PLAGUE
by Obsidian Blade
Over the Edge
'They're leaving, you know.' A pause, as though Shiraar Rinaari expected a reply, then: 'Won't you at least see them off?'
'No.'
Even Shaaca's ocean of tenacity failed to drown the tiny part of her whining for rest. Escape from Rinaari's pestering and a chance to loosen her locked joints were both compelling luxuries, and rebuking Tziir had drawn her down to new levels of utter exhaustion. Her body declined ever closer to rock bottom.
That did not mean she would submit. Just one look at Kognook's ailing body kept her motionless, only speaking when an answer was truly necessary. His clear distress when she had lain beside him coated her thoughts like black ice.
'But if they succeed they might find a way to cure him,' the young healer persisted, her instinctive fear of the aashnin long since lost.
Shaaca said nothing. The possibility sat well beyond her sphere of comprehension. A cure now would be a miracle. She had no faith in miracles.
Two sides of her clamoured bitterly nevertheless. Tziir could be right. He usually was. Perhaps she wasn't helping Kognook by staying here at all – it was her weakness and her sentiment that had distressed him earlier, after all. No shiraar would have done something so self-serving.
Any chance of a fight with the omastar was endlessly appealing to her as well, but just the thought of leaving her son crippled her. Even if her presence wasn't making him any better. Even if maybe, just maybe, the trek might bring the very results he needed.
A long sigh escaped her. Her bearing fled with it, shoulders slouching and head bowing forward, defeated.
Rinaari eyed her warily. 'Won't you sit down, Aashnin Shaaca?' she suggested.
The little kabutops gestured with an especially dull, rounded scythe to the worn remains of a boulder that lay against the base of one of the shiraan's sentinel stones.
Shaaca didn't even glance in its direction. With a non-committal murmur, she permitted herself a retreat and lowered her weight blindly onto the rock. Her scythes rested against her thighs, the left as blunt as the healer's and the other badly maintained, its once-sharp edge eroding away. Desperation swelled like a winter wave within her chest as the desire to sharpen both blades and throw herself back into her blood-stained element rose to new heights. She wished Tziir had never come to her with that tantalising escape.
Her sandy, coarse skin transformed to deep brown in the bloody morning light, Rinaari stepped forward again. The two scouts would be long gone by now, so there was no point in begging for the aashnin's attendance to the leaving ceremony, but a familiar weariness had settled into Shaaca's eyes. Seeing it there was wholly unsettling. It usually kept to the dying.
'Shaaca,' she said firmly, discarding the respectful title of aashnin for the first time, 'Please. I am a healer. You've pushed yourself past your limits, and I can see it in everything you do. Your collapse will do your son no good. Leave this instant,' she took a deep breath, raising her chin, 'or I shall remove you myself.'
The black kabutops gave a condescending snort nobody had heard out of her in days. Her angular eyes came to bear on the smaller female.
'Really?'
Her voice was flat yet scathing. Rinaari was sick of hearing it.
She struck with a speed and precision that surprised her, although evidently not as much as it did Shaaca, who suddenly found herself on her knees. The shiraar glared down at her fiercely, blunt blades lifted threateningly.
'Really,' she repeated.
She hadn't enough time to draw another breath before Shaaca struck back as fast as lightning. She surged to her feet and slashed out with both scythes in one fluid movement. The left struck tenths of a second before the right, smacking the healer back against the wall and holding her there. Its twin shot past the terrified kabutops' head with an audible hiss. Rinaari trembled, all righteous fire lost in the face of Shaaca's thunderous appearance, a deep, thin white line sliced all the way along the left plane of her helmed head. The very skin that had picked her out as a healer – sandy, soft, unfit for combat – crumbled away from the cut.
Silver wings buzzing irritably at her back, the aashnin waited just long enough for the shiraar to regain a healthy measure of fear. Then she stepped back and let her slump to the ground.
'You will not tell me what to do,' Shaaca snapped, taking one last glance at Kognook and storing the image carefully in the back of her mind, 'Although I appreciate the attempt at humour. I will see you first thing tomorrow, understood?'
Rinaari barely had the presence of mind to nod numbly as Shaaca swept out of the shiraan with nothing but the fading whine of her wings to mark her departure. Very slowly, her cheek smarting, the healer raised her head. Her gaze trailed sluggishly over the shocked faces of her fellow shiraari.
'She left,' she said, blinking.
