A Song in Storm

The day's hunting proved successful for Iskra, the hyena spirit. She'd taken a brief leave of her friend to go out hunting on her own, and she'd managed to acquire a goat like creature that struggled against her mouth and tickled it as she dragged it off. A short distance away, she saw a lake and a marvelously vast ruin nearby that didn't bear the particular smell of human, though like most decent ruins it was likely the habitation of at least one creature.

A few fat raindrops plopped down on her pelt, and soon several fat, black clouds rolled into view, obscuring the sun and drenching the land in replenishing rain. The beast didn't mind as much, however, she still wanted to eat her prey somewhere that could shelter her from the chilling effects of the water.

So trailing blood behind her, she cautiously made her way towards the abandoned-looking megalithic structure.

[ EXP: 239 ]

The hyena lay down to enjoy her goat, that was now too anemic to move much. She was underneath the circular "porch" that composed a formerly-welcoming entrance to what had once been a very advanced bioengineering lab. Now the overgrown grass made a soft bed for her, and a tree had long fallen across the large semicircle. The columns of the half that the timber had not fallen on were sufficient to support the tree at a 45 degree angle, and moss and mushrooms speckled the surface cheerily. It was crawling with life. Frogs sang and the steady pat-pat-pat of the storm with its rumble of far-off thunder was a lullaby.

Yet, an unnatural sound cut into her enjoyment of nature's beauty. She turned and stood to her four feet, determined to not be driven out into the rain or have her meal stolen from her. She bared her teeth at the darkness behind the cracked glass doors, as though to say, These are my fangs, so this is my bed. After all, she was a very large hyena. Fully four-and-a-half feet at the shoulder with a body made for chasing and tearing apart creatures three times her size, a mass of bristling hair and lean muscle. Her small, dark blue eyes detected nothing behind her, though the sound told her something was definitely there.

[ EXP: 314 ]

Iskra winced under the monstrous sound of the broken door being forced open by the strange person's claws.

Well, was it a person? She wasn't very sure what he was. Her first instinct was that it was another spirit, like her, though she somehow guessed that to be wrong.

But it walked on two legs like a human. Perhaps it understood human speech.

"What are you?" The voice, feminine and low despite the appearance of the hyena, who would look male to anyone not familiar with the anatomy of hyenas. It was a small, but confusing detail, as the creature's mouth didn't move when she spoke. She did, however, growl and stand possessively over the fallen goat, throwing a snarl back in the face of the guardians of this ruin. It was a preliminary round.

[ EXP: 214 ]

It was at that moment that Iskra recalled all the lessons that associating with humans had taught her.

One of the first, imparted to her by a vagrant traveler in the desert and various demons in hell, is that others always felt entitled to something for goods and services that they had available. It was a hyena's way to simply take whatever he or she wanted because hyenas are stronger than most other kinds of creatures, but now would be a good time to test her new philosophies.

The beast stood up on two legs, gradually growing taller as her fur, tail, and snout receded into clothes. Her feet grew flatter so she could stand on them and the hair on her head grew longer.

At the end of it all, a spotty-haired woman stood over the goat before the draconic entity.

"I will give you two options. We can negotiate a payment for you to tolerate my presence here until this storm passes or we can fight. Either way I will be here at least until I finish my meal."

[ EXP: 262 ]

"You can take it easy," she began, relaxing and deciding that attacking him was ultimately an energy-saving choice. Humans were truly wise sometimes. "I haven't the faintest desire to go into your..." her eyes drifted back to the lab. "...rock."

the woman didn't wish to reveal that she was, in fact, afraid to go back into that area. She was affected with the same generalized claustrophobia that most wild creatures had for manmade structures... the kennel... the cage... the trap... the building. They were all the same.

She plopped down before the goat and casually tore one of its legs away from its uncooked body, munching on the appendage, hair and all, in a manner that might have been reminiscent of a caveman if such things existed on this plane.

"I think you are an onikonjou like me," she said at length, speaking her mind on his identity. "You look like a dragon and you have wings. Have you ever been to hell?"

