Hoxoni bustled with activity as the Stragman people hurried to prepare for the Great Hunt—or at least, that was what Rudra assumed was going down. The day following the Chos’s proclamation, his remote cavern remained largely undisturbed. His cell still hung from the cave ceiling, rocking back and forth almost imperceptibly as he sat against a wall and wallowed in his misery.

He had failed. It was that simple. Any attempts to rationalize his actions, to couch them in softer terms, fell flat. He’d failed himself. He’d failed the Shells. Worst of all, he’d failed Tepin.

Though he was the one who’d bargained for daily visits from Tepin, he found himself growing more and more agitated as the first such visitation approached. On the one hand, there was nobody he wanted to see more. He found himself almost pining for the fragile beastwoman, their recent time together having fanned flames in his heart that he’d thought extinguished years ago. Yet, on the other hand, he found himself dreading her arrival more with each passing second. He could already picture the look of betrayal on her face, and his imagined version was more than enough to send him into a spiral of despair. He couldn’t conceive of what the real one would do to him.

Several moments later, Rudra heard the sound of gears clacking many meters away. With an unceremonious lurch, the cell began to slowly travel from his usual location above the center of the Chasm along the system of chains and pulleys fixed to the ceiling. An agonizing span of minutes later, the cell finally touched down onto solid stone.

Rudra watched as the cage’s door swung open, revealing two large silhouettes with a much smaller one sandwiched between them. He immediately recognized the tiny figure as Tepin. The two larger figures—surely guards—shoved Tepin into the cell and closed the door behind them. She stumbled from the force but caught herself before she fell.

Slowly, she strode towards him. Rudra, for his part, simply stayed seated against the back wall and let her approach. The small woman halted her advance right in front of him and said nothing. Rudra, for his part, wanted to say a number of things, but he couldn’t seem to find the words for any of them.

The glowmoss that Tepin had burned just several days ago had not even begun to grow back, leaving only the soft glow of the moss growing intermittently around the cavern to illuminate his prison. The light from behind created a halo effect, leaving much of her face hard to discern with his one good eye. All he could make out were her eyes shining in the darkness, those iridescent orbs gazing down on him in silent judgment. He didn’t see betrayal in those eyes. Instead, he found profound disappointment. He quickly discovered that was just as terrible.

Without a word, Tepin drew her right hand back before swinging it towards his cheek.

Slap!

“You.”

Slap!

“Stupid.”

Slap!

“Bloody.”

Slap!

“Fool!”

Already huffing and puffing from the mild exertion, Tepin’s arm fell. Still, her rebuke continued.

“All our progress is disappearing as we speak! The Chos will feel emboldened to undo everything she agreed to now that she has you under her control! We don’t even have our largest source of leverage anymore since you saw fit to bring her husband back, and he’s far more conservative than she is! He’ll push her to revoke every concession and likely restrict Shells even beyond how they were before! All because you were weak!”

“What was I supposed to do then? Just let you die?” Rudra asked.

“Yes, you idiot! You should have just let them kill me! As long as she can hold my life over you, everything is lost. I should end it myself and free you of that burden.”

“Don’t even think such things,” Rudra scolded her sternly. “I’ll just bring you back every time.”

“No! Why would you say that?! I’m not worth the rights of every Shell! I’m don’t deserve that treatment!”

“Yes, you do! Why not?! You deserve to have a life just as much as all the other people out there! A good life, one with dignity and respect! After everything you’ve put yourself through, after all the sacrifices you made to help your people, you deserve it more than anybody! You’re a special person, Tepin. I know that now, more than anybody. I couldn’t just sit here and let them hurt you and kill you, not when I could stop it! I’m sorry! I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t handle the thought of losing the person I care about... not... not again...”

His voice drifted off into the aether and his head fell back down to gaze at the floor. A moment later, he felt the soft touch of a hand against his cheek.

“Whatever should I do with you?” she wondered aloud as her fingers lightly ran along the bandages wrapped over his eye. “You’ve given so much for me, even your sight, and yet I’ve done so little in return for you, my stupid, boneheaded, naive, foolish, stubborn lunk of a man...”

Raising his head against that touch, he saw that the disappointment from before had disappeared. In its place, he found guilt. But beneath that guilt lurked something else, something he hadn’t seen from anybody close to him in a long time: affection. The sight sent his feelings roaring out of control, like pouring liters of oil onto a sputtering fire.

Rudra reached out and wrapped Tepin up in his large arms, drawing her in against his burly chest. She let out a small surprised yelp as he pulled her close and planted his lips on hers.

Tepin squirmed awkwardly in his embrace and he pulled their heads apart, confused.

“There are people out there!” Tepin protested weakly. “They’ll- they’ll hear everything!”

Rudra could only grin.

“Let them hear,” Rudra replied roguishly. “I will not be ashamed of love, and neither should you. If the world already knows, then let them hear all of the ways I love you.”

