Chapter 44
"Might"
We stalked closer. Step by careful step, we slipped through the grass with barely a whisper. The dampened earth quieted the rustle of our movements, yet the pack did not need the cover of a storm to hide us. Our black and grey marks concealed us. Every hunt and every battle prepared us for this moment. We could not see nor smell one another yet I could call each by name by the presence of their Spirit. We pressed forward, eyes fixed ahead of us. Alpha led the way. There was no telling when the enemy would appear. They were just as quiet, if not utterly silent, as they prepared for our final confrontation.
We were in the thick of it now. Having broken through the front line with the help of the Striking Beasts and Sky Tails, each and every one of us now pawed at the heart of enemy territory with our shadow steps. They thought themselves at an advantage. That playing defense would give them an edge. If we slipped by one another without ever making contact, they could catch us by surprise. I knew they had the skills for it. Cloaking and killing and deceiving were a darkened creature's strongest weapons. But no matter the preparation or caution or care, they could not hide themselves from those that posed no threat in their minds.
A Bell Sprout jingled in the grass off to the left. Mato's eyes darted towards it. Maw Mouth peeled away into the dark and disappeared. Jumper followed. A few moments later, another jingle. This time, from the right. Tired Eye and Phantom Back took off. Mahakah walked in front of me. His ever inquiring nose bumped into the head of a Bell Sprout close to the ground. I tensed, but the Little Thing bounced back into place without so much as a rattle. The rest of the pack kept going. I paused to watch the flower wobble back and forth.
It did not bother me a glance. The flower could not see me in the dark anyway. I gently brought my nose over and touched it to a stop. The flower continued to stare out contently in the dark even with my teeth so close. Two more light chinks tolled in the night and I was beginning to see the shape of the enemy's troops. Scout and Runner were already ahead and rushed off separately to meet the sounds. Omega and Mahakah looked at one another before dashing in opposite directions to join them. A few quiet breaths passed. Then, another jingle. Quickly followed by a second a little farther away. That one clunked halfway through, squashed.
Alpha bolted towards the latter, teeth flashing before his shadow took over. It triggered Ume and Watepei to tackle the first. All with little more than a whisk of grass into the night. I waited alone where they left me, poised and ready for the next warning. I did not expect it to echo out behind me from the very same Bell Sprout Mahakah bumped into earlier. Its gentle toll signaled the arrival of another. Just as silent and menacing as the shadow of the pack, it had to be a Mighty Hena. But it was not one of my own, yet I did not whirl upon him teeth first. I remained where I was, unafraid yet a little surprised as he came up beside me and slid into the pocket of my presence as if we had hunted together before.
"Kill the flowers," he whispered, passing along the enemy's message.
No wonder he found me first. He was a messenger of death.
"On whose orders?" I whispered back, playing along like the upper rank he thought me to be.
The rough wounded nature of my voice further disguised my identity.
"The Shaman," he answered with enough bitterness to scrunch up his lips.
There was dissent in the ranks for him to answer so. He held animosity towards those that existed outside of the hierarchy yet demanded obedience from it. She was here then.
"Why?" I pressed and he glanced at me, fleetingly, too nervous to look away from the dark for too long despite his nature. Had he looked a little closer, he might have seen me for who I was.
"She prepares a song. None can interfere."
I turned my head away, furiously scanning my memory for the meaning of such words. A chorus of snarls shot up from the grass. Squeals, whimpers, and the pounding thrash of bodies mixed in with the sudden ruckus. Alpha had initiated the attack.
"They are here!" the darkened Hena hissed, flinching at the unexpected violence and crouching closer to me.
"How?" his Spirit bristled, confused and prideful and scared.
I turned back and looked at him with such purpose that the Hena flinched again. His red eyes started glowing as they reflected the harsh light emanating from my own. My entire body fell under their shadow, blanketing me with impenetrable darkness. He recognized me then, realizing his mistake, and took off running, yelping as if I pursued him, but I had no need. Our strategy was to play to our greatest strength, the power of the pack, and each of us fought as a hunting pair. The grass rippled harshly. One sharply pitched yelp followed. A pair of soft, small feathery wings winked against the stars. My partner kept good watch. I almost did not catch Aquino pass amidst the warfare spreading around us. Friend and foe alike battled through the darkness.
