Control Comes from Within

True to his word, Afon had me and the other envoys up at the crack of dawn, and we were packed and ready to go within the hour. The chief sent us off, giving our group a number of parting gifts: food and water for three days, a pair of salamanders that they bred for use as mounts, and a collection of curved knives that I recognized as teeth.

After my little healing spree, the tribe had apparently decided to repay me with gifts of ill-fitting clothes that had leather undersides and disturbingly, an outer layer of blue lizard scales. I was a little put-off by the bundle of clothes made of their shed skins, but I took it in stride, bowing and thanking the chief for the gifts. Everyone exchanged farewells, and then we were off once more, racing towards the council with haste.

Our group now had mounts, and the additional speed they provided would see us reaching the council in roughly one month. I was aware that Vor World (yeah that wasn’t the official name, but the planet didn’t have a name as far as I knew, so that was what I referred to it as, in the safety of my mind) was much larger than Earth, but there was a difference between learning something while safely ensconced in the comfortable chairs of the library, and personally racing across each mile of the endless plains of the world’s largest continent.

As a famous person whose name I couldn’t recall once said, there was a difference between knowing something, and knowing something.

Speed was our main priority, and with that in mind, Afon unilaterally declared that the slowest and worst runners among our group would be the ones riding the mounts. I expected more grumbles and maybe a hiss or a growl of dissatisfaction, but everyone abided by his decision, as Cuul and Mohl, two of the reptilian beastfolk, had one salamander to themselves, while I sat behind Zanth, his spidery limbs thankfully curled forward and nowhere close to mine. The bumping and jostling of the salamander’s sprinting made me bounce up and down a few times, but the ridges of its scales had enough space for me to get a good grip with my fingers and latch onto them during times of turbulence.

Many people complained about soreness and chafing while learning to ride, and that their first time caused their inner thighs to chafe and bleed, and their butt to throb with pain for hours afterwards.

I felt none of that, and that was even including the fact that there was no saddle or padding on the salamander’s back. Once again, I mentally patted myself on the back for improving my original breathing technique, and modifying it to improve my general physical capabilities.

We left the territory of the blue-scaled lizard tribe in a few hours, and began trekking across the vast grassy plains, the four envoys who were non-mounted and relying only on their own legs to keep up doing an admirable job of maintaining a steady pace. They were always behind our mounts, but they were never out of sight.

That lasted until those of us in front were ambushed.

We were four days into our journey, the sun well into the sky, when colossal earthworms and moles, badgers and pangolins quietly flanked us and had us four surrounded in the space between heartbeats. I counted at least eighty animals and a handful of creatures, but thankfully there were no beasts.

“Human, use your magics to keep them away!” Zanth clicked at me, his teeth gnashing every time he spoke. “We hold until the others can reach us, understand?” He had no weapons to arm himself with, but he was preparing for battle nevertheless, as he jumped off the mount. Thirty feet away, Cuul and Mohl had dismounted as well, and were drawing their weapons from their backs as they faced the pack, their backs to each other.

“Yes!” I shouted. Defense was the priority, but nature magic would be harder to work with here. Every animal around us could burrow through the ground, disrupting any efforts I made to prevent their movements. Still, I would do what I could. I got off the mount as well, in case it lost control and ran off in the chaos that was headed for us.

The animals were circling us, searching for the weakest prey or the one that would give them the least trouble.

Not on my watch.

I quickly pulled up a circular stone fence that surrounded us, ten feet tall and with sharp spikes on the top. With my blood sense, I searched underground for any forces lying in wait, but there were none. So the animals here were all we had to deal with.

Easy.

I stretched my hands out, palms facing the horde that was finally leaping over the stone wall, and sensed their blood. It was much harder to replicate spells in battle conditions than in a testing room, but I steeled my nerves and focused on the blood. All the sources of it. One was jumping from body to body, delivering swift bites that delivered paralytic venom into bloodstreams. Two more had their claws outstretched and were biting or swiping into whatever got close.

Everything that jumped over the walls to get at us had received at least minor wounds, and that was what I capitalized on. I felt all the blood inside the stone fence, and just…pulled. With an improved level of will and control, I had segregated my allies from my foes, and drew out the blood that I sensed was inside a body that wanted to attack me. What followed was gory to the extreme.

Blood erupted out of every hole that the animals had, and only a few let out cries of pain and howls of disbelief as they fell to the ground, making a disgustingly goopy, multi-colored mess of blood, viscera, and body parts. It was probably difficult to make sounds when there was no blood pumping in your body.

