The People's Pride

The constellation of the owl is not as bright tonight as it had been in years past.  Many of the brightest stars seemed to have submitted to the constellation of the sword that started to form in the eastern sky a few years ago.  Beneath this sign that represented the peoples' tie to the world around them, a girl screams.
The scream is a scream of frustration as she is dragged through the village and dropped just inside the hut she shares with her mother and older brothers.
"Young girls do not go hunting with the men!"  Her mother is not yelling, but the words are as sharp as the spear she had been carrying that her mother threw into the eternal fire.  As the door flap closes, Vreena feels her world close about her.  She can still feel the yearning in her loins as she remembers all those boys mounted and ready to leave on the hunt.  It would have been a great hunt for one of those boys.  She slowly gets up and walks over to her lion-skin mat to sit and wait out her mother's wrath.  What was her mother's problem anyway?  Vreena had 7 brothers, her mother must know what it's like to need the comforts of a man at her side.
As she calms down, she remembers the meditation the FireMaker had given her to help cool the need she felt.  She begins to imagine herself in the cold river fishing in the old ways of her people.  She imagines the feel of the cool water penetrating her stiff linens and chilling her skin.  She imagines scanning the water searching for the succulent salmon that was one of the few joys in her life.  She imagines slowly lowering herself into the water and enacting the ability of her people to match her body temperature and smells to the surrounding water.  She imagines the feel of the water flowing past her in its frantic race to the freedom of the ocean.  She imagines contorting her muscles in anticipation of the strike.  She holds this image in her mind for many minutes knowing that it’s the cool water and refocusing of her eagerness that is the key to the success of the meditation.  Slowly, gradually, her raw lust starts to change into a hunter’s tightly controlled anticipation.  Then that begins to fade too as she holds the image to let the adrenaline that holds her captive slowly recede. 
After what seems hours, she opens her eyes.  The sun’s shadow under the door hasn’t changed much at all so she knows she still has a long wait before her mother will release the locking spell on the only opening in the walls of the hut.  She starts turning inward to project her senses beyond herself and her hut to spy on those around the village, when a loud explosion shakes the ground she is sitting on.  Her concentration is shattered by the sound she can feel in her bones.  She can hear panic from the other villagers.  She hears the clashing of weapons and desperation in the voices of the women as they seem to be fighting off another raid from the barbaric human tribes.  Of course the humans would attack now.  The men are not more than an hour out of the village and won’t be back until well after dark.
Another heavy explosion, one much closer, doesn't just shake the ground but blows a small hole in the corner of the hut just big enough to crawl through.  The only thing holding Vreena from succumbing to her own hysteria is her anger toward her mother for not even letting Vreena out of their home to help protect the village from the ever more constant raids.  Everyone knows that she is the best woman in the village with a spear.  She is almost as good as the boys.  She pulls her thoughts over her fear and anger and begins to creep cautiously toward the hole in the wall.  She looks out through the hole to search for the cause of the explosion, but there is a body blocking most of her vision.  The body lying there tossed aside like yesterday’s waste once belonged to her mother.  Her anger refocuses on the humans that killed the only woman that might have been able to help Vreena understand her magic or her femininity.  Her thoughts vanish beneath a hurricane of rage and sorrow.  She feels suddenly lonely and neglected.  The sounds of the battle are suddenly lost to her.  Her ears and throat start to burn and her lungs refuse to take in air.  Then she realizes that the piercing scream that drowned out the battle is also invading her throat and ears and ripping the air from her lungs.  Gradually, her scream takes on a life of its own and begins to draw on her own internal magic.  Vreena feels as though her entire existence is being sucked out of her.  Then blessed silent darkness is all she knows.

Awareness is slowly coming back to her.  She feels different, more whole than she has ever felt, and freed of an overwhelming burden.  She is sharply aware of her physical desires.  She can feel the wolf skin under her.  She isn’t in her own bed.  She can smell the trout cooking over the fire, it’s not salmon, but it still makes her mouth water.  She can acutely feel the man sitting next to her. Though he is much older than her, she can feel the lust he suppresses deeply inside.  Slowly, she tries to open her eyes.  They burn and pull but they won’t open even to squint.  It feels like those malformed human children she has heard about.  Her eyes have grown over and sealed shut.  Panic begins to rise again.
“Just calm down,” the voice belongs to the Fire Maker.  “You’ve gone through quite a change and it will take some time to get used to your new powers.”
Vreena is only barely keeping her voice from reaching for her soul again.  “I can’t open my eyes!”
