by Joe Darris
Skup, on the back of his vultus with Urea in his talons, swoops around, following the corpse of the Spire back to the navel it punched into the earth.
Skup drops her and she screams. A quick dive and she's in the kingcrow's talons again, sobbing.
“I don't deserve... this... all... my fault...should be... dead,” she chokes out between sobs.
Skup swoops low with Urea over the crowds of people. They stand back from the stump that once made the Spire. It still throws sparks into the night sky, but not so many, without the full gradient of the stratosphere, the root of the Spire lacks much of its power.
Skup releases Urea some distance from the crowd, then swoops back around and goes in closer. She can hear screaming, someone is spewing Naturalist propaganda, even now, at the foot of the crumbled Spire. But she doesn't listen, instead she feels. The earth is warm beneath her feet, much warmer than she'd expected, probably from the burning Spire, but the grass is soft, her toes curl and uncurl, wet with dew and dirt. She remembers her dream, but feels no terror until she hears a long growl.
It sounds so ominous when coming through her ears. She swallows and turns around. Two slits stare at her from orange spheres. Her dreams play through her mind and she considers running, but that would be folly. She could never outrun her panthera. Besides, she is not prey, but a hunter as well.
So she growls between her sobs and trudges to her death, one heavy step at a time. The panthera's fur bristles, but Urea doesn't stop moving, she doesn't care if she dies. Whoever is left of the Spire wants her dead anyway. Their panthera princess, as big a liar as they come.
“Death to the false god!” Ntelo lunges at Urea with a prong from one of the bucks. Urea, trapped in her own misery does nothing, but her panthera leaps and crushes Ntelo with her paws, soft as velvet and strong as iron. Blood spurts from her mouth to the panthera's face. Her ribs are all broken, her lungs collapsed, Urea knows the look. The panthera looks to Urea and bares her teeth. Urea shakes her head no but the panthera ignores her. She swipes a clawed paw across her neck and the High Priestess, is no more. The predator starts towards Urea.
She is a few feet away, than one, then inches. Urea can smell the priestess's blood on her breath, feel the low rumble of her growl. Just like her dream, just like she deserves, she'll die for enslaving this magnificent creature.
The panthera stretches out her neck and smells Urea, her hair is sucked towards the feline's huge nostrils. Before she knows what she is doing, Urea hugs the panthera, wrapping herself in her deadly black fur. If I must die, this is how I want to go. She touches every part of the magnificent creature she knows so well. Her arms, her legs, her paws, her claws, her wonderful tail, how many times did Urea wish she just had a tail? As a girl she dreamt about having a tail. Urea ever so gently scratches the panthera below her ear. Its all she's ever wanted to do, ever since she was a little kid. Finally they stare into each other's eyes, redefining their relationship a thousand times a second.
The panthera nuzzles her with her whiskers and Urea feels her growl turn into a purr. She cries sweet tears into her black coat until the panthera pushes her away and licks them clean off her face.
Chapter 46
In death, I fear nothing, for my fate is known. Instead I pity the living, who must carry on with no one but themselves to turn to.
A crowd of nearly a hundred people cower together as biselk kick at the earth and walk forward in lockstep. Every one of their movements is perfectly synchronized, they move as one. The crowd is surrounded by the biselk on one side, the collapsed Spire on the other, and two Wild Men battling in the center.
“Stop it!” Kao's sister yells, as the two grapple with each other.
“Release him!” Kao screams at the hermit.
“There is nothing to release you fool! He ended his life when he threw my body from the Spire! I am all that remains.” The body of the hermit cackles. As he does electricity arcs over the crowd of people from the stump of the Spire to the enclosing ring of prongelk. The people scream in terror, the ghost of Baucis just laughs harder.
“I always wanted a body like this, and now I have one!” One of the elk breaks file and charges Kao. He dodges and it careens into the stump, electricity crackles into the air, some catching on Kao's prong stubs. “Though I must admit I didn't expect the added benefits!”
Kao leaps away from the hermit as another prongelk charges him.
“You can't stop me!”
Howls ring out across the Garden and the monkeys surge towards the battle. They too move as one, guided by Baucis's single warped mind.
“I lost the Spire but will not lose my Garden!” he screams to no one and everyone. The monkeys’ howls become dangerous. People from the Spire fall to their knees, noses bleeding. People vomit. The monkeys’ howls hurt even the prongelk. They bellow in protest but march forward, pinning the crowd together.
“Bow to me!” Baucis yells from the hermit's throat, and all the Evanimals drop to their knees as bolts of electricity surge directly from the stump of the Spire to Baucis's new body, to the hordes of Evanimals he has created. Most of the crowd, those with VRCs, bow as well, the command short circuiting their will power, an argument as strong as any against technological meddling.
Kao rushes at Baucis's incarnation but is stopped when Baucis releases a wave of pure power from his hands at Kao. It knocks him back with more force than any of the walls in the Spire ever did. The stump of the Spire throws more and more blasts of lightning into the air. The ground starts to bubble beneath Baucis's feet.
