I woke up… My head was throbbing and I didn’t know where I was…
What was that smell? Goat? On A Fire.
Was this camp?
I opened my eyes and looked around in the dimness of afternoon twilight setting in, three sets of eyes on me with spears at the ready; glowing green blades able to slice through nearly anything. Only magic could stop that sort of magic.
Nearby a fire burned in the shadow of a large outcropping and a ring of people sat around it, sharpening blades and preparing for the meal. I chuckled as my guardians noticed I was awake, “Oh man! What is this, my Grandpa’s day and age? Are you gonna eat me now? I’m over here like, “I Am Anthraxus! Blaaah! I Will Make You Vomit White Powder! You Shall Not Devour My Flesh Today!!! Hahaha!” I blurted out with my usual, divine humor!
I laughed at them as they relaxed a bit at my obvious antics, wiggling in my bindings experimentally to test them and see how much room they’d given me to work my literal magic. Grandpa HAD always taught me how to handle this sort of scenario. I’d only hoped that I’d live to see it!
One of them struck me on the head with the butt of his spear. I tensed against it and laughed it off, “Hohohooo man! That’s NOT the best way to get into muh pants! You need to watch yourselves, Good Gentlemen! This is NOT my grandpa’s day and age! I am not a simple and delicate lady!” I snapped back, completely unsure of whether or not the Daroba savages could make anything of it out. No “Simple And Delicate Ladies” came with the founding expedition so it was natural that nobody I’d ever known fit that description.
Gently I felt around my own ass.
Damn.
They’d found my secret weapon. No expulsion token today… And there I was kicking myself for not listening to Father years ago when he’d told me that’s EXACTLY where they’d look first! Possessing of the finest ass in the land, admittedly, I couldn't rightly blame any of them for wanting to check it out first!
What else had they relieved me of?
“So you’re not gonna pull out my TEETH, are you?” I started rambling at them again, taking mental stock of things, “Cause I hear that’s really painful and it’s one of those few things I can’t really grow many more of. I’ve already got all the baby teeth gone and I’m sorta attached to the ones I got.”
My Focus was nearby… I could feel it… but not summon it yet. Limited to low level stuff, then…
I could still FEEL Ta Exadio Ferabatun, though! The power underneath it all still flowed through me like everything else… They could feel it… but so could I! To unlock TRUE power I would only need to make it a bit away; fight my way to where I could summon my focus and show them what REAL power looked like.
“SHUT UP, WOMAN!” The Daroba guard yelled at me in crude Kandia, “You Talk… Too Much! I Hit You!”
“OH! He Does Speak A Proper Language! Good Boy! You MIGHT just be marriage material after all… BUT we’ll have to work on that Daroba accent… It’s disgusting.” I chuckled at him before he gave me a half hearted but still painful jab to the temple with the butt of his spear, “Oh, goodness, sweetheart! Don’t be like that! You look prettier when you smile!” I laughed, squirming a bit in my bindings to… Yes! “I’ll tell you what… How about you turn on your friends and just… take care of them for your wife to be and I won’t even tie you up when I bring you back home! Come on, Husband, Whatcha say?” It was really a shame too… he wasn’t half bad looking at the time.
“You Dumb Woman… Mama Tando Want Talk To You…” He told me with a loud huff as he turned away.
“Awww… Wanting for me to meet your parents already! You really DO care!” I jabbed, reaching back into my boot, conveniently hogtied right next to my hands the entire time. “One last chance! Just turn on your buddies here and I’ll make sure to give you EXTREMELY solicitous treatment when we get home!” I pushed my chest out, trying in vain to be more seductive to his uneducated sense of savagery. After all… I’m already a pretty hot piece of ass! No way to improve on perfection, right?
Slowly the man started walking away and I had my chance. A blade token in my sock had been rolled up into discrete safety and now, with a crush in my fingers, produced a decent sword to cut my bonds! Slicing the pitiful Daroba rope at the moment of its manifestation, I found myself free and my hand armed with only the FINEST Kandia Steel! The sound of my heartbeat in my own ears as my senses keened dulled the throbbing of my head as I fell into Ta Pagnia Mun!