Even verbalised, it seemed impossible. The aashnin had stayed at her son's side for two weeks solid. Even in the midday sun she stood like a black statue, when everyone else retreated to flooded ka'aan. Heat exhaustion might have allowed the healers to remove her for a few hours before, but Rinaari had started to suspect Shaaca would never leave by choice. And now this.
She leant back against a standing stone. 'Amazing.'
Whatever fierceness she had conjured in the shiraan sloughed from Shaaca like an ill-fitting skin, leaving her soft and vulnerable. She crumpled against the wall of her cave, limbs sprawled at awkward angles. Her vast strength ran like water through her arms, legs and neck, gathering in a well of discomfort at the pit of her stomach. It left everything else hollow. Lonely thoughts plummeted down the empty fissure of her head. Her eyes roved the walls in search of words to patch the gap, and found nothing.
Both scythes itched. Shaaca raised the right, eyeing its pits and swells. Unthinkingly, she pressed the edge to the wall and lifted her arm in one weak, shaky arch. As dust and dislodged pebbles rained down around her, the aashnin closed her eyes, blocking out the empty ka'aan that gaped at her feet like an open wound.
Rinaari was right, Shaaca mused. She had no place in the shiraan, at the side of her innocent hatchling. She swept her sharpening stone from the ring around the ka'aan and settled it against the wall. Her scythe scraped over it until the edge gleamed. Emptily, the aashnin stared at the blade. Two weeks hadn't made the razor-sharp line alien. Relief surged from that heavy pool in her belly at the sight of it, only to be forced back down by the growing weight of her heart. Her body readily provided all the necessary proof: she was never meant to be a mother.
Collapsing heavily onto her side, Shaaca ducked her head against the rock floor. She wished she was years away. Perhaps then she could live without wondering if her son would be there when she opened her eyes. Perhaps then all this suffering could come to an end.
o o o
'So, I don't really get it. Why did we leave in the morning?'
Telniin Raahn the kabuto glared through the humid jungle heat-haze. Balanced on the broad head of the annoyingly bouncy Raakin Zetaahn, he struggled with the urge to release an especially concentrated blast of water into his steed's eyes. Dodging low-slung vines and protruding branches irritated him enough. He certainly did not require Zetaahn's verbal onslaught of stupidity to make this trip an utter nightmare.
'After all, it'll be noon soon. We'll have to stop or bake. I think we should have left just before sundown,' the raakin continued doggedly.
He seemed set on generating some sort of conversation. Raahn had no intention of indulging him.
'Tradition,' he ground out.
He clicked his yellow needle legs on the left side of Zetaahn's head, directing him toward a promising accumulation of knotted wood. Towering almost as tall as the kabtaar, the tangled root system sheltered a shadowy space beneath. Raahn suspected it would be the closest thing to a cave he was likely to find.
'Oh,' said Zetaahn as the kabuto dropped to the ground with an inadvertent huff. 'Why did they send you out here anyway? How old are you? Ten?'
Without a second thought, Raahn drove his front leg into the kabutops' ankle.
'For your information,' he snapped as Zetaahn squealed, 'It has been ninety seven years, six months and twelve days since I hatched. Just because I haven't evolved into one of you does not mean I am your inferior. Have I made myself clear?'
Zetaahn nodded rapidly. 'Yes! I'm sorry!'
The strategist tugged his claw free, huffing. 'You will be.'
Leaving the raakin to whimper over his superficial injury, Raahn clambered over forest floor detritus. He scaled a bothersome mound of rotting leaves and pressed his shell halfway through one of the smaller gaps between roots. His red eyes gleamed in the gloom as he inspected the shelter.
The space proved positively cavernous. A sizeable boulder took most of the tree's weight. Beside it, the earth had been torn away, leaving a remarkably ka'aan-shaped dip in the ground. Roots arched overhead, wreathed with moss and studded with yellow mushrooms. Zetaahn would fit inside without any problems, pressed up against the woody fence. That would leave Raahn with a good six shells' length worth of spreading space in every direction. It was much more than he had expected. A few quick clicks with his talons communicated as much to Zetaahn.
The raakin hesitated for a second, glancing between the impatient kabuto and the shelter, before it sank in that he was here as a guard. Of course he had to enter first. Scuttling forward, he ducked easily through the largest hole and peered around. Inside, the air was moist and heavy with the scent of rotten leaves, soil and faeces, but Zetaahn saw nothing particularly dangerous. No tentacruel, no brightly-coloured fish, nothing potentially poisonous at all. He nodded humbly to his elder, allowing him inside.
