Hundreds of feet up, in the canopy of a Mew tree that was just as tall under the mat of the floating mesa as above it, a troupe of Ooura hunters moved silently among the branches despite their frames that dwarfed both human and elf even if they were stacked on top of one another. Swinging from one tree to another using the naturally grippy and obscenely strong and elastic slimevines, bounding between the thickest branches available, and all without a single fearful thought among them.
Tonight was a hunt for special game, the kind only eaten during moon convergence festivals, and aswell, in this case, political negotiations between two empires that hadn’t communicated on formal grounds in three decades. Three decades in which the Pyathen had gotten closer to wiping them out than any time in living memory, and in most part due to their so-called alchemical shamans or a similar sort, though they called them scientists. The Pyathen had always been obsessed with their word ‘science,’ only now their worship of it had finally, hard as it was to admit, surpassed the power gained through worship of Kimitrius.
They claimed science was a method that would pass above religion, above common reason and generational knowledge, above even the virtue of the individual. Whether Banon thought their movement of science was far more fanatical than that of any religion, or bond of simple community, was irrelevant in the face of facts.
Science had created what the Pyathens had used to win this war.
Or start swinging the tides, anyway, though even that would be an optimistic view of where they were now. Thirty years ago, more than two hands worth of years more than Banaon had years on his life, the Pyathen had made their first strike with their new weapon, the ‘Gaelo Cocaulo,’ it was named in their language.
Banon’s people only knew it as Pyathen death.
What it really was, was a kind of acid. One that could be dropped in ambush attacks in the dead of night from the high tree canopies. The Pyathen death droppers, as they had come to be called, held it inside pouches in its inert form that was like sand to the touch but fire to the nose, until they were ready to mix it with another liquid activator and then deploy it into the Ooura villages below.
When the red substance fell from the sky, you knew it would not be a quick death. It would be one of thirst, for the acid killed a water vein immediately, polluting the drinking water of hundreds, sometimes thousands, just with one successful deployment of it. That water stayed poison, permanently, as far as they could tell.
The Enka, despite their numbers that dwarfed both Pyathen and Ooura combined, should have been just as at risk, if not more so, due to being on more equal ground with the Pyathen elves physically. Only that their cities were stone, built out of the foundational ground rather than atop the floating mesa mats, and having water sourced entirely from bedrock aquifers that simply could not be targetted from the outside, not without finding a way to sneak into the single most guarded part of an Enka city.
The Ooura, on the other hand, were more scattered. An empire, still, as his own lineage proved, but fragmented as to make each piece stronger individually. Though it was during these times of innovation that this strength flipped and became their greatest weakness. Ooura had thrived for all of history in small communities, though never far apart from each other, and reserved mass gatherings only for holidays of religious or astrological nature, which were often the same thing. Their homeland was floating thickets of weeds and roots that formed the mesa mats that separated the above jungle from the depths underneath it. Though Ooura lived in the trees as much as on the ground also, it was still the mesa and the sub-surface lake and river systems that provided for their water and much of their food. Water that they were losing more and more of, and spending more time and effort on defending instead of hunting, fishing, foraging, and tending to their families. These were strained times. The most strained, from what Banon could tell based on the oral histories told by his elders, especially that of his own family's legacy.
The Pyathen, in other words, were the oppressors of his people, the radicals untethered from the gods and traditions of the Ooura and the Enka Humans. Pyathens were what happened when you separated the body from the soul.
They believed in nothing, and so they were nothing. Nothing but pale wraiths with hollow minds bent on unraveling natural order.
And on the seventh night’s apex of their sacred summer festival, the Ooura would be holding a banquet in their name, sitting and eating alongside them and much more, allowing them to witness one of their most sacred of rites. And now, here, at the top of the tree canopy, Banon and his fellow men were on their way to hunt for the prized dish of the night, the one whose taste would be so excellent it would smooth over a generation of massacre and the uncountable generations of war before that. Or, that was how it would go if this were one of the stories of raw spirits and gods brushing up against one another in the times of such fantastical things.
Banon pushed the thoughts aside as he leaped from tree top to tree top, trailed by the rest of their party as he led the hunt deeper into the jungle.
