Chapter Text
Prologue
The little human child sat out alone in the petered-out riverbed. She was crouched atop a stack of slippery river boulders, counting glossy pebbles inside her tiny hands—dividing them in some ritual that she felt was needed for the tiny minerals that she had plucked free from the reeds.
Placing the rocks she wanted into a tidy pile next to her and sending the ones that failed her inspection straight into the lazy torrents of the low water.
Her skin bronzed under the happy and hot sun was now naked to the elements, her little jacket divested about a dozen yards back into the woods she had bumbled around in. The child was hopelessly lost.
Le’tokde hid himself behind a screen of trees not far from the river. He had been keeping his eyes on the little human child—watching her, lamenting silently for her. She was going the wrong way.
For days she had wandered further from the paths he marked ahead of her—hoping she would take the hint and follow them back into civilization. But she tottered along and onward toward certain death and peril maddeningly. Le’tokde surmised bitterly that his presence here on this patch of earth was likely the reason this child was now astrayed from their parents. He had likely and unwittingly scared off her tribe while hunting and killing his trophies.
He had not intended for this to happen... the collateral death of a pup was always a deep shame. Le’tokde had hoped that the little one would have followed his signs, or that perhaps her parents or tribe would have been resolved enough to find her without his direct intervention. But whatever time they had to spare had dwindled.
Even now—her wispy hair stuck to the salty sweat of her face like dark whirling kelp to the sandy beach. Her little lips white and cracked, her minuscule eyes—dulled and foggy with exhaustion. Her slight, delicate body sagged and rocked—fighting against the powerful tides of the last sleep.
She would perish before the next sunrise if he didn’t intervene. He conditioned his thoughts with cold resolve—he had a duty to protect the innocent, for even the lives of little prey fell under his umbrella of honorable obligation during the hunt.
Gingerly so as not to scare the child away, he left the shadowy wood and fern and crossed the river rocks toward her.
***
The child was younger than he had originally thought as she rose to her shaky feet—balancing herself atop the sharp and slick boulders. Her glassy eyes wide and her lips drawn back over her teeth in a tight grimace of terror.
It was an expected reaction. Le’tokde stopped at once at her frightened display, relaxing all the rigid and explosive lines of his ferine body—he didn’t bother slipping into a crouch, figuring that the child might intuit the action as aggressive—like a mountain cat readying to pounce on its prey.
Instead, he lifted his hands into the air like he had seen others of her species do when wanting to appear peaceful and unthreatening toward one another. It had an immediate effect, the child’s eyes lightened and a reedy sound of relief and misery trickled out of her body with a sob.
The child lurched toward him vehemently. Le’tokde withheld his surprise as the child clung to his leg wailing and trembling. A perplexed and tense chitter rippling out of his masked jaws. He reached down to pat the girl’s wispy temple, but she shrunk away at the sight of his wickedly curved claws nearing her face.
Slowly he pulled out a strip of game jerky from a pouch at his hip, holding it out for her to take.
The child still anchored around his calf cautiously plucked the piece of meat from his giant palm, bringing it under her nose to sniff, then without any other preamble she began to rip it apart in her small teeth—swallowing it all down hungrily.
Le’tokde gave her another and then another. He even shared some of his purified water with her, then when enough tenuous trust had built itself up between them–he reached out for her again, pulling her up into the crook of one massive arm and letting her rest against his chest. The little girl did not struggle earnestly against him for long.
Swiftly he dashed across the remaining river rocks and reentered the forest. The child drifting to sleep in his arms lulled and soothed by the sway of his sure steps.
***
10 years later
He named the human girl after the rainfall, both fast-moving and annoying. H’ulij’ju swaggered ahead of him in the earthly forest near her village pouncing and chasing after modest lifeforms lurking in the undergrowth.
He tried helping her in perfecting her stalking methods–but those lessons always ended disastrously. H’ulij’ju always found something in his body language to chortle at, bursting the bubble of seriousness, content to rather play and frolic than be his student, flagrantly disregarding the ancient knowledge he wished to impart.
She was infuriating at times.
But even now, burning with agitation at another lost lesson, he watched her race in the dark tripping on her own feet, a clumsy soft weight tumbling through the woods trying to hunt, he could only feel utter affection for her.
These visits to earth were a precious gift… every time he was afforded one.
Hunts here on this planet were becoming more difficult to secure and excuse, after all, human trophies did not warrant his constant visits, they simply were not something so sought-after and desired to the degree he pretended to make them.
The council was starting to scrutinize these sojourns of his.
