Tema sat crosslegged on top of the thickest branch sprouting out of the tree upon which his home was built around. Higher in its canopy, shamans and spirit women tended to the inflicted brutalities unto his son, clustered around him in his sleeping chamber.
As they repaired his face, every few minutes Haeran’s moaning caught the wind just right, or wrong enough that it made it all the way to Tema's ears, despite him climbing down here to get away from the sounds of his son's suffering. He was considering venturing somewhere further, and the Pyathen camp on the edge of the clearing, all shrouded in hellish blue lights from their ever-burning torches, was looking like a good place to escape, a good place to fulfill his desire to thwart Poh’s lap dog, or maybe it was the other way around.
It didn’t matter.
He wanted revenge upon both of them.
Tema growled, unable to control himself as his fingers dug into the bark beside him until their tips began to shred and bleed. The callouses would grow stronger; it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, nothing besides the sickening twists of tradition and what was right that they had been hurtling towards for too long now.
The worst part of it all was… he simply didn’t have the power, didn’t have the sway to force the other elders and ‘his’ emperor to bend to his will. He was trapped in the same system as they were, unable to climb above his station and pluck what he wanted for the sake of the spines covering the deceptively tantalizing fruit of rebellion among those spindly higher branches.
And yet, with every new day, Banon was climbing.
Poh’s worst son still had not played too close to the edge, not yet, not out in the open enough to warrant exile. Though if Tema had been emperor, he would have done so the moment Banon waged war and called himself a warrior before undergoing the sacred trials and earning his rite. But such was the unfortunate reality of his position. Even if now he did use every man who would follow him, lead an attack in the night while the Pyathen’s eyes were worse than theirs, even then he could muster, what, fifty loyal enough to him to overtly disobey the others within this village? And that was optimistic, given many among their village Kothai, of all things, idolized the arrogant boy like some savior, some better, some spirit.
Tema thought he might have felt a tooth crack as he bit down on that empty realization.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to steady for a long time, sinking into the animal within him, the one who only existed in the world and not in the ever-tangled mind. Time passed as he felt the drafts and breezes wash over him, heard the grunts as his son struggled through the pains of the mending worms the healers introduced into his flesh, smelled the chemical stain upon his senses from their oppressor's blue burning fires.
His eyes gradually opened as the finally untangled thoughts began to re-present themselves to his cognizant self. No longer flashing images and surging emotions without outlet, now solidified into ideas, concise actions he could take. His gaze swung slowly to stare at the Pyathen camp at the edge of the clearing again.
Now, there was something worth chipping your tooth on.
***
Tema crouched in the darkness just on the other side of the Pyathen encampment’s rear flank on the jungle's edge. Sneaking up this close had been laughably easy, so much so he was having doubts Banon and his Konka bunch of little boys ever had the slightest trouble in ambushing the absent-minded creatures. These elves with their chain linked armor, their prettyness and their pomp, even after all these years of fighting them, they still never learned to pay attention to their surroundings properly, all with their blunted senses and forgone lust for the present.
Pathetic. Less than it, for how much they thought themselves the opposite.
He may not have been able to justify leading an all out assault, nor hope to survive it, but that did not mean there was no course of action, no way to destabilize without taking blame himself. He stuffed the sickening comparison to Banon’s own escapades into the irrelevant corner it belonged, continuing to watch the edge of the Pyathen guard perimeter, continuing to wait.
For all their ingenuity, for all their science they thought put them above life in the jungle, one of them would need to wander far enough away as not to pollute their comrades with smell, dig a hole and shit in it sooner or later. He only needed a little luck that it would be one among them insignificant or embarrassed enough not to take a chaperone. He knew he would not have such luck with the princess, or anyone important, but a grunt on the night watch? It was worth the wait, even for the chance.
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Tema only needed them uneasy, reluctant to negotiate tomorrow, unwilling to acquiesce to whatever scheming demands Banon would bring to them. One unaccounted-for soldier out of a hundred and forty would not raise the alarm to flee on its own, but it would certainly sew the kind of unease that would make every further tainting acts of unity with these creatures more unlikely to go forward than the last.
There was an unholy tapestry being sewn in the aether around them, as much as they would deny it, and Tema would see it unwoven.
He didn’t need to wait long.