Out of the dark of the night itself, bounds the panthera. She roars at Baucis, then, plain as day to all those with VRCs she chimes
The elk freeze, the monkeys as well, people look up from the ground, but Baucis does nothing of the sort. He cackles ever louder, each guffaw of laughter magnified to inhuman levels by a chorus of howluchin monkeys around him.
“You dare to challenge ME?” a hundred voices call out, even the biselk grunt rough syllables.
“I AM BAUCIS LORD OF MANKIND, LORD OF THE ANIMALS, LORD OF THIS EARTH!”
Lightning thunders from the remains of the Spire and a great plume of electricity shoots into the air. The ground shakes and the volcanoes on the periphery of the caldera erupt. The earth beneath Baucis's feet glows red, fissures form, and finally its solidity gives way.
Kao has seen much in the last moon, but never did he think he would see the earth boil. But boil it does, as rolling a boil as any soup pot he has ever stirred. Flecks of lava spurt out of the earth around the Spire. The ground rolls and sputters out protest to the energy burning it from deep below.
Baucis sees this too and tries to run from the burbling lake of lava, but he is too close to his source of power, the ground gives way and his feet and shins slip into the earth as smoothly as an eagle hunts in water.
Baucis screams out in the hermit's voice as all below his knees is incinerated in an instant. For a moment he balances there, an homage to his precious Spire, but the pain overwhelms him and he cries out bestially, lightning shoots from his palms and lava boils more aggressively. The ground shakes him. He tips forward and falls. His hands are no more. He's just a torso, screaming into the night as he slowly melts into the earth.
“I AM BAUCIS,” he screams again and again inside of everyone's minds, until his body is gone, and he's just a head, but the earth is not sated, and that melts too, so that all that remains is a VRC, made of stronger carbon than meat and bone, glowing red into the night, and then that sinks below the surface, and finally his will is no more, and all is silent.
In the aftermath Urea runs forward to Jacob's burned body. His elk is half submerged into the earth, but the pilot is still alive, barely breathing, but alive. He moves to speak but she puts a finger to his lips.
“I know. I love you too.” He smiles, then passes unconscious. The panthera approach
es and Urea gently lifts Jacob onto her back.
Skup and Elia hold hands, their birds flying overhead in the predawn light. The flock already descends on the remains of the Spire, some instincts are too strong, but they spare the five hundred living souls that walk from the Spire, thank Nature.
“What do we do now?” a child asks no one in particular.
Skup and Urea say nothing, but turn to Kao.
“Let's go home,” Kao says.
“We're already here,” his sister replies, wiser than she was for all she went through, her brain and body, even her soul forced to grow under pressure. Excess was stripped away, desire, pleasure, slovenliness, childhood all chipped off like shards of marble, until only the core of power, the most necessary, that which was needed to stand up to all that confronted it, remains.
Epilogue
He is the Wild Man, and his world is out there, among the animals and the trees, the sun and the rain, the lions and wolves and everything else that we hide from with our walls and our culture and our comfort. It is good his kind is out there, for as long as they are, there's place for all in this world we share.
Kao looks to Father Mountain, hoping to recognize the old craggy rock face that never aged until the Hidden's storm removed his forested beard. It looks nothing like him. He does this every day since the Spire crumbled, hoping for some sort of recognition.
The hunter walks through the growing village. Close to a thousand people survived the Spire, few of them older than Kao. I am an elder with only fifteen summers. Its different for the people of the Spire though. They had no time up in the sky, the seasons meant no more than the moon. Down here the seasons are real. Winter was cold. A few of the youngest did not survive, but considering where they came from... They grow strong. They do not need me.
For six moons, all of winter and much of spring, he was their hunter. He taught them stealth, patience, how to butcher an animal. They learned hunger. Much of the Garden was burned by the eruptions or crushed by the Spire, but enough remained. A fresh crop was planted and already it offers its fruits. They will not starve.
Water cascades down Father Mountain to the two rivers that water the Garden, The North and the South. Father Mountain protects his children. The mountain sent meat too. Rabbits, squirrels, even some of the egg laying ground birds Kao's people valued so highly. They caught and ate the rabbits and squirrels, but Kao taught them how to keep the groundbirds, and they quickly learned the joy of eggs. He thought they would be desperate for meat, but he should have known better.
They never slaughter prongelk, though just one of the huge males could have fed hundreds of people. They worship the animals. Though even Kao had to admit the animals of the Garden were the closest to gods he had ever met. Does One-eye still look for me? Skup and Elia had moved to the mountains with the kingcrows. Urea had cried so hard, but Kao was not surprised to see them leave.
“We have to go,” Elia had said, “the flock needs a leader.” So they moved to the mountains and took a few dozen people with them. They are children in truth, but that is the way of things now. Children to build a world from the scraps of adults.