[ EXP: 270 ]

The claim that he'd always lived in hell confused her to an extent, until she examined the statement more closely and figured out that he meant it metaphorically. She waved a gory goat leg at his wing before she continued. "Hell is a place at the bottom of a big lake where only spirits can live. I am an onikonjou... a spirit that's not a kamikonjou. Kamikonjou are generally whispy spirits who protect the weak. Onikonjou are more complicated than kamikonjou because we have different natures and motivations, which is why I say that an onikonjou is simply any spirit that isn't a kamikonjou. Personally, I'm a hyena spirit descended from the great clan of these forests. I don't group myself with beings like lust and pride demons."

She stopped to take another chew of the goat leg. Indeed, her entire speech had been punctuated by crumbs of meat falling like the rain nearby.

[ EXP: 241 ]

"Oh, this human-looking form?" She continued to munch between every few syllables, her speech sending a spray of blood. "I actually got this only recently. I'm normally a hyena. What they call an animal. Puh." Munch munch. "A human term if I ever heard one. What is an 'animal', exactly? Anything living that isn't a human? I may as well make a term for everything that isn't a hyena, though we had one in our language." Gulp. "You have to know about spirits, though," she waved the bone outside towards the rain. "They're everywhere. You might have seen a few and not known what they are. Some of them look a lot like normal animals. 'Spirit' is just another one of those human terms, though. Humans classify everything. They like to have a label for it. If they saw half of the things I did, they'd have to invent a whole new dictionary to contain their fresh labels. Heh heh heh."

She seemed proud, but only because she was speaking to a person who didn't know what an onikonjou was and ostensibly hadn't done much traveling outside of this ruin. It was the cockiness of experience in the face of someone a little green behind the ears.

[ EXP: 305 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

"Everything a spirit?" she said, once again not watching where she was speaking. "I think that makes sense." A few thoughtful chews. "Everything's descended from a spirit, after all. Have you heard of Paike, the great hyena?"

She swallowed before she began. "You can see her in the sky every day, giving warmth to the land. She's the mother that birthed this world twenty years ago. The fragments you see around us are this world's sibling that died on the way out of the womb."

It made plenty of sense to her, though it was a decidedly hyena-centric view of the world. She certainly couldn't help it. From the time she was a small subadult she'd heard many, many stories about various figures of her clan's mythology. Paike, the mother of the world and her mate, Vosht, the moon and the creator of all wickedness. There were other members of the clan... the rainstorm and the fire. They were all spirits in her head, and the world itself was the body of an offspring of a spirit, and they were all offspring of the world. That would make them all grandchildren of a massive spirit, and thus all spirits.

"So you're right. Everything's a spirit, but some things they call 'spirits' more than others."

[ EXP: 246 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

She shrugged when he reminded her that he wasn't born of a hyena. She couldn't account for the not-hyena things. They were more creations. Only hyenas were made in the great god's form, but his second question was easy for her. "Oh no, they aren't spirits themselves," she continued on without missing a beat. "Both creatures and spirits have meat. Stones and metals are the meat of this world, and humans take that meat and make things out of them. Weapons and buildings and such things..."

Her eyes went up to the lab. "I guess some humans on the sibling world must have created this before they disappeared. The buildings that they make can't live, and only living things can give birth. You must have come from somewhere else and ended up inside the building."

She tilted her head to the side. "You aren't the first, actually. I've met some other people like you who say they just woke up on the world one day and weren't born of anything. Those are the ones who were born of this world itself. Maybe the world just birthed you inside of this building thing."

[ EXP: 233 ]

The woman shook her head in affirmation of the first statement. "No, trees do not have spirits, though... they're like hair."

Of course, with the hyena-centric worldview came the thought that trees, like hair, were indigestible, and that plants were merely the hair of the land, which was a spirit.

"No one can know the will of Paike or this Terra itself," she said finally, not sure exactly what the man's story was to begin with, but sure in her simple faith that it did nothing to contradict her established worldview. "I have seen serpents like you, but you seem somewhat different..."

At no point did she stop eating, but she did slow down, hesitating as she thought on. "Maybe something different happened to you? After all, I'm sure that it is possible that something that wasn't Paike is your grandparent, though everything I've seen is descended from her. There are many wonders and strange things in this world. If you were born in this building, then maybe it's an unusual building and can make offspring like you."

It was an odd thought, but one that made perfect sense in her head. After all, the stories she was told were far from complete.