But why target the Bell Sprouts? For a song?
That was when I heard it. The notes of an ugly twisted language masking themselves in heavenly harmony. Paired with the sounds of slaughter, the song was nearly indistinguishable from the growling and whimpering rising into the night. It was the Shaman. I recognized the flare of her curses woven within the deceivingly melodic notes. This music originated from the orchestra of the underworld. A perish song meant to strike down all that heard it. With that much power imbued in the Shaman's voice, many would instantly fall prey to it, never to rise again. It mattered not that her own forces would get caught in the attack because every death added to her army of freshly turned ghosts.
Immediately, I took to singing in a similar manner. I knew not the words, but I did not have to. I let her song fill my mouth. I sucked it in, remembering what it was like to speak Giratina's name. The language all curses were born from. My mouth moved, quickly catching up, yet nothing came out of it. Instead, an awful taste filled my mouth. My poison sacks discharged and stomach flipped. I winced as the muscles working my jaw cramped and shuddered. The Shaman continued to project her voice, but I chewed up her words, silencing them as soon as they were spoken so that an eerie chorus of strings haunted what escaped my bite.
The tempo picked up. Each word mutated with complexity. I pinched my eyes. My gums grew red and inflamed. The curses filling my mouth spilled down my throat, making me nauseous and dizzy and ready to vomit. I took them in to spare the others, but the poison inside was building up, filling every tissue and cell when my fangs could hold no more. My legs began to shake. Blood dripped down from my gums, coating my teeth and mouth. Her song intensified. I staggered a step, soul oozing in streams down my chin and neck to turn my grey fur black. The Bell Sprouts started tolling, ringing, and jingling in warning. The Shaman's song peaked in a devastating climax.
Then, it abruptly ended as I clamped my jaws together and held them tight. I squeezed my eyes shut. Tears stained my face. Water and blood gushed forth, washing away the last and useless empty notes of the Shaman's song. The attack, thwarted. I collapsed, blood still running across my teeth, jaws propped open and trembling. The very touch of the air burned every nerve and root. I opened my tear logged eyes to screaming. The Shaman's ire was too volcanic to contain. It echoed into the sky, giving rise to an earthquake of intensifying magnitude. The ground began to shake, vibrating me to near numbness. Something underneath the ground dampened the waves. It buffeted the attack to tolerable levels before stopping it all together. Legs steadying to manageable proportions, I stiffly pushed myself up in a shuffle of paws.
Distant pounding thumped closer. More tremors threatened my balance. Heavy schuffs of dirt filled the night as slanted slabs of rock began thrusting themselves out of the surface. They grew like a trail of hellish thorns, forever altering the terrain to more mountainous proportions. They spiked out of the grass, jettisoning creatures into the air. They struck hard and fast and without warning. One jagged piece of rock jumped up from the ground and struck me in the chest. It pushed me up into the air. I did not remember hitting the ground. I did not remember much of anything for a while. I could not breathe and the struggle for air rushed enough panic in my veins to jumpstart my consciousness again.
When I finally awoke, three slabs of rock had angled themselves from the ground to encase me in a rock tomb. I was lucky they had not grown in such a way that they crushed me between their edges. I sat up and immediately regretted it but lying down felt no better. The weight of gravity alone warned me of how fragile my condition was. My aching ribs told me my ability to protect myself had shattered like my bones when the rock struck me. A tomb was befitting of my condition. I swallowed blood with every reflex from the song. It was quiet in the stone prison. Even safe to a certain extent. The darkness was whole and full even by nighttime standards.
Just how much time had passed?
Mere seconds lost in a fight could decide the battle. I would surely die if I did nothing. If my injuries did not take me, starvation would. The pack might try to dig me out, but they might not know I was here. They could all be dead or trapped just like me and in need of rescuing themselves. With a few steadying huffs, I dragged myself up. My back legs gave out. I fell into the rock wall. Pain exploded in my eyes. Finally, some light. If I was in pain, I was not dead yet, which meant I could still fight.
