----------------------------------------
It was at the very height of midday when the trio returned to the Outland-clan’s home compound.
A ring of whitewood walls was adorned with razor-sharp maneater bush-nettles and camouflaged by condor feathers. Three palms opened to reveal a secret entranceway as the trio approached. Within awaited a series of whitewood huts built around and even up the trunks of nearby trees.
“Welcome back to Secondhome,” said a sentry – Hector, father of Lloyd and Sara.
“It’s midday, Mister Hector. Are you still on watch?”
Hector laughed. He had a weakness of the eyes, somewhat common among those of the Outland-clan. While he could see well enough to greet people at the gates, he wasn’t going to be manning the watch tower anytime soon.
“Eh, might as well let the others cool off downstairs. I can handle it.”
Hector was a gray-haired man who’d grown overweight since Lloyd and Sara were born. Supposedly the heat of midday could help him lose weight. Evidently humans possessed the power to just sweat out all the excess mass if they focused hard enough. He’d been taking the hottest shifts for years to no effect.
“My boy filled me in. Lloyd should be down reporting to the Quarterchief now. Might want to go pay them both a visit.”
Most of Secondhome was underground. Sara and Ma’at dropped Kur'iel off at the nearest medical tent then ventured into a natural series of caverns where they and their clan had lived and slept since time immemorial. Cool air prevailed down here, particularly further down in the dryer, larger caverns near the residential areas. A respite from the Stormheaths head.
Quarterchief Michael maintained a humble abode next to the armory in a dug-out chamber off the main cavern network. Ancestral armor – a ceramic chest piece improved by local wooden upgrades and ghillie over some ceremonial fabric – rested in a divot carved out of porous stone. A family weapon was displayed below: a cylindrical wooden war club that tapered off in a frayed handle.
Legend had it that the ancestral war club had been shattered in a duel against the clan-head of the mightiest band of Stormlanders across the river. Even now, the splinters were filled with local metals and gold filling just to keep the thing together. A fragile relic, but still deadly in skilled hands. Ma’at had only seen it in action once, when his father ran off a particularly hungry centurion bird who had made its way into the compound nursery.
Michael, the settlement’s Quarterchief, waited over his war map. In many ways he looked much like his son Ma’at, but with more chiseled facial features around the jaw and chin. Like all the Outlander men of the clan, he had a scraggly black beard that he frequently trimmed down into something manageable.
“Lloyd has informed me about the condor attack. Was anyone injured?”
Lloyd stood beside the chief. He waved to his sister.
“Kur’s leg got hurt,” Sara said. “We got him out of there.”
“Only because of a distraction.” Ma’at presented the oblong wooden noisemaker. “It was the witch of the fumaroles.”
Quarterchief Michael examined the device. “The witch?”
Sara nodded. “But it’s not supposed to venture beyond the fumaroles, right?”
“Lucky break. Glad she’s still looking out for us.” Michael put the noisemaker on the table. “What were you doing out in the field near midday?”
“Kur and Sam wanted to prove something to the stupid Outlanders,” Ma’at said, deadpan. “Sorry that I couldn’t keep the team together.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Sara, Lloyd, you two can go,” said the chief.
The twins made their leave.
“Hey, any day you see the witch of the fumaroles without getting turned into a shell-rodent has to be a good day, eh?” Lloyd said as he pushed through the bird-skin flap that served as a door.
Michael put a stern hand on his son’s shoulders. “Don’t be sorry. Sounds like everything worked out.”
“Only because of the witch,” Ma’at said.
“Don’t go questioning serendipity in your favor, Ma'athiel. Just roll with it. Go with the flow.”
The older generation and their strange idioms. Going with the flow in the Stormheaths would send you careening into a whirlpool, or drowning in the rapids, or into the waiting maws of a terrorfish.
“Maybe everything turned out okay,” Ma’at admitted. “But in spite, not because, of me. I don’t feel like I was an effective leader.”
