Walking alongside a riverbank, already in the Pride Lands yet close to the Death Marsh, there was a male jamaa with. Unlike most other jamaa his scales were a shade of red and his eyes green, sign of good omen among the inhabitants of the Death Marsh. The crocodile scale armor he wore denoted his status of not just a elite hunter, but also that of part of the family of the chief of his tribe. His name was Adhabu, warleader (the one who led the hunters during wartime alongside the chief) of the Swampspear Tribe, and firstborn of Chief Mkuki.
And he was remembering everything leading to his current situation.
... everything burning...
'MONSTER!'
... his father roaring with rage charging at Mshindi, earning a thunderbolt that takes too long to kill him...
'ADHABU! HEEELP!'
... his mate and friends screaming as the monster eats them alive, piece by piece...
'THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO DARE CHALLENGE ME!'
Mkuki had been one of the first chiefs to oppose Mshundi's conquerous onslaught, but unlike his fellow 'rebels', as the Lizard King called them, he knew from the get-go that fighting him face to face would be a futile, and so decided to conduct a guerilla war against his growing army. Everything was fine at first, since they made camp in one of the most dangerous groves of the already hostile swamp, the perfect place to hide after skirmishes and sabotaging.
They failed to take in consediration Mshindi's magic, nor his unreleting desire to unify the jamaa under his iron rule and make a example of those who resisted him, as the burned husks of many villages could attest. Since they evaded him the longest and hurt his operations the most, the tawala, after finally managing to catch them, decided to be particularly cruel to the Swampspear, making Mkuki and his family to watch as he killed the future generation. When Mkuki managed to free himself and tried to attack Mshindi, the monster simply electrocuted him to death and then ate his family alive, sans Adhabu, who cried in horror as he was forced to watch Mshindi do the deed.
He didn't even get the relief of death: Mshindi ordered his warriors to beat him near to death and then dump him into a nearby river, possibly hoping that he would drown. He forgot that jamaa, while not as home at water as their Pridelander cousins, were still able to hold their breath for quite a long time, and since survival instinct was strong on them...
Now, though, after surviving not just a tremendous beating with clubs, crashing several times against rocks, and falling from a waterfall, he hated his body for forcing him to survive all that (although the 'executioners' didn't really want to hurt him, and he was wearing armor).
"Dead... Are all dead..." He muttered as he dragged his feet on the riverbank. He could still remember the massacre, the fire, the screams of fear and agony. "And yet, I still live."
Losing a loved one or a friend due to age was expected, since they were old, and so their bodies were eaten so that they may stay with the tribe. Losing them because of the dangers of the Death Marsh was painful, but also half-expected given their home, and the bodies were given to the beasts of the swamp. Losing them in a battle was less painful since they died fighting for their tribe, and the bodies were ritually burned but the experience was still painful. Losing an egg or a young hatchling was worse, since they had barely began to live, but even then their parents, after grieving, ate the bodies of their young, so that they could be reborn again, and moved on.
Losing your entire tribe to a tawala and being unable to do anything as he ate them alive, though? That was the worst, especially since many jamaa thought that the tawala didn't eat just their flesh, but also their very souls.
The only thing he could to to relieve the pain was to die. But he didn't want to. Something compelled him to stay alive, but now he realized it was not his survival instinct.
"Kill." Adhabu said as he stopped walking, his mutters becoming growls and hands clencing into fists, baring his teeth at the thought of Mshindi. "I must kill that monster."
However, after a minute of glaring at nothing, Adhabu sat on the riverbank with his head on his hands, distressed once more. "Who am I kidding? Just one backhand from that bastard could crush my bones; damn it, he wouldn't even have to attack me, just walk in my general direction and step over." He then sighed, not knowing what to do. On the one hand, and just as stated, he wanted-no, needed to avenge his people and kill Mshindi. On the other, Mshindi not only outmatched him in size, strength and maybe intelligence, he also had magic at his disposal, and the loyalty of many jamaa. Related to the last, he couldn't just join another tribe either, since by that point most, if not all, were probably already under his control... or destroyed.
He sat like that for several minutes, thinking of what to do, before standing up and walking again, this time away from the river. He had decided it.
Having no real means to fight Mshindi, let alone kill him, but unwilling to live without his family, he chose a fourth option: commit suicide.
However, rather than taking the easy way out (bashing his head against the rocks, wait for either starvation or dehydratation to kick in, or simply lose the will to live) , he would do it the warrior way: fighting and getting killed, which given where he was, wouldn't have been difficult. He knew that practically all Pride Landers, especially lions, feared and hated his kind for the simple fact that they didn't mind eating their dead, and thus sometimes sent what survivors called 'revenge' after either a tribe or tribeless males wandered into the Pride Lands, even though only those influenced by tawala did so just to get lion flesh. Obviously seeing a 'lizard man' wandering into their kingdom would send them on a killing frenzy and send warriors after him. He would die, but at least he would take a few with him.
