Some will fail, it is inevitable. Let their bodies sustain yours. It is the ones who overcome their faults and foibles that are of value to the brood.
-From Neonatum Provisae: 1:7-9
That night, she struggled to sleep, the pain of her wounds waking her several times.
Leaves!
No! I will not be controlled by them anymore. She had faced a demon, she could go one night without giving in.
What was worse was her dreams. The same things every time. All the dangers she had faced, all the horrors, just amplified by her visceral imagination.
Dripping wiggling mouthparts lowered against her belly. They slowly tore the flesh from her as she watched. She couldn’t get away, her body pinned by cold clammy too-long hands. A sting lifted, dripping venom.
She struggled, snarling. She had killed it, it was dead! And yet it wasn’t.
The sting shot into her eye, bursting it, a spray of writhing maggots raining down onto the rest of her body.
The neonate woke with her blade in her hand, for what felt like the thousandth time that night, gasping. Her scales were ghostly white with brownish yellow splotches. Fear.
She swallowed, scanning for threats.
He’s dead… It’s dead… Dead as dirt.
She lowered her knife, finding that she couldn’t let go of it. She leaned over and drank water from one of the rivulets falling from the reed roof. She didn’t want to bend over to drink out of the little stream. Need my eyes up, to watch. She didn’t lay back down in her nest, instead feeding the fire before curling around it.
Maybe the heat will bake the fear out of me.
She fought a losing battle to stay awake and keep the nightmares away. She didn’t mean to stay awake all night, just long enough so that she would dream of something, anything else. When she finally closed her eyes for rest, then opened them again, it was morning. It had been a relief to have no dreams at all.
Rest is needed. Too much stress… Her Instinct hissed, weighing down her limbs so that they felt like they were made of earthbone.
The point really came home when thunder crashed and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Several fresh flakes fluttered in the light breeze.
I do need rest. She had plenty of food, so the little predator could afford to recover from her wounds, mental and physical. So, finally giving in, she got some of her herbs and chewed up a poultice. She tried to only take what was necessary. The neonate still spent the rest of the day in a dizzy stupor, and hating it. Already trying to think of a different way to use the herb.
It took her ten whole days to start feeling better, which wouldn’t have been possible if she hadn’t come up with something new.
She had known that she would need to use the leaves, but she was completely sick and tired of relying on them. Of being only partially awake and aware. Surrounded by threats. She had wanted to forgo the herb in exchange for having the healing take longer.
Then she thought of something. She didn’t have to be the one to chew the leaves. With a pair of stones, one grinding against the other, and with the help of some rainwater, it made the poultice just as well if not better than chewing the leaves.
When she had figured that out, her Instinct screamed, begged, and whimpered all across her body.
No. No more. Never again.
It lashed out by making her apathetic to the point of almost complete inaction. Sullen and irritable, her limbs and digits shaking with the need for the drug.
The Greenscale started to get frustrated at mundane things, snarling at the firewood that she accidentally knocked over, hurling the bag at one of the walls when the strap tangled in her feet and nearly tripped her. She even threw a partially completed snare into the fire because her clumsy trembling fingers couldn’t twist it right.
And all the time she craved the leaves. Not for the dreamy feeling, but just to feel whole again.
The neonate tried to keep herself working. Distracted. And even then she found that she didn’t want to do anything. Just lay around. And on the worst day she only managed to move some more stones and place them in a little wall on the far side of the fire. To reflect the heat back at her from the far side.
It wasn’t a full wall, only about knee high. So she could still see out and keep watch. But it surprised her how much more warmth she felt at night in her nest of rags.
Which was good, because it was the nights that the cravings were the worst. Just before falling asleep. When her will was stretched thinnest with her exhaustion. She had to fight to keep her trembling hands from grabbing the healing herbs and stuffing them in her mouth. It was more than once that she had to force herself to put the dried medicine back into the rafters.
I can’t have them here.
Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! On and on and on her Instinct screamed within her whole being. For days on end.
But she didn’t give up, determined not to.
No more, I am done. She had a way to get to the others, it would be too dangerous to give in. She was ready to start enacting her schemes against them. That, and she was tired of wasting her thoughts on artificial peace. She would have to deal with earning that through surviving. So she fought back.
She moved the herbs to the temple, making it more of a chore to go get them. She used some of the cordage and sticks to build a little rack to keep them dry. She added a shelf as well, placing the grinding stones there as well so she had no excuse to put them in her mouth.
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This also helped with getting her up and over to the temple every other day, which needed to be cleansed of the viscera of her combat with that abomination. It didn’t seem right to not try her best to keep the place clean, and rude to expect the Gods to do it.
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Such a good Kiddo, isn’t she?
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She washed out the central octagon, placing intricately shaped earthbone bowls in the waterfall going down the steps, filling them. The little predator had picked them out of the piles of trinkets, after deciding that the Gods wouldn’t mind if she didn’t intend to keep them for herself.
Dumping the water over the odoriferous viscera, the neonate let it sluice away the gore down through the gratings and into the depths below, scrubbing the more stubborn sections with extra whiptail reeds that she had. They were the leftovers from building her shelter.
She hissed in rhythm as she did, a tempo from Tok’s teachings.
It was the work that helped occupy her the most, distracting her Instinct. She still had tremors in her limbs, still felt drained a lot of the time, and still was irritable at the most inconsequential things. But the work was something to do, and it also wasn’t so strenuous as to slow her recovery either.
And hopefully it was pleasing to the pantheon.
She bathed ritually each time in the fresh water flowing into the temple from the monsoon outside. And her wounds healed well. Every time she had to reapply the healing herbs though, her Instinct rebelled.
