“We lost because we did not know what was made the day we went to the Cave Children’s lands, we lost because we were weak! We must grow stronger, even if we are fewer!” Ayente shouted after forcing the young of her tribe to line up under Archos’s direction.

The dragon stood at her right hand with the tip of his sword in the dirt, his tail lashing behind him while the woman of ice blue eyes barked at them. “The Cave Children are weakened too, but they will come for us, soon or late. Makine will not forget us for long. When his warriors are healed, he will come to kill us!”

Murmurs of fear ran through the remnants of the Red Ax. Eyes went back and forth seeking answers that nobody had.

“His hunters will take our women, they will cover our bodies, and no child will be born of love, then that will be the end of us. Your fathers will die, your aged mothers will be killed. Makine hates us, no woman of us will be loved, and every child we will bear to their hunters will be a sign of their victory. The children of those children will never know that the Red Ax ever were!” A yelp from Fen’Biter who sat at Ayente’s left hand seemed to add emphasis to her words.

Shivers ran through the remnants of the tribe.

“You will do as your chief says, and I will not make this true!” The narrow eyed look was backed by the onikoslof claws that hung from her neck, and the scar of the beast across her face that was slowly settling into permanence.

Archos held back a smile at the shudder she induced in her tribe, the raw unhinged power of the scarred woman brought back an old memory of his own combat instructor.

“Now take up your sticks, and do as we show!” Ayente ordered and stood a few paces from where Archos was.

She held up the fleshless bone of Fen’Maki and held it as one would a sword.

Fen’Biter’s bark signalled the beginning, and their warcries filled the air between them.

...Hours later...

Seyi observed the curious ritual from one side, seated on a small rock, their actions had him focusing intently, his brow furrowed. ‘I am missing something. Why do I feel like a hunter staring at tracks that have stopped for no reason? Or staring down at tracks that belong to a beast I have never seen?’

He watched without taking a break while they swung their sticks at air over… and over… and over again. Every now and then Archos would approach one, stop them, take an arm between two fingers, and move them slowly again in the way he wanted. Or he would bring his tail around and lightly tap their foot into the preferred position.

Archos moved up and down the line of fur-clothed tribesmen and women, and after checking them all again he returned to where Ayente stood, guiding them by her own actions. When he took position beside her again, he roared out encouragement, “You are not dragons! But you are predators! Predators do not let themselves become prey! The shout Ayente and I made at the start of our showing, this is called a ‘warcry’ it shows your fighting soul! A powerful cry may kill the heart of your enemy and cause them to turn and run! Show no fear! Kill, and you live. Win, and your young live! Win! And your daughters will not weep beneath the body of one of Makine’s hunters! Win! And you see tomorrow! And if you die, do not die for nothing!”

“Good! Like that Raena!” Ayente said and stomped her foot approvingly. The dark haired beauty smiled, and did the same exact swing again.

A memory stirred in Seyi’s mind as he watched, and lightning ripped through Seyi’s soul as the sudden realization hit.

‘Yes, hit just like that, my sons…” Little Seyi and Kelo watched as their father brought the stone in his left hand against the ridge of the stone in his right hand. The crack of the stone and the falling fleck that drew the right hand stone one blow closer to being a spearhead was quickly followed by another. And they tried their best to do as their father taught them.

‘By the gods… she is… he is… they are living axes… that is what they do.’ Seyi felt his blood run cold and goosebumps rise.

“Now, for the next! Archos, can we demonstrate form two?” Ayente asked, and a bark of the little fenrisu pup later, she was on the attack with more blows of her own, which were then repeated and slowed down.

Seyi’s thoughts raced faster than his heart as he watched, ‘They took the making of spears and axes and knives for children, and are making people the same… the monster… the dragon’ he corrected himself, ‘makes them to know its knowing… what power will this bring. Forget fighting ‘it’, I do not want to fight any who learned to fight from ‘that’. When I return, I must convince my tribe. If I do nothing else, the Spirit Horse must come to this knowing.’ He swallowed violently and felt the lump form in his guts. The elderly members of the tribe were mostly sulking off away from the work of the young that chose to follow the former outcast.