Their troupe counted seven Ooura, all warrior men or soon-to-be. Five, including himself, were all the emperor’s sons Banon and Poh had managed to round up on such short notice. Sixth was the emperor himself, and the seventh man was Elder Brahman. After what happened with Tema, the three of them involved closest in the conflict thought it best to separate themselves for the moment while leaving the other four elders to deal with the situation back at the village now that bloods had cooled and a stalemate was achieved until the negotiation tomorrow night. Tema was no doubt watching over his son, despite the final outcome being in the Mother Dryad’s hands alone, though healers would be surrounding him and making attempts to dimm pain and salve away rot from the wounds even so.
That image out of his mind, Banon’s mind was free to feel the stress again.
No matter how many bodies joined the hunting party tonight, no one had the knowledge of the sunning dragon eagle Banon had been watching throughout the past several days of the first trial, and more bodies at one time were useless in hunting dragon eagles the traditional way… by hand.
If Banon thought he could get away with shirking tradition, he would have stashed his great-bow before the Kothai trials ever began in a place where he could pick it up discreetly, but there were some traditions that had the kinds of costs for breaking that the risk wasn’t worth it, even for Banon. It would be especially impossible now that Tema was set on checking the eagle himself after Banon caught it.
Another slight hurdle it would be, even just going about that interaction without getting his head knocked off by Tema, and that wasn’t talking about the likelihood of pulling this off to begin with. His idea to find a more mature Orux than the other boys was a gamble but much, much less of one now that his original gamble to find an exceptional staff had paid off. He already had three Orux dens scouted out. One that was of a young bull only barely of age to mate. The second was one just older enough to be impressive compared to his peers, and probably, if just barely, still one young enough a normal staff could take it down. The third and final, however, was the one he knew he needed to have now.
An ancient bull living among a den built so large he had initially mistaken it for a natural formation, or perhaps a mangrove spider den in the early stages before it began building its web around it, one so old its horns had curled back around almost to meet at their tips, and whose fur was so long and thick and tangled it formed such a tough cushion of natural fibers it could likely stop a great-bow’s arrow before it even reached rawhide.
Oh, and there was also the new promise that was now a necessity for his other insane plan to even be allowed to begin.
A dragon eagle.
Ambition, Banon mused, would most certainly kill him someday.
Banon glanced upwards at the receding behemoth of a moon that was Kimitrius, shrouded by a black cloak dotted with white spots as the night began to replace day. Not that ambitious, older brother, he thought, nodding subtly to the moon God. He didn’t get a response besides a warm feeling, which might have just come from inside himself.
It might not have, also.
Banon bounded between three gradually higher tree branches, then swung his staff around and planted the shooting end against the thickest section of the branch next to the trunk as he leaned forward, holding on and aiming himself as best as he could at this level of experience with it. He sent himself flying, air hissing in his ears, squinting so his eyelids didn’t inflate like balloons. He caught the top branch of the next tree in the cradling arch of his nimble feet and, while only barely, stayed upright as the tree swayed angrily under him. He leaned back and forth to counter the bucking tree top while holding his staff high above his head and tilting it back and forth as an added counterweight.
Lonka whistled from somewhere long behind, among the rest of the pack of seven coming along for this hunt. “Sheesh… he’s going to be a contender for scariest jungle beast besides Tema within the week, isn’t he?”
Tamil, Banon’s one-year-older brother, sighed while he swung in a far outward arc on a particularly long slimevine to catch up with him. “I don’t hate that he’s trying new things. What I hate is that it most definitely looks like a way to end up overshooting or undershooting and falling to a splattery death. Living reeds aren’t entirely consistent with their force output and speed, you know?”
“Maybe yours, but his?” Lonka said.
Banon smiled as the main group caught up with him, leaping to the next branch of a nearby, much greater Mew with just the strength in his legs as he continued listening to their chirping.
“Shutup man! He’s not some spirit hunter from a story, nor does he have a perfect staff. No one does. If his plan is to regularly risk using it like that, like I said, plop.” As always, Tamil was a man ever set on refusing to join Banon’s exploits and mostly viewed Banon as a reckless idiot. Shame, since he was an extremely promising young warrior, blood relations irregardless. There was small consolation in the fact Tamil at least didn’t hate Banon like some of his other brothers, mostly because Tamil thought Banon would die doing something stupid before he ever got to the chance to rule their people and have a chance to make any truly damaging reckless decisions.
