive, if that’s what you’re asking. And I still have plenty of questions.”

I was taken to see the prisoners. I felt there was some miscommunication in play, or I was also a prisoner, which I might very well be. But before I left, I grabbed the steak. I was hungry, afterall.

Blessings: Rank (1/9)

* Body: 65

* Mind: 75

* Spirit: 49

Talents:

* Athleticism (3/9):

* Climbing I (1/9)

* Featherlight (5/9)

* Stealth I (4/9)

* Trackless Tracks (8/9)

* Alchemical Immunity (ineligible for growth)

* Eschiver (2/9) (+1)

* Evasion (6/9) (+1)

Spells:

* Illusion I (5/9)

* Touch (6/9)

* Closed

* Closed

Gifts:

* Obsession (3/9)

* Closed (0/9)

* Closed (0/9)