The realization was a stark one. Seyi cast his eyes to the heavens when the sound of rolling thunder came on. ‘Thunder… the great horses of the Everplains ride close to us.’ He thought, and took a deep breath through his nose. The air smelled different. ‘If Kelo is not back soon, I may need another night here.’ He frowned faintly and looked into the distance.

‘Kelo… are you safe? It was only the small game, but still.’ Seyi pondered his concerns, and looked toward the distant dark clouds.

Fey’Ka’El watched the clouds approaching with some trepidation, he took a deep breath in through his slender nose. The tantalizing smell of the pollen of the plants was much diminished. ‘Storm. The air is damp.’ He thought to himself and swept back his hair.

‘A storm in the sky behind me, a storm on the ground in front of me…’ He thought and clenched his teeth when the human woman shoved her black headed spear into the throat of the old man. His long elven ears twitched with her pronouncements, but what she said, he only faintly understood. ‘They speak so quickly, how do they even understand one another?!’ He cursed their language and struggled to catch the faint few words he’d heard before when hovering around the periphery of hunter’s camps that ventured into his forest.

His chest tightened when another realization struck him, ‘That one… that one is not of their tribe… he should be with them if it were so, he is not. He watches close as I watch from far… does he join them? Does he speak for his people?’ Questions ran through Fey’Ka’El’s mind, along with the stark memory of the bloody clearing, the fenrisu corpses lying strewn about, torn in half, severed in half, stabbed to death, beaten and broken. The scent of blood and death still lodged in his nose like it was the pollen he’d sought a moment ago to predict the rain.

‘If they fall to fighting, there may be nothing tomorrow but another today. But how if they do not? How if they become one?’ He touched the bow on his back. Two tribes to one tribe with a dragon at their head?” He muttered the rhetorical question under his breath and stared down at the grass that was a few finger widths from his face as it was. From so close, the grass that was only as long as his finger, might as well have been tall as the great trees that stood holding up the sky on the outskirts of his home.

Without thinking when his hands lay flat on the ground, he tightened his fingers into fists, scraping up dirt and grass into his palm and releasing the smell of earth and broken blades of grass close to himself.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the intrusion on his home a second time. The stories of his youth, of screams, of blood and pain. He felt the powerful muscles of his leg tense as if to tell him to run away. Fey’Ka’El’s head turned and looked behind him, the way he’d come, the way to the forest, past where his legs stretched out, to the place where Fey’Na’Ora waited to make love to him when he would return. To where the gatherers would be preparing a feast and their young were running between their huts and leaping from branch to branch like they were chasing down imaginary monsters.

‘Just go home.’ The ancient wisdom came to mind, trouble beyond? Go home. Trouble elsewhere? Stay home. ‘So simple.’ He thought, and watched as the dragon clobbered a human and sent the woman sprawling onto her back. Whatever it said in its rough, gravel voice, it seemed to draw laughter from those around him, and the motion was repeated again.

The tension in his legs grew greater, demanding that he move. He brought his knees up under him, and pushed himself to his feet. He stood up on the hill, not moving for some time until one of the humans below saw him. His ears twitched and heart raced when he heard the anxiety in the feminine voice that belonged to one of the fur clad tribe women who started gesturing and pointing in his direction.

Fey’Ka’El bit down hard on his urge to withdraw, lifted his foot, and took one step toward the tribe with his arms hanging harmlessly at his side, ‘This is either the biggest mistake of my life, and so my last… or this is the start of the best of days undreamt of before this hour.’ He then closed his eyes, and waited, ‘If they strike, let it end quickly.’ He thought and counted out the breaths of his life as if each one could be his last, waiting in the dark that his own closed eyes made for him, for the tribe of humans and the monster that guided them, to decide his fate.