Standing up with the stability of a mountain and the force of a charging ox I slammed the tip of my blade through a guard’s face and took hold of his spear hand, pushing the glowing blade through his partner’s chest without any effort at all. As the life slipped from my now faceless first guard the green glow faded and I briefly sighed at the loss of such potent magic… magic we’d still not found out how to reproduce.
“Darling! Baby! Come Back To Me! Please!” I called as everyone got up in a sudden huff. Turning to the somewhat better educated savage and throwing the second Guard’s spear into my prospective “Suitor’s” knee, I brought him to the ground as his friends (do these savages actually HAVE friends?) stood to help. “I just wanna talk! You know! In a Civilized Language!” I mocked concern as I procured the last spear near me; the one sticking conveniently out of the second of the two corpses I'd just made. (When You Kill Someone You MAKE A Corpse! Classic Logic!) Throwing it masterfully at an incoming Daroba, I impaled him and sent him back into the nearby campfire! With the last of what life he had he screamed only briefly before the chest shot I'd dealt him ended his life.
Lucky guy, really...
Some nearby asshole I hadn’t seen in all the excitement blindsided me then and there, tackling me in the ribs from the right side and sending me lips first into the dirt.
I groped around for a bit and finally found purchase on his face. My hands glowed crimson and I felt the touch of Ta Exadio Ferabatun; felt it flow through me! Circumventing the divine, I channeled my own Personal Effect; the man’s eyes turning red with blood immediately as the flesh within his head started violently hemorrhaging.
I pushed him off of me just on time for all the orifices in his face to rupture and shower blood over the sandy mountain soil, turning just in time to dodge a few odd swings from more glowing green blades at the end of crudely lathed shafts perhaps not even six feet long! Some of the skinnier of them went to grab for their tiny bows; seldom even two feet long but tipped with deadly poisonous arrows.
I had more important things to worry about, however… I needed my focus!
I scrambled toward its call, away from my assailants as I closed my eyes to visualize it in some pile of stuff under some stones a small distance from the camp! Arrows flew and I reached back reflexively to grab the surest flying one! It eagerly accepted my grip as I offered it purchase and gladly returned to its sender under my invitation to do so; piercing through his neck and killing him before the poison even had time to take effect.
Leaping behind a stone outcropping, I checked myself over for cuts. One cut and you’re dead!
Feeling nothing, fortunately, I felt out into the void for my Focus again as they closed in beyond the boundaries of my rocky cover.
It was within range, just fifteen feet off underneath a small pile of stones.
I reached my hand out and called out for it to return to me. My mind touched Ta Exadio Ferabatun and connected the two of us.
Time slowed as the magic encircled my left hand, surrounding it with the force of that which made the cosmos! I stood and turned around the corner of the stone behind which I’d been hiding.
I raised my left arm in a threatening posture, catching the arrows in flight with my will alone as my focus manifested upon my person; a glorious, fully articulated gauntlet of rippling plates of Kandia steel, gleaming with the luster of chiliad gemstones in a perfect fractalline pattern that flowed across the bulk of it from the slightly pointed tips of its exquisitely hinged fingers all the way down my arm to the elbow. Held together by ray skin from the bejeweled western coastlines and padded with velvety, rose tanned hippo leather; the gleaming gauntlet, an artifact in its own rite, leveled on my advancing kidnappers!
All of them… all ten of the remaining Daroba fell down; heads exploding in a fantastical display of gore and viscera that showered the area with chunks of skull and brain.
I stood dumbstruck as my would-be assailants merely… had their minds blown.
It was, of course, not my handiwork. I would have left my would-be husband alive on the ground screaming where he lay.
Instead rage boiled up inside of me, “MARNA!!!” I called out, infuriated, “You ALWAYS do This! I Go and try to have some fun! ALL I ask is that you play interference with mother for a COUPLE hours and then you have to go and ruin it! I ALMOST Had A Man!... AGAIN!!! He could even speak the language!” I called out into the inky void of the coming evening, “Are you gonna at least do me the courtesy of being visible while I yell at you?! I can’t believe this! It was SO Romantic! You’re SUCH a Killer Of Songs!”
Marna, my dearest Leconis and “Brother” in arms, stepped out from behind a nearby boulder and into the light of the now burning man on the fire who smelled vaguely of what I’ve been told Pork must smell like.
