by Matt Larkin
His answer was a high-pitched seal bark.
As Sanna continued to shift, the other wereseals rushed at Kama, crossing the forest in great bounds, with speed no human could have managed. Snarling, he swung his fist sideways, swiping into a leaping male. The blow caught the wereseal in midair with a meaty thwack and sent the Shifter flying backward, crashing into a banyan tree.
The other wereseal tackled Kama, driving him to the ground. The woman remained in human form, though she still leaned in, trying to bite his nose off. Which definitely broke some tabu or other.
Growling, he forced her upward, his forearm under her neck. Twisting, he managed to get his other hand around her. His fist connected with her jaw. From his position, it didn’t have much momentum, but it still sent her tumbling end over end.
Before he could rise, Sanna was on him, a hulking shadow of dark fur. One hand snared his hair, the other his shoulder, and she heaved. His world spun as he hurtled sideways. His side slammed into a palm tree, cracked right through it and kept going, tumbling through the woods in a shower of bruises and cuts.
Everything dimmed.
His host had broken ribs. A dislocated shoulder, too.
Growling, the Boar God rose, grabbed his own wrist, and yanked his shoulder back into socket with a satisfying pop of luscious agony. The ribs had begun to knit back together, yet still delicious pain lanced through his torso with every glorious, free breath.
He worked his jaw, stretching his eight-feet-tall frame with a chuckle.
The other female wereseal closed in, then faltered at the Boar God’s inimical visage.
The Boar God grinned, shaking his tusks at her.
Then he charged, swatting aside a tree between them like kindling.
The wereseal turned, tried to run. A single bound closed the distance between them and the Boar God caught the back of her neck. Bellowing with laughter, he rammed her face against a tree trunk and jerked it upward, tearing off every last vestige of skin. Grinding, until the skull collapsed and gray goo squished between his fingers.
He licked the delicacy off his palm, savoring the salty taste of it.
Slowly, he turned at the progenitor seal-woman’s approach.
How many millennia had it been since he’d faced such a challenge? Mortals were like swatting flies. But this—another progenitor! Ah, the pleasure of it. Breaking her host in half. Tearing her limb from limb. The very thought of it had his cock hardening.
Let death come to them and revel in the glory of the worship he would lay at its feet.
Yes, she was like him, but while he had persisted in this form for eons, she was, as yet, larval. He, who had seen the fall of Dark Faerie, the sinking of continents, and the collapse of more empires than he could count. He was ancient. Timeless and fathomless.
The seal-woman leapt, agile and fast.
The Boar God caught her flipper hands and rammed her backward against a tree trunk. He jerked upward, swinging her bodily through overhead branches that came crashing down around them, then kicked, sending her hurtling through the night even as she had done to his host.
Then he faltered, staring at the space she had just occupied. This was it? This pathetic exertion?
This excuse for battle would not have passed in the days of old.
Shaking his head in disappointment, the Boar God broke into a charge, closing in on his prey. He crashed through underbrush, blowing aside anything in his way.
The shadow from above fell upon him as he passed, forcing him into the ground. Since when did seals climb trees? Her weight upon his head drove his tusks beneath a tree root. The woman shrieked, yanking his head upward so fast one of the Boar God’s tusks snapped off.
Delectable rivers of pain coursed through him, drawing out a roar, even managing to blur his vision. Blow after skull-dazing blow rained upon his head, pommeled his still healing ribs, and sent him stumbling backward. The seal woman drove a knee up into his balls with enough force he lifted five feet off the ground and smacked his head on a branch above.
Waves of agony ripped apart, mingling with the pleasure into a sea of sensation.
This! This was what he had missed! This glory, this fury! Naught since the days of the war with Faerie had so gripped him. War wrapped bloody fingers around his throat and throttled him.
Through sputters of blood and wheezes of pain, he barked laughter.
Those seal jaws lunged at his face, and he barely caught her throat.
Fucking glorious! She had nearly killed this host after all.
