Bitter Drink
Blood and fire, ash and wind. First the ashes of men, disintegrated by the goddess's servants, then the ashes of plants, as they burned in the fields. The Twin Mothers were used to this. Attacks came frequently, and the fields had known destruction many times before. Eldron could only shake his head and sigh. There hadn't been a raid in quite a while, two months at least, but he knew it was just a matter of time. The whole tribe felt it coming, felt the change in the winds. First the goddess vanished, right after the last raid by the Scorpion's Bite. Helea held the tribe together in that time of tribulation, acting as representative of the goddess in absentia.
She was so strong for the tribe in the time of its greatest crisis, that when the goddess returned Helea should have relaxed and returned to her old, happy self. She convened in secret with the goddess, and on the outside she seemed just as spirited as ever but over her hung a dark shadow. The shadow grew and grew until Helea was almost like death, a dark shade haunting the tribe. Everyone felt the tension and fear, especially when the annual Ogre migration didn't happen.
The Ogres visited the Twin Mothers the same time every year. When the tribe was very young they feared them, but the goddess taught them to respect the Ogres and the Ogres respected them. The huge, furry monsters generally kept the area clean of other predators, and largely ignored the Twin Mothers crops. Occasionally they up and died by the Twin Mothers village, providing the tribe with a good source of supplementary food. They discovered just how much they'd come to rely on Ogre meat when there wasn't any around.
Bad omens swirled in the air for weeks, and the Twin Mothers grew restless. Some in the tribe wanted to hunt, to go and find the Ogres or anything else, kill it and bring back the meat. The general consensus spoke out against it, though, and the goddess agreed. The Twin Mothers were to remain pacifists, no matter what.
When the new raid finally came Eldron breathed a sigh of relief. There were a lot of them, certainly, at least four hundred men had come to raid the Twin Mothers, but whether it was twenty men or twenty thousand, the routine was always the same. They came, they burned the fields, the Twin Mothers withdrew into their cliff home, they left, the Twin Mothers rebuilt the fields. That was how it had been for generations, and now seemed no different, save the foreboding omens.
The men gathered at the base of the Twin Mothers home, established tents and began a routine patrol. Some gave orders and some followed orders, some wore armor and others wore rags. They established camp and there they stayed. And stayed. And stayed. A week went by. That wasn't so strange. The Scorpion's Bite had stuck around for approximately a week and a half. The Twin Mothers had enough food to last for more than a month. Yet still the men stayed. Two weeks went by. The men established an arena and began to fight in it daily. Eldron laughed at this.
"You see, two men enter and one man leaves. That's what violence gets you. They'll deplete themselves before we run out of food," he told his wife, the leader of the tribe.
Still the men remained, and despite their near-constant fighting amongst themselves did not deplete. Men came and men went, they brought women and their camp grew more solid and permanent. After three weeks, more servants of the goddess arrived. They were defeated, surrounded and set upon with a fury and violence the Twin Mothers could not comprehend. Some of the men tore the goddess' servants apart with their bare hands, and attached the pieces of metal to their own armor, gaily draped in the skins of their enemies. Four weeks went by and still the men remained. The Twin Mothers turned to their goddess for help.
"Oh great Diana, we need your guidance. These men have come from parts unknown and they behave unlike any raiders we have seen before. We do not wish to violate your doctrine of pacifism, but we see no other alternative. Our stores are running out!" Alaya, Eldron's wife asked the goddess in her shrine for help, as Helea had cut herself off from the tribe, and had possibly already starved to death.
The goddess appeared before her, but her appearance was different somehow. She was not the shining light, the tall woman with the golden halo. She looked smaller, darker. This terrified Alaya more than anything else in the past few months.
The goddess Diana flickered and wavered, and only said one thing to Alaya before disappearing completely. She said, "Run."
But there was nowhere to go.