Never had it, so I wouldn’t know. Grandpa once told me humans smelled like pork when burned, though.
So this man smells of burning pork and is burning and Marna steps out into his light.
Classic scout, honestly; a sleek body without too terribly much chest and only just enough ass but possessing of long legs and a supple sort of grace about her that could easily slide into the bushes OR my bedchamber any day… provided she wasn’t always spoiling my fun, often at my own Mother’s orders!
“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t nearly worth it. He wanted to introduce you to his Mama Tando.” She gave a ghost of a smile and I couldn’t help but cringe a bit.
“Was it that bad?” I Huffed
“Yes.” Marna answered, returning to her typical deadpan as her caramel skin reflected the flickering light from the fire in the darkness, “It was really that bad. You’re better off without him.”
I looked at my would-be husband for a moment as his brains lay splattered along the ground. Looking at him in that light, I could immediately see that this crush had been just that. There was no need to get myself distracted over some naked, big dicked savage, after all!
There were plenty more around like him. “Ya, I guess you’re right…" I relented, "Let’s set up downhill near Ta Samitia Do Lecrimia. The lions have been moving away from the hills lately, back toward the grasslands below. It’ll be safe.”
Marna nodded, blasting the burning body with a quenching token to put out the fire instantly. “Makes you wonder what’s been happening… The Great Mountain to the south blew its top. It must have rained for over a week.”
“And we barely got any of it, of course!” I snarked, “It all flew south over the ocean. What reasonable mountain blast flows TOWARD the ocean? Some divine nonsense, if you ask me! We’ve been trying to make inroads with these deities for a century but they don’t show their faces at all. Meanwhile we KNOW they’re there! We can feel them! We can see them jerking us around! We Regularly Fight Them!!!” I complained to my companion as we wandered down the slope toward the wilder lands. Then... “Hey, Why didn’t you rescue me earlier? How long was I out?!”
“A couple hours? They were only dragging you for a quarter of an hour though. It was quiet. I figured you’d benefit from the rest.” Marna gave a small smile as we walked on. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
I put a hand to my head and groaned, temples still throbbing, “Ya. I guess…” I moaned.
We burrowed downhill at one of the streams. Like all of Ta Samitia Do Lecrimia the body of water was nothing impressive but it was enough to get water to boil for dinner. We used some cramir to flavor the water after we boiled it and threw in some field bread to give it some substance. With the introduction of a delicious ostrich egg that Marna had snatched up while I was chewing on dirt while being dragged along the sandy hillside it all came together pretty well! After having located good thorn bushes and moss to cover our burrow we ended up bedding in relative comfort that night!
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Early next morning we woke suddenly to the sound of elephants trumpeting and people screaming! It wasn't some hunting cry or tribal Daroba chant being called out either!
It was the sound of women and children screaming for their lives, the sound of men fighting and dying in terror and agony and confusion, the sound of infants and elderly crying; terrified!
The morning light had barely started seeping into our burrow's vent and the coals of our tiny cave fire had long since died. The ground where we lay… shook ominously as Marna, always the discerning one, was already sitting at the peephole; peering out into the all too audible carnage.
"The elephants are... attacking." she said bluntly, her usual deadpan punctuated with surprisingly real confusion and awe.
"What? Attacking?" I asked, sitting up and crawling to the peephole to stare out, pushing Marna aside. “Elephants don’t just attack, Marna… What are you talking about?”
As I stuck my eye to the peephole, however, Marna’s surprise became mine as well!
Hundreds ran scattered about the area across and along the stream. Elephants chased groups of natives into the water and trampled them into the mud without mercy!
The few long-legged Hippos that could wallow in the small, shallow streams this far uphill, for once, could not withstand the assault and were taking flight from the horrendous stampede of tusked beasts upon what was always considered nominally human territory…
There were hundreds of them; angry, gray, tusked monsters chasing down any human big enough to be called an adult. Children, strangely enough, were simply ignored as mothers were pried away from them and discarded through the air or torn apart by two or more yanking trunks! Fathers, trying to chase their families away just to keep them safe, were trampled into the sand and dust without so much as a thought by the gigantic, trumpeting monsters that fell upon them.
