Hunger

Part I - Chapter 26 - Vicissitude - Part 2

Nearly seventy steaks had been pounded into the ground, and every steak bore a body.  Some were positioned with large corpses facing a line of smaller smoldering corpses.  Jakim uttered a string of profanities that would have made Iya blush under different circumstances.

“The adults were forced to watch their children burn,” he said.  Iya collapsed to the ground and retched.  All of the children were burned.  The adults had been tortured.  Several were missing ears, lips and fingers.  Many were disemboweled, their entrails hanging to the ground.  The smell of burnt flesh and death lingered in the smoke.  Iya could taste the anguish. 

In the epicenter of the village, a woman had been staked and tortured more extensively than the others.  A sign written in blood was held to her chest with an arrow that read ‘Dyrvish Traitor’.  She was naked and her chest and torso were lacerated from flogging.  The woman’s legs bent at unnatural angles, and her right hand was missing all her fingers.   She had been scalped and a pile of flesh and blonde hair lay at her feet.  The woman’s lidless grey eyes stared ahead—eyes Iya knew.  Iya dropped to her knees as sobs wracked her body.  Jakim stood stoically beside her while Tvetja paced around and mewled grief that echoed Iya’s.

“She knew this woman,” he said softly.  Iya nodded and looked at Aichii’s mutilated corpse. 

It is all my fault, Iya thought as she pounded the ground with her fist. If I had not argued so long, if we had left earlier, this would not have happened!  If she had never come to see me, if she had never met me, she and this entire village would still be alive!

Who would do this?  Who could do this? To children? To humans? To any living creature?

Suddenly, Iya’s sobbing stopped and she stilled as the answer came to her.  Jakim briefly glanced down at her, curious, and leapt back in surprise when he glimpsed her appearance.

Though Jakim was immune to her glamour, he did not recognize the creature that knelt in the dirt with streaks of soot washed off her young face by the tears she had shed.  To Jakim, it seemed as if her image had blurred—her skin roiled like waves on an enraged ocean.  Like the pounding of a drum that matched his heartbeat, his instincts warned him of the danger—that death was nigh. 

Jakim spoke to her, but his words fell upon deaf ears.

Currents of raw power emanated from Iya, and Tvetja whimpered in pain as the cub tried to hold her ground.

Iya felt nothing—no more grief, no more pain.  Like a deep cut to the neck, Iya’s humanity—her compassion, her empathy—bled out of her as the hunger roared to life and rampaged through the restraint she had gathered over her life span. 

And Iya no longer wanted to subdue it.

~*~*~*~

Silence leapt from his seat as a sentry’s horn blew two short bursts—and then one long blast.

Naff’s voice could be heard above the sudden uproar within the stronghold.

“Two short, one long—you know what that means!  Up with your lazy bones!  To your posts!  The enemy is upon us!”

Silence tested the bow, checked his quiver, and ran to the men he had been assigned to command. 

“Archers!” Silence bellowed above the din.  “Ready your bows!  Remember your targets!  Hold for my command—two for cold, three for hot.  Aim well!  Shoot true!  For the Gentlemen!”

“For the Gentlemen!” the men echoed as they dispersed along the wall.  From the opposite side of the camp, another sentry sounded the alarm—two short, one long.

On the ground just outside the wall, men rushed to arm the enormous crossbows with quarrels.  The head of each quarrel was a pointed jar that had been filled with a thick tar. 

Again, a sentry blew his horn, this time two short, followed by two short—the enemy had reached the range of the crossbows.

Silence raised his horn in response, and blew the same call.  The gigantic crossbows twanged in response.  Silence blew again, two short, followed by three short blasts.  All around, flaming arrows arched through the night, and most found their mark, igniting the tar the crossbows had laid down.

Men and horses screamed as they caught fire, and the front ranks of the onslaught scattered.  Yet, Silence swore as the fires lit up the night, revealing the true numbers of the enemy.

He reached out to Iya in his mind, and was sent to his knees by the brute force of raw power that answered.  Something was very, very wrong.

~*~*~*~

The battleground lay before him, yet he observed from the rear.  He had only just arrived, and having established his rank per the letter sealed with the mark of the Chancellor, Seventeen had delivered his orders and surveyed the results with satisfaction.

Surprise had been on his side, and against the objections of the former commander than now lay in a deserted camp in a pool of his own blood, Seventeen had roused the army to attack.  The longer the traitors were given to organize, the higher the costs.

He motioned the soldier that had been the aide to the former commander.  The aide quickly stepped over to Seventeen, eager to avoid the same fate of the late commander.

“Send in the next advancements,” Seventeen said.  “Give the traitors no time to gather their bearings.”

The aide scurried away to complete his errand.

Seventeen watched as his orders were delivered, and his army began the onslaught in earnest.

~*~*~*~

With her last vestige of control, Iya stood and turned to Jakim, her eyes empty pools of swirling indigo and azure.

“Run.  If you want to live,” she said, her voice deep and unfamiliar.  Jakim shivered as the temperature dropped and a wind blasted against him, knocking him back twenty paces.  “Run,” she said again, to Tvetja as she turned back toward the corpses. 

Frost crackled and radiated from her feet and the wind whipped around her, picking up dust and debris.  Jakim struggled against the wind trying to reach Iya as did Tvetja until the first house caved and splintered—then he ran. 

Jakim used the buffeting winds to propel him toward Tvetja, and his body struck the cat broadside.  He clung to the cat as she dug her claws into the earth, trying to avoid being swept away in the tempest.  Yet, in a gust that overpowered her strength, Tvetja and Jakim were knocked from the ground, and out of Iya’s sight.

Iya hovered above the ground as the storm built.  She arched her back and screamed into the night, giving voice to her anguish, her grief, her frustration.  Her screams took on a ragged edge of agony as her body convulsed, as her woes manifested in the hunger.