To be fair, Banon found that all completely reasonable to assume about him. You would have had to be a part of his inner circle among his organization of ambitious young Ooura for these past few years to fully understand the rigor and dedication with which Banon approached every new action he took. And if you had been a part of that inner circle in the beginning, you would have been right about the recklessness. It was Hoetia’s losing of an arm during Banon’s second raid attempt on a Pyathen hunting party that shocked him into the realization that him and his group of ambitious young non-Kothai were far from invincible, even as dominant physically over the Pyathen as they were. He still remembered the verbal tearing-up Hooetia’s mother had given him and Hoetia both, and for good reason. They had still been little more than children at the beginning, after all, and even now Banon still hardly felt like they were more than just… slightly more cautious and better-organized children.
War, he had found, was not some honorable pursuit. It was dirty, confusing, chaotic in all the ways he had least expected, and boring at many of the points he thought would hold the most glory and excitement.
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“It’s funny, but I can’t see why you’re wrong,” Lonka responded, with that same ringing tone of half-care Lonka always had when he was doing anything but fishing. “It’s a silly thought but it might genuinely be true. Banon’s pursuit of fun might actually be what kills him. Not some monster, or Pyathen’s, or Tema.”
“Tema still might kill his corpse,” Tamil added.
Elder Brahman sighed longingly as he swung out in front of the main group briefly on a particularly long slimevine. “You sure have produced an eclectic group of boys, Poh.”
“It’s not just fun why he uses it like that, by the way,” Lonka responded to Tamil again, somewhat less humorously and completely ignoring of Brahman’s jibe.
Tamil made a considering noise as he made a series of rapid lunges between close-together branches of a particularly large skee tree next to Banon and then lept to another tree below the main group where the next few gaps between trees were lesser. “I suppose he is right. Being able to suddenly shoot yourself long distances might be his idea of the next stage of his ambush tactics. So, Tyube, is it?”
Tyube, Banon’s one-year younger brother, and who was also his only brother who took part in his core circle that attacked Pyathen hunting groups, made an annoyed noise.
“Oh, that’s right. It’s all a big secret among you not-even-Kothai.” Tamil tapped his bare head to indicate where his Orux skull headdress would be during a proper battle. “Tell me, what amazing secrets are you hiding from your older brother? It could not possibly be something that would be more than me, a real man can handle?”
Tyube grunted something hoarse. “Keep your own mind to your own path. I follow him because I believe in his vision, not him as some hero.”
Lonka made a farting noise with his lips. “I do.”
“So why not aid him?” Tyube asked at Lonka now.
“Me?” Lonka gestured at the general lack of Kothai-ness all over his body and facial features. “I fish. No fight.” After leaping out ahead, Banon glanced back just in time to catch the same leaned-back eye-rolling gesture Lonka always made repeating itself again, even as they bounded over death drops.
“I hear you put the beatles to Tema’s son,” Dartome, his much older brother who had been silent up until now, added abruptly. “Bold move, even for you.”
Banon grunted in the affirmative from his place far ahead of the main group as they continued deeper and deeper into the jungle, though he knew they would hear the subtle noise perfectly. Ooura hearing was orders of magnitude sharper than human or elf. Banon could practically hear the seams of Lonka’s cheeks bursting as he began to reply to Dartome.
“Heard? All the rest of us saw it! Only you could be capable of missing the most important moment of our lives for a piss.”
“It was a lengthy piss,” Dartome admitted. “Smelled like snails.”
Banon rolled his eyes. Dartome was notorious for his snale eating. They all ate them, of course. They occupied a small portion of every Ooura’s diet, but Dartome had a taste for them like Lonka had a mind for fishing. To call his breath bad would be to call a mountain a strange rock. In honesty, Dartome himself, even in his flesh, was part snail to the extent he simply smelled like one all the time. The only reason Banon wasn’t smelling snail right now was that he was leading at the front of their group– which was no coincidence.