The Boar God grabbed her with his other hand, then swung her around like a whip, slamming her back-first into the ground. Chuckling with gratitude, he kicked her, sending her tumbling over onto her stomach.
Already he longed for their next duel. For the chance to hunt her once more.
He planted a foot on her back, grabbed her snout, and began to yank. Her flesh resisted at first, then slowly began to tear, head being ripped off its shoulders, spine pulled right out as a delicious trophy.
That’s Sanna! the pestilent voice of his host lamented.
The Boar God ignored the fool. Naught could sour the succulence of this victory. Had the blow to his balls not rendered it temporarily difficult, he might have enjoyed fucking the seal-woman before he killed her. Under the circumstances, after would have to do.
Even Shifter flesh had its limits, tearing slowly away from—
A stick abruptly rammed through his knee. The impact hit him before the pain, and he lost his grip on the seal-woman. She lurched over, releasing the branch, convulsing in obvious agony.
The pain followed, intoxicating and erotic, even as he slowly drew the shaft out of his flesh. His leg gave out, and he tumbled to the ground.
Amazingly, the wereseal managed her feet—lurching and stumbling, hand to her neck—and fled, colliding shoulder-first with a tree before disappearing into the valley’s darkness.
The Boar God growled.
Well, then he might get another chance to fight her in this lifetime, after all.
Knowing it was too late, still he stumbled after her.
A sudden bark rang out, and he ducked around a tree to find the wereseal ensnared in the embrace of a thousand lashing vines. Branches, undergrowth, and an abundance of flora battered and bound the other Shifter.
Wood spirits? The Boar God snarled in distaste. Woodwoses, dryads, whatever one wished to call them—they were disgusting prey he positively lived to rip in half.
Of a sudden, the foliage lashed him as well, yanking his wounded leg out from underneath him. Roots crawled over him, binding him so tightly he could manage no angle to struggle against them.
Fuckers! Had the spirits tried this any time other than after such a battle, he’d have torn them to pieces! He tried to spew vulgarities at them, but the vines bound his mouth as well, holding him tight.
And the woman who stepped from the foliage was no spirit, but rather a demigod.
The roots constricted, cutting off his air.
Kama woke to find sunlight hot on his face. A whole shit-tangle of vines had him bound to a tree. He’d been tied up plenty of times, but getting tied to a tree was a whole other thing from being tied by a tree.
Sanna lay before him.
Her corpse, anyway. Ruptures marred her skin, as if he’d literally tried to tear her apart, though he couldn’t see what had actually killed her in the end. Only, there was a lot of blood. So much, the scent of it choked the air.
“I did this,” he moaned.
“No,” Kapo said, guiding a woozy-looking Pele into his line of sight. “I did. Though I could not have managed it had you not so weakened each other.”
“Y-you killed …?”
Kapo lifted her kihei to expose a series of tattoos that ran around her collarbone. “After your last altercation with my sister, I divined some secrets of Old Mu.” The way she said it made it sound like getting those answers had hurt. “Enough to ensure one of your kind could not easily slip in
side myself. Do you know why I chose this valley, wereboar? There’s no one here. No one that thing inside of you could easily have moved into.”
It hit him then. “You mean if I turned on you again and you had to kill me.”
“When I realized what pursued us, I had to ink similar wards upon my sister.”
Pele winced, and he saw the symbols painted upon her shoulders and back, as well.
“You killed Sanna,” Kama said. “How did you …?”
Kapo raised a brow as if shocked he would dare ask. “I drove a branch down her throat, pierced her heart, and ripped it out.” She pointed to a tree, where, indeed, the organ remained impaled overhead, crimson and thick.
Her casual description of such a brutal murder made him balk. Wonder, for a moment, whether sorceresses were, in fact, even less human than wereboars.
Without further warning, the branches released him and he pitched face-first onto the ground.