Tepin blushed so heavily that Rudra could see it even in the dim light. “You sappy idiot...” she mumbled.

He leaned in and kissed her once more. This time, she welcomed it.

Rudra shifted awkwardly as the wooden cage held above his head caught on a branch of a vine somewhere above. Unlike the migration to Hoxoni, his burden for the latest trek was the very cell that he’d spent the last season inside. The wooden cage was very awkward to handle and, somehow, incredibly heavy. Other than the massive tree he’d lifted months ago, it was easily the heaviest object he’d ever had to deal with. The reason behind the wood’s absurd density was beyond his ken, but at least it explained why even his immense strength couldn’t even make a dent in the material.

It didn’t help that his arm still ached from the stab wound he’d received in the fight against Sneak. Luckily, the wound had largely healed at this point—Stragman salves were no joke—but the arm still protested when taxed. Sadly, no amount of salve would save his right eye; the blade had bitten too deep. The bandages over the socket had been replaced by an eye patch, but little else had changed. It didn’t look like he’d see anything from his right eye for a good while, if ever.

The lack of complete vision made traveling through the Stragman jungle even more difficult. He still had trouble getting used to the lack of depth perception, and things like stray branches had a knack of sneaking up on him from his right. Still, he sallied forth, making sure to stay in stride with the rest of the long line of Stragmans winding their way north.

Several weeks ago, when leaving the Hoxoni cave system, the Stragman populace had split into two separate groups with differing objectives. One group had departed northwest towards Kukego, the site of the traditional Stragman spring city. Rudra had never been to Kukego, but he understood that it was located on the western edge of the forest and within a day’s travel from the Divide. That made it the closest of the four sites to the place where he’d first arrived in this world.

The way Tepin had described it to him—a wide, sprawling city spread out in the least-dense area of the forest—made it sound like an almost normal place compared to the other three. It sounded almost idyllic, except for the reason the Stragmans had to move on to their next site every year: the massive swarms of large centipede-like insects, countless in number, that made their way through the area every year, devouring every single bit of organic matter in their path. As Rudra understood it, many herds and flocks of beasts in the Stragman forest could number in the hundreds of thousands to the millions. For something here to be called a “swarm” really meant something terrifying.

The group headed that way consisted of the children and the elderly, perhaps two-thirds of the Shell population, and a large contingent of Flegs for protection—about half the population of Stragma in total. Their job was to establish Kukego as best they could with their diminished worker base and hold it until the other half returned, triumphant.

Rudra found himself in that second group, the one headed north intent on killing and pillaging not just at Crirada but along the entire Ubran supply line. He wouldn’t be participating in either activity, of course, but the Chos wanted him nearby for any and all resurrections that might be required. After all, the more live people, the more arms available to carry back the loot.

Rudra’s capitulation to the Chos had already put him in a major funk, one that not even several hours a day spent with his new love could eradicate. Whenever Tepin wasn’t around to distract him, his thoughts would always wander back to the same subject: his failure. Now the prospect of being an accessory to wholesale slaughter made it all far, far worse. He felt like he’d almost completely lost at this point, and he had nobody to blame but himself.

That or Tepin, at least, and he wasn’t about to offload his self-loathing onto her. Though she would have been far more suited for the Kukego group, the small wolfwoman had accompanied him in the war group. Rudra didn’t trust in her safety without him somewhere nearby, and so he’d used the one bargaining chip he had—the Chos’s agreement to allow the two of them one visit each day—to demand that she come along. Given her weakness that made even other Shells seem mighty in comparison, Tepin spent the majority of each day riding along inside Rudra’s cell instead of walking.

The war contingent consisted of the normal Stragman army, as well as the stronger Stragman citizens to bolster their already numerous forces. Every non-Shell Stragman, from Flegs on up, was in effect a sort of reservist, ready to put aside their normal life at a moment’s notice to defend their people from threats of any form. Given the Stragman culture’s emphasis on combat strength, he didn’t doubt that the reservists would do just fine.

A large number of Shells also accompanied the war party, both as porters for the army’s supplies and as extra people to carry back more spoils of victory. Now surrounded by thousands of others rather than secluded away in a remote cavern, Rudra could no longer avoid the gazes of his fellow Shells. They looked at him much like how a child looked at their favorite athlete after they lost the big game. Each glance was like a small paper cut on his soul, painful yet insignificant on its own, but devastating when multiplied.

At least there was one silver lining he could point to from this whole ordeal. Tepin’s reputation among her peers had never been very positive. When she’d refused to join the Shell strikes—publicly at least—and continued to aid the Chos as her assistant, other Shells had viewed her as a traitor of sorts. That seemed to have changed. Perhaps the goodwill he’d enjoyed had simply rubbed off onto her via association, but it looked to him like they recognized her now as one of their own. During the few hours each day that she left their cage and traveled on foot with the others, nearby Shells would go out of their way to help her. They would help clear her path or even, to her obvious dismay, carry her along.

