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This is going to get worse before it gets better, and the better isn’t going to be better at all because it means I’ve finally died.
This situation was avoidable, but I couldn’t live according to the rules of the tribe. I couldn’t stop myself when it mattered most, and now my arms and legs are bound to the starving board and I will become more bones for the mouth of the cave, big and small littering the entrance as warning to those who disobey the chief and medicine man.
I screamed for a while, but it made my throat sore and it did nothing to hasten the end, nor did it bring any hope of rescue. So I stopped screaming, and I started singing. That’s what started all this trouble, but they can’t slowly execute me twice. I sing to the ancestors, in the faint hope that they might send someone to rescue me. I sing to my mother and her mother, all the women who sacrificed themselves in blood to enable me to draw the breath they are trying to take from me, the very thing that allows me to sing.
I wish I could see the stars, but they positioned me in such a way I can only see the top of the cave. I am becoming intimately familiar with each of the handprints painted on the walls, blown in place with dyes through straws. In several months they will come for my bones and add the new prints of the young warriors who have survived the ordeal of adulthood.
A male must become adult by trial, but a woman becomes an adult when she bleeds and brings an infant into the world. I have bled, but no man has mated with me. I was born cursed with hair the color of blood, and eyes the color of dirt. My tribe is sky-eyed and sun-haired. It is said my father was not of our tribe. It is said that he was a demon from the stars. It is said that I was born singing, not crying. So many things are said, but I will not hear any of them soon. My hearing will fade. My senses will turn inward and I will feel nothing.
I was born out of darkness and now I prepare to return to it. I find myself anticipating the peace which might come without the burdens of existence. Soon I shall sing and dance with the ancestors who wait to embrace me, their hand prints forming a welcoming fan above me, reaching toward me. If only I could reach back, we might touch, and this would be over.
Vulcan
I follow the sound coming through the cave channels, a soft, mournful, rasping whimper. It sounds like a wounded animal, something which needs to be put out of its misery. I am hungry, so perhaps we might help each other out, me and this wounded animal which will no doubt be in possession of precious fats, proteins, and amino acids.
I am not that hungry. Scythkin do not need to eat as often as humans and other creatures on this planet who begin to suffer after a matter of days. But I am bored, and I do like to hunt. A few missing small creatures should not overly affect the timeline, and if it is dying anyway then there is no harm in turning it into food.
As I get closer, I become more certain that this is a dying animal. There is a sound which only emerges from the terminally wounded and without help. Those who are hurt and calling for help have a desperate edge to their tone, a volume and a will to survive. But the whimpers I hear now are so soft they barely count as sounds. These are not intended to communicate anything, they are just the escaping whimpers of a voice soon to be heard no more.
I turn a corner in the winding tunnel and I stop, not sure of what I am seeing.
There is a plank of wood propped up on two rocks, and there is a body on it. A female with a flash of fiery hair. I growl in recognition. This is the woman of the song, the one who enchanted me across the fields and made me feel for a moment as though I was not so far away from home.
What have they done to her?
There is so much rope, and it is tied so tightly she cannot move so much as a finger. She has been restrained and left alone in this cave which routinely fills with gases toxic to humans, but that is not the worst of her predicament. If anything, the gas would be a mercy. They have left her without food or water. They have left her to die.
I immediately forget everything Krave said to me about not interfering in the timeline. I will not allow this precious creature to die this brutal death. I run to her to find that she has not just been tied up. She was stripped first, and beaten, her body covered in bruises. They have painted over the bruises, but hidden nothing. The same hands which pressed themselves to the cave’s roof have been laid over her body. It looks as though she was carried up by these painted savage people who understand just enough of humanity to be inhumane.