“Leadership isn’t a personality trait. It’s learned, practiced.” Michael patted Matthew’s shoulder. “Quick thinking under fire is nine-tenths of the battle. You, Sara, and Lloyd demonstrated that well enough between the three of you.”
Quarterchief Michael let go of his son’s shoulder and returned to the map. Glowworms illuminated a rough outline of the Stormheaths, centered on the river valley they called home. The whole map was carved from wood but rested on a heavy metal frame far too heavy to ever be moved. Maat’s father moved a token over the burnt-over glen. It would not be useful grounds for hunting anytime soon.
With no lecture to be had and, apparently, nothing to apologize for, Ma’at took his leave.
“If I sharpen my leadership skills enough, think there’ll ever be time for me to inherit the ancestral armor?” he asked on his way out of the room.
Michael smirked. “It’s not really for combat. More for… competitions? Tourneys? One day I’ll teach you how to use the bat, though. Promise.”
----------------------------------------
Maat’s clan-kin had hand carved the first expansions into the porous limestone of this natural cave system. As the years passed and new ethnicities – first clanless Stormlander exiles and low-caste refugees, then plainsdwellers, and most recently off-isle humans – came to seek shelter at Secondhome, the Outlander clan ventured further down into the cave system, where it was cool and arid enough for their fragile constitutions. There were no official living arrangements by which any one group had to live in a certain part of the complex; in general, the already-acclimated Stormlanders dwelled on or near the surface, the Outlanders of the other-clan stayed in the cool lower quarters, while the various other-islanders, walkers of the interior plains, and assorted nomads filled out the middle.
Outlanders – the same-kin and the Quarterchief’s people. They had rounded ears and a varied but generally stocky appearance, among the shortest of Secondhome’s denizens. Their bones were shorter but denser compared to island-natives. The Quarterchief’s generation referred to their own kind as ‘humans.’ But they were not the only people who met this qualification. Other-islanders often appeared close enough to outlanders to confuse the uninitiated. Their languages were still utterly alien to Ma’at’s kin.
Plainswalkers and Stormlanders were both island natives. That was where the similarities ended, and Stormlanders rarely even included any mention of Plainswalkers in their creation stories, or vice versa. The former hailed from the interior highlands, beyond a wall of mountains where the lowland whitewoods seldom grew. The one potential clue towards shared lineage for the two groups was the ears, which ended in a sharp pinprick or a long but rounded point, depending on the individual.
Beyond that, any given clan of the Stormheaths shared neither mythic claims of lineage or even remotely intelligible language with even their closest neighbors, let alone a highland plainswalker. Among the couple hundred souls of Secondhome there were dozens of unique tongues and a constantly churning pidgin language forever mutating to try and accommodate them all.
Living arrangements, too, varied by group. The Outlanders – humans, like Ma’at and the Quarterchief, typically stayed in family units. Stormlanders and those from the plains congregated in an elaborate series of allegiances that left them all living in one big room per clan. Other islanders most often arrived alone or in small, shipwrecked groups and so had no families or clans to group with. Obviously, there were mixed marriages – Sara and Lloyd were half-clan with Ma’at, thanks to their human Outlander father, for instance – so as often as not the settlement just played things by ear. Flexibility was key to Secondhome’s internal harmony.
Maat prepared to retire to the Quarterchief’s family abode to sleep through midday. It was just Ma’at and his father for now, and beyond a few meeting chambers the chief maintained smaller than average living quarters. Just before retiring, however, Maat checked in on Kur, one level up.
Outlander medics – clan-kin to Ma’at and the Quarterchief – performed an ancient outlander ritual on the Stormlander’s injury. A human magic well-known to denizens of Secondhome, by which a wounded leg could be bound by wood and wrapped in either leaves or reed-paper until the bone within was mended. An ancient ritual, passed down through the ages.
The Quarterchief’s son wanted to think that this charity from an older outlander woman would help persuade Kur to mellow out among the human other-clan, but somehow he suspected it would not.
----------------------------------------