“They would only prevent you from learning what your new abilities can do.”  There is fear in his voice.  “Besides, there are ways to see without your eyes.”
Fear takes her thoughts and throws them toward terror.  ‘New abilities?  What the fuck is he talking about?  Am I going to become some kind of freak like him whose only future is to find a remote tribe that will only see me as a path toward some old forgotten god?  I need to get out of this place!  Not just the fire maker’s hut but the village.  Hell, out of the wilderness all together.  But where could I go?’  Vreena feels her control slipping away again like the last inches of a blood soaked rope sliding from her raw hands as she hangs over a bottomless chasm of despair.
‘Irindonerridia has teachers that can teach me how to use this thing inside me.  But, what if I can feel other peoples’ feelings.  A city means many people with a gigantic stew pot of emotions.  I would go insane just being there and feeling all those feelings.  There are universities and tutors there who actually understand what I can do, but getting to them means going through the city.’  Slowly, she is able to envelope her fear in cold determination.  She gets a hold on her emotions and begins to formulate a plan.
“I need to go home.  I want to be alone.  I need to think this out.”  She lies.  The Firemaker is an old fool, but if she tells him she’s ok, he’ll know she isn’t telling him the whole truth.  She can’t stay here being invaded by his private emotions either.  He offers little argument since he knows she won’t let him help her if he holds her here against her will.

At the hut she shared with her mother and brothers, she prepares for her journey.  All the food she has that won’t spoil on the road fits into a small pack: a few hard bread rolls, the remnants of a round of horse milk cheese, and some dried horse jerky.  An old travel cloak her oldest brother covered her in to carry her home from the last hunters’ feast covers and protects the food.  She grabs her mother’s pouch of dried herbs for healing and flavouring and ties it to the outside of the pack.  The preparations are easy without her eyes because she is in her own home.  Now she just needs to wait for the camouflage of father night to make good her final departure from this hell of a heritage.
To pass the time she cleans up the remaining evidence of the raid from around her hut.  Someone had removed and likely buried the body of her mother.  Somehow she feels guilty about that.  Not because it should have been her that buried her mother, but because she is thankful for not having to be the one to clean up that gory mess.  And because she isn’t as distraught as most would think she should be about the death of her mother.  She picks up the branches and tattered pieces of leather that were strewn about the tiny yard outside her hut using her newly purposed senses to find them.  The rocks and stones, she uses to block the hole in the corner of her house.  All this serves to use up most of the day and her energy.  She goes inside to eat some of the fruits and berries her mother picked the day before she died.  They seem to taste sweeter than usual.  Then she lies down on her mat to rest before her night’s journey begins.

The night is cool when she slowly sneaks out of her hut just before moon-rise.  She is carrying the last of the berries to finish as she tiptoes out of the village on the path toward the burial mound where her mother would have been buried with the rest of the tribesmen her tribe has buried for 3 generations.  Once past the mound, she will be mostly guessing the path to the elven capital.  The only thing she knows is that it is in the southern forest of Donerridia.  So, if she goes generally south, she thinks, she should find the forest eventually.
The journey south is mostly a haze of dreaming, walking, and hiding.  While she walks, she dreams of the things she will learn and what it will be like living in the grand capital city.  She will finally learn real magic and from real wizards.  The paths leading south are many and winding and she often finds herself leaving them because they lead her less south and more east or west.  Many times on her journey, she senses plains animals, some of which are predators.  On these occasions she uses the ability natural to her people to blend in with her surroundings to become virtually invisible to them.  On a few instances, the creatures she encounters are less natural and simply blending in with her environment won’t help much.  Luckily for her, she has spent enough time with the hunters that she knows something about these creatures too and is still able to avoid them most of the time.