NOW! GIVE! LEAVES! It snarled and gnashed, fighting for control of her body. But the stronger it got, the stronger she got. It was her, after all.
Several times it sneakily got her to put a leaf in her mouth before she could think about what she was doing. And every time she spat it out before it could start to work on her, before even chewing once. The little predator fought the shakes and kept using the stones to grind up the poultice.
As she did her work, she wished that she could see more overt signs of the gods’ approval. It would help with her motivation. Still, even if they didn’t care, the cleaning that she was doing would make traversal through the temple more bearable, especially through the central octagon.
It was when she was done, feeling proud of how the place no longer smelled like a rotting heap of gore, that she noticed that the whole temple smelled fresher. Brighter. Like it has been purged of threats? She would remain vigilant, never again would she trust anything to be safe, not if she could help it.
The symbols continued to glow, not dimming in the slightest, and she didn’t think they would. Eventually, when she was feeling up to it, she traveled back to what she had started calling the Ropemaker door at night. She climbed up the stairs, going outside and seeing if the runeglow was visible.
It was just a clump of ferns to her eye.
And I know it is there.
Lea-!
She clenched her shaking hands as she grit her teeth against the sudden urge, silencing her Instinct.
Give up. I will not chew them again!
When the neonate fought that wave of craving down, she used the opportunity of being near Ropemaker’s old nest to scavenge more of it.
With exceeding care and stealth, she gathered up the unused bark fibers, bundling them with more of the netting that she thought had been his bed when he had been alive. That tied tight together, she brought it all back to her base.
As she passed the drying rack for the herbs at the top of the stairs she gripped her bundle with both hands. Not even looking at it and feeling her Instinct growling about it.
She piled the fibers into her nest to use as further bedding, but she wasn’t sure what she would do with any of the netting she had just yet. It was too awkward to take through the canopy, and if she left it anywhere, like trying to use it for fishing, it would get taken.
She liked the idea of using it to tangle the others, but again, it was so large and awkward that it would be a chore to just carry the netting. Maybe there is something else I can do with it.
For now, she would just hang on to it. The neonate tied it to the pole running along the bottom of where the thatch started, still bundled up, out of the way until she found a purpose for it.
She was glad for that extra bedding on the eighth night.
Chills!
Cruel, slicing, rending, tearing, gnawing chills.
They ripped through her, her whole body vibrating with them. She had a hard time even feeding the fire, her fingers dumb and clumsy. It was agony, she could not get warm.
What sorcery is doing this to me? Am I sick? She had to be dying.
Leaves.
No.
Leaves!
No!
Defiantly, the little predator just pushed several logs into the fire, more than she usually used. Her joints felt stiff as she did. It burned high and hot and she was still cold.
The neonate curled up so close to the fire that she almost burned her skin. She didn’t care, she almost wanted to crawl into the coals themselves, become part of the heat, the warmth, the light.
Her thoughts were not… straightforward.
No… not… what? She struggled, looking for the term. Rational. There it was. Her thinking wasn’t rational.
But she didn’t fucking care… and dug deep into her own stubbornness. The same stubbornness that screamed at her to live. It was part of her damn it, not she of It. She bundled the fibers of her nest around herself, trading cushion for insulation.
She covered everything but the front of her body, and that only because she was facing the fire. The neonate hunkered down, and stared at the flames. She was glad she had left the leaves in the temple.
If they were near at hand she wasn’t sure she could have stopped herself. She couldn’t stand because she felt so cold, so she wouldn’t be able to get to the herbs. Not with the rain and the wind.
Her Instinct screamed in frustration until exhaustion sent her to sleep.
The next day, she felt surprisingly well. It wasn’t that the urge, the need, for the herb wasn’t there anymore. It was much easier to push aside though.
After recovering, she decided to head back out into the island proper. She had to scope out her competition and continue her campaign against them. Stealing parts of the brought food before the others would get it, as well as more directed methods of sabotage.
I should also check the snares and gather more firewood. She had used too much of the wood the previous night with the fire, and her recovery had depleted her supplies of food.
She climbed back up into her tree, looking across the island at the trails of smoke. One of the easiest things she could do to sabotage the others would be to raid their camps, soak their fires, scatter their wood.
That would be best. But did she want to do that right away though? Or did she want to observe for a while, learn some more and gather their skills first?
Both, idiot.
True.
She tried to visualize where the other entrances to the temple would end up, using the two she knew of to make an estimate of where the others might come out. She thought that one in particular might open up close to one of those little trails of smoke. The perpendicular exit to the east.
That should be close to Harvester’s territory.
Agreed. Her Instinct was still sullen at losing the battle of wills. She did miss the leaves. It stirred inside her, sensing her weakness.
No, I do not! I refuse to miss them! She would lie to herself if it meant that she could keep her thoughts clear.
Refocusing on her plan, she felt that that direction would be a good start. Somewhere familiar and with the added bonus of being in the direction of a fire. She would travel along the coast from there.
Check in on any of the others I come across. Start narrowing the competition.
Compete!
Plan set, the neonate climbed back down to the ground. She snatched one rope, her bag, and her weapons. She also grabbed the leather pouch with a stopper she had gotten from Gix’s grave. She had found that it could indeed hold water. Her torches were still in the bag. She wished she could use the mushrooms as light, but she had double checked with whole ones and taking them into the rain had melted them like fat in the fire.
With what supplies she needed, she was off down into the temple, only pausing to fill the waterskin from the rain running down the stairs.
Confidence soaring, she decided to be a bit bolder on this excursion.
Thrive!