They had done well though, never did the kingcrows attack. Kao wished it had all gone so smoothly. For a time it had been too hectic to think. Most of the howlers had fled as soon as Baucis had died, but the monkeys had returned to raid the fledgling village. They had even taken a few of the youngest children. My fault. But there was nothing the hunter could have done. The howlers had feinted a strike on one side of the village, and when Kao and Urea had gone to defend it, they had snuck in the other side and looted their food stores and taken children screaming back to the woods. Urea wanted to go after them but Kao would not allow it.
“No!” Kao had ordered, his teeth bared, and Urea had backed down with a furtive look towards Shadow. I should have let her go. Urea and her lion had adapted well to their new relationship, but he had not wanted to risk their greatest weapon and their wisest thinker. A bad decision, but I am no hermit.
Kao thinks of the hermit more than anything. They never found Baucis's tiny pudgy body after the hermit had flung it, with his own consciousness inside, over the edge of the Spire. It had probably been swallowed by the molten earth, same as the hermit's true body, but Kao cannot be certain. He longs to see the hermit's cave again, to see what he could glean of his people's history from the drawings that went down so deep in the earth. Did he write his recipe for the mushroom potion?
Kao wishes he could have another taste. He understands much of what the fallen sky people said, but many words allude him.
His sister had suggested using one of the Stones same as she did. If she failed to understand anything, she shared a look with one of the pilots and understood. Chiming, they had explained to him. Speaking mind to mind, same as the pilots and the animals. Kao could never do it. He had tasted another mind in his and it was far worse than the hermit's foul potion, but that was the way of things here. He had wanted to leave the stones where they lay but his sister would have none of it.
“They're important Kao, more important than your prongblades.”
Wyla, how did you grow up so fast? Wyla had organized a scavenging party with Elia's help to gather as many of the stones as they could. They had found more than a hundred (numbers still hurt Kao's brain but Wyla seemed to have no issue with them) and some of the few howlers that had stayed in the Garden knew how to implant them in person and animal alike. Those howlers will be trouble. The ones that left took another ten hands of the Stones with them. But what can be done? His sister has the truth of things, she is very wise and Kao is confident she will think her way through any problem the village might face. He still remembers his little sister with her grass braids, but that might as well be another person. That girl was not called Wyla, the sister I remember had no name... but neither did I.
Kao sighs at the way of things. It is time. The prongelk and their pilots plow the earth together and rut as one, pilots mounted on the backs of the prongelk.
Jacob is a strong leader of the prongelk. Skup and his tribe defend the Garden from above. Wyla is wiser than me. Urea and Shadow are better hunters. They do not need me.
Lost in self pity, Kao almost fails to notice two orange slits materialize just past the clearing. The Garden has grown in thick in spots, thick enough to hide a panthera.
Foolish! Kao reaches for his prongblade but hesitates. I will fight this battle with my hands.
“Come on,” he growls. The panthera lunges. Her silence frightens Kao, but he has learned cat's movements. He sidesteps her and punches her hard in the ribs. She yowls and hisses. Kao spits and snarls.
She lunges again and Kao dodges easily enough. She is ready for him though, and kicks him viciously with her hind legs.
Kao tumbles to the ground, the air knocked from his lungs. The panthera stalks closer. She relishes the agony of her wounded prey. Kao manages to push himself to his feet in time to see her lick her lips before she swats him to the ground with one of her huge paws. She stands over him, snarling, her teeth dripping slaver, her breath reeking of blood.
***
With an annoyed flick of her tail, the huge black panthera took her paws of off Kao's chest. Urea pulled him to her feet.
Kao scratched the panthera in her thick main, behind her ears. She licked his face appreciatively.
“You've taught us a lot.”
Kao shrugged.
The panthera purred. Sometimes Urea was certain she could understand Kao better than she could. When Shadow caught sight of something in the Fruit Forest, and vanished silent as her name, Urea wondered if Kao wanted to go as quickly and as silently as the predator.
“We never would have survived without you.”
Kao nodded. Does he mean I'm right? Or that we would have? Even after all this time with him, he could be so mysterious. He really was the Wild M
an, whether he'd admit it or not.
“You don't have to leave. There's plenty of food here, plenty to do.”
“I am hunter.”
“And what exactly do you think I am?”
“Hunter,” he said, grabbed her shoulder and squeezed her arm in the same place the three stubs of prongs were still lodged in his.
Urea smiled and was happy to see Kao smile too, if only for a moment.
“And your sister? Are you sure you're comfortable leaving her with the Hidden?”
He looked into her purple eyes with his big round ones, dark as the Scourge. He could say so much more with those eyes, more than he ever had with words. He shook his head no. This time Urea is certain he means, you are not the Hidden. He smiled for another instant, then it was gone again.
He didn't belong here. He was no farmer. And today he would leave, his big mournful eyes practically screamed it at her.
“I know you have to leave, I was just hoping it wouldn't be so soon. I'm really going to miss you Kao,” Urea choked back a tear but it escaped and she wiped it away. Kao smiled again at that.