Once she uses her blending to avoid contact with a flock of birds.  She thought they might be pheasants or geese or something like that but as she comes closer in walking past them, she starts to sense an intelligent evil.  Not the danger of a predator on the hunt, but the truly evil of something that hates life.  She stops and crouches low hoping that whatever it is hasn’t already noticed her.  Slowly, avoiding quick motions, she lies down and begins to turn herself inward.  It takes a little effort, but she is able to project her senses outside herself.  She moves her ethereal self at an indirect path toward the creatures.  She can sense that they are searching for her.  As she approaches them she is moving away from her prone, meditating body.  Once she gets within a few meters of them, she can sense that they aren’t natural at all but warped by magic.  They smell and move like chickens, but they hunt not for food, but for the pleasure of killing.  When she gets close enough that she can get a sense of their numbers, they somehow notice her.  Strangely though, it’s not her body they notice but the essence of her meditation.  They turn toward her ghostly form as one, though there must be more than forty of the terrifying creatures.  They have ‘smelled’ the fear building in her as she realizes she doesn’t even have a spear to protect herself.  She moves away from them and away from her body hoping to get them to chase her and save her body.  It works as they quickly and methodically form a semicircle with the points closest to the direction she is going.  With her fear quickly turning to panic, she realizes they are far more intelligent than she imagined.  Her only hope now is to keep her meditation long enough to lure them far enough away that she can wake up and run before they find her body.  Luckily enough she can move her ethereal self without effort so speed is only limited by her imagination.  She soon leaves them behind and can hear their chilling guttural warble as they give chase at a surprising speed.  Just as her concentration begins to reach its limited distance, she senses a village.  She wanders why the village seems to be populated with statues?  Her meditation begins to waver and soon breaks, but just before it does she senses a child wandering the statues sadly looking for something.  Did she just sense the child turn to stone too?

She doesn’t know what happened to the child and she can’t remember where she is.  She’s no longer floating around as a sightless ghost, because her connection snapped suddenly.  She tries to look around but her eyes won’t open.  Frustration wakes to replace the fear of a moment ago.  She can’t see and her body doesn’t want to move.  Slowly, feeling begins to return to her limbs, or is her mind just remembering she has limbs?  Her legs start to tingle as though she has been sitting at the village ritual for hours and just stood to leave.  She remembers the raid, the Firemaker, her eyes, leaving the village, travelling outside her body, and the child in the village … was he even real?  And she remembers the birds.  The birds!  They’ll be looking for her! Run! She needs to leave this place!  Slowly, painfully slow, she gathers her legs under her and tries to stand.  It takes a couple minutes, but she does manage to get to her feet.  Fuck the pins and needles are going to drive her insane!  She stands there for a second to let the blood reach her toes.  A piercing scream reminds her of the danger she is in.  She turns away from the sound using her magical senses to ‘see’ her way and starts to jog erratically to get as much distance between her and the bird-creatures as she can.  Gradually, she steadies and picks up speed.  She runs for what she is sure must be hours. Her legs and lungs are going to leave the confederation of her body and form their own republic.  Then she just collapses in the middle of the trail she had been following.  She knows she should leave the trail and find shelter, but her body has stopped listening to the demands of her mind.  For now, she has decided to let her body win.

When she wakes this time, she sends out her senses to investigate her surroundings before moving.  The air is cooler. There is little movement from the animals and insects around her.  There doesn’t seem to be any danger in the nearby area.  She sits up and rummages through her pack for some food.  She hasn’t eaten for hours and sending her consciousness outside herself uses a lot of energy.  Now that she has slept, the food helps to return her to the calculating frame of mind that makes her most comfortable.  She repacks her belongings into her pack and continues her journey toward the forest that she thinks she can just sense over the horizon.
A couple more days of generally southern travel brings her to a village within sight of the forest called Donerridia.  Her food supplies ran out yesterday and she can’t hunt blind so she needs to go into the village to find more supplies.  A little news of where she is wouldn’t hurt either.  As she comes closer to the village, she sends out her senses to learn the type of people that live there.  She senses women and children in a large building grinding grain and making bread.  In a smaller hut, she picks up the distinct personality that only a holy man would possess.  “Are they all so self-important?”  She says quietly to herself.  She hears some of the older children walking into the fields around the village with baskets of fresh cooked food.  It’s then that she realizes this village cares for and guides the flora and fauna around their village, rather than foraging for miles around for food like her own village.  That’s where the men are and where the older children are taking the food in their baskets.  Some of these men have noticed her already and one has been watching her long enough that the children are asking him about her.
“How should I know who she is?  I’ve never seen her before either.”  His voice is neither youthful nor wise, but the strong voice of a hard worker who knows his place in the world.
“We thought you were expecting her.  You saw her before anyone,” says the oldest of the children, a girl by the voice, approaching the first voice.  The other men stab their tools into the ground and converge on the children as if they brought pieces of heaven in those little baskets.  Vreena has always been able to get her way with the men easiest so she adjusts her destination to just outside the rough circle formed by the hungry men and their child saviors.
“Is there someplace a tired traveler can get a bowl of soup and somewhere to sit and eat it?”  She can already sense fear in them.  They must have noticed that her eyes have grown over.  They must think she appeared out of nowhere like a prophet or an omen.  “I don’t want to interrupt your work, but I have been travelling many days and need to eat something hot and rest my feet.  Is there somewhere like that around here?”
