T'aakshi

T’aakshi was running before he had fully taken in what was happening. Blood roared in his ears, and the frigid winds stung at his eyes. He did not close them. He dared not—not even to blink. No matter how awful what his open eyes saw was, he knew that if he did not close them, not even to blink, it could not get worse in the time it took to open them again. 

The snow was ankle deep, and he more staggered than ran, the smell of smoke and burnt hide filling his nostrils as he approached the borders of the village. His legs burned, the muscles already exhausted from the trek from Kuchisoto. T’aakshi ignored it all, only letting up when he reached the first collapsed home, the wood supporting its animal hide exterior splintered and scattered across the snow.

His eyes found the first dark shape and made himself blink, finally, to make sure that what he was seeing was real. The dark shape—the body—lay covered by a blanket, their identity hidden. T’aakshi’s jaw clenched, and he set off at a run once again, following the settlements’ winding dirt paths, marking each ruined home, each blanket-covered body with a strange, disbelieving numbness. 

He stopped at what he thought was the last blanket-covered shape. T’aakshi hadn’t dared to look beneath the blankets, to see who lay underneath, so each body that he passed bore the faces of those he cared about most in his mind. His mother. S’aahiri or Mura. Even imagining S’aarasu’s stern face covered by the furs brought hot, stinging tears to his eyes.

“There are too few dead,” T’aarak’s voice sounded from beside him, and T’aakshi did a poor job of hiding his surprised start.

“What?”

“There are only a handful of bodies here. The rest of the tribe has survived whatever did this.”

T’aarak was right. Even from a distance, there had been few bodies visible when put beside the level of destruction. Whatever had happened here, most of the Su’roi had escaped. He turned, looking back into the village, where the rest of their parties had filtered into the village, searching homes and ruined buildings. Some had found courage that he hadn’t, and were checking whose faces lay under the blankets.

He found T’aallin crouched in front of what had been his home, staring straight through its splintered, scorched wood, and straight past the scattered remains of what had been his life. T’aakshi could see the tattered remains of wall hangings strewn throughout the rubble, each carefully painted with faces that he didn’t recognise. 

He crouched down beside the older man, saying nothing because he knew nothing.

“They’ve been dead for twenty years,” he said, voice barely a whisper. “Twenty years and I hadn’t changed a single thing since the day the sickness took the last of them.”

T’aakshi felt shame wash over him, twisting his insides as though they were in the grasp of an enormous fist. He did not know what the older man was talking about. Years of hunting lessons and stories—hundreds of hunts together—and he had never once learned that T’aallin had once had a family.

Of course, he had never asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for something more meaningful to say, and falling painfully short.

“Me too, lad. Now,” he said, “what do you need?”

“T’aallin, if you need time—”

“Nonsense. My family is long-since gone—all I’ve lost is echoes. Most of these lads have family missing right now. Tell me what needs done, and I’ll see that it gets that way.”

“We need to find out where our people have gone. Gather our best trackers and have them look for some sign of where the tribe escaped to. Fast, but thorough.”

“The best trackers in our group, or should I include T’aarak’s as well?”

T’aakshi scowled. “People before pride. Take the best of everyone. If T’aarak has a problem, tell him he can take it up with me.”

A delighted smirk crept across T’aallin’s face, and some of the tension that was gripping the older man seemed to fall away.

“I’m on it, lad. It looks as though they’ve been back since whatever happened,” T’aallin said, nodding towards the nearest covered body. “Their trail shouldn’t be too hard to pick up, unless they’ve felt the need to hide it.”

T’aallin clapped him on the shoulder and strode past him, heading towards the others. T’aakshi started in the opposite direction, following the paths to his own home.

The wooden hut he had grown up in was as shattered as T’aallin’s home, its pine boards scorched and broken, its contents twisted, sooty husks. Fire had taken his old life—the one his father had been a part of—and reduced it to ash. Nothing besides his mother remained. If she’s even still alive. 

It would have been easy to stay. To sit and mourn this loss like he had the loss of his father. He could see in his mind’s eye a thousand mealtimes, lessons and scoldings that had happened right here, in this building that now stood a blackened ruin. He wanted time to deal with this, to process this fresh wound dealt to their family—needed it, even.

But his people needed him more. Somewhere out in the snow, the rest of the Su’roi waited, needing who knew what help. He turned his back on his home for the last time, and as though in answer, an alarm call sounded from one of the trackers T’aallin had gathered.

T’aarak beat T’aakshi to her, though not by much. S’aari nodded to the both of them as they arrived, her hair, usually kept in a tight bun, falling loose across her face. She gestured to the horizon.