I formed blood needles from the blood-soaked ground, and jabbed them into every brain I could feel, double-tapping the enemies and ensuring they were finished off. The grass was dyed red in an instant, and the stone fence had splatters on it that wouldn’t look out of place in a crime scene. My tentative allies, the envoys accompanying me to the trial that would determine my fate, finished slaying the creatures they were engaged with, and took an impassive look around at the carnage I had wrought.

In the initial confusion, our salamander mounts had run amok, doing their best to survive by avoiding everything that targeted them. Now, Zanth and the others had gotten them under control, letting them eat the bodies that were trying to eat us, not a minute ago. The irony was not lost on me.

The battle couldn’t have taken more than ten or fifteen minutes, but Afon and the others behind us hadn’t regrouped with the four of us yet. I took the opportunity to collect all the blood that had spilled, picking out any brain matter or muscle fibers and discarding them,assembling it into a sphere above my hand, and compressing the sphere until it resembled a maroon marble. I also slightly heated it up until I was sure that physically touching it wouldn’t immediately give me an infection.

Zanth nodded at me to approach him, and I could see they were cutting the bodies into short strips of meat, or chunks. Here in the beastkin continent, it was literally a ‘eat or be eaten’ type of mindset, the law of the jungle. I couldn’t help much with the ‘food’ preparation, so I was made to haul the bodies closer to where they were cutting them up.

“Should we not check on the others?” I asked Zanth, as he was closest to me.

“If they don’t come back in an hour, we will send someone,” he said, dismissing my concerns. For all that I was in two minds about my escorts, I didn’t want them to die if they didn’t deserve it. Now, one might argue that if they died in an ambush, they deserved it. I didn’t have that opinion.

Luckily, my worries were unfounded, as four figures came into sight soon after, the stone wall being reduced to pebbles earlier. Afon and the others were all unscathed, if slightly winded. Apparently, they had been waylaid by a similar ambush at the same time that we were. Afon posited that the animals saw our separated pack as an opportunity for some easy meat, a notion he swiftly disabused them of.

This battle illustrated his earlier comment about needing to travel with speed in a new light. If we were held up by constant beast assaults, our travel time would increase even further, and we might not reach the council before spring.

So, once again, Afon made a series of unilateral decisions. We would travel together from now on, rotating between who got to ride the mounts, except for me. I would have tamed one of the creatures that attacked us and used that as a mount, but that wasn’t as big a concern as survival when the attack happened.

The safest way to travel would be to take shelter with every tribe on our way to the council, as tribes made a point of regularly clearing the areas around their territory. The added safety meant we’d face less attacks, but according to Cuul, or Mohl, that would add at least another two weeks.

For now, we made haste, heading straight towards our destination, riding until the sun went down. Once night fell, we were lucky enough to stumble upon a small grove of trees, an elven addition to the landscape. Elves often planted trees when they roamed the beastfolk continent, placing seeds of whatever plant seemed most appropriate for future visitors.

And the wisdom of the elves was upheld once more, as Zanth informed us these trees released a subtle repellent scent that only beasts could detect. We would be safe sleeping within the copse of trees for the night.

It would be easier if the beastfolk had more cities and towns populating their lands, but that just wasn’t how they lived. As far as I knew, there were only three cities in the entire continent, though none of them matched the scale of cities in the other continents. There was a city in the north, a sort of trading hub for the visiting humans and elves who had used the teleport formations to enter the beastkin lands. The capital city, the closest approximation it had, was in the very center of the continent, the heart of the beastfolk tribes, where important business was conducted. And their final city was in the southernmost reaches of the continent, near the pole.

Oddly enough, the south pole became dangerously hot the closer you got to it, while the north pole had the snow and ice and accompanying freezing climate that I believed all poles should possess. There were rumors of an ancient city in the desert, but I neither cared nor desired to determine if that rumor had any truth to it. If I could go the rest of my life without feeling the heat and humidity of a tropical sun, I would do it. I much preferred the cold over the heat.

We left just before daybreak, and I carefully plucked a few seeds from the beast-repelling tree, placing them into my beast space to be used later. With my proficiency in nature magic, I could quickly enhance the seed’s growth and create the same tree if I needed to, though it would only last two-thirds as long as a naturally-grown one would. I needed more practice if I wanted to increase the longevity of seeds grown that way.