For a moment, the silence continues.  Then the strong voice says, “My daughter can make you something.”  He doesn’t volunteer anything more. 
“Follow me,” it’s the voice of the girl.  She doesn’t seem excited about leaving the fields.  Her voice has a hint of pouty resignation in it as she walks away a stiffly. Vreena follows her into the village that seems deserted with most of the men in the field and most of the women and children in the large grinding building.  They cross a bridge over a babbling stream that separates the village from the fields the men are working in.  There are several mud and clay huts that the villagers live in and the big house made from logs and packed with mud that they use for the work they do.  There is a road that runs through the middle of town and aims in the direction of the forest.  It doesn’t seem as different from her own village as she had hoped it would.
The girl leads Vreena to a modest hut facing the fire well that shows that this village shares the same beliefs as her own village.  Inside, the hut feels so similar to her own that she almost expects her mother to welcome her home with the same bitter expectation she always had.  In the center of the hut is a circle of stones that contain a fire with a hole in the conical hide roof to let the smoke out.  Along two walls lay a couple of sleeping pallets covered with deer hides.  Along another wall, she can smell the bread and meat that must be what these villagers eat.  The bread is the only sensation that saves her from being completely overrun by the feeling of coming home.  It smells as though it was made from the beer the humans drink.  The home feels so much like her own that she begins to miss the comforting presence of her older brothers.  Vreena has to stop and extend her attention outward toward the fields again to remind her that this isn’t her house or even her village.  Once she recovers control of her emotions again, she can hear the girl saying something to her.
“Sit there by the fire and I’ll get you some food.”  If Vreena were any other traveller, she would be insulted by the coolness in her hostess’s voice.  But she isn’t any other traveller and is quite used to people, even her own people, talking to her as though she were insignificant so she barely even notices.  “I have mead or honeyed tea to drink … “
“Tea please,” Vreena is at home enough in this place that she figures it would be useful to respond to them with the same cool courtesy she used with her own people, since they were already treating her as her village had,  “with two drops of honey.”  She sits down by the fire and waits for the girl to bring her what would qualify as guest food.  She lets her senses seep out into the room a little as she sometimes would do when the conversation didn’t include her, and it clearly didn’t right now.  She senses a kind of practical love that seems to permeate everything as though the family that lived here really is happy.  When she touches the girl with her other senses though, she is a little surprised to find the girl is with child.  She doesn’t act like a girl who is married nor does she seem unhappy.  Maybe she really is the woman of the house and her father is just staying with her.  The young lady absently sets a clay plate in front of Vreena on smooth topped stone that smells as though many a traveller has slopped their fare on it.  And it occurs to Vreena that this girl must have served others in much the same way before.  Her father seems to naturally assume the role of inn keeper and she didn’t sense any kind of public building like the humans would use to keep travellers out of their homes.  Vreena eats the food set before her with the passion of a beggar, which, she thinks, is what she is right now, and contemplates how these facts might affect her.  The pregnant girl without a husband might indicate this village actually has less in common with her own people than she originally thought, since it was clear she still had the respect of the men.  The girl is serving Vreena herself instead of deferring to the holy man like her own people would do.  She knew she would have to prepare for a change in how people behaved when she went to the city, but she is surprised to see people here are so much different from her own people especially after noticing how similar their village is to her own.
“Do you live here with your dad?”  Vreena tries to sound like she was just making conversation while she listens carefully to the unspoken words for clues to the girl’s curious situation.
“My dad and I with my brother yes,” the girl responds absently.
‘That doesn’t explain where the child came from,’ Vreena thinks to herself.  “Do they mind that every young man in the village is looking at you to be his mate?” 
“They protect me from the dangerous ones and let me choose how to treat the rest,” she’s getting into a rhythm as though she has been asked these questions a hundred times before.
“You must have a favorite.”
“Not really, but my dad has a couple of them that he asks to help me with things to keep them closer to me than the rest.”  Vreena tries to hear the feelings behind the words.  “I don’t mind them really, but none are different enough for me to leave my dad all alone with no one to care for him.”
“Where is your mother?”  Vreena asks.
“My mother died when I was a little girl.  I remember very little about her.  It’s always been my dad, my brother, and I.” 
“And your brother.  How does he feel about the boys seeking you?”
“He likes it because it leaves all the other girls in the village for him.  He has the pick of the litter you might say.”
“It seems to me that you do too.  You had the attention of all the boys and half the men in the field when I walked up.”
“Maybe, but none of them care enough about what a girl is inside to bring me any happiness.”
