The Hunter and the Hunted

Xachek leant against the drift of snow, wriggling her shoulders to shift the packed whiteness a little to better hide her outline. Her arm was still dripping thick white blood onto the snow, blood that shined a very delicate blue under the sun’s rays.

She looked down at it nervously, chest heaving, brain surging with the knowledge that it was going to betray her presence sooner or later. The creatures hunted with their noses as much if not more than with their eyes. It was worse for her than it would have been for some poor Human that wandered into the frozen lands; the blood of her people was deeply resistant to the cold. Were she Human, the blood would have frozen almost as swiftly as it left her body.

Of course, were she Human, the blood wouldn’t be betraying her position.

This body had taken some getting used to, it was small and lean, where once she had been tall and soft. She was quick and strong, where once she had been slow and elegant. Nonetheless, after a month of training to harden up the muscles she had grown on her flesh, she had swiftly fallen in love with it. She had been a dancer for so long before. But three months ago, when she was male, she had chosen to be a hunter after her next shakso taris, and here she was.

Now, she wondered if she would live to see her next shakso taris, to be male again.

She had to move. She shrugged off the snow bank, hand clamped to her wounded arm. The less of a trail she made, the better. She adjusted the thick leather goggles that hid her sensitive eyes from the sun’s blinding light and rendered the landscape into dim greys. How she wished for nightfall! The goggles killed her peripheral vision, made her glances almost furtive as she looked widely left and right. It could be nearby...

She snapped her head around as she moved, keeping in a low crouch. She thought she saw a shape, moving in a hunched position past a bank of ice-coated rocks.

She paused, crouched in the open, framed by towering icy mountains at her distant back and the rolling frozen plains around her. The wind seemed to pick up speed, tearing at her long, pointed ears and causing her to grit her teeth in pain as ice shards slit the tender flesh. No roar, no leap. If the beast was close it wasn’t ready to strike. If it had been one of her friends they had not seen her.

She adjusted her head wrap to better cover her mouth and ears, hoping the fresh blood would stick the cloth in place, then hurried on. She came to a decline and turned her body into a sideways slide, she carefully aimed herself at a quick-spotted curve in the ice below, an upwards surge like a frozen wave; a natural place to break her forward slide.

She hurtled down, teeth gritted. This was going to hurt.

The ground rushed up to meet her, orientation shifting as her diagonal descent became a sideways rush. She lost control and span out, hitting the wave shoulders and head first, her impact jarring her with enough force that she slid up and rolled over the bump instead of stopping in its crook. When she eventually came to a stop it was to adopt a curled, paralysed posture, hands fixed to her pounding skull while the world span before her. With her tongue she licked a little of her wrap into her mouth and clenched it with her teeth to deaden her moans as best she could.

She stiffened. A snuffle.

She looked back, and through her goggles’ tunnel saw the beast. The laicas stood on the crest of the bank she had descended from, its six legs poised to spring, its shaggy fur of blue and white dancing in the wind, long muzzle twitching as it sniffed and growled. It stood taller than Xachek, and from tail to snout it was surely twenty feet long.

Heedless of the pain in her head, Xachek struggled to her feet and ran, instinctively dodging between icy outcrops for cover. Her snow runners found decent purchase even on the ice, and long-honed instincts prevented her from slipping out when she misjudged her step. But she knew it wasn’t enough.

The laicas let out a low, long howl that seemed to permeate the very wind and blow it against Xachek’s ears as a mournful dirge. She glanced back, and saw the creature leap onto the ice, sliding and scrabbling down to chase her, its massive claws quickly finding purchase to power it forward.

She panted and turned back to the run, looking back and forth for an option, a place to hide. Her bow and arrows were long since lost, and her short sword with them. All she had left were long knives that had next to no chance of harming the monster, for the laicas’ fur was tough to cut. All she could do was run, and find a place too narrow for it to penetrate. But there was nothing around her but ice and snow, none of it soft enough for her to dig deep where she could hide like a waiting lover.

“Chadar, have mercy on your daughter, guide her to safety, I beseech you mother,” she rambled under her breath as panic overtook her and heat rose at the back of her neck. The beast was silent now, only the growing sound of its heavy, rhythmic step betraying its presence at her back.

Xachek turned to face the end, choosing to go back to her Goddess with her head held high, though her voice rose in a scream as the beast thundered in her face and its muzzle opened wide to reveal two rows of flesh-shredding teeth. It lashed at her with its claws and sent her skidding backwards as its blow powered against her upraised arm. With her free hand she drew one of her hunting blades, then ducked low and planted her footing to receive its lesser charge. They always led with the claws. She gritted her teeth, and met its growl with a determined cry.

