A Land Far Away

She ran. And the jungle floor blurred at her feet as specks of mud kicked up behind her flicking heels. Her walnut skin glistened with sweaty lather, under the canopies of green and purplish, wide-leafed branches, thirty feet above. Various openings split between leaves above, sending straight rays of pure sunlight onto the steamed degrading bits of tree bark, clay, and mud, lining the jungle floor below. Her adolescent heart of sixteen seasons beat against the lizard skin throng across her budding breast. Her head and eyes shifted to the left and backwards for a moment, to notice the dimetrodon of eight feet in length charging behind, it's sharp flourescent greens, and splattered yellows, and splotches of blaze-oranges, flailing in a wave of motion against it's massive sail, lined with thick spines nearly five feet in length at it's climax.


The girl had hit it in the rump with a nice-sized sharpened stone from her snake-skin sling. The dimetrodon was female, and the Chultan girl knew it was in heat due to the males nearby, hissing and mutilating each other in claim of the female. The female took notice of her, like she had wanted, her small malicious grin revealing her thoughts across her sweat-lathered, serious-minded face. Behind her, the female dimetrodon charged ever faster against the pesky girl, it's lungs hissing through it's gullet, and long and needled maw, it's annoyance apparent at the running pest.


She eyed the ground's flora and fauna ahead and knew she was close. She ran and ran, full-bore, her arms whisking beside her sides, as fast as her legs could manage. She knew the dimetrodon was enclosing on her, but she had time.

The veined ferns and bushes of the jungle floor came near, and she leaped above them hard, one leg tucked beneath her, the other straight over as if pointing beyond to her point of destination. She landed and tucked in, rolling, right into the center of a batiri camp, ten goblin warriors strong, resting from a meal after a successful boar hunt in the nearby area. The shock of the girl rolling up to her feet brought them scrambling for crude wooden spears and dinosaur hide shields, though stomachs brimmed with pork, the task proved difficult in momentum.

The dimetrodon charged in, blind with anger, thrashing at the nearest moving batiri, clamping down with it's maw and thrusting it's head violently to the side, halving the goblin at it's midsection. The Chultan drew her stone dagger, chiseled to an edge, and drove it into a goblin that was her only obstacle to the jungle beyond the clearing. It's orange skin squeezed in at the puncture, black blood spitting out across her arm, face and chest, the tip of the crude weapon deep within, it's length becoming soured in foul blood. With more rapid footwork, she trampled the batiri and raced onwards, the dimetrodon behind her no longer interested in her, but the several bits of prey that were now howling and terrified of the crazed carnivorous dinosaur in their midst.

She snorted, and raced on, hearing the screams of batiri falling fast behind her, until she heard the sound of rushing water splashing upon jagged rocks ahead. Soon, the sun above became more apparent, and she came to a well-sized pool, amply drinking from a twenty-foot wide waterfall, digesting deep to the earth below, into underground streams.

Her feet slowed to a stop, and she knelt over and breathed fast, glancing back to where she ran from, the almost distant disharmonic peals of brutal death echoing throughout the expanse of jungle strewn out for endless miles. She grinned, satisfied, and turned to the pool only to feel a sudden vicious slap across her left cheek, sending her to the ground, black spots dancing across her field of vision. She got to her hands and knees, and then heard her father's voice.

" Zuna! How dare you!" He spoke in harsh, tabaxi tongue. His face showed just as much, creases in his face showed his displeasure detectably. His reptilian-shaped eyes narrowed at hers as she looked up to him. " You will marry Nabja. He is willing to exchange his blood with our nameless, accursed tribe. You will carry and you will stop this foolish behaviour!"

She spat out a wad of saliva and blood to the ground and looked up at him defiantly. " No."

She knew his wrath then. He grabbed the tight curls of her small, blackened hair at her scalp with a clenched fist and brought her up on her feet. Her face tightened at the pull, and tears uncontrolled, rolled from the corner of her eyes in pain. He stared into her eyes with grim intent.

" No? No is what I say to you, my ugly, foolish daughter, that looks more like a boy who smashed his head into a stone." His words spat like acid on her heart. He always called her that. An "ugly boy". He always wanted her to be a son, his seed too weak to bear any other offspring with his wife and her mother, another of the reclusive tabaxi outcast to the deeper parts of Chult. She grimaced in pain, but her face tightened into a sneer.

" I saved us from the nearby batiri." She spoke though clenched teeth. " Go look.. for yourself." His face flushed with fury, eyes widening with promises of new hurt, but then regard came to his expression. His grip lightened some at her scalp, her relief exhaled through her mouth loudly. He let go, and stalked past her to where she came.

