23:14, Rotation 264 / 365, 232 AE, -67.281747, -68.771588, Reath
God fucking skai sha diu hai cunt piss shit bitch of a motherfucking nakaz snaga brother dick sucking hai! Fucking hai! I’m such a hai! Why did I say that? Cunting piss shit dick fuckery orc waghing FUCK! FUCK!
How did her sweet sixteen, her quinceanera, Rotation 274 of Revolution 232, which was supposed to be the rote she got laid for the first time, and saw what the big deal was about, end up so horribly, twistedly, wrong?
She did too many drugs and lost her sanity.
She got molested.
She annoyed every single one of her pham and they each ditched her one by one.
And now she’s hurt her friend in an unforgivable way, and they won’t have a relationship anymore.
All for a hongbao of nazge, some tankards of beer, this stupid ‘Late Show’ shit that just made her paranoid, and the most nightmarish rotation she’s ever lived through in her entire life.
“LAWRAH!”
The bamboo closed ominously over her, and it was pitch black above her. Lawrah had run straight into the thickets, the center of the bamboo forest that was just too thick now and so atul was just too lazy to cut it. The bamboo branches smashed into each other to create denser and denser thickets that blocked out all the twilight.
Skai this! She was so sick of trees! She was sick of reading about trees, she was sick of getting tripped up by trees. She thought for just a moment of the living tree which had ensnared Merry, Old Man Willow, and she shook her head and scowled. Get some sense, Thraxes! Trees don’t move! But still, the canopy, and its dense increasing darkness, began to spook her with the thought.
Which way did she even come from? Could she remember anymore? She was now completely alone, and lost, in the dark forest. She could echolocate underwater – she could easily spelunk and then swim her way out of an underwater cave – but she didn’t have bat ears. She had no way of knowing where the high holy hell she was, and she also had no idea where Lawrah was in this dark running bamboo forest.
She felt intensely scared now. Something evil in the air.
Skai this. Skai this. It was simple. She was going to find Lawrah. Quickly. She was going to beg for her forgiveness, grovel, do whatever it takes. Maybe once they get out of here. She would clean Lawrah’s room, cook for the Durban every single rote, ace all her classes, give up surfing, whatever it took to get her friend back. It didn’t matter. She would do it.
She couldn’t do without Lawrah.
Why does it always have to be dark woods where fairy tales get scary? It was something a much younger Zhak would ask Meldy. The question flashed into her head.
As if answering the question she bumped into a tree, even though it was illuminated by the thinned patch of the thicket above it. The tree had been poisoned by toxins in the ground, and its barren branches didn’t grow- still it stubbornly persisted, refusing to die, standing tall with little denuded and malformed, baby mutant stumps.
She stared up the tree to look at the gap of ceaseless twilight opening from the canopy.
Of course. Of course it was this again.
Far off in the distance, despite all the waghing, the Ziggurat blasted:
“I had a way then, losing it all on my own.
I had a heart then, but the Queen has been overthrown.”
She had no more tears left to cry. No more fucks left to give. It was one thing to lose a razza and have a bad trip. That’s just one experience. It would pass. It would be forgotten. A new rotation, revolution if you need it, will be. It will be. It will be.
What was at stake now was so much more. Her relationship, her friend, her bestie, her ash nakaz zug, her partner-in-crime, her comrade, her ally, her idol, her love, her pham-
Her soul sister Lawrah.
She didn’t want to.
She sank her climbing claws still extended into the hollow bamboo. This was a twisty, gnarly one, didn’t quite go straight up, a little crooked. It made it easier to climb in some parts, harder in others. Githarie stared straight up at the gap in the canopy and sprang lightly up to the first twisted bend.
But how else was she going to find her?
“And I’m not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat.
And I’m not keeping now. The strength I need to push me-”
Climb. Don’t look down.
“You show the lights that stop me, turn to stone-”
Climb! Don’t look down!
“You shine it when I’m alone.”
Don’t. Look. Down!
She was atop the malformed, dying, twisted, branchless and barren bamboo tree now, the sun backlighting her forward facing silhoutte. She squinted through the sun, trying to scan the canopy, trying to ignore how the bamboo tree was bending and swaying a little bit – no, okay, a lot – back and forth from her weight.