Or maybe not. He had fought lions, elephants, rhinos and crocodilians before, and while formidable, none were able to injure him nor his father despite loudly proclaiming themselves as their doom. Yes, he was wounded, but as stated before he was relatively unscathed and was pretty big, enough to scare away the average farmer and give a tough fight to whoever wanted to slay him
The last thing left to do was reach a village; just being seen by its inhabitants would suffice.
'And if not, there are always patrolling warriors, wild animals and... adventurers'. The last one made him growl. From time to time, the Death Marsh was trespassed by small groups of all sizes and races; not just warriors, but also shamans and thieves, came to kill jamaa, chura and the beasts of the swamp, and steal their stuff for stupid reaons, or something else he didn't care about.
The fact that he was doing something similar evaded him.
Hours later, when the night had already fallen and he was in the 'savannah', Adhabu was still searching for Pride Landers.
"Dammit, I thought they bred like frogs?" He swore, his feet aching from walking all day on stable and dry terrain, much different from the wet and soft ground from the Marsh. He had procured himself a weapon, a stone spear, to fight and in case he was attacked by anything, but for some reason nothing seemed to want him dead. Sure, there were a lot of prey animals native to the place, like many horned but small mammals or huge, longnecked reptiles, but no trace of fangs or anything that looked remotely like a carnivore, much less lions or dwarves or whatever. He could see lights in the distance, even discern the rocky silhouette of a rocky formation, but they were still too far away to reach in that night.
"Well, I suppose I can rest tonight and fight tomorrow." He said. However, he didn't want to sleep just to be tormented by nightmares, so he decided to keep walking until he couldn't do it anymore, weighed down by tiredness and sleep.
However, after walking little less than a hundred feet, the wind change of direction and Adhabu catched a sniff of a familiar scent.
"Is that...cooked meat?" He thought outloud, smelling the air again. Yes, it smelled like meat on a fire, although he didn't know what kind of meat. "No, you're just hungry and tired Adhabu. Or maybe not?" He said, not sure if it was his imagination or there was really someone out there cooking meat. He shrugged, supposing that it was just his starved brain, but before he could keep walking he heard a roar of pain coming from somewhere on his left, followed by screams of terror, death cries, warcries and the sound of battle. Soon, there was only silence.
Adhabu, who stood in silence after being startled by the sounds, looked to the direction of the screaming and discovered a large boulder, from behind which he could see the shine of fire in the air.
Light meant fire, fire meant intelligent life, and intelligent life here would happily attack a jaama. However, the screams made clear that something was happening.
Adhabu, confused yet excited with the prospect of a fight, knew that he wouldn't have to look any longer. That said, instead of rushing blindly to his death, the hunter decided instead to take the stealthy role. He wanted to die fighting, not getting skewered by a hundred arrows the moment he was seen.
Jogging to the giant rock, Adhabu scaled it and reached the rough yet somewhat flat top. Getting on all fours to reduce the chances of being spotted, Adhabu walked to the edge of the stone and looked down.
There was a village below him, a typical lion village made up of several huts and a palisade, useless to stop a raid but good for keeping cattle in and scavengers out. Only half of said huts were burning, and the shapes dumping stuff in a pile near the entrance were not of lions, hippos or any Pride Lander.
At that height he couldn't really discern them, but he already knew what they figures were thanks to having fought them before and by the fact they were too short to be ogres yet too tall to be goblins, and in fact looked like the missing link between both races.
He growled in disgust when he realized what they were.
Cavemen. Lion-sized, hairless ape-like creatures with wiry builds and hairy bodies (hairy, not furry like a lion or hyena's) who, as the name indicated, made their homes in the many caves of the Outlands, a dry wasteland home to hyenas, goblins, ogres, orcs and monsters of many types. Adhabu saw them as the most dangerous of the Outlanders thanks to their use of metal weapons and tactics, although just like their neighbors they were quick to turn tail when the a battle turned against them. Paradoxically, they were the most likely to attack either the Pride Lands or the Death Marsh, sending raiding parties to obtain metal, food and, for some reason, things like gold and gems.
This particular raid party, armed with wooden clubs and spears, and numbering at least thirty, must had attacked while the inhabitants of the village were asleep. They were busy finding anything that looked valuable to them and putting it in a pile, and burning the corpses of the lions they killed during the attack, all of them males, which also explained the scent he caught. Busy as they were with laughing and looting the place, the cavement didn't notice that there was a jamaa watching them from above.
On another occassion he would had looked with hunger at the burning meat and attack the cavement with abandon, but now he simply sighed in relief. It looked like he would have the death he wanted after all.
