Dangerous magic wielders invade the stone age to replace humanity with a species fit to serve their kind. One man was sent to stop them and a group of misfits join the struggle for existence. Archaeology and cryptozoology meld into high fantasy.
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She pulled her thin legs close to her chest. Despite the furs over top of her ochre dyed sun dress, the Swapper youth shivered against the cold. A fire blazed bright on the far side of the cave but she had to wait for the local Icehunters to finish gawking and prodding. Though she was somewhere between childhood and becoming a woman, the Swapper stood a head taller than the locals. Her frame was lean, especially compared to their stout shoulders and muscled limbs. A youth approached her, pulled a buckskin glove off his hand, smiled, and reached for her hair. The Swapper disliked contact with someone outside her tribe, but those who tended her now had killed the rest of her tribe.
"Good thoughts, goods words, good deeds," her ilu said. Her ilu had been mostly the voice of her mother since she died.
The Swapper bowed her head, despite her own loathing, this was her part to play in the group's livelihood. The Icehunter boy gently pressed his fair skinned hand into her thick black curls. Then he twined a bit between two fingers and gently pulled until the strands stretched well beyond their resting length. He then grabbed his own pale golden hair and gave it a firm tug, seemed to contemplate the difference, smiled at the Swapper girl, and moved on to the Firebringer for a closer look.
She despised being inspected and prodded. The Icehunters who held her and the three others from far flung tribes hardly hunted or foraged. They got meat and other provisions by displaying the oddities to other Icehunters who never ventured past the frozen Northern expanse to see the world beyond. A great arid desert separated the Icehunters from the rest of the peopled world. Only fearless bands dared go below, and even then only to gather food or captives to trade among their people.
Swappers made the journey of course. Not that the girl agreed with the notion. Anger at the thought of her people's death brimmed within her. She contemplated another attempt to murder her captors.
"Good thoughts, goods words, good deeds," her ilu repeated in mother's soothing voice. The Swapper girl breathed deeply in through her nose, then out through her mouth, a hint of frost puffed with each exhalation. She looked into the fire and shivered.
A fur cloak gently prodded her. The Swapper girl turned her gaze from the flame to the cloak, then to the long hand, webbed to its second knuckle, and tipped in dark blue claws. The skin of the Waterbreather next to her was bone white with a blue grey hue. She shook her head to decline.
"Swappers cannot make their own heat in Icehunter country." The Waterbreather stared intently at the Swapper girl. He stood a head taller than her, more than two heads taller than the robust Icehunters. His elongated head was bald, his solid black eyes, the size of apples, gazed from under raised brows. Where a nose should be, only two thin slits flared slightly. A small mouth curled into a smile. "We only have one another for now," he insisted.