“And so I tell myself that I’ll be strong and dreaming when they’re gone.” The last word echoed across the treetops. “Gone. Gone. Gone.”
Recce from any other point on the treetops would produce the same results, and the sun’s glare prevented her from spotting any sort of perch or lookout that could give her a better view of the forest thicket interior. But the wind was gusting, the bamboo swayed harder, and she suddenly wanted to empty her bladder. The leaves blown out by the gust rattled a soothing tshhhh- and some leaves blew upon her and whipped and stung her, but it didn’t hurt, not really.
The echoes of the song were faint from up here - “Cause they’re calling, calling, calling me home-”
She thought, how wonderful it would be to be free from the grasp, and to be able to dance from branch to branch. Xianxia. She could gracefully and gently float from one spindrift of leaves of the thicket to the next, and she would spot Lawrah in no time. Maybe they could dance through the leaves and the air together, in a spectacle of swordplay. That would be cool.
“Calling, calling, calling home…”
The passing rain cloud that drifted soothing drizzle to the revelers at the psytrance temple had now rolled faster across the horizon, spurred by the gusts, and slid over the sun’s glare. It was so beautiful. Githarie had to tear her eyes away from the hunt. She wanted to see a rainbow.
Wait.
Wait, what was that? Bamboo doesn’t bunch and grow in together like that. It was kind of like a- a raised pyramid of bamboo? Curiouser and curiouser.
“You show the lights that stop me, turn to stone,”
It was terrifying, but her curiosity got the better of her fear. She picked her way through. Aliens? What was this? Sometimes she had to swing from one swaying bamboo tree to the next, and that was always scary, but she would gulp, get the timing very, very carefully right – where Lawrah was she didn’t know anymore, so there was no strict time pressure – and leap.
What was this? Part of the razza? Secret treehouse? Maybe- Lawrah’s secret treehouse? It was not completely implausible given the Chief’s wealth. She indulged in this childish fantasy. Maybe they could have a mug of tea and talk this over up there. That would be so serene-
She very briefly yelled “Wah!” as she missed a branch, thinking about drinking tea in a treehouse, and had to grab the branch beneath it. Since it meant she fell harder, the branch bent lower, before lamely lifting her back up again. She would be surprised if she hadn’t had a heart palpitation from that, but her heartbeat was the last thing on her mind in this forest, she was well and truly something adjacent to sober now, as survival instinct stepped in to stop her from falling to her death. She shimmied back up to the canopy again.
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“You shine it when I’m alone-”
She was closer now, and she looked closer. They had to be bundled together by some other force. Rope? Githarie squinted now into the vanishing point in front of her, now more visible with the passing rainclouds reducing the glare- it was- flat? How could the treetops be perfectly flat? It was too dark to make out what it was. It looked like the silhouette of a roof - a hidden fortress in the trees. Her eyes widened when enough sun now peeked out from the rain cloud to illuminate perfectly the elvan recce:
Two cloaked figures, pale in complexion for certain, laying prone. They had not bothered with camouflage, for who at the razza would look up here?
One of them was aiming a sniper rifle at- she followed the sightline as she made another jump from tree to tree, to get a better line of sight.
Lawrah. Finally, she found her. They were aiming at Lawrah.
They were aiming at Lawrah.
They were aiming at Lawrah! LAWRAH!
“LAWRAH!” she screamed, but this high up in the canopy, with this much of a gust, and this many leaves rustling up a tshhhhh- sound, and with Lawrah a sniper rifle’s range distance away, there was no hope of her hearing Githarie. Not that Lawrah even wanted to hear that stupid gezzno hai’s voice right now, anyway.
Skai! NO!
Ominously, the bass drop hit just as she spotted the elvans and Lawrah.
There was no other course of action, Githarie Thraxes. Only forwards. No retreat. Do or die. Now or never. Victory or death. We run to life.
Or death.
Lok Tar O Dar.