The moment clashed in a heavy, fleshy thud as the air was driven from her body and its teeth closed on her arm. A muddied roar was added to the mix, and Xachek was ploughed along the ground as the Laicas pinned her arm to her chest, bearing her forward with its weight and power.

Xachek coughed and raised her legs away from the creature’s front claws, tried to hook around its neck, while it began to shake and wrench, trying to get its head free. By some miracle, it had bitten her forearm vambrace in such a manner that its teeth had become stuck in it. Its teeth hadn’t even grazed her flesh. Yet still she screamed in pain as it jerked its head to the side and she felt her elbow creak to the point of shattering.

Like a nimble fox she wrapped herself around the beast’s head, clinging to her hunter for protection, to save her arm from being snapped and torn. Splinters of ice ripped at the ragged cloth, leather and armour that protected her from the hungry elements, the swirling cold permeated her flesh, but she was only barely aware of it as it floundered against her natural resistance to it.

Suddenly she was free, sliding back, voice raised in a stunned scream, rolling end over end and digging her toes in to skid to a stop amid a shower of icy chips that coated her legs like fine dust and cracked glass.

The laicas let out a bellow, but it was a sound tinted by pain. Finally, Xachek saw the reason. It’s right forepaw had been stuck in its very centre by her blade, and it had sunk into the hilt, the blade surely snapped off inside its flesh. As she knew, it was an annoyance, nothing more. She had seen enough of the beasts skinned to realise what had happened; the knife blade had snapped off after striking the bone, and its next step had driven the remainder into the flesh.

The beast roared, and ran heavily at her, adjusting its gait to keep its injured leg off the ground. Even as she backed away, trying to think of a way to turn the injury to her advantage she had to duck a tremendous swipe from its blade-punctured foot. She could think of nothing immediately, and fell back on instinct. When flight was impossible, her soul turned to the battle. She deliberately rammed her vambrace into the creature’s mouth and tried to find a knife to assault the animal’s large, raging eyes.

The laicas immediately reared back, and her feet left the ground. Agony shot through her arm, and she squeezed her free hand tightly into the animal’s fur, kicking at the underside of its body.

They struggled, the small and insignificant prey opposing the huge and unstoppable hunter; and yet, as if in reward for mad bravery, Xachek’s end did not come.

The ground beneath them rumbled, cracked, and collapsed. The laicas fell backward, floundering for a moment at the edge of the hole. Xachek’s arm slipped free of its jaws, and she screamed into the darkness below. With a deafening bellow, the laicas’ grip slipped and followed its one time prey into the land’s open mouth.

Xachek blinked.

There was no light. Gratefully, she pulled her goggles off and looked about her with naked eyes. Immediately, the darkness of the cave fell away, and she saw it in its glory.

She’d fallen into an ice cave, the rock long since swallowed by it, covered with layer upon layer until the primordial earth seemed to have been replaced entirely. It was like looking at a cavern full of crystalline gemstones, beautiful and dazzling in equal portion. But with these qualities came an edge, for Xachek felt a little shiver of cold run through her.

She looked up, resisting the urge to cry out as she tried to sit up and accidentally put weight on her right arm. As she hissed with pain and hugged the arm to her body, she saw the ragged hole she had fallen through. It was small, lined with brittle twigs and roots. Plants from long ago now buried, entombed and preserved as if in mockery by the relentless, creeping ice.

Xachek looked around, and gingerly worked her way to her feet. As if in doing so she had made a challenge, she heard a low, angry growl ringing and echoing through the cave.

“Marak shi,” she swore, ducking low to the frozen cave floor and peering about her at the stalagmites, seeking holes or deep grooves that might hide her when the laicas came by. She glanced at her arm. The bleeding had almost stopped. Her scent would nonetheless be strong in the still air. It had to be coming.

In a frenzy, she looked about for any possible route away, but she was presented with walls of ice on either side. Ahead of her there were a branching series of tunnels, from which she felt the laicas was coming. The ice, so dense, played havok with her usual sense of underground harmony, but she was still confident of this. Behind her, a long, cylindrical tunnel disappearing beyond the edges of her vision.

“Already tried running. That didn’t work so well,” she murmured to herself.

A ripping roar echoed from the walls nearby, and she jumped, despite herself. The laicas was drawing near. “Marak shi! All right. I know how to do this. No different than a hundred times before.”