I watched as a single Daroba Warrior stood strong against the herd, spear raised and gleaming green, his head adorned with a bone helmet headdress; the skull of an elephant he had no doubt taken years ago to prove to his savage brethren he was some kind of man or something.
As he stood strong and thrust his spear into the first elephant hoof that came down upon him… he was promptly trampled to a fine paste by the rest before he could enjoy the sight of his own handiwork. Much as the one elephant he had stabbed in the seemed all too wounded by the gesture it did not slow the herd at all.
I felt my body push out at our burrow door…
I had to get a closer look! A tiny peephole in the morning light through our burrow wall could not do justice to what I was seeing! I couldn't believe it yet!
I'd seen elephants posture and charge and threaten and even gore some natives before, especially when attacked by the Daroba during their savage rites of manhood… but this was not some defensive herd tactic. This was not a single elephant with a bone to pick over her dead loved ones…
The elephants were attacking en masse! It looked as though they were selectively destroying every native adult they could find and leaving the children behind!
No...!
As I got closer I saw that they… weren't just leaving them! It was far more organized even than that! They were gathering them up!
The elephants were TAKING children! Not just killing the parents but hauling struggling children and crying toddlers away from their homes toward the south in trunk!!!
Just as they had come some were already leaving, carrying two children in each trunk and forcing terrified toddlers upon their backs
"Get back in the hole!" I heard Marna yell from behind me but something pulled me forward. All the sound of the world seemed to fade away as I took it all in! SOMETHING wanted me to step forward… as if destiny was calling to me and I wasn’t ever trained to deny it!
Men and women begged and screamed as the massacre continued before us; without sympathy or mercy. Blood exploded from their bodies like water bursting forth from squished bladders as they tried to crawl away but were unceremoniously crushed by gigantic feet; forcing the water inside of them out through their heads and arms! The ground continued to shake at my feet as the elephants rampaged through… hundreds of them. There might have been an elephant for every human; a unified force having perhaps chased them here overnight! It was impossible to tell, however.
This sort of thing… I’d never even imagined it!
“No elephant herd ever gets this big naturally!” I heard myself mutter under all the din of death and destruction. “A hundred at the most… for the strongest matriarch! Nothing like… this!”
"Anna now! They'll hear us! We have to go now!!!" Marna's yelling voice found its way over the deafening silence of my own disbelief.
"But elephants don't fight…" I felt myself saying as I trudged on toward the carnage, something in my mind somehow still disconnected from all of it; my entire existence, the whole of my cultural memory telling me that this sort of thing just didn’t happen.
"These ones do! If they hear us our burrow can't stop them! They'll cave us in easily!" Marna protested, "You're often reckless but you're not be stupid, Anna!" she said, slapping me across the face, finally snapping me out of my slavish march toward unbelieving death.
As if that very strike broke the noise of the entire massacre and reached the ears of the morning twilight itself… twenty elephants peeled off the beaten path from the main group of the Daroba; through a small family of natives, trampled over several crocodiles and up the stream bank toward our position! Altogether all of them were screaming, trumpeting and stomping at us with such force that Marna and I were bounced clean off our feet before they were even within accurate throwing distance! Marna tried scrambling away, grabbing at me by the armor and screaming in desperation but I had once again lost my hearing; awestruck by what I was sure was the last sight of my life… a cavalry-like wedge formation of elephants charging at us, coming to trample us to dust!
There were… no riders!
It really WAS elephants going on a unified effort to destroy all humans…!
Or so was my fear until they stopped the charge in front of us, just short of crushing me to pulp! They stopped so suddenly I could FEEL myself floating briefly in the air as that final stomp halted the lethal assault on the streambed.
For a long moment, massacre in the background and these noble but terrifying beasts covered from head to hoof in human blood before us, we merely waited to die. The crimson stained trunk of the leading matriarch reached down toward me and sniffed deep… then patted me on the head and she trumpeted a bit… and they turned to go back to their destruction.
"Let's go home…" Marna said over the din of complete annihilation not even two hundred feet away
For the first time in my military career I felt no desire to argue with my Leconis. All I could feel myself say was, “Ya…”
What had happened?!
What was happening to my home?
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