“What do you look for in a husband to be?”  There must be some reason the girl is hiding the father of her baby, Vreena is sure if it.
With the practiced grace of one who doesn’t want anyone to really get to know her, the girl answers, “oh the same as most girls, an honest, hardworking, kind man that can provide for my family and loves me for who I am inside.”
Vreena is starting to get frustrated at the girl’s evasiveness.  She decides to stop being polite.  “You say you want the same things as most girls, yet you say none of the boys in your village would make you happy.  There must be something that makes you want something different than the other girls.”  This girl is hiding something that might help Vreena get a better understanding of what to expect in the city when she uses her powers to ‘see’ things others can’t.  “Do your father and brother know you are with baby?”  How can this average girl find happiness while pregnant and with the dad clearly not involved.
“What do I want that makes me different?”  Vreena can finally hear anger in the girl’s voice.  “I want what other girls only pretend they care about!  I want a happy family and that includes my dad and brother!  And if that means I have to make some sacrifices so they can be happy too, who am I to be selfish!  Yes, they both know I am pregnant.  And yes, they knew who the dad was.  They both approved when I suggested it.”  The comfort has definitely left the conversation.  “What about you!  How strange it is that a girl barely older than I am has wandered into our humble little village with no food or supplies.  You are clearly not an adventurer.  Yet you are over cautious with your words and tried very hard to keep the conversation focused on me to avoid having to answer any unwelcome questions about yourself.  I had thought just to feed you and send you on your way with no more than a “Safe Journeys” to take with you unless you could pay for more, which you obviously cannot.  So if you don’t mind, I would like to leave the inquisition for the FireMaker when the baby’s born and I won’t tell anyone that you ran away from some prearranged marriage or sacrifice or something!”
Yup, the gentleness had certainly gone from the girl’s voice.  While Vreena broods over the implications of digging for more details from the girl, she decides she would be better off leaving instead of trying to find some way to get food to take with her.  She stands and curtsies to her hostess with a “Thank you milady,” and leaves the hut to continue her journey to the capital.

She isn’t even out of the village when she remembers she can’t walk to the capital without any supplies.  The girl won’t give her anything to take with her that’s for sure.  She looks around with her senses at the small huts that line the path out of the village at this end and wanders if one of them might have something she could just take with her.  She doesn’t want to risk asking one of the other villagers and having them react the same way the girl did and she certainly doesn’t have any guilt about taking stuff from them.  She walks over to the nearest one and sends her senses inside.  The interior feels empty of people so she enters and starts to search for things she can carry with her.  She quickly spies some peaches in a crate on the far side and what smells like salted bear hanging in a net from the roof posts that supports the conical smoke vent.  She starts to scan the hut for something to put the food into for carrying it.  In her hunting she comes across a newly made doe skin tunic and pants that look to be fit for a girl about her size.  She removes her own battered clothes and pulls the tunic over her head.
As she settles it around her very feminine curves, a pair of strong hands grab her around the waste and pull her roughly against a very masculine body and holds her, tightly restricting her movements.  “I knew you would try to steal something,” it’s the voice of a man used to pushing people around.  As she wriggles and struggles, she begins to notice a prominent lump wedging itself into the cleft of her buttocks.  This she understands and starts to move more seductively as she reaches out with her senses to grab his lust the way he grabbed her body.  She only resists enough to make him believe she isn’t volunteering herself and delves deeper into his lust and intensifies it so that he loses all consciousness to it and becomes a beast of pure lust.  He doesn’t even think as he removes his pants and starts to give what men have wanted to give her since she first hit womanhood.  He isn’t the first and she knows how to remove herself from her body and only feel the overpowering feeling of lust.  She consecrates on making sure he has no conscious reasoning left and that his entire being is focused on fulfilling his lustful desires.  Once he finishes, she locks his reasoning mind into the lust that is now satiated and wanting to sleep so that as she pulls her thoughts back into her own body, he lays down on a nearby pallet without so much as a look in her direction and immediately falls asleep.  With a satisfied smile, she cleans herself and pulls on the soft new pants that match the tunic she is now wearing.

She scans around the room with her senses again and, this time, sees a shoulder bag that looks like it could hold all the things she might need for the trip through forest.  She fills it with the food she found earlier and a few herbs she recognizes.  She grabs the travelling cloak hanging by the door on her way out.
The day seems somehow warmer and brighter that it did a few minutes ago.  She is very light on her feet as she makes her way into the forest with a little remembered tune she knows her mother used to sign to her brothers as they lay in their cradles as babies.