43
The firmament shifted in kaleidoscopic splendor, a stark contrast to the muted sea of shadows spreading out around Namaka into infinite depths. The undulant landscape of flitting grays and blues meant she had drifted near to the edge of the Roil, where Pō ceased to echo the Mortal Realm and became something more nebulous—and magnitudes more dangerous.
The land writhed as if liquid stone in a tenebrous wasteland, twisting back on itself where it did not fall away completely into expanses of empty space or pits of bubbling tar.
Time and space melted away, leaving her untethered, wandering this place of unrealities. Like the umbral miasma dancing about her, her mind seemed wrapped in a haze that choked thought and swallowed memory and ambition.
She knew it … ought to have known … whispers in Nyi Rara’s past, warnings of the Lethe that siphoned soul memories of those passing through these depths. Cognizance of the danger—of the feeling that something seeped out of her—it ought to have been enough to send her scampering away from this place, diving for the safety of the Mortal Realm or even the more known dangers of Avaiki.
Instead, Namaka’s feet plodded ever onward as if given minds of their own to replace the consciousness she knew she lost. The ground before her felt porous, squelching beneath her bare feet, sucking at her heels as if intent to devour her whole. That fact only further encouraged her to push forward, to not linger.
In the dark …
How did the chant go? Deep! Such things were so long ago now. Infancies in Avaiki …
Unfolding unrealities pulling her ever deeper. High above, in crystalline spheres, the Spirit Realm twinkled, beckoning the spirit half of her toward her treacherous home. Surely some path, some nether river connecting her to that firmament must lay just around the next mound of roiling darkness.
How had she come here? Where was she headed?
Like the space before and behind, all was darkness not even mer eyes seemed able to pierce, as if shadow here took substance.
In the dark, memory fades … whilst the lidless watchers endure …
There were … things … entities dwelling in this liminal space. Watchful. Hungry.
Young mer were always entreated to minimize time spent in the Astral Roil. This Realm itself, and the denizens therein, preyed upon souls and thoughts. It became a kind of inevitability for one lingering too long on the fringes of reality.
The Dragon Kings!
She had used the Chintamaniya to create the Dragon Kings.
Namaka paused. The land lapped at her ankles, slithering up her calves with its cool embrace.
Had she utterly discorporated from expending so much mana? Or rather, had her mind simply projected into the Astral Realm? If the former case, Namaka’s body would have perished, but if the latter, she need but find a way to return to that body.
Grunting, she yanked her right leg upward. The tendrils of nebulous rock clung to her before finally plopping free.
A way back … she needed a way back …
While everything remained cold colors and swirling shadows, at least now she saw a fragile, twisted echo of the world she knew. The seabed, though the waters had no substance. All around her, she saw the shadows of creatures swimming by on the far side of the Veil, their images distorted as if they were the etheric ones. There, a whale, and beyond, sharks and fish and so many others.
Tiny flickers of life glinting beyond the gossamer shroud that separated the Mortal Realm from the greater realities beyond.
Every step she took threatened to steal her purpose. To swallow a little more sense of memory and self and suffuse her with the ennui that comprised the Astral Realm. The side of her that was Namaka blanched at the thought. What, after all, did it mean if the Astral Realm encompassed the Mortal Realm and was a reality of despair?
Kāhuna believed the dead passed into Pō, lived here in their own kingdoms of night. But the darkness must surely gnaw upon them as well. However terrible the pains of the Mortal Realm might seem … she could not help but feel everything beyond contained ever more unfathomable horrors.
With stubborn desperation she clung to her self-image. In her mind’s eye, she felt an etheric tether pulling her back to her body—an iridescent cord she had followed from the depths of the Roil to here, back in the Penumbra.
The Echo, some termed it, for it seemed an empty, limitless mirror of the Mortal Realm. And her etheric tether guided her back … She followed it down deeper and deeper, until at last the chasm around Uluhai greeted her.
Without the buoyancy of water, there was no swimming there, so Namaka paused on the threshold, peering down into the darkness of that gorge. Her stomach lurched at the thought of the climb, but what else would she do?