Raahn made a quick circle of the interior before coming to stop a scythe's length from a sizeable pile of dung. He eyed it suspiciously. Though calculating and intelligent in theory and strategy, he knew full well his shortcomings when it came to experience.
'Old, is it?' he inquired airily, gesturing in the heap's direction without wanting to move any closer.
Zetaahn barely glanced in its direction. 'Of course,' he said brightly, hoping to redeem himself by being the closest to quick and efficient he could manage. It involved a lot of quick and not much efficient.
Skittering to the furthest corner, Raahn settled down, eyeing Zetaahn from beneath the rim of his shell.
'If you're sure,' he relented.
Proud that he had satisfied the temperamental little telniin, Zetaahn lay down on his side. Heat lodged between his armoured plates, leaving him sticky and uncomfortable. Rolling onto his back, he tried to bury his fins in the cool earth, to little effect. He recalled a calming exercise Siira passed onto him after he missed a lesson with one of the strongest warriors, the djirnoi. The raakinoi were supposed to will serenity through their limbs between fights. They had to purposefully loosen their muscles: let their joints relax until they slumped within their armour.
It didn't work. Now that he'd thought of her, Zetaahn found himself focusing on Siira. Specifically, where Siira was probably sleeping: in her own smooth ka'aan halfway up the cliff side, filled to the top with water and covered with leaves.
His eyes slid shut as he remembered the cool press of liquid all around him in his own ka'aan. Fern fronds let slats of midday glow filter down against his eyelids, while silt swirled over his body with each absent-minded swish of his sickles. He twitched slightly as some phantom movement registered beyond his consciousness, but Zetaahn was long gone. His shielded helm fell slack against the ground as he slipped down into sleep.
o o o
A twisting sensation deep in her stomach woke Shaaca, drilling into her dreams and dragging her to the surface. She blinked in the dulling light of late afternoon, staring blankly at the sloping ceiling overhead before moving slowly to her feet.
A few hours' decent sleep returned a measure of her usual strength to her legs as she made her way to the shiraan. Instinct guided her toward the narrow path around the cliff face. Her wings fluttered at her back, unsure whether to utter their signature whine or fall still altogether. With sweat seeping between the gaps in her armour, her breath coming harsh and flustered, Shaaca lacked the presence of mind to direct them one way or the other.
Urgency struck. She broke into a run, racing nimbly over the sea-slicked path. Her wings shrieked by the time she reached the one gap in the standing stones, but as Shaaca's gaze swept the silent shiraan they fell against her back. The shiraari were gone, every last one.
Shaaca froze in shock. Dread ate up her insides, reaching for her sluggish heart. She started forward, as indecisive as her wings. Two quick steps, a hesitant shuffle. A pause as she glanced, unseeing, down at an acid-burnt raakin. Then a surge, darting forward to her son's ka'aan as though she might catch relief with one well-timed burst of speed.
Kognook lay motionless. His needle legs hung limply from his overturned shell, furrows in the damp sand writing out their frenzied death-spasms. No warm red glow issued from the dark pits of his eyes.
Shaaca felt not even the faintest tingle of surprise.
But her body locked up. Bent over the lifeless shape of her son, she couldn't lean closer. She couldn't turn away. Her throat seized as though grasping at some last-minute miracle. The one she had never believed in.
She had expected this, she desperately reminded herself. She had known. Everyone touched by the disease withered; they slipped away so quickly; she never should have hoped. She should have prepared.
'I came as soon as I heard.'
A voice, deep and sombre. Fire surged through her at the sound.
Tziir watched his aashnin shiver, a myriad of words brooding behind his tongue. The missing medics cowered behind him, silent.
'Shaaca,' said the kabtaar, 'if there's anything I can do-'
The black kabutops spun suddenly to face him, her violet eyes gleaming passionately.
'When did they leave?' she demanded, the tremble in her blades accentuated by the way one flashed dangerously with each shake.
Tziir blinked, caught off-guard. 'How do you mean?' he asked stupidly, cursing himself for it.
'The group,' she snapped. 'When did they leave.'
'At dawn,' he said, peering at her with a growing sense of understanding. 'Aashnin, I ask nothing of you, only that you let me help-'
Shaaca didn't hear his words. They were inconsequential. With an agonising burst from her wings she launched herself over the standing stones, crashing onto the rocks on the other side, and began to run. Up the beach, up the cliffs, up into the jungle. She knew who had done this, she knew it beyond any shadow of doubt, and there was only one thing to do with omastar. The aashnin bared her blades.