Tema watched as one of the night watch whispered something to his nearby man, then began off into the jungle with the look of a man on the way to relieve himself. The elf, though he was, disappeared into the thicket without seeing Tema hidden a mere body-length from him as the ivory-skinned, whittled-down excuse for a man made the last footfalls of his life. Tema followed him at a distance no further, having no trouble remaining silent and unseen. Ooura were built for the night.
He loomed and swept along the landscape like a living shadow.
***
Out of the ambient moonlight, he slipped into the shadow of a tree trunk while the elf scrambled to dig a tiny hole in the mat with some silly metal tool. Were they really so weak they could not even penetrate the jungle mat with their bare hands? The elf discarded the tool and stood up, looked down at it a moment as if deciding which way to hang his arse into it. Silently Tema moved in, kneeled down behind the standing elf, and when he did he was still taller. Up until now, he had been deliberately quieting his breathing by slowing it and breathing through his mouth instead of his nose up to the point he could, and had made it completely undetectable, but now he let his breathing be free, his huge mouth inches behind the Pyathen’s blonde head.
The Pyathen, pants around ankles, tried to turn and, though he didn’t trip, only barely managed to face his aggressor.
Tema shot his hand out, caught the Pyathen by the face and wrapped his fingers around the back of his head, cutting off his ability to breathe or scream or see anything besides Ooura flesh. Metal sang as the elf drew his silvery sword. Tema swatted the blade out of the little man's hand and sent it spinning away into the night.
Slowly, Tema forced him first to his knees, then onto his back on the mat. It was pitifully easy, he just wasn’t so eager to finish things just yet.
He leared his face close to the side of the elf’s head, making sure to move a finger so it could hear him. “You have trod where you should have not.” Tema cut off with a grunt and leaned away, squeezing and relaxing the tension of his grip immediately to see if he could feel the skull underneath the flesh flex.
The little elf fumbled for something at his belt, then drew a pitiful knife, even for his size, and stabbed it into the massive hand covering his face. Tema had taken worse wounds picking spear berries, though by the third tiny gouge the man’s rapid strikes made into his hand, he grew annoyed enough to catch the hand that held it and, rather than worrying about the blade itself this time, simply turned the wrist, felt bones and tendons dislodging and snapping, and then finally managed to tear it off, leaving a stump dangling with misshapen flesh.
There was no scream, no sound at all while Tema’s palm stayed wrapped over his face completely. Eventually, the frantic flailing began to fade as he used up the last of the air in his lungs, unable to retrieve any more.
The moment he stilled, Tema let go, hoping him just unconscious and wanting to extend this game. He leaned in close, putting his face right over the blank sleeping expression of the elf. The pale nose twitched, the lips parted to let in a subtle stream of air, and a moment later, his eyes were opening again. And the first thing the elf was aware of was Tema’s rage and wrath, his face literally shaking with it as he loomed closer, spittle dangling, imagining the many faces of his enemies plastered over the features of the pale, meek thing gaping its shock back up at him.
Before the opening mouth could form its impending scream, Tema jammed two fingers down the back of the throat until he had the base of the wriggling worm of a tongue firmly held.
Then he pulled.
It required pathetically little force to tear it out, and yet he made sure to be gentle, to make sure it tore slowly enough for him to feel it, and for that feeling to have time to make its way to his eyes for Tema to see. Tema showed the wide-eyed, pointy-eared, white imp his teeth before snapping the last muscle fibers and connective tissue with a final tug, then promptly shoved the torn-out tongue back down the elf’s throat whole, stopping the incoherent moan as it formed, sending the ‘man’ into a series of immediate convulsions, all unsuccessful to clear the obstruction. Without the tongue, he probably couldn’t have made enough noise to alert his companions anyway, but Tema valued the catharsis just as much.
The struggling elf desperately clawed at his attacker's face. Tema bit off the only stray finger that managed to slip past his lip, then cupped the little head of the little elf in both his hands, pulled it inside his mouth, and bit down.
There was a solitary disappointing moment before the skull gave, once in which Tema reluctantly entertained the idea he was getting too old for these things, and then the skull simply popped, and Tema dropped the finished corpse where it belonged, into the dung pit carved into the mat. He licked brain and blood-spattered lips, blinked without care as the cranial awful seeped inside the rims of his eyelids, and he smiled all the way through it.
Age, it seemed, had not yet made it through the gates of night. For the night had still too much reason to fear his retribution.