She dropped to her knees again, burning tears swallowing her eyes, as she clawed the wet clay and mud into a handful. Minutes passed that seemed to feel like hours, and she heard his feet pad up the side of her. Zuna looked up to see her father's face, shadowed by the jungle copses above.

" You are to marry him. Unless Ubtao himself comes and says otherwise... you will marry. " The words struck her like stone striking stone. She rose to her feet as he walked forcefully past, his shoulder ramming into hers, knocking her aside for a moment. She stared at his back and sneered, his path taking him around the pool and behind the waterfall where the remaining few of her dying tribe had recently taken shelter.

No, she would not marry.

Nice. I love Zuna. Can't wait to learn more.

Very nice, Kill.

If anyone pulled my hair like that, I'd shave my head too.

Mizbiz wrote:If anyone pulled my hair like that, I'd shave my head too.

Heh...that was my first thought too.

The stench was unbearable. The thick, humid air seemed to sponge and disperse the wafting, pungent black smoke from the burning flesh of the young man smoldering atop the pyre of oiled kindling. The acrid smell had made Zuna's eyes water some, but she stood there, unmoved and impassive like the rest of her tribe, watching the body burn, making certain that it would be ash by the end of the fire's demise. This was the way of the tabaxi, burning the dead so that Ras Nsi, the outcast bara of Ubtao, would not raise them up, and have them wander mindlessly throughout the jungle, hungry for entrails and brains.

Her father stood next to her, glaring at her with pure disdain, though she continued her gaze into the flames. She clenched her jaw tightly, feeling his beady pupils on her face, but she dared not look at him. She did not fear him, nor wished to show him any.

" See?" He whispered to her sharply, in the tongue of her people. " We are dying Zuna. This one to a boar's rabid tusk. And the other before, to a burrowing parasite in his stomach. And before that, another son lost to batiri, eaten alive. Do you not see now, that our survival depends on you, and the other two daughters of our accursed tribe?" He looked back to the pyre, his eyelids narrowed, his mouth giving way to grim expression.

Her brow creased with defiance, and a few random thoughts danced across her glossy eyes as they flitted to the left and right slightly, though never leaving the sizzling, popping corpse. She knew how the young tabaxi warrior had died, but it was not due to any act of bravery or skill. Zuna had followed the hunting party as it went, keeping far behind from view, for fear of word reaching her father at her continual, bold rebellion. She could only watch in silent disbelief, and slight horror, as the young hunter had decided to relieve himself on a thistled brush, that she knew from a previous walk, had been the nesting grounds of a mother boar and her four piglets. She meant to warn him, but her voice could not find it's way from her throat and by then, it was far too late.

" All I see are fools that do not know how to live by way of Ubtao." She spat back to him, her chin inclining ever-so slightly, her upper lip rising at one side, drawing a deep nasty line from the side of her nose to the corner of her lips. Zuna did not flinch, but she expected to be hit, and hit hard.

Her father's face darkened into a scowl, but to her unsettled surprise, he remained motionless for several seconds. He nodded once, sneering, as he bore into her with his damning eyes. " And I see a fool here, that willfully ignores her place amongst our tribe, bringing us into extinction with her acts of foolishness. Do you wish to burn like Nyawe?"

It was then she turned to face him, her voice thick with venom. " If that is what is my fate, then yes. I am not some mindless warrior's wife, made to wash his soiled loincloth, cook his food, tend to his wounds from hunting," her brow creased sharply, angular, showing her anger," Nor lie on her back and let him take me to birth a child. I am a warrior like you, and like him," Zuna gestured with a slight jut of her chin to the pyre.

His lips curled into poisonous grin, his voice serrated but kept low. " Again, you do not seem to get this through your thick, ignorant head. You will marry. And you will lie on your back, and let him spill his seed inside you until you bear. And after you bear, you will do so again. And again and again. We are paying two emeralds to see this happen. To carry on our tribe, despite our shame and unholy blood. Only through this, will our blood thin and we may once again enter Ubtao's holy city."

She shook her head slightly, and turned away from him. " That is not my path." Zuna felt only content in battle, or at a full run. It was the adrenaline that made her heart dance fast in her chest, a pulse that screamed out to the rest of the jungle that she was very alive, that no cursed blood could ever bring her down.

" Then you are as blind as the old witch." He turned to the fire, disgust written across his face, speaking ill of the haggardly, frail crone with milk-white eyes, that stood away and to the side of the cremation and gathered tribespeople. The witch's presence put the whole tribe at unease with her mad, devious spellweavings, though if not for the old woman's skill at making elixirs and remedies, she would have been cast aside long ago.

Zuna's jaw locked again, as she watched the blackened bones and charred wood sink abruptly into itself, giving rise to many, tiny cinders that snuffed out shortly after dancing into the dense, moist air.

They do not care much about their own maze, she thought. Not much at all.

Sweet.