She had spent all her readily available fat reserves beating off the cold to surf. She spent all her glycogen surfing, and dancing, and climbing, and running, and fighting, and getting all coked up. She had barely anything to burn left- she was now breaking down some of her own muscle stores for energy while tapping into what fumes of calories her liver could dig up. She was strung out, pissed off, cold, and a little thirsty. She was also still drunk and crashing from stimulants. She had been up without proper sleep for nearly twenty-four hours straight. She was covered in dirt and mud caked upon her crawling around in the techno-forest. Her muscles ached, her calves were all scratched up with bamboo branches, and she had been molested- a creepyboi had fondled what little underboob she had. She was pretty sure she had lasting psychological damage from the trauma of the bad trip, which she was still a little bit under the influence of, but of course, the adrenaline pushed it away- she was dangling high above the ground – her greatest fear – on an infamously bendy kind of tree.
And it was one against two. Hardly fair.
If this wasn’t the absolute rock bottom nadir of Githarie’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad birth rote, she didn’t know what else could be.
The berserker rage knew when it was needed, and even when this little nakaz zug had been pushed to her absolute limit, even when she had already raged once earlier in the rotation, she still had just the fatty stores left in her liver, just the bare minimum amount of subcutaneous body fat, just the absolute bare necessity – she would have to be smart and keep economy of motion – to do it.
To berserker rage.
To redeem her shitty teenage zug behavior, how carelessly and for granted she took all her most treasured precious nazge – her dearest of her pham, her best friend Lawrah – and rise to become the hero.
Her hero moment.
“I had a way then, losing it all on my own,”
To save her friend Lawrah from foul elves who appeared to want to shoot her with a high bore caliber rifle. Why she did not know, and she did not have time to ponder. And more importantly-
“I had a heart then, but the Queen has been overthrown,”
A chance to save their friendship.
“And I’m not sleeping now. The dark is too hard to beat.”
If it still could be saved.
“And I’m not keeping now…”
Lok Tar, Githarie.
The stone turned to flesh, and the mind turned to stone. This time as the gargoyle emerged, the red faded in slowly, the dilation of her perception of time easing in with her control over her new monstrous body. Her corneas warped to fisheye lenses, splitting sometimes into compound eyes so she could see both sharp, far, and ultrawide. She could smell the bamboo forest now, and all its scents. She could hear where every tree trunk torqued flexion, where each branch swung. Her teeth sharpened. Her breathing became inaudible even as she began to inhale far more than she ever had before, and it puffed her chest out through her stomach strung out lean. She looked like a monster, a stalker of prey. The predator.
“…The strength I need to push me.
You show the lights that stop me, turn to stone. You shine it when I’m alone.
And so, I tell myself that I’ll be strong and dreaming when they’re gone.
‘Cause they’re calling, calling, calling me home.
Calling, calling, calling home.
You show the lights that stop me, turn to stone.
You shine it when I’m alone.”
There was no more Githarie.
There was now only the Berserker.
The Berserker shot with felid grace from tree to tree, though her claws sunk into bamboo it was with such dextrous lightness – quick, precise pounces – that she made almost no sound distinguishable from the tshhhh- of the leaves. Never did its gaze leave its prey. She knew that time was of the essence now. There was only one window of opportunity. Closer, tree by tree, she pounced, closer and closer she came to the unaware hunters, now the hunted.
Drizzit and Vyerna, so fixed on their prize, did not notice at all.
Lawrah had finally stilled, stabilized her breathing. She focused on a fixed point on the ground that she was staring at. When she heard the music coming from the Ziggurat, she couldn’t help but think- ooh I love this tune.
Vyerna felt her heartbeat slow down to 95 beats per minute. Soon it would be low enough for the probability of 99.998525% accuracy. It remained at 99.987356%. Vyerna accepted nothing less than >99.99%. She was a perfectionist.
The Berserker was three trees away.
Lawrah looked at the little dirt mound she had been staring at for a while. Maybe she should reconsider completely cutting Githarie out. She was just really pissed. Lawrah did really feel bad that she went off to have sex with Zholl instead of at least hanging out with Githarie for one drink. But all she really wanted to do, to be honest, was go to the psytrance trance, not fuck Zholl! Not… necessarily. If anything, Zholl ruined what was supposed to be a pure moment for her in the temple. Oh, if she hadn’t been distracted, and found Githarie just a bit earlier…
94 beats per minute. 99.988029%.