Archos looked down at Ayente, the scales of the brow that protruded slightly beyond his eyes rose up. “Did you not say the deep ones do not leave the wood?”

Ayente nodded fervently in answer, “As I knew it to be, this was so. The deep ones never leave, so it has always been? Could he be an outcast from his people? Our outcasts wander off alone and are never seen again. We think they die, the monsters are dread ones and will kill and eat any human that wanders off alone. But…” She scratched her bloodstains at the base of her skull, “a new tribe? We know others exist. This deep one may come to us for that reason.”

Raena was the first to approach her as the tribe began to settle down from the sudden disturbance, the Deep One had taken one step forward, but no more. She reached out and touched Ayente’s shoulder.

“You are chief now.” She said with a hopeful voice, drawing her lips close to Ayente’s own, she squeezed her hand confidently on Ayente’s well muscled shoulder, “You must decide what to do, speak, kill, capture, or drive off… we will follow… and I trust you.”

Ayente felt her heartbeat, already rapid from the rapid exertions to which she’d been subjected by Archos’s relentless demands, redoubled and then redoubled again.

Understanding dawned as it had not before, faced with a challenge none had ever faced, she sought traditions learned from infancy and found none to tell her what to do. The stories of the chief she revered, offered no solutions either. Casting her eyes about as if seeking answers around the world she knew and finding none, she found herself turning again up to the face of the dragon she slept with, hunted with, bled with. The question, ‘What do I do?’ formed in her gut, but died before it could be given voice. ‘You are the answer.’ She realized, and her lips began to curl up in a tiny smile of growing confidence. ‘You were new to me, too. Just because I was blinded when we met, doesn’t change anything, and now? Now I cannot imagine life without you… my truest friend.’ She touched the necklace of onikoslof claws around her neck, and watched his long scaled arm extend out away from where she stood and toward the unknown Deep One.

“Wait here.” She ordered the dragon beside her, touching his arm and savoring the feel of confidence that he would listen, because of his confidence in her.

She stepped forward, first one foot, then the other. Step followed rapid step, and though she kept her spear in hand, she turned the point down, hoping he would understand.

When she neared the watching Seyi, she put a hand on the center of his back, “Come,” she said from just behind him, “you speak for your tribe as I speak for mine, until we are one tribe. But this is my place here, so stay behind me at my left.”

Seyi swallowed hard and did as she said, watching the bloody woman whose furs were stained with red both wet and fresh, and dried from time, over a fair amount of her front, and from what he saw, not even a little on the back.

They closed the distance together, stopping two spear lengths from the Deep One who stood with eyes closed in silence, accepting whatever might happen as his fate. ‘Brave? Desperate? Both at once?’ Ayente wondered, ‘So much for showing my peace by holding my spear upside down.’ She thought when she saw the gently closed eyes, as if he slept on his feet. ‘Then this will do.’ She raised the spear up, and stabbed the obsidian tip into the earth at her feet. It made a dull noise as it parted the dirt and grass, then her hand released it.

“Ayente.” She said sharply and put her hand to her breast. “Seyi.” She slapped a calloused hand on Seyi’s chest.

The Deep One twitched his long ears rapidly, and his eyes opened. Ayente repeated their names. She saw the corners of the pale Deep One’s lips turn up ever so slightly and his slender chest exhale with what could only be deep relief.

“Fey’Ka’El.” He said proudly, then pointed beyond them, to where the dragon stood, waiting.

“Dragon?” His voice went higher with its inflection at the end of the word.

Ayente nodded hard and pointed to Archos as well. “Dragon.”

‘Great.’ Fey’Ka’El thought with the same quiet acceptance he used when accepting that a storm was heading in his direction and there was nothing he could do about it. ‘Now what do I do?’ He wondered, realizing he had not thought much beyond this moment, as he had imagined he would most likely, simply die.