We faced no more attacks that day, perhaps due to the residue from the trees. Unfortunately, that was the final time we were able to travel a full day uninterrupted. Every day after that, we faced at least one attack from animals. The majority of attacks were either from a single large animal, or multiple small ones. Packs like the first one we faced were rarely seen, and we quickly dispatched anything that got in our way.

I did ask Afon whether I should tame whatever attacked us next, so we would have more mounts and thus more speed, but he denied my request, though he never gave a good reason why, which I questioned in my head. The others were complaining that the rate of beast attacks had gone up drastically recently, a troubling sign. I suggested that perhaps the increasing rate of monster attacks was the cause, but they shot my idea down as soon as they heard it.

For the most part, monsters in the beastfolk continent tended to create nests in the seas rather than on land. That’s not to say there were no monsters on land, because there were, but for some reason, monsters just preferred the seas. Perhaps it was because there were less predators capable of killing them, or perhaps it was an undiscovered environmental factor. Or maybe voranders just really liked swimming. Whatever the reason was, the envoys believed the two groups' increased rates of assaults were unrelated.

That theory provided little comfort as we faced unprovoked attacks from creatures on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times in the same day. According to Weil, who had the best senses among the group, we had avoided going anywhere near beast dens, where animals and such made their homes, so there should have been no good reason for the high frequency of attacks.

Finally, after almost two weeks of travel, Afon decided we needed to resupply at the nearest tribe. Our stores of water were running low, and everyone declined when I offered to summon some using nature magic. Ironically, the tribe we were closest to was one that had one of its members sitting on the current beast council, the ruling body that would decide my fate and my status. I recalled what I knew of the beast council while the others deliberated on which direction to travel in.

The council, in theory, ruled over the entire beastkin lands, making major decisions for the whole of the population. The most important member of the council was the Beast King or Queen, who was selected from the pool of chiefs of every tribe in the continent. Naturally, there was some long process to determine who held the throne, but for the most part, it wasn’t hereditary. As with many other things, the beastfolk had plagiarized their system of governance from the elves, as the two races were closer to each other than the humans, even going back to the beginning of recorded history.

I had no idea how the group decided what direction the nearest tribe was. There was no consulting of maps, or use of magic, or even a momentary pause for them to utilize their famed beastkin senses. There was only a short round of conversation, and we were off once more, heading…southeast, judging by the position of the sun.

“Weil,” I said, getting the attention of my fellow rider, “how do you tell which direction the nearest tribe is in? There are no landmarks, and I didn’t see you look at any maps.”

“Once again, you are wrong, little Rhaaj,” he said, clicking his tongue and shaking his head in mock disappointment, a trait he admitted he picked up from his time spent among humans. It irked me how that gesture proved annoying no matter what species was doing it.

“There are landmarks, just not obvious ones like you humans have. You see that hill?” He pointed out a small lump in the ground. Calling it a hill was somewhat overstating things, but I noticed what he was referring to, and so I nodded. “That hill denotes a boundary between two tribes. Going this direction will lead us to the horned wolf tribe, while the other direction leads to the howling mouse tribe. Small things that might seem insignificant to you humans are enough to serve as distinctions for us beastkin. Blades of grass bent the wrong way, a rock standing straight when it should be flat on its side, a plant that has less fruits than it should for the current season.”

I stopped asking questions as I absorbed the information, and realized that I would probably never be able to navigate the land as they did, which meant I was stuck with relying on old maps and the stars to know my position.

It took less than two hours before we were met with a group of mounted guards, though this group consisted of anthropomorphic wolves with horns on their foreheads, riding some kind of multiple-tailed canines. Cuul and Mohl stepped forward to speak with them, Afon giving them a chance to talk for once. They kept turning around and looking in my direction, but we were eventually allowed passage to the tribe.

The rational part of me realized that this tribe was home to a council member here, and so I would have to tread with caution to not give off a bad impression. I would need to conduct myself with honor and dignity, not to mention respect.

The irrational part of me would have killed everyone and their mothers if it would earn me a hot meal, a shower, and an actual bed. I was already fighting the urge to sleep as we approached civilization, a welcome sight from the endless fields of green.

What was less welcome was the large group of horned wolves standing at the entrance to their village, led by a horned wolf that was taller, more muscled, and had more grey furs in his coat. He stood with his arms crossed, though thankfully there were no weapons drawn.

As his amber eyes met mine from two hundred feet away, any thoughts of sleep were quickly chased away. That was the most unwelcome look I had ever seen on someone’s face.

And it was directed at me.