'Good. I always hated cavemen. Bunch of filthy apes, all of them' He thought with a smile.
Adhabu crawled down the stone from the other side and approached the sacked village stealthily, planning on killing one of those brutes before roaring his presence. Once in the camp, he started to look for the closest caveman, but just as he chose one he noticed that there something square-shaped and covered with a leather tarp just outside the palisade from which he could heard a noise.
'Is that... a child sobbing?'
Something inside Adhabu's head told him to check whatever it was below the tarp. Forgetting the caveman he was about to kill, the hunter approached the thing sneakily it and, walking to the side not facing the village to so that the cavemen wouldn't see him. After leaning around it and making sure he wasn't seen, he grabbed the tenting and pulled it off.
Staring back at him through wood sticks were several lions, adults and children. Most of the adults were obviously women since many had the lithe build of females and those strange bumps on their chests, and lacked the trademark manes of their males, although there were three males with them. Apparently the cavemen wanted to take the villagers with them, either as prisoners to ransom or slaves... or in the case of the lionesses, as playthings.
He growled. Jamaa ate their dead and those of their enemies, but as patriarchal as their race was, rape was taboo to them just as much as it was to Pridelanders.
All of them were staring at him in horror and speaking in murmurs, obviously afraid of him but also not wanting to attract the attention of the cavemen, but one of the males, the youngest of the three, began to snarl at him before his companions covered his muzzle. He also noted, however, that one of the females, a cream colored lion with green eyes and dressed in better clothes than her fellow to-be-slaves, who was also caressing a girl that looked exactly like with her left hand and holding a sleeping baby on the other, wasn't looking at him, but at something behind him.
Adhabu looked back to see what had her spooked, and had to hold his own gasp when he saw it glaring at him. Now he knew why the night had been so silent and why he only saw small or huge herbivores. Those were either too fast to be caught by behemoths, or so big nothing could take them down.
Lying in front of him, chained and immobilized by steel chains, was a tyrannosaurus.
Focused as he had been in not being seen he didn't notice the 50 foot, brown scaled, green eyed monster laying near the cage, and even with the chains Adhabu was terrified. Tyrannosaurs were the largest, most powerful flesh-eating reptiles in all of Baramkoa barring dragons, and many jamaa saw them as the living embodiment of the spirits of war. Adhabu didn't, but he did know that few beasts could take on one and win. Sure, raptors were smart and attacked in packs, allosaurus were twice as big as raptors, and more, but a tyrannosaurus could take on a dragon one on one, beasts that could get as big as hills, and win.
How the hell did those apes capture such a monster!?
He heard a chirping sound from next to the beast. The Swampspear's eyes widened in shock as he discovered two tyrannosaurs hatchlings staring at him. They were chained just like the big one, but their jaws were left free.
The adult, clearly the parent of the little ones growled at him and tried to get up, but the chains, despite their feeble appearance, stood strong and held it down.
Adhabu shook his head and looked back at the prisoners, unsettled by being so near to a tyrannosaurus. The whispering had stopped, but they were still staring at him with fear, but the green eyed lioness and her daughter, who had been looking at him the entire time, didn't seem to fear him. In fact, they were looking at him with pleading eyes.
His mate had those same eyes.
Sighing in defeat, Adhabu left his spear on the ground and, grabbing the bars of the cage, began to pry them apart. They were tough, but nowhere as tough as the fever trees of his home, and soon enough he broke several of them.
'If they try to kill me, that's one stupid jamaa less in the world' He thought.
However, before he could break enough to make a hole large enough for an adult lion to fit through, the green eyed lioness screamed and pointed behind him. Acting on instinct, Adhabu swinged his tail, making the caveman that would have sneaked on him fall to the ground screaming.
The distraction he provided, however, was all his fellow cavemen needed to tackle the warrior and pin him to the unbroken bars of the cage. The lions began to scream and roar before the cavemen silenced them with their own shouts.
"Um yaga, um yaga ook!" Screamed one the brutes, which judging by his apparel was the leader, right next to his head.
Adhabu shouted back. "I don't know your language, you damned monkey!"
The caveman looked at his men and grunted some more, then looked back at him "What a lizard doing hear!" He said in a badly spoken jamaa tongue, surprising Adhabu, who shook off his shock and snarled.
"I don't like slavery, nor raiders like you that steal anything but food."
"Oooh!" The leader said with a smile. "Lizard want meat!" He then reached inside the cage and, before the lions could stop him, grabbed the cream lioness by the head and pulled her out, so fast that she didn't have time to leave her baby with the others. The males roared and tried to get out, but some cavemen screamed back and pointed their weapons at them, forcing them to back off "Join us, you have meat!" He said, ignoring the snarling lioness trying to bite his hand off, and the now awake and screaming cub.