“People. A handful of them, at least. Not sure if friend or foe.”

T’aakshi squinted in the direction she pointed. Sure enough, five distant shapes moved toward them. Though whose people, he could not say. 

“S’aana,” T’aarak said, pulling his spear from the sling holding it on his back. “Gather the hunters. If they aren’t Su’roi, they are likely enemies.”

The rest of the hunters gathered in an arc behind the two of them, T’aakshi’s dozen on his side, T’aarak’s behind him, weapons drawn. A tense silence fell. It wasn’t fear on their part; whoever was coming, the hunters outnumbered them by far. It was more a silence of anticipation. Of knowing that, one way or another, they were about to get the answers they all needed about what had happened here.

Then, the silence broke, the figures in the distance now definite people instead of barely visible dots. Hoarse but familiar voices filled T’aakshi’s ears and his heart swelled as he heard one word clearer than the others:

“Shi!”

Once again, he was running before he could stop himself. This time, though, the panic replaced by sheer, giddy relief. It seemed to him that he crossed the distance between himself and the approaching figures in a heartbeat, and he collided with the first with arms open wide, having hardly slowed at all.

“Gods, Mura, it’s good to see you,” he muttered, as his friend returned the embrace. “What in Ain-ou’s name happened?”

Mura pulled away, rubbing at their eyes with a tired hand.

“It found us, Shi.”

“What did?”

Mura grimaced, as though just remembering was painful. “The beast. Come, let’s join with the others. I don’t want to explain this more than once.”

It didn’t take long to get a fire large enough for all of them to sit by and warm themselves, desperate for answers as they were. Just the mention of the beast, though, had set T’aakshi’s heart racing all over again. It had been here. No plainsbeast had ever come this far out of the deep wastes over land before, let alone attacked the village. That was one reason their ancestors had chosen this location for a home in the first place—it was out of the way of the more dangerous creatures that lurked in the waste.

“So,” T’aarak said, face dark, “what happened?”

He had addressed the question to all five who had arrived, but his eyes seemed to hone in on Mura, making them shift uncomfortably on the log stump they’d made their seat.

“There was a storm. It came out of nowhere on the third night after you’d gone. No warning, no build-up—one moment clear skies, and the next, snows you’d only see in the worst of mid-winter.”

T’aakshi nodded. He could picture it almost perfectly—snowfall you’d hardly be able to see your own father in, even if he was only a few paces ahead of you.

“Then the screams started. They were on us—”

“They?” T’aakshi asked sharply.

Mura nodded. “They. Wolves. Larger than I’ve ever seen by half, darting between tents and throwing themselves at anybody they could.”

T’aakshi exchanged glances with T’aallin, and then T’aarak in quick succession. There had been no wolves with the beast out on the plains.

“Clever bastards. They backed off the moment S’aahiri had rallied everybody who could to fight. Just stood back and watched. Waited.”

Mura sighed, taking a long sip from the water they’d boiled on the fire, eyes never leaving the dancing flames.

“Then it came,” he said finally, and the temperature seemed to drop despite the roaring fire’s best efforts. “Just like you described it, Shi. Quick as lightning, and bloody enormous. We scattered. A few tried to fight it, but it was no good. Then some tried to hide inside homes, and it just ripped them apart to get to folk, as easy as breaking open snowfruit. S’aahiri could see what would happen if we stayed. She got as many as she could together, and we ran.”

“It didn’t come after you?” T’aakshi asked, incredulous.

“I’m as surprised as you are. It didn’t seem interested in a chase. The wolves tracked us for a time, but we kept everybody as together as we could, and after a while, they gave up too.”

Their interrogation of Mura continued, moving from the attack to the condition of their people. They had found a place to rest once they felt far enough away that they would be safe, with only a few serious injuries. Besides that, people were mostly just afraid. The few hunters they had did not want to risk hunts, and people expected another attack at any moment. To his great relief, Mura let him know that his mother had escaped with the rest of them.

T’aakshi turned to T’aarak once they were done with Mura, brows knitted together with worry. “They need our help, T’aarak. We can’t abandon them to this.”

“No, boy. What they need is to know that they are safe to return home and rebuild. That can only happen when the beast is dead.”

T’aakshi cursed, but knew the truth of what T’aarak had said. “We take smaller parties then. Six apiece. Leave them with some hope of defending themselves and finding food enough to survive while we hunt.”

“It will make our task more difficult,” T’aarak said simply.

“Aye. But I’d rather risk us than them.”

T’aarak held his gaze for a moment, then nodded brusquely. “Then think on your six, boy, and prepare for the journey. We leave at dawn.”