[ EXP: 235 ]

The woman's eyebrows furrowed. Older than Paike? Well, it was feasible, she thought, looking up at the clouds behind which the sun, to which she attributed creation of the entire globe, rested. "Well, it's possible. I certainly don't know how old Paike is. I only know that she had a great number of relatives in her clan. Some of them are female. It's possible that they had children as well, though I never heard the whole story concerning them."

For a moment, the food became less interesting than the conversation, and she left the corpse to poke her nose around the door to the lab, careful not to cross the threshold, lest she offend her conversational partner. "You can go inside of it and outside of it. Is there anything inside of it that looks like a womb, maybe? If it's a special building and if it is alive, then it has to move and have organs and bones and those kind of things."

Her eyes fell on the draconic entity before her again before she continued. "There's a place called hell, and many of the persons and creatures that were born there look like you... scaly and such. I can't really account for them, but since they are under Terra, I assume they have to be descendents of Paike as well. None of them remember where they came from either."

[ EXP: 263 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

The noise injured her sensitive ears, though they weren't as sensitive as one might expect a wild beast's to be. Such a thing occurred when she first discovered her human form: the loss of some of her senses. It seemed they defaulted to a more human state of affairs, though the noise might have shook her skull had she been completely deaf.

Once the noise cleared the wind, however, her curiosity seized her immediately and drove her forward, despite the way she'd told herself that she was thoroughly uninterested in this lizard-man's territory. A building that was alive and could have children? The idea was all too amazing to pass up, though she couldn't help but wonder if the building was female in the hyena sense of the word or female in the sense that all other species considered it.

The way he forced open the door and walked inside, however, seemed to point to the latter.

A curious thing as well was how her new acquaintance seemed to live inside of his mother. Most creatures she knew departed the womb and never looked back. If this thing was his mother, then...

Well, it might be a wicked and perverse thing, but she certainly didn't plan to judge until she knew the whole story. Wickedness wasn't necessarily "bad" in her worldview, after all, just not very hyena-like.

[ EXP: 262 ]

Iskra shifted down to her more bestial form as they proceeded, simply because she felt more natural in it and she found it easier to spring away from danger or defend herself. Her humanoid form was... a weak thing. The only equipment she had to fight with that required hands and fingers and opposable thumbs was a spear she'd gotten from the corpse of her friend's father, but she'd never bothered to learn to use the thing. Perhaps it might have been useful to fish or hunt with if she didn't have claws and teeth, but as things were she did.

Another peculiarity were the sheer number of traps. She raised an eyebrow every time the gentle sound of a contraption being triggered or disarmed echoed around the darkened halls. She didn't see how most of them even worked, and she certainly couldn't see the need for so many. Were the first dozen or so insufficient to kill any potential intruders? Perhaps if a great number of them suddenly all disarmed them with their bodies...

It had gotten pretty dark, but she intuitively sensed her way around. It wasn't unlike being in a den. "As long as I'm following you, I will be fine."

[ EXP: 230 ]

At first the hyena thought that the number of traps was a matter of mere impracticality, but upon hearing his story, she felt a bit of sympathy for him. He obviously didn't have a clan growing up like she once had... an entity of several older, more powerful adults to ward off the danger with ominous snarls... noises and snaps backed by bonecrushing power. No, he must've been all alone in this big, dark... thing.

It was a sad tale, one that only seemed to grow sadder when they arrived in the room of his birth.

She tilted her head to the side, squinting in the sparse light of the fire and inching closer gingerly. There was an interesting smell about it, and she investigated with both her nose and eyes the tube itself and the roots of the smaller thing trailing off into the black around them.

It took a full half a minute for her to finish pacing around the thing respectfully, sniffing here and poking there and taking in all angles of the odd object.

At length she sat back, thoroughly confused. "Well, it's definitely a womb of some kind," she concluded with finality. "I've ripped wombs out of creatures before, and this seems like a particularly large one to me. It has the same sort of... tube shape." She sat back. "But it doesn't seem alive at all. Maybe your mother died delivering you?"

Her eyes trailed up to where the cylinder disappeared into the ceiling. Organs always led each to another, and it only reinforced her conclusion that she couldn't see the larger picture.

[ EXP: 308 ]