Chapter Three – First Blood

Yane gave an involuntary growl as Karanga pushed aside the last few blades of grass and revealed the clearing in front of them. And yet again, it was devoid of anything living and edible. With a grunt, Karanga rose up and plodded heavily into the clearing. Yane followed, not rising out of her crouching position, her fangs still bared.

"And the Pridelanders claim they live in a kingdom of plenty," deadpanned Karanga.

"We could probably have found something by now if you didn't keep advertising our presence to everything within a kilometre," hissed Yane.

"I haven't made so much as a rustle this whole trip," snapped Karanga, her temper nearly cracking under such a galling accusation. "If you were half the hunter you are a liar, we could have been done hours ago."

"And now you're shouting," hissed Yane. "Your voice will carry. You never know what you might scare off." As she said this, she seemed to glide away towards the grass on the other side of the clearing, still crouching, not turning her head even once.

Karanga growled under her breath and started after Yane, wondering for the thousandth time that day what she might have done that merited her being paired with this snake-like sociopath.

Karanga was a good Outsider specimen. Her coat was darkened and matted by the unrelenting sun and insufficient shade of the Outlands, and her body, like all the Outsiders, was chequered all over with battle scars. Her physique was toughened and hardened beyond any other pride's understanding due to Zira's four-year regimen of training and the lack of food in the Outlands. It was a hard life, but by now it had made her strong enough that she had nothing to fear in the Pridelands.

Her life had been about as mundane as was possible given the circumstances under which she grew up. She was the daughter of a male from the Outskirts regions of the Pridelands and one of the lionesses of the old Pridelands pride. Her father had deserted them once the bad drought set in during the last year of Scar's rule, and mother had been killed by some irate hyenas soon after. She had only been a little more than a year old then, and Zira had offered her a shoulder to cry on and a source of strength and inspiration in those hard times. As a result, she had whole- heartedly joined her attempted coup and gotten exiled along with everyone else.

The vast majority of the time, she didn't regret the decision, but now, wandering illegally through the Pridelands with only Yane for company, she did wonder what life might have been like. Yane was one of the most bizarre psychological specimens Karanga, or for that matter anyone of the Outsiders, had ever seen. Her voice seemed to have absolutely no volume between the lowest hiss of a whisper, and an ear-splitting bellow that bordered on a roar. She always, even when she was asleep, seemed to be crouched for stalking, coiled up for a pounce, or ready to lash out with claws and teeth. It was such that one never felt comfortable talking to her within arm's reach, if at all. And all this was compounded by the fact that her temper was totally unpredictable. Some days even the most innocuous action or remark could set her off into an inferno of rage, while other days she seemed to possess almost infinite patience. The trouble was telling when she was in which state.

With a sigh over her uncomfortable life and difficult companion, Karanga was just about to another step forward when she suddenly stopped and focused all her hearing outward. Her hardened Outsider instincts had detected something, and she dared not ignore them. She slowly lowered herself down into a fighting stance and slowly began gazing around at the grass-line surrounding the clearing.

A nanosecond later, a yellow stream seemed to launch out of the grass next to her. With a reaction time that did credit to her fitness level, Karanga threw herself aside just in time, and a cheetah shot through the air where she had just been. The two of them landed, scrambled briefly to get their bearings, and, combat instincts instantly taking over in both, launched themselves at each other, fangs bared and claws unsheathed.

Their battle never joined, however.

The cheetah stopped in mid-lunge and quickly back flipped onto the ground, Yane's claws embedded in the nape of his neck. Almost sooner than he was down on the ground, her claws had freed themselves with a wrench paralyzing enough to allow time for a decisive downward slash. The cheetah never had time to even begin react before his jugular was surgically sliced to shreds.

Yane didn't even stop to admire her handiwork. She lunged at her victim's face with her fangs bared and began biting and mauling mercilessly, working her way down to the intact side of the neck. Only when her breath finally grew short and the taste of blood had sufficiently filled her throat did she desist. Yane then turned, took a single stride away, lifted her leg, and urinated into the red pulp that moments before had been her attacker's face. She then stalked away with a low snarl in her throat.

Karanga could only stumble to a halt and gaze in shock at Yane's tough, grizzled, seven-year old form stalking away from the cheetah twitching reflexively in a growing pool of blood. She looked down at and clearly saw their attacker for the first time. He had been young – definitely not more than four years old – and though his face was now unrecognizable, he had no visible battle scars on the rest of his body. His fur, now drenched with his own blood, was soft and well-kept.