Le’tokde knew that he wouldn't always be around, he could only hope that H’ulij’ju would learn to keep herself safe so he could have some peace of mind when gone.
***
30 years later
Her face was etched with the many spidery starts of aging. Her hair once flowy and raven-dark was streaked with frosty whites and ashy gray.
Even her particular and fragrant female scent had ebbed, her pheromones thinning.
She approached him after dark when all her many children had fallen asleep inside her small home. Out into the woods, she came walking with careful steps, where once H’ulij'ju would leap and bound carelessly through the brush and even he would have trouble keeping up with her antics.
The moonlight radiated the shadows just as it luminated times passing.
“Le’tokde, you're back,” her yautja tongue was still as sloppy and jarring as ever, which brought comfort to his uneasiness at how much she had grown and changed in so little time.
She hobbled out a few more steps, resting against a lucuma tree, a few of the fallen and rotten fruit on the ground worrying him that she might slip on their wet peels and fall in the low forest light.
H’ulij'ju’s new frail body did not look like it could sustain any injuries without great consequence.
Le’tokde guided her with his arm against his side, shaking her shoulder softly in a warm, fond greeting.
She laced her brittle fingers over his strong ones at her shoulder, smiling up at him in the dark, chittering in her bad yautja, “Now that you're done all your fussing… tell me about what you've been up to, friend?”
***
Le’tokde watched all her children play in the cool waters of a cenote high up in his perch in the trees.
He admired their playful fervor and childish, free laughter–a gleeful sound that raced faster than even them up into the canopy.
H’ulij'ju was sleeping off in the shade of her little home when her brood ventured out into the wilderness without her. He had taken up the responsibility to watch over them.
They did not know of his existence, or of his silent sentry above them wading and splashing below in the waters.
But he would be there if they needed him.
***
15 years later
H’ulij'ju’s offspring were nowhere to be seen or found this time.
‘Gone now’ was all that his H’ulij'ju would say about the whole affair, jutting her soft chin toward the open backdoor of her kitchen, and with a knobby hand gesture to all the empty spaces of her small home.
Her stare was riddled with apprehension and grief. She did not want to share these secrets of the heart with him.
She poured a cup of hot water for him, sliding it into his giant scaly hand when he wouldn't take it. None of her furniture was able to fit him, so he sat on the floor by her feet.
“We've never shared a morning drink together. Many nights lost hunting in the dark… but I never seem to catch you at dawn…” she mused with a bitter sting that he could not decipher.
The pan of her face read of a washed-out lifetime filled with regret.
***
Le’tokde sprinted across the jungle floor, pouring all his focus into the hunt. He couldn't afford to be distracted with thoughts of H’ulij'ju and her little home off in the hills.
He had to focus on impressing the council with this newest batch of young hunters.
He couldn't think that this might be one of the last times he could see her, he couldn't think of her deteriorating health, or of how lonely she was now that all her offspring had left her side.
Her despairing gaze lingered in his mind's eye as he remembered her disappointment at how short his visit was this last time.
He shook free of the dark and gripping imagery, to instead watch his young pupils follow the human spoor, then catch and dive those blades into the fighting body of the pyode male they had pursued through the darkness.
***
The fire was low and undetectable against the earthen soil when he returned to the temporary den he had excavated with and for the young hunters.
They were cleaning their kills, paring skin from bone under puffy flesh-eating clouds of solvent.
Blades rubbed against skull caps as they shaved their skinning knives across the bones and practiced their fileting.
The young hunters pressed against each other, swelling their chests pridefully and roughing each other with eager and playful shoves as they rooted around in their hunted corpses.
Le’tokde detected a morbid string of excitement in the air.
He had only returned now that the dawn was inking bright as satsuma across the Earth's eastern horizon.
A yautja male that he had known as a chronic underachiever and a lingering disappointment during routine hunts now eagerly approached him without reservation. It piqued his curiosity to have the young male so unashamedly approach him now.
“What is it…?” he hissed, straightening himself so that he stood taller than the young male so foolishly carefree in his presence.
The young hunter shrunk slightly, lowering his eyes, his voice quiet but exhilarated, “There was a human trespasser while you were out, I dealt with them.”
Le’tokde snorted unimpressed, the barrier he had erected earlier would have been impossible to bypass, “The soft-skin would never have been able to find this camp, no matter how close they got. Why did you jeopardize the pack to “deal” with this threat?”
The young male shifted uncomfortably on his feet, wibbling his sharp, fresh, and never-been-broken-before jaws, “...your name…the prey…”
Le’tokde was growing impatient, a growl cindering acidic inside his gut threatening to explode, he snapped waspishly, “ What ? Spit it out.”