As chuckles trailed behind that statement, Banon found his eyes picking up flickers of white through the jungle thicket far below. It was a mangrove spider’s nest, a large and fully formed one. Perhaps a large enough one for his favorite maneuver, one which all among their hunting troupe besides Tyuebe were yet to have seen him, or as far as he knew, anyone do. Banon felt the grin creeping as he measured the distance. Their path would take them directly over the massive spider’s den in about a half minute. Perfect. He’d been looking for a way to escape anyway, if not one so theatric.
Who was he kidding? Theatric was perfect.
“How many Pyathen are staying in our village tonight?” Dartome asked as he swung up to the branch beside Banon, dangling on a slimevine by one hand.
“My scouts say one hundred and forty,” Poh replied swiftly. “One royal.”
“Which royal?” Dartome asked.
“The young princess.”
“They halt communication for decades, burn us with their water and soil killer, target individual villages, sometimes without a single warrior to protect them… and they send us the daughter alone?”
“It is more than they have sent since before I was born,” Banon said, scanning the treeline where it intensified in density, starting a half mile from their current position, marking the beginning of the deep jungle. Banon wholeheartedly agreed with Dartome that it was strange, actually. He knew himself from subtle tells that the princess had something unknown hanging over her mind as well. He just wasn’t sure enough as to what it was to warrant discussing it openly yet.
“So you will advocate for peace?” Tamil asked, disgust thick in his voice.
“My voice is no stronger than yours, brother,” Banon replied, not hesitating in the slightest at the sudden aggression. “Tell me, is my father, the man who killed Dorse of Ain and ate his heart and spleen in front of his village Kothai, the kind of man to show weakness, to throw away an opportunity like this?”
“He is the kind of man who listens to his son, unfortunately,” Tamil said.
“You sound like Tema.” Lonka’s barely audible mumble was overlapped by Banon’s response, but Banon still heard it and flickered a grin in response nonetheless.
“Only because I am right,” Banon replied to Tamil.
Poh only sighed. “I listen to the wise, and I listen to reckless just as much. And I do not mean that in the way all of you may think. In every person's speech, it is my job as emperor to parse out what is true and not something simply said to me because of who I am, or due to an ulterior motive to manipulate my good grace. Unfortunately, as Dorse proved, the only way to know the real truth of the man without barriers is to consume that which produces his honest thoughts.”
Banon grimaced. Watching his father quarter Dorse had been and was still one of the worst things he had ever witnessed. Cannibalism wasn’t a commonality among Ooura, but there were exceptions, mainly during the specific case of a chieftain opposing his emperor. It was something that had happened countless times in history, and some said it was the measure of every great emperor that they would eat at least one of their rivals after defeating him in single combat. Knowing that hadn’t made it any less monstrously disgusting to witness, especially at the young age Banon had seen it. Poh himself hadn’t shown even a flicker of a grimace while he ate him. Banon hoped, he really hoped, that it was just a sign of his strong mind.
It was an uncomfortable ponderance to think of your father enjoying consuming the flesh of another Ooura.
Banon came to a halt after surging ahead of their group. He looked down and saw far below exactly what he had hoped for; a full-sized mangrove spider den, its highest parts stretching almost halfway up to where he was now. It was a sea of white silk, completely empty since its inhabitants would be at ground level. Mangrove spiders, thanks to their unimaginable size compared to most spider species, simply had to live on ground for most of their lives.
“I wonder,” said Banon in response to his father, “has Lonka ever had an honest thought you couldn’t tell by the fishing rod in his hand?” He hoped that would lighten up the mood away from memories of Dorse of Ain’s attempted rebellion.
Even Tamil and Brahman allowed themselves to laugh at that as all the rest of their party caught up to the branches around him, where they all paused together in response to Banon’s own abrupt stop, probably assuming Banon had deemed the next jump unsafe.
Oh, how wrong they were.
Despite Poh being the oldest in the group of ten, he was fastest only after Banon in the trees, and a smile creased Banon’s lips as he realized there was still just barely enough of Poh’s old fire in there to pull some of the old competition out of him.
“Father,” Banon began, speaking loud enough for the whole group to hear, “you have gotten slower than said fisherman, by the way.”
Banon heard the branch Poh had been wrestling his body over the top of creak as the old man sunk his fingers into crumbling bark. Banon promptly made several consecutive bounding jumps until he had ascended to the very top of the tree their whole troupe clustered upon.