Karanga felt cheated and horrified. She had been surprised by a young and well cared for cheetah who had obviously just hoped to win a reputation of his own, and she had never even been able to touch him. She could easily have beaten him and then released him with a warning not to be so stupid in future. That she would have actually done so she could not honestly assure herself, but such a course now seemed infinitely desirable. She was strong – she did not recoil at the mere site of gore – but she could not escape the feeling that the brutality she had just witnessed had been needless at best, abhorrent at worst, and that they would be punished for it one day.

The Outsiders were approaching Za Kodan soil now, and the chance of finding combat increased with every step they took. Everyone else was becoming edgy. Tahl, on the other hand, was looking forward to what the next few days might bring. She knew, with the certainty that comes with an outsider's perspective, that this pride could annihilate anyone that attacked it.

Tahl had been born in Rinkai, the maze of rocky chasms at the very heart of the Za Kodan Empire, and had had the misfortune to be incredibly pretty. This had caused her to be taken from her parents when she was only a year old and placed in the cave that was the imperial harem, which served the pleasure of the emperor and those in his favour. When she was only two and a half years old, she had been painfully deflowered by a huge, hulking beast of a general who had enjoyed her so much that the emperor himself had taken notice and made her his own.

For the next year and a half, she had lived at the side of the Za Kodan emperor himself. She'd been well fed and cared for, and the emperor hadn't been cruelly demanding of her services, but she'd still longed for a better life. When she turned four, she finally decided she could live no longer like this, and managed to run away. She'd been chased to the borders of the empire, but after that she passed into lands that got more and more desolate, and the guards had ceased the pursuit. She'd gained her freedom, but it seemed that death had come with it.

Then she'd met the Outsiders. Zira took her in as one of them, and had turned her from a meek pleasure thing into a hardened warrior. The lightness and flexibility she'd been made to cultivate in her old life had stood her in good stead as Zira rigorously grilled their way of life into her, and she quickly became the most acrobatic fighter and the and one of the best pouncers among them.

And now she was heading back. She almost hoped they found a fight, just so she could show some of those imperial guards that she was no longer so meek.

"Have you thought about meeting your parents while we're here?" Vitani's voice suddenly broke in on her thoughts.

"Actually, no," replied Tahl. "Not until now."

She bit her lip and slowed her pace a bit, her head hanging. Her daydreams of returning to the Za Kodan Empire in an avenging blaze of glory suddenly withered and died.

"I haven't seen them for almost four years. They've probably had lots more cubs by now. I don't know if they'll even remember me."

Tahl stopped altogether, her voice choking up with emotion.

"And I wish they would. I've been happy here with you for the last few seasons, after years of being a slave. I'd almost forgotten what happiness was like. It was all I could ever do to think back to my parents... and then once I came here I stopped doing that because I finally had a future... But they weren't part of it."

Vitani could almost swear she saw a tear quivering in the corner of Tahl's eye. She herself betrayed no emotion, but inwardly had as much sympathy for Tahl as her hardened heart allowed her to bestow.

"You want them to remember you because you so nearly forgot them?" said Vitani.

"It'd be nice to know that someone spared a thought for me those years," said Tahl, picking herself up and starting to walk again.

"We've all thought of you endlessly since you came to us," said Vitani after her, a soft, heartfelt, tone entering her voice and eyes for the first time in a very long time.

Back in the Pridelands, under the noon-day sun, the body of the cheetah so ruthlessly executed by Yane had already begun to degrade into carrion when the grass he had pounced from rustled again.

Again a young cheetah burst from the grass. This time, however, it was not an upstart youth longing for glory, but a powerful and intelligent youth who had seen and understood enough of the world to know the value of survival. Nor did he pounce forward for a fight, but simply ran, desperation wracking him. Reaching the side of the body, he stopped and collapsed.

Mopani, third son of Sopami – the most powerful animal in the kingdom besides the lion king himself – wept bitterly, cradling the mangled corpse's head in his paws.

"Karaki! My best friend in the whole fucking world! What've they done to you?" He wheezed out in his exhaustion and sorrow.

His answer was barely a second coming as his eyes distinguished among all the desecration and mutilation what were unmistakably a set of lion claw marks on his comrade's neck.

"Someone's murdered my best friend," said Mopani to himself, determination and hatred taking over from grief. He looked up from the gory sight of his friend and gazed upwards.

"And I will avenge you upon the bastards, whoever they are!" he suddenly bellowed to the sky. With that, he let out a long, piercing, cheetah scream that carpeted the sky with flocks of fleeing birds.