“...the prey was calling out for you. They knew your name.”
The sky around him started to fade and fizzle out, burning out its fine edges.
A part of his mind registered what was being spoken–beaming and focused as all other pieces of his body numbed and fell away, scattering like broken ice.
His voice bubbled and oozed with malice, “... what did you just say…?”
The young hunter sensing that his anger and rage were directed at the trespassing prey who dared utter his name rather than at himself, pointed his gaze toward a large silver pot. It simmered atop the flames.
The water roiled with bone.
Le’tokde heard his far-away voice ask why the young hunter hadn't used his solvents. He heard the dry response in turn that his supplies were low and that the female's bones were hardly worth the resources.
He felt himself plummet into a black hole of despair and rage. Le’tokde reached into the scalding waters despite the agony it brought, scooping out the small skull…
And even with all the flesh peeled away, even with the boiling water having polished her bones into a beautiful gloss, he knew that it was her .
H’ulij'ju, who lay in his hands now.
***
From the narrow slit of the head cage chained across his face and maw, he catches the first sight of his new home.
Twisting grotesque branches bristling into the dank fog, long curtains of bruise-purple moss clinging to the bark of sickly-looking trees. A cacophony of nocturnal life filling the dins and jagged shadows between the trees, louder and more foreboding than even what he remembered the jungles of yautja prime could sing out.
The sky.
His steps shake under him as he glares upward.
It was cast-iron black tonight. The oval moon hung obscured in a bank of cloud, it was a silver foggy beam that barely lightened the planet's swampy floor.
Le’tokde followed the trickling moonlight trail leading down into the darkness, spore-filled and faint.
Then he is shoved down into the thick mudflats before him, a heavy foot pressing him into the swamp’s rotten dregs until he begins to sputter and choke.
The bitter seconds pass. This was to be his last company with his people. He stings with potent shame and regret.
Their kicks and punches sink in like the bites of wild feral creatures, his breath burning hot, captured tight in his chest.
As the feet drum his ribs.
The fists wallow in his flesh.
His binded hands crossed behind his back crack a few fingers under the violent pressure.
When they are done he drags himself up to his knees, bloody mud sliding off his caged face, his pained gasps an explosion of silver in the tepid night air.
From under the bridled brow of metal, his swollen eye connects with the clan leader who stands before him, looking down at him impassively.
“You, Le’tokde, are hereby banished to this planet for the atrocities you have committed against your clan and brethren.”
Unbidden, he can hear the shrieks of his victims pinned under his blades, their harrowed cries slicing into his ears… broken threads of life spilling across his skin.
The horrifying slip of him losing himself, spiraling out of control.
Their yellow eyes, glowing with fright as he snuffed out their life.
The skull of H’ulij'ju painted by the vengeful splatter he rained down from their bodies.
The clan leader's composed trill interrupted his dire thoughts, “For the next 200 years, you will remain here… survival only assured to those who use all their wiles and determination.”
Le’tokde shivered and trembled under the weight of the passing words, never before feeling so small or weak.
“You will be stripped of all your armor, all your weapons. Let it be known that you will never be as you once were. There is nothing else for you but this penance you must pay. There is no tomorrow. There is only what you do today, you will be nothing more than the singular thought of a prey-creature, living one moment to the next. All that is you…grinded down to these ashes of simple truth .”
Le’tokde sagged, whatever left steely inside him cracking. Every wound on his body, blistering against the wet air.
“... Your redemption will come… not at the cost of time… but at the price of blood . At the end of your sentence, if you have survived, you will be assigned a trial.”
His trussed arms quivered against the strain as he lifted himself one last time in pride and swallowed down all the blood and bile sticky in his throat, to levely stare at the clan leader as he delivered the last of his verdict.
“Prey will be dropped here for you to hunt down. You must succeed in this hunt to earn your place amongst us once more. Fail and you will know your place in this universe is among the dirt and grime.”
Le’tokde forced a roar out of his restrained and broken jaws. He would not fail ! Never again!
The bog around them quaked under his vehement cry, only the sharp clatter of shifting armor plates filled the silent wake of his burgeoning vow.
The clan leader flagged his hand through the air and departed, his crimson cloak rippling out behind him.
The head cage was then roughly yanked off his face, his wrist restraints unclicked. Naked and alone, the strange jungle night filled in his nerves and anxiety like wet concrete to an empty mold.
Broken and resigned to his fate, he stumbled out into the murk.