Just a little more. Then, I could rest.
I scratched the grass. Its thickness worked against me. I tried again, pawing at the surface, too weak to dig, but a knock was all I needed. The ground beneath me began to move. It bubbled up against my paws, pushing me back into a corner. The earth sunk down and gave way. I tensed, afraid I would drop, but the sinkhole sloped downward, giving me a sense of direction in my blindness. Was it a cave in from all of the displaced rock?
There was movement. Small pillars bumped into my paws from below. I lifted them and the bumping came again. Round and soft, they were the heads of Little Diggers encouraging me down into the underground with passionate nudges. The moment I stepped toward the slope, they stopped and spread out, rippling through the earth ahead of me like a sonic wave, showing me it was not hole, but a tunnel.
A way out.
I crawled down into it, sucking back sharp breaths with every movement. Little by little, I scooted through the path they created, but I did not make it far before I collapsed, exhausted. I had not the dexterity nor the strength to wiggle through. When my head dropped down and stayed there, the earth rippled again. The Little Diggers rolled under me, trying to get me to move, but the air was stale and filled with dusty dirt. I had gone from tomb to grave. I did not know if I should apologize or thank the Diggers for their hard work, but they refused to give up on me. The floor dropped some more as they began to widen the tunnel.
A large trio of them came in from the side and plowed their way through, expanding the tunnel so much that I had room to stand. The air cleared a little, enticing the freshness of an exit to the surface. Like my travels in the Great Cave and the burrows of the Bone Wars, I abandoned my senses and followed the will of the Spirit, hobbling along with the wall to support me whenever I stopped to rest. Each break grew a little longer. I lost sense of time although I did not have much to begin with. Between being struck by the rock and crawling through the endless dark, I had no way of knowing just how much I missed. Only that it was too much, whatever it was.
Eventually, the earth sloped upwards. Smoke carried on the air. Light trickled in from up ahead. I hurried towards the end. The light grew brighter. It began to flicker. A fire was burning somewhere. The end curved up vertically. I put my two paws on the edge and pulled myself up, kicking with my good back leg until I was out of the tunnel. I stumbled at the surface, but quickly righted myself. The land opened up. The night sky seemed limitless compared to the confined passage, but I traveled too far down. Death had already taken me for what I arrived in was hell.
The grasslands were on fire. Toxic green flames burned the vegetation despite its wetness from the storm. It was hellfire. Cursed flames. Sparks and cinders and ash polluted the sky. They rained down around a ring of fire that had ignited the inferno. The Shaman stood within it. She wielded her club in one hand. It burned with the same unnatural flames at both ends. Three Bone Taker skulls were tied together with sinew and dangled from her other fist. The taint of the underworld had dyed her skin a dark purplish black. A matching mark crowned her skull face at the forehead with a sinister diadem.
Two Mighty Hena lay on the ground around her. Gruff Growl and Keokuk White Echo. Yet when I looked for their souls, I felt them stuck to the skulls in the Shaman's hand. Three skulls for her three hatchlings. Three sacrifices to obtain this taboo power. The Shaman had become a living ghost. An accumulation of so much evil it was as if I stood before a concentrated legion even more devastating than the one at the moon altar because this ritual was successful and the monster had been freed from its confinement. I fell a third time. Smoke burned my eyes. Both lips peeled back, but I could not make a sound. My chest shuddered with tearful sobs. Each one impaled my heart with broken ribs. I closed my jaws and it felt as if my teeth pierced through my head and into my skull.
The Shaman had three skulls for three victims. Only one more to fill. The last skull, still empty, belonged to the Shaman's first born of the clutch, a female like her. Strongest of them all because of the potential she had to be like her mother. The last of her clutch. The end of a bloodline. Only the most fitting of souls could fill that skull and the Shaman set her sights on Omega who was trapped in the circle of fire with her. One eye blinded with blood, he lifted his head, panting heavily. Barring his teeth, he charged. The Shaman laughed, pulled the end of her club around and blew on it, creating a blast of fire that sent Omega skidding in the dirt. She meant to kill him.
