She was not breathing, she was not moving, her heart did not beat. Kai was soon accompanied by two of the Agents he most admired. Somehow he was expecting his grandfather to show.
Hielta dashed to the young woman splayed on the ground and Terriman pulled her stuttering brother away from her. He tried to shush Kai tried to calm the torturing fear, anger and doubt that enveloped the whole of his being.
Hielta looked strangely puzzled at what seemed to be the death of Dureyr’s prophecy. Her questioning look did not reassure Kai. He wrestled himself away from his mentor and hero. Terriman watched as a cold callousness steeled over the young man sucking in air through flared nostrils.
Nothing would serve to cool his rage now for only one thought had eclipsed his mind.
The moon will come when you will only have the Now to guide you. And what will you do then?
Heed my mark.
A new wind caught the follicles of his loose locks and he snapped toward the offender’s not too long left trail.
Terriman knew that look and before he could grab at him the boy was gone. Terriman burst to follow but Hielta cried out.
“Let him go!” She looked around with a sharp hatred piercing her eye. “He hunts whomever committed this treason.” She eyed the swaying trees and the trickery the herding forest played accomplice to.
Guided by the feel of the winds through his hair, he ran. He could feel the hunt crawling over his skin through ground and nose and hair; as was the very reason for the Agents’ lengthy tresses. Every end of his nerves were alive. Aching to the point of itch with a sharp knowledge that ’left’ was the correct way to go. Then ’right’ was where the crosser had escaped. Through hidden glen and bushes the vermin had fled. Away, was not to be his victory. Caught, captured,
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and ripped asunder, was to be his fate when Kai finally wrapped jaws around the back of his neck.
The winds of his wake ripped through the leaves, tearing them from their branches leaving only some to slap violently against their wooden arms. The loud whooshing of the force lasted on for a half second through its passing but like a tornado bent on destruction, so too was the forceful frame of a man without wings. He whizzed through the forests of Ashok like a giant wolf, dodging trees and low hanging branches and small animals. He so tried not to bash the inhabitants of this impossible wood as he chased faster than the sound of his own rush through the trees. To the animals he was only a head turn; not quick enough to catch but disturbing enough to blink and shield the eyes.
Passing through the gigantic forest of Ashok, he flew on and on, never tripping never slowing; running low to the ground, then up looking only to check position, then breaching short bushes blocking his chase with skillful leaps.
Tree roots of many make threatened to halt him at each hop. Soft sinking sod moved to toss him to the ground. Nonetheless their efforts were thwarted. It wasn’t the cool of the ground nor the fresh whiff of mint in the brisk morning air. It wasn’t his schooling or self study or even situational training that spurred his feet on their queerly fleet-footed chase. It was the hunt; that freakishly wild heat of anticipation. Anticipation to sink white wet gleaming teeth into the the flesh of something with wicked meat. On another level it may have been called hatred or even justice but here in the fall and rise of hill and cliff there was no highborn high-classed moniker for that simple unfettered lust for the blood of a brazen enemy. He’d see his throat opened.
Hacking the limbs of angered trees. Slashing the vines of pulpy patches and sniffing sweats of forest beasts; he huffed like a soured steed. Smells, so many smells, whizzing past his nose making frustrated his already heightened senses.
In sharp glances he studied new tracks and broken leaves on the trail of the heathen responsible. On two occasions cries of the
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shamaness’ in Cashtiel, with their deep bellied drums, filled the memory of his ears and he let them drive him; drive him solidly over the densest decent of the wood, drive him over slowly yellowing slippery dirts, drive him on through the throes of the ’now’.
That moment when man is neither speech nor reason, when his capacities and capabilities turn to dust, when he is reduced to only the five of his senses and that finite compulsion in the gut of his raw wilder.
Atop the hill where his sister lay, fawned over by two Agents wrought with pleas, the teal sky darkened. Terriman looked to the sinkhole and the waters within. They trembled with a slow galumph. Hielta looked up to the skies, greener now in their darkening. She looked to her lover and her ears reeled back. The intermittent pounding was becoming rythmic.
Through the palm holding the wound at the Princess’s belly, Hielta could feel the steady thump...of life.
Under no spell of Hielta’s own, her hand had begun to glow a bright white. Terriman shot to a stand and instinctively grabbed at his weapons. The humongous form of a figure in robes wearing a shining helm poured from the wound as the Princess’s body twitched. It came to a looming hover cresting just above the canopy. They both gasped for they new her instantly, death’s commander, though they had never seen her.
“No, Hollow, don’t take her!” Hielta cried covering the whole of her Princess.
A pair of green dots glinted toward her sharply. It was looking at her. With that great helmed head, the robed phantom gestured in the negative. Hielta sighed in relief, then she and Terriman both looked around them searching for what it was this one had come for. They followed it’s head as it looked over the
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Princess’s body; over her breathless chest, her limp arms, down to one clenched fist. The Hollow opened it.
Kai howled at the sky sniffing the closeness of his stinking prey. When he saw it—a black gob of flapping wings there on a wide stone face—the death-howl in his bark was hard to contain. But the way to it was difficult. Giant fallen trees and a fissure in the rock kept his prey at bey. So he paced as he barked. It mattered not he didn’t know what this swarming mass was. He knew it was the thing that murdered his sister.
Between two fallen trees, the flapping and screeching folded in on itself until it formed a figure. Black dust and red sparks wafted from the entirety of its black attire. A woman.
Her scent was most familiar. Her blood smelled like his.
He ran down to pounce, mumblings of ’I hunt my blood’ broke through the growls in the throat of his pallet; mumblings now solidly audible approaching the hair-spiked spine of her back. She spun to face him advancing. The heat of his amber-eyed glare sent jolts through her. She took one step back to recompose.
She was unsure if it was the fallen trees between them or their blood-kin that kept him from biting her at this instant. He glared, however, pacing at her position on the open stone as if to scope a weakness. She thought in quick defense to offer reason to his twisting scowling brow.
“Brother. My poor brother.”
He stood there heaving breaths in front of her; the story of his five previous kills etched in sharply designed tontantoa upon his bare skin, wet with hot chase. In the grip of his fists, two daggers readied to meet any flesh his teeth did not claim.
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“Wilder blood-brother born to our mother.” She pleaded. He advanced. “Keep your wits about you, wolf, lest you be broken like a dog!” She belted.
He barked in a full gnash of his teeth and swiftly advanced with edged weapons toward her throat. He huffed down her face. In the quake of her instinctive apprehension, she remembered immortality and spread a slow shuddering toothy grin up at him.
The evidence of their shared blood filled the sight of his singular thought and he snatched himself—weapons, teeth and all— two steps away from her.
Language struggled to return to his panting tongue. After three huffs and a full bellied heave he managed to growl out some semblance of intelligent speech. “Why?”
She bent ear to beckon more of his reason. She’d offer answers after.
“ANSWER ME!”
And there it was. The fullness of his heat. Intelligence in a fevered scream. The amber left the brown of his eyes but the daggers did not leave the grip of his hands and the huff did not leave the breadth of his lungs.
“Proof!” She offered.
“Of?”
“Will.”
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
He bucked at her but was staved by her palm’s force that blocked the narrowing distance between she and his daggers.
“Why?”
“I needed to know. We both needed to know. You and I.”
“Know what?”
“Who we were in this little game.”
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