She took a deep breath, then retreated behind a stalagmite and began to strip off her clothes and armour. She focused on the task, not the threat; on the goal, not the consequence of failure. She unbuckled the forearm vambraces and pulled her gloves off, shrugged off the thick furs around her shoulders and legs, then unbuckled the leathers and spread the lot in an unkempt pile, being sure to hook her goggles on the stalagmite itself.

She crept over to the wall, towards an outgrowth of ice crystals, a complex honeycomb caused by the burying of ice beetles making a nest. Though she shivered a little, she was relaxing more and more with each passing moment. She pressed against the ice as she might against a lover, and took the cold into herself.

Xachek felt it entering her through every pore, every scratch or wound, flooding her body in moments. She took a deep breath that emerged as a final puff of warmth, then turned her eyes to her long fingered hands as they glistened and turned translucent. The change came over her, flesh camouflaging to resemble the ice, soul bonding with its essence. She felt a comforting stillness fall over her, the living need to move replaced with a stoic sense of quiet repose and calm.

But she would not meditate as she and other Thorassians often might in this state, for just as the change completed and her body became a feminine sculpture merged with an icy honeycomb, the shaggy, growling shape of the laicas limped into view.

She watched, turning ice-clear eyes to see in a sidelong flash the beast raise its paw and try to grip the knife with its teeth. Instead it let out a howl of pain and thudded the ground, then stalked forward snuffling and sniffing at the air.

Xachek watched, with somewhat detached yet razor sharp awareness, as a drop of blood, building strength for over a minute, finally fell from her arm, a great droplet of water molding into flawless milk white blood that splattered heavily on the ice beneath her. She realised that she would probably die now, and considered moving. But in taking on the ice’s qualities she had attained a level of patience she did not normally possess, and she reined in her instincts. After all, she was now naked. If the beast struck, what hope did she have?

The laicas let out a grunt and sniffed sharply at the air, then ducked its heavy head close to the ice. It licked at the blood, then sniffed the air again. Its big eyes seemed to cloud in confusion, its limited mind unable to connect the appearance of the blood with the nigh-scentless ice before it.

The laicas turned its head away, and headed towards her clothes. If her breathing was more than a faint passing of air through still lips, it might have been more noticeable that she had stopped breathing at all as anticipation sweetened the sight of her ruse bearing fruit.

The laicas sniffed and pawed at her clothes, batted them about, then let out a long, angry growl. It loped painfully around the cave, then grunted away down the long tunnel, casting its shaggy head back and forth. The sound of its snuffling and heavy tread carried back to her long after it had vanished from her sight.

Her patience held for longer than she expected. There came a point where she became aware that she would have broken her cover much earlier, without the relaxing effect of the blending upon her.

She blinked slowly, clear eyelids fluttering over clear eyes, staring at the ice wall opposite. It was time to move. Her fingers, which seemed to meld to the ice, parted and began to slowly drift into a fleshy hue. She concentrated hard, and kept the blend up, kept the cold from fleeing her. Her scent was masked, and it needed to stay that way for as long as she could maintain it.

She crouched and moved to her clothes, then began to dress with slow, measured movements. She watched her hands, and consciously speeded herself up. All that mattered was that she dressed, nothing more. Pain entered her mind again as she pulled on her furs, clamped her vambrace over her forearm, but no sound escaped her transparent lips. She closed her eyes and pulled her furs around her shoulders on her knees, her face turned up to the roof, screwed up with the effort to keep from crying out.

A tear dripped down over her icy face, dripped away and splashed on the floor. She stood tall, hugging her right arm to her body, then loped away from the laicas into the network of caves beyond.

Her movements became quick, focused, she followed her instincts now, heading in the directions that felt as if they would lead her to the surface, no matter the direction they appeared to take. She had no real sense of direction, but she knew when she passed by a cave twice from the tiniest details that her mind recorded. The blend began to fade, her ability to hold it waning. She was no expert. A few minutes was all she could really achieve.

The cold began to bleed from her, expelled by her blood, and colour swirled across her body like ink in water. Swiftly, the armoured icy female became Thorassian again, smooth grey skin flowing over her, crystalline slivers of hair turning to snow white, and completely clear eyes flowering into a gem-like, penetrating azure blue. Her own nose picked up her scent on the air for a moment, and instinctively she turned to look over her shoulder as her heart rate doubled and andrenaline flowed through her limbs.