To steal his soul.
I wobbled forward. A collection of ghosts floated above the battleground in a frenzy. Some fought at the edges of the fiery moat where the pack desperately tried to make their way in, but the flames were too thick and too high and would burn without end at the touch like a holocaust.
If only I had my blessings!
I dragged myself towards the inferno. The heat tossed my coat. The flames burned the hairs on my face. Ashes caught in my mane. Embers glowed at the tips, threatening to catch fire.
"Mother, no!"
A body slammed into mine, holding me from my suicidal trek. It was Phantom Back.
"Let go of me," I cried, pushing against him.
"Trust the pack," he harshly whispered.
His words stunned me into silence. They dried my tears and held me still. I looked at him and he looked back. An old light I thought had withered away in his fall from grace shined in his eyes, rekindled in the fight I had lost track of. My emotions had gotten the best of me. My composure as Mother burnt away like the rest of my might in my imbalance. I had lost sight of the most important part of being in a pack. To help me remember it, Phantom Back looked at the circle again, guiding my sight back to the battle.
Yes, some had fallen. But not all.
Omega put his paws underneath him again. He lifted his sagging head, and there, in the light of the cold underworld, I saw the silver lining overlaying his face like a helmet. The Spirit was with him, protecting him, just like it once did me. His eyes glowed brightly underneath, clear and crisp and so full of life despite the blood and dirt and drool coating him with battle. And it was not just him. Phantom Back burned beside me, black Berserker flames coolly managed by the presence of the pack, and if there was a pack, there was an Alpha.
He came without warning. Charging with the pressure of a stampede and plowing through the darkness, commanding the very shadows around us. Mato jumped and leapt out of the night. He flew over the moat of fire as if he had grown wings. The ghosts scattered, terrified by his arrival. Mato's body stretched out as he soared through the air. The hellfire below reached up for him, tongues dancing with screams and screeches and curses. Not as much as a lick tasted his fur for their mouths were empty. Useless without any teeth. Mato's jaws opened wide. Shadows gushed out of them, snarling and whipping and catching fire until his whole body burned.
As he passed over the ring and into the Shaman's domain, her spiritual pressure revealed his own. Like the light of the holocaust, the true nature of each party was revealed. Mato landed in front of Omega. From the tips of his claws to the end of his tail and the point of his ears, his body burned with black Berserker fire. His eyes glowed as red as a blood moon. The teeth in his jaws burned back the flesh to the bone. Yet the blessings of the Spirit also armored him in glowing white and silver plates. An ethereal image of a Mighty Hena overshadowed him, bleeding black smoke from the cracks in between. Such Spirit was worthy of his name. Alpha of Alphas. Greatest of Mighty Hena.
Champion of the Night.
Mato wasted no time with intimidation. He launched into an attack the moment all four paws touched the ground, kicking up ashes and grass as he disappeared in a maneuver that brought him face to face with the Shaman as soon as the concussion blew out. She caught Mato's bite by bracing her flaming club between both arms, but she could not stop him. The attack pushed the Shaman back. Her arms shook as she skid backward against his momentum. They gave way, just like her legs, as Mato shot them both out of the circle of fire. Flames spat out around the collision. More grass and cinders danced through the air. Mato clamped down on the club. The Shaman refused to let it go and jarred backwards the full length of her arms when they slid to a sudden stop. It created enough distance for Mato to thrash her sideways and into the ground with a shake of his head. He then slapped her down the other way.
When she continued to resist, he began to spin. Two rotations and a well-timed release flung her off into the dark. Without the light of the ghoulish flames, Mato's appearance returned to normal. The Shaman landed with a wheezing bounce. Gritting her teeth, she hurried to her feet just in time for Mato to body slam her at full capacity. The blow sent her flying again. This time, with a landing that jumbled up her limbs. The Shaman brought her club into position once more. The reflex caught Mato's next bite, burning armor returning to his face. This time, the bone cracked between his jaws, but it refused to break completely. Too many souls were still trapped within. So he rammed the club into the Shaman's throat instead.