Rudra found it remarkable how much the Shells as a people had changed in just a few seasons. When he’d first arrived, “Shell” had been simply a catch-all pseudo-slur to refer to the so-called “failures” of Stragman society: the weak, the cowardly, the sick, etcetera. There’d been no collective identity between them; to be a Shell was simply to be somebody incapable of fulfilling the basic requirements of a true Stragman. But now, he felt that Shells had become something defined by more than just failure. They were something much more unified, and in some ways radicalized. The sight lent much-needed warmth to his heart.

Smack!

Suddenly, a long branch caught on the lower edge of the cage finally bent far enough to slip free, causing it to whip around from the right and whack him straight in the face. Rudra let out a low grunt of pain as he fought to keep from dropping the cage above his head. Tepin was likely sleeping inside and he didn’t want her getting hurt. As he kept going, placing one foot in front of the other, Rudra pondered the benefits of imprisonment. Sure, he’d been locked in a single room for months on end, often bored out of his mind, but at least he hadn’t had to deal with arbor assault.

Tepin slumbered softly against Rudra’s shoulder in the darkness of the night, her breath calming in its rhythm. It felt wonderful to have somebody again, even under such adverse circumstances. It didn’t hurt that he found the small beastwoman so adorable. He found himself especially fond of the fluffy lupine ears sticking out of her mess of tangled silver hair atop her head. The urge to caress them warred with his fear that he’d wake her up.

The two of them laid inside the wooden cage, which he’d plopped down in the middle of the Stragman camp at the end of that day’s march. It seemed that they were close now, only a few days at most from reaching the northern end of the forest. Soon, the bloodshed would begin.

Eventually, Rudra drifted off to sleep to the sounds of the jungle outside and the soft whisper of breath by his side.

“I just don’t understand how you can accomplish anything if you’re not willing to fight for it,” Rudra said as he sat and skimmed the newspaper. “When the other side is willing to do anything and you’re not, then all that’s happening is you’re going into a fight with both hands tied behind your back.”

“I never said that being a pacifist is easy, Rudra,” Jaya replied as she quickly chopped away at a handful of carrots with expert precision. “Yes, it can be a handicap sometimes. You have to make sacrifices. But you can’t stop just because life is hard.”

“So when you put everything you have into your dream, and it doesn’t work out, then what?”

The knife in Jaya’s hand paused. Slowly she put it down and walked over to where he sat. She bent down and leaned against the arm of his chair, putting herself at his eye level.

“Then you get up and you try again.”

“That’s it?”

“Somewhat, yes. Don’t think you can just try the same thing again and expect a different result. Consider changing the vector of your approach. Look for other points of leverage. Find other people to work with. But yes, the most important thing is simply to keep trying. Perseverance is your greatest asset. I know that things didn’t go well the first time, and I know that you’re afraid, but you have to keep trying. They need you. She needs you.”

“What are-”

Jaya reached out and caressed his face with her soft hand. “I’m glad you finally found somebody else. You can finally let me go.”

“But I don’t want to let you go,” Rudra protested.

“You can’t cling to me forever. You need to live for yourself and those around you, not for a ghost of your past. It’s time, Rudra. You found somebody else, somebody special. It’s time to move on.” She gave him a shining smile, the sort that could light up even the blackest void, the sort that had made him fall in love with her in the first place. “I want you to know that I’m proud of what you’ve done, mistakes and all. Goodbye, Rudra.”

Without another word, Jaya faded away until there was no trace that she’d ever been there in the first place, leaving him alone in the small apartment.

Rudra’s eye snapped open as he jerked awake to find himself back in his cell, the glow of the morning sun was still nowhere to be seen. His sudden movement woke his partner as well. She yawned and looked up at him with a sleepy gaze.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Just a dream.”

“Mmmmmm, really?”

“Yeah... no... I just...” He paused for a moment and took a breath to find his thoughts. “I decided that I’m going to keep fighting, I guess.”

“Oh, is that all?” came the seemingly bored reply.

“...yes? Does that mean nothing to you?”

Tepin stared at him like he had the intelligence of a houseplant. “What else is there for people like us but to fight? Do you think that I’ve stopped fighting just because I lost my cover and my position and my freedom? As long as I breathe I will fight. What else would I do?”

“I... I just had sort of given up for a while, you know? It all seemed so hopeless. I mean, you say that you are still fighting, but what can we even do anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Tepin admitted, “but I’m going to keep thinking until I come up with something. I didn’t get into this mess to stop the moment something went horribly wrong. Now go back to sleep. You can’t think with a tired mind.”

With that said, she snuggled back up against his shoulder. Within moments, Rudra could hear light snores coming from her petite mouth. He couldn’t help but grin as he reached over and gently stroked his partner’s soft silver ears, eliciting from her a soft moan of happiness. Jaya was right again. She always was.