“Still, you are our greatest hunter besides me, so I have decided to leave you to carry the weaker. Show them the way you cook the ass of the round-legged monkey, will you?” Banon turned his attention to the rest of the group before Poh could decide whether to toss him from the tree-top, and began speaking earnestly. “It’s the tenderest cut, of that I can assure you. Twice as flavorful as wood fiber and only half as hard to catch.”
He ignored the scowls of all but Lonka and Tyube, who was laughing with his paw of a hand covering his newly whiskered mouth.
Banon looked once over the horizon before departing. “I’m afraid the jungle open only open to spirits is calling my name.”
Banon stepped off the top branch, only to land on another one much further down, putting him level with his father but on the tree’s opposite side for a fractional moment until he used the massive downward momentum and the extra spring in the branch it caused to leap far out and away into completely open air, not one branch within a dozen feet in any direction for him to grab. He fell like a stone over hundreds of feet of open nothingness, booming taunting laughter all the way.
Below him, the sprawling white-grey silks strung thickly between every surrounding tree hundreds of times over rapidly approached. The mangrove spider’s layer was a thick mass spread between the trees, not like some much smaller spider species that made flat webs. And it was huge, almost the size of a small village, a blank white patch where the jungle simply ended, and the white ocean of spider’s silk began
It was also the only natural structure large enough and soft enough to break the fall of a full-sized Ooura from a thousand feet, well, almost anyway. But there was a trick to that ‘almost’ becoming an ‘almost definitely’ if you knew how.
The web also housed a proportionally large resident, along with thousands of its much smaller children.
Banon grinned all the way down.
***
After Tyube managed to convince Lonka and the others that Banon hadn’t just killed himself for the sake of making a joke and was instead just doing something the followers of Banon simply called ‘spider falling,’ the hunting party surmised that Banon had made his exit and was off to do Banon things of which only Banon could do.
Which figured.
From there, the remaining ten hunters in the royal hunting party continued their journey along the top of the jungle under ever-brighter stars. Lonka lept along the canopy along with his brothers, his elder, and the ever-presence of his father. He had planned to stay quiet for this hunt since quiet was the only way one ensured a lack of self-embarrassment. But, of course, he had found himself embroiled in petty jibes once again after Banon had departed, up until he made a particularly sharp joke about dung beatles and swamp lions. After those laughs died, the cool hand of his father took control once again.
“So, my sons, since we have quite the fisherman among us, and the night is when the deep jungle gigantism sets in, what do you boys say to a trip to the lake of eels?”
Lonka almost slipped and fell to his death out of the sheer rush of fear that name brought.
Poh shot Lonka back a knowing look over his burn-scarred left shoulder.
Lonka resolved himself to move to a different village after this was all over.
Poh cleared his throat, which was a surprisingly soft noise, yet it silenced them and turned attention to him through some subtle note in the sound that meant a request for attention. “Perhaps we leave the joking, Lonka, and the man of men contests, the rest of you, out of this night until we have claimed a forest spirit to be proud of, one worthy of presenting to our long enemies. This hunt is how we show our strength. So strength! And eyes sharp! And the best man to the killing blow of the worst beast of all!”
“To the worst!” Tyube agreed.
“The worst!” the other sons except Lonka chorused.
“I think he only just left us,” Lonka muttered.
His father and brothers chuckled one more time before they all became silent, silent so long they eventually began to feel more of their animal selves.
All senses, sensations, and intuitions. Scanning out into the night with eyes a hundred times sharper than Pyathen or Enka, hearing the slightest of changes in the intensity of the breeze and smelling the animals whose essence wafted along with it. No thoughts and feelings to be found as they descended deeper and deeper into the jungle, bent on claiming something truly exceptional. Even regardless of whether Banon should succeed in his insane promise of a dragon eagle or not, tomorrow would be the greatest feast in Ooura living memory between their ‘visitors,’ the Orux carcasses being roasted over a hundred fires, and whatever monstrosity this royal hunt could claim tonight.
Banon might not expect anyone besides himself to have a chance with a dragon eagle, but a royal hunting party counting seven, and seven as exceptional as this troupe, would come up with something truly awe-inspiring if they used every advantage their numbers and teamwork skills provided.