Already, the cord of her life grew thinner, her body failing without its soul. If that tether snapped …
Shuddering, Namaka settled down onto her knees, then kicked her legs over the side of the gorge.
Reaching Uluhai had required vertiginous leaps over empty space and a longer climb than she could measure, but settling back into her body proved easier than expected. Nyi Rara simply lay into herself, and woke, eyes hurting but encompassed in blissful waters once more.
Taema started awake when Nyi Rara stirred, then stared pensively at her.
Groaning, Nyi Rara rubbed her face. “What happened?”
“Daucina took one of the Chintamani stones and fled.”
That much she remembered. He had always been obsessed with the flaming pearls, but Nyi Rara hadn’t thought he would turn on her for one. Deep, what a fool she’d been.
“He must mean to rescue Tilafaiga.”
Nyi Rara turned to the gold-tailed mermaid. “Why would you say that?”
Taema shrugged. “They were lovers.”
For a moment that stretched on and on, all she could do was stare at Taema. What? What? How could she not have known that? Deep damn them both. Damn herself for being so obsessed with the surface world she knew nothing of the goings on down here. Had she even suspected, she might have known he would never stand to leave her in danger. “Y-you … why didn’t you go with him?”
Taema shrugged once more. “He didn’t ask me. Nor did I know his plan until he had already left.”
“But you would have?”
The gold-tailed mermaid said nothing.
The Dragon Kings swam about outside Uluhai, ranging far, testing their new forms and the extent of their new powers. Nothing like what they had become had ever existed. Not in aspect, nor power, nor majesty.
It was Piika—almost unrecognizable—who greeted her as she and Taema swam out in search of the Muian refugees. Nyi Rara held onto the hope they had not already made the trek to Lemuria and joined the court there. That she could still save Mu.
“Piika, how do you feel?” she asked him, as the great dragon swam up before her. His bulk now stretched out in great fathoms beyond. His scales had taken on an azure tinge that seemed to reflect the waters around him.
When he spoke, she saw fangs near as tall as she was. A maw that co
uld swallow her whole on a whim. Power that reminded her he was more than a beautiful form. His laughter—she prayed that was what it was—spewed a curtain of bubbles that obscured his face a moment. “I’m not sure that name still applies. I may need a new one in time, for I am no longer what or who I was.” His voice had grown far deeper, resonating through the waters like a drum.
Nyi Rara nodded slowly. Given her symbiosis and fused souls, perhaps she could understand metamorphosis better than any other mer in the Worldsea. “Do you know anything of the Muian refugees?”
“Yes … They are beset by the seals now, well north of Savai‘i. The Shifters seem intent to cut them off from joining the Lemurians in the South Sea.”
Nyi Rara blew out a breath. “So, they are most likely in league with Hiyoya, then.”
“A reasonable supposition.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth only to find her shark teeth had descended on their own accord. Ready for blood. “Well … call your brethren, Piika. The time has come to reunite the people of Mu.”
Four great Dragon Kings encircled the Muian refugees. Their bulk distorted currents, sweeping enormous wakes behind them with each beat of their tails. Each of them had taken on a different hue, scales tinted vermillion, obsidian black, snowy white, and, of course, Piika’s own azure color.
Watching them circle was like watching a force of nature in motion. Their passing swept such currents as to create a hint of a maelstrom beneath the waters.
Nyi Rara stared enraptured as a reptilian maw snapped down, swallowing a wereseal whole as it tried to dart away. Arms folded, she did nothing when a black claw seized another of the creatures and crushed it to pulp—the victim soon resuming its human form.
In silence and utter stillness, she watched the impossible slaughter of those beings who, not long ago, had sought to destroy her people. They had killed in Puna, caused harm aplenty … and yet beholding this massacre, she could not help but feel sympathy for them. Watching them try to flee the Dragon Kings seemed not so unlike watching a man try to flee a kai e‘e. A vision of futility that evoked compassion, though she could have done nothing to help anyone.