Adhabu snarled alongside her. The bastard said 'meat', but the way he said it and the smile he had on his flat face while saying it made clear he wasn't talking about food.
"If you think I'm like you, you'll be sorely dissappointed."
The leader growled and pushed the lioness towards the ground. The lioness, who managed to fall on her back and protect her baby, snarled and tried to get up, but another caveman forced her down with his foot. The others were screaming and yelling, banging their weapons against their shields or on the ground. One of the lions, the largest, tried again to help his comrade, but this time one the cavemen guarding the cage hit him in the head with a club, knocking him out, and dared the others to do the same.
However, before something else could happen, they heard the scream of a caveman... alongside the growling of something large, raising in intensity. Everyone fell silent when they heard that sound, even the baby.
Slowly, jamaa, lion and caveman alike turned towards the direction of the growling and all palled.
Because of the ruckus, no one noticed that the green eyed cub had literally walked out of the cage, somehow grabbed the keys of the keys that held the adult tyrannosaurus in place without being noticed, and fred the monster.
Which at that moment was staring down at them at its full height of twenty feet, with the leg of a caveman dangling from its bloodied jaws.
This would prove to be the doom of the cavement.
Thinking quickly, Adhabu turned and slashed one of the cavemen pinning him down in the throat before punching the leader off him and grabbing his weapon, a spear with iron head, and chopping the arm of a third one. His scream of paim was smothered by an earth-shattering roar from the tyrannosaurus, who spit the corpse of the caveman it just ate and attacked the rest. The lions, seeing an opportunity to fight back, roared and pounced on the nearest cavemen, dispatching them with their teeth and claws and stealing their weapons.
None of that mattered to Adhabu, who was fighting for his life against the leader, who unseathed a long metal knife.
"Killed many warriors, captured sharptooth!" The caveman shouted in a rage as he tried to push back Adhabu, spear and blade interlocked. He was able to use his full body and his weapon was better for stopping attacks, but Adhabu was more skilled. Behind them, lions and cavemen fought like animals while the tyrannosaurus slaughtered the latter, ignoring the wounds it was sustaining. "Won't let lizard kill me!"
"I've killed worse things than lions, ape!" Adhabu screamed back before headbutting the brute, sending him tumbling to the ground with a broken nose.
However, just as the jamaa raised his blade to deal the killing strike, Adhabu hear a feminine scream at his left. In another occasion he would have ignored it, but something compelled him to look.
Adhabu watched in horror as a caveman loomed over the girl who fred the tyrannosaurus, looming over her with a murderous expression. He didn't have weapons, but his raised, muscular arms would be enough to kill such a small being. Her mother cried and ran towards her, but with the baby still on her arms Adhabu doubted-
"AIEEEE!"
One of the tyrannosaurus cubs, the closest one, bit the caveman in the most painful place imaginable. The man screamed in pure agony until the huge tail of the adult hit him in the back, sending him flying with half of his bones pulverized andscreaming until colliding with the ground and breaking his neck. The cub then ran towards her mother and embraced her, both smiling with relief before the girl noticed him. Without realizing it, the former Swampspear had run towards the girl before the tyrannosaurus baby saved her.
Both parties stared at each other as the battle around them started to wind down, thanks to the combined rage of the surviving villagers and the tyrannosaurus (although it was the latter who did most of the damage).
The lioness then stood up with her daughter and, to the surprise of the jamaa, smiled at him before saying something he couldn't hear and giving a small bow, followed by her daughter, who simply walked up to him and hugged his leg. Adhabu, surprised by the fact that a lion of all things would didn't know what to do. Even more surprising, the young tyrannosaurs, who had been set free by the girl, imitated her and rubbed themselves against his other leg. Their progenitor, covered in countless but minimal wounds and with a dead caveman on its mouth, watched him intently but from a distance, while the lions watched on; some were glaring at him, but most were smiling in gratefulness.
Adhabu, despite everything that happened to him, managed to smile; he had been in a similar situation before, only it had been with his sister's hatchling and the tribe's pet crocodiles. He crouched and hugged the girl while also ruffling the heads of the tyrannosaurs... before realizing with horror that he hadn't killed the caveman leader.
Said caveman was at that moment standing up behind the cream lioness, giving a silent snarl and raising a stone club to kill her.
Adhabu screamed and jumped at the lioness just as the ape attacked, hitting the jamaa's head so hard the axe's stonehead broke on impact.
The last thing Adhabu saw before losing consciousness, just as the tyrannosaurus roared like thunder, was the mother of the girl rushing towards him with horror on her face.
Well, here it is, the first official chapter of the Chronicles. For those who wonder what do cavement look like, they're literally the Subhumans from Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice, the closest thing we'll ever have to an animated (and faithful) Conan adaptation, with barbarians, buxom but badass princesses, pale and evil wizards, subhuman savages, prehistoric monsters and more.