For a moment, he strangled the Bone Taker with her own prized possession, but at that distance, even her short limbs could land a blow. The Shaman double kicked Mato in the chest, but he outmatched her in shear physicality. He yanked his catch backwards, forcing her to her feet. She used the momentum, lunged forward, and bashed their skulls together. Mato's head dropped, but his bite remained steadfast. He rammed the club back into its owner and released. Expecting him to hold on like before, the Shaman stumbled back and swung out her arms for balance. The three skulls dangling from her one hand swung out into the open and away from her.
Mato blinked past her and snatched them in his teeth, thievery at its best. The Shaman swung her club after him, smashing through black smoky remains. They dispersed quickly around the flames still clinging to the bone. Mato reappeared behind her a short distance away. He walked to a stop, dropped one skull on the ground and held two in his mouth. He pulled the ligament holding all three together and snapped it with a jerk of his head. This way, the souls could not transfer from one to another. He then crunched the two skulls between his teeth, freeing those trapped within, and looked up at the Shaman, bits dribbling from his jaws. At this distance, his armor was feint and eerie.
The Shaman tottered back into place and stomped a foot on the ground to stop herself. Fist clenched, eyes screaming through bared teeth, she forced the earth to tremble. Mato stayed on his paws, seemingly unmoved as if he existed on a different plane. He made sure she was watching when he too stomped on the third and final skull so hard that parts of it puffed up as dust underneath him. It was not worthy of his teeth. The unnatural flames at the end of the Shaman's club burned low. Her skin began to lighten. The dark stain faded into molted blotches before disappearing all together. Her diadem disintegrated. The Shaman returned to normal.
The ritual was over.
Cursing us down to our very souls, she threw her club with everything she had. The bone rushed straight for Mato's head. He snatched it out of the air in a single bite. The bone shattered as soon as his jaw clenched. White shards exploded outward as the bone cracked and broke on both sides of his mouth. The pieces sprayed into the grass and clattered against themselves on the ground. The Shaman leaned forward in a shriek, blood weeping from the sockets of her skull. The unseen damage of the ritual and this fight revealed. Mato lifted his head and howled, dissipating the sound of her cries like the puff of her daughter's skull.
Wicked tongues never stood a chance against the tradition of our ancestors. Bone Taker words only strengthened themselves whereas the voice of the Mighty Hena empowered those around us. The pack joined in Alpha's summons, raising a chorus that filled the night with life. The grasslands had no special place of power because life was spread far and wide in these open plains. These lands were far too vast for its energy to collect in one spot. One for all and all for one. No creature could master its energy. That was why there was the pack. For when we came together, we created that temple, that altar, that portal in which the Spirit came into this world. It called to us now in the voice of our Alpha.
Having followed the fight, we revealed ourselves as shadow. Dashing, stalking, and snarling in the darkness around them now that Alpha invited us to join the fight. The Shaman frantically looked from one side to another, unable to keep up. She slowly backed away even though she was surrounded because the hulking shadow of Alpha looming in front of her was far more dangerous. She was so focused on the threat in front of her that she did not realize she retreated to the edge of the battlefield, the very spot upon which I stood. She backed up to a wall of darkness.
Leaning closer on her heel, all I had to do was remain still as her neck came within a whisker of my nose. I wrinkled my muzzle so that nothing but my teeth came out of the darkness. Blood stained and dusted with the dirt of a tomb. I did not even have to trigger an icy fang for my lips to carry the chill of the underworld. I exhaled lightly. Just enough for a cool invisible puff of air to tease the back of the Shaman's neck. Her eyes widened. Bloodshot and shaking, they slowly turned to look behind her. I lowered my silent snarl and the shadows relaxed, pulling away to reveal the marks on my face. The Shaman stared at me, quivering.
She should have kept her eyes on the shadows and wondered where they went. Pooling behind her, the pack had already closed the distance. They would tear her to pieces within moments, and yet, when I looked at her, I felt something prick my paws. My jaws began to ache. That terrible insatiable shadow tightened its grip around my neck. All because of a single, simple, soul shattering thought that suddenly crossed my mind when I looked at her.
If the Shaman was here, where was Exile?