She hurried on, until she emerged from a thin tunnel onto a yawning opening. She let out a choked cry and pulled back, jamming her hands against her eyes and gritting her teeth. The sun! It was still light outside.

She blinked in the darkness, but her vision was hazy. She whipped her goggles from her belt and tied them to her head, reducing her world to two narrow strips of muddy greyness that stripped the beauty from her surroundings, and rendered them only harsh and unforgiving. Her eyes burnt, and she forced them open even as they teared in protestation.

“No time for blindness. Just a lit...” just then, she heard it. The laicas’ roar!

It echoed from the walls, bounced from the ceiling and blossomed from the floor. The ice seemed to shake and jingle, and distantly she heard the thudding of its approach. Swearing, she scrabbled forward, her boots lost grip for a moment then caught anew.

She ran with all the strength her legs could carry towards the cave mouth, jinking around stalagmites and leaping fallen stalagtites. Behind her the laicas burst through one of the walls amid a terrible cracking sound that echoed dried bone. Animal rage blasted against her ears, and ferocious hunger blazed in eyes she saw in half-stolen glimpses over her shoulder.

She jinked between two stalagmites and ran out onto the plain beyond, not daring to look in any direction but forward. If she could find somewhere high, she would be safe. With an injured leg, the laicas surely could not climb well.

Then, she came skidding to a stop before a half dozen silhouettes framed against the slow falling sun. Her footing slipped out from under her and she slid on her butt to a jarring stop against a bank of solid ice.

“Now,” came a voice, firm and authoritative.

Xachek looked over her shoulder as the laicas bounded after her, bloody slather freezing as it left its mouth, then piledrover into the ice as two arrows sank into its good leg at the shoulder and knee. Before it could rise, four buried into its back, and a final one penetrated its forehead as it tried to lift its shaggy head and bellow defiance.

The beast slumped, and died.

Xachek reached up, and her glove met the dark glove of her hunt master.

“We thought we’d lost you,” he said.

“Nirrti!” Xachek cried, and jumped up into his embrace. She winced as her arm touched his shoulder, then kissed him fiercely on the lips. He patted her on the good arm, and moved to check the kill.

Xachek’s heart sang as she kissed and embraced the remainder of her party, all alive and all amazed to find her likewise. Her bow was offered to her with sheepish humour. But there was little time for anything but the next challenge.

“Nirrti!” Nahar called, a tall and loping male who served as their prime spotter. He was the only one who could really work with the impediment of the goggles. “There’s a storm coming. We have to move.”

Nirrti looked up from the kill, then kicked it with his boot. “It’s a good one. Lots of meat, and very solid. Chadar would like it, and Her children would surely appreciate it. We’ll take it into the cave and last the storm out, then head back home.”

Xachek turned to the West, to Chadar, and her heart filled with awe at the sight of the Mother Mountain’s curving slopes, stretching up from the ground to high up in the sky above. With her vision so hampered by the goggles, Xachek could barely encompass a third of Chadar’s beauty. She wished it were night, so she could see the moon part hidden by the rocky slopes, peeking out from and shining gloriously upon it. But with a sigh, she realised that it would probably be some time before that sight was hers to savour once again. One glance at Nahar’s face suggested that he was not sure about the cave as an option.

“I say we abandon the carcass and look for another. That storm looks harsh. It’ll surely bury the cave entrance. How are we going to get out?”

Nirrti looked at Xachek, “You’ve been down there. Are there other exits?”

“None that I saw, but the cave network looks vast. He’s right, we’ll probably be entombed when the storm’s over, at least from this end. It is your choice, huntmaster.”

Nirrti sighed and shook his head. “So be it. We’ve got no chance of outrunning the storm, anyway. There’s no cover for leagues in any direction. Survive now, thrive later. Such is the way of Thorassia.

“Come on,” he said, “the weather awaits. Let’s not oppose it.”

Xachek looked to the North, where the wind gathered like an angry spirit, and the air seemed to shimmer with ice shards ripped from the land and snow blown from rocks and plains. It had teeth, that wind, would shred them as much as freeze and deny them breath. The land was always hungry to claim Chadar’s children for its own. But for now at least it would be disappointed.

Xachek swept her hair back over her shoulder, and took up one of the still arms of the beast. This kill would likely not be going back to Chadar, instead it would be their source of energy as they strove to escape the caves, as often happened. Tomorrow, the day after or whenever it was that they surfaced again, they would return to the hunt, and seek meat to bring back to the mother mountain.

As the ripping wind rolled over the plains of ice, the hunting party strode into the pyrrhic sanctuary of the caves.