Two trees away.
Should Lawrah go find Githarie? Apologize? But- then she still had to tell Githarie about what happened to her. What Zholl did to her. And that- that was complicated. That had literally still just happened, she hadn’t even processed it herself!
93 bpm. 99.988568%. Nearly there.
One tree.
92 bpm. 99.9899-
Vyerna began to oh so lightly squeeze the hairpin trigger…
A black shadow rustled across the elvan recce…
And as Lawrah finally decided that yes, she was going to stand up, and go look for Githarie, the dirt clod she was staring at suddenly–
POFF!!
–exploded! Dirt shot up and out everywhere, Lawrah had to sneeze and cough, and now where the dust cloud faded was a loose crater. Reflexively, Lawrah spun away to take cover behind a bamboo tree, but unfortunately, bamboo doesn’t provide much cover.
CRACK!
Lawrah was just able to spin away to a bundle of bamboo branches growing as a bunch out of the ground before the next ketamine bullet tore right through the bamboo, breaking it in half.
“WHAT THE F-”, shouted Lawrah.
And as Lawrah scrambled for cover, just moments ago the Berserker flung herself the farthest and highest she had ever gone, her vertical limit, wildly windmilling her claws so that she could sink them into one of the trees that bent up to the elvan recce. Though she leapt from the canopy, she only caught the tree halfway down to the ground, her claws leaving long, shredded strips of bamboo opening out around all the way down she slid.
She dynoed again and again up the shredded tree, shooting up with fully aerial leaps, no holds at all, surging up in the air until she tore into the next holds for the next dyno. When the bend of the tree was just enough past vertical for her to sink her toe claws – her moccasins were barely a scrap of leather wrapped around her heels now – directly into the tree so she could run straight up without needing to grab holds with her hands and arms.
This all happened so fast that Vyerna, just about to fire the gun, could not react in time when her psion’s jumpsuit jolted thirty-eight volts through her water phase meridian line – from behind her knee, up to her butt, straight up her spine and to the nape of her neck – to tell her to move, Vyerna! Dodge! Evade! Incoming!
The Berserker knocked the muzzle of the gun just enough for the shot to miss when she pounced Vyerna.
Finally, she ran out of swear words, once again.
So far.
Meldy would say- “Because the protagonist is stepping out from the comfort of their normal world, their home, where they belonged, into the magical world of the adventure, where they must find the elixir.”
And at this point it had also caught on fire, although it had yet to completely burn down.
Lights (Bassnectar Remix) - Ellie Goulding.
It was lucky she did, for she would not have spotted what she spotted high in the canopy if she didn’t.
She had no idea that there actually was indeed a very urgent time pressure.
Though technically still the same forest, just on the opposite side of where a bunch of young orcs indiscriminately chainsawed it all down.
Slightly less than max range for the AWP for Vierna had to dial back the gunpowder in the ejector casing lest the ketamine dart pierce straight through to the other side. The instructions were clear: bring them back alive.
Her volumetric oxygen intake maximum had tripled, but it also meant her jacked up metabolism would burn through her remaining stores rapidly. She had to get this done quickly.
A dissociative fracture. It occurred because of her dolphin-brained transmogrification. A split personality, borne of trauma. She would not realize how far this shadow would fester and grow, in time.
This was just like one of her favorite movies.
Her birth-rote had passed not long ago, for she was a Virgo like Githarie. But she did not remember her birth-rote, it was a memory that had been deleted to make way for imprinting that reminded her that the Goddess was merciful, and that the Goddess had granted her mercy…
What Zholl did to her did occur quite often in temples far, far in the Lost Ages, except it was a fertility ritual - the hope that the expression of species fertility would connect, by spiritual energy, into the fertility of the ground. But the orcan species fertility was thriving and still the fertility of Reathean ground had been sapped of its vigor. No amount of fertility rites could bring Reath back.
