Tribes of Venara Read online

  At first he’d regretted that he hadn’t stolen a long drink of the gorgeous liquid before tainting it with his filth, but now he wondered if that was something that he needed to worry about. The whole ordeal with the ring had caused him to scream his throat raw, so he only hesitated for a minute before he dipped his head into the water and began to gulp it down.

  A soothing sensation travelled down his throat to warm the pit of his stomach. The water was cold and had a crisp, clean taste. Pulling his head out, he was astonished to see that even the mass of blood that’d been caught in his hair hadn’t left a speck of redness in the twinkling waters. Nolan dipped his raggedy clothes in next and kneaded the rough fabric together for a while before pulling it out with a small sense of satisfaction. Not a single stain remained, as if the liquid had devoured the blood.

  Leaving his robe out to dry, he left the property and trekked over to the end of the glade that was opposite from the corpses of the fox and the mantis. The trees and plants, the sky; all was completely still and silent in this region, as if this corner of the world were lost in dead space.

  Staring at a gap between two trees along the fringe, Nolan took a deep breath and charged into the colourlessness beyond. He was immediately repelled in the same fashion as earlier, his naked body tumbling away in a pathetic manner. If there was anything to be grateful for it was that nobody was around to see his shameful state.

  He couldn’t wrap his mind around the strange mechanics that governed this lifeless woodland. It seemed as if an invisible barrier of sorts had been erected around the small field and that nothing could pass its boundaries. If this was truly the case then his current situation was a lot direr than he’d originally suspected. The fact that he couldn’t enter the forest meant that he was trapped within this glade. He hadn’t seen any sign of Jason, or anyone else for that matter. He was all alone as far as he knew.

  Although it didn’t seem like there were any threats in the area, Nolan had no way of knowing whether or not he was safe. Since the moment that he’d awoken with a muddled mind and lethargic limbs, he had been slowly regaining control of his faculties. He felt particularly revitalized thanks to the water from that strange fountain, not to mention that the soreness of his body had noticeably lessened.

  The gears had started to turn in his head and yet he still failed to make sense of what was happening, which caused a terrible sense of doom to settle in his heart. As selfish as it seemed, he didn’t have the luxury to worry about Jason at the moment. What did it matter if he could figure out how he’d been transported here? He still wouldn’t be able to leave the forest, and he’d soon be facing a hunger crisis. At this point, there was a high chance that this glade would be his gravesite.

  Chapter Eight: The Netherwolf Tribe Arrives

  Jason’s eyes peeled open as he was roughly shaken awake. Only a fraction of the evening sunlight leaked beneath the distant treetops, which shrouded the forest in shadows and the occasional patches of dusky light. One of these silhouettes was currently jostling him by the shoulder, not only waking him but also arousing the aches and pains that he’d been oblivious to in his slumber.

  His eyes regained focus. “Quin?”

  Nyla’s brother appeared aggravated, his lips curved downward beneath at least two weeks’ growth of thick facial hair.

  Jason struggled to his feet and realized that most of his body was encased in a thin shell of partially dried blood. Oh my God! As soon as he discovered his grisly appearance he began to frantically pat himself down in search of an injury.

  Quin was indifferent to his crisis. The young man absentmindedly picked at his beard. “Nolan?”

  Jason looked around in confusion before his eyes widened with dread. It was only now that he remembered the massive fox that they had bumped into right before that lunatic Bron would have killed them. The last thing he remembered was being tackled to the ground by Nolan as that horrifying animal looked them over with its ghastly, luminescent eyes.

  He felt sick to his stomach as he examined his surroundings. The soil was moist and dark with more than enough blood to fill a few bodies. Nolan, their kidnappers, the fox—there was no sign of anyone that had been involved in the scene that had claimed his consciousness. There was only that hair-raising patch of blood, several metres wide and yet to be fully absorbed into the forest floor.

  He wasn’t lying about what he saw in the forest. Jason began to cry. Nolan had definitely died. It was obvious that he’d tackled him out of harm’s way only to be eaten by the fox along with Bron and that woman. Why didn’t it eat me? Maybe it was…too full?

  Quin seemed to put things together after finding him alone and covered in blood, in addition to seeing his crestfallen reaction upon awakening. The big man picked up his great axe from nearby and walked off into the forest, which gave Jason no choice but to follow. As much as he was quiet and unsympathetic, Quin didn’t rush him during the long walk back to the village.

  Jason couldn’t believe that he had lived to see the end of the day, and even more, that Nolan hadn’t. This was the first time one of his friends had passed away—he still wasn’t convinced that most people from Earth were dead—not to mention that Nolan had been eaten alive by a monster. He doubted he’d ever be the same after today.

  The two of them arrived at the village in the early hours of the night. Quin led him down paths speckled with dying fires and grunting shadows until they arrived at a modest cabin near the village’s central square. He opened the door and waved Jason inside without looking back to see his response.

  “How was it? Did you find them?”

  Nyla’s pleasant voice spilled through the doorway as he stepped inside. The main room was large and open, outfitted with simple wooden furniture and lit by a healthy flame that cackled in the stone fireplace over on the right wall. Beyond the main room were two closed doors, one on the left and one on the right.

  “Jason!” Nyla hurried over. “Are you hurt?” She took in his bloody appearance. “Where is Nolan?”

  “Where do you think?” Quin hung his axe up on two metal pegs that jutted out from the wall to the left of the door. “Why bother worrying over them?”

  “They’re my friends!”

  “How many weeks has it been since you met them? Becoming attached to such weaklings is only setting yourself up for pain in the future.” He dropped into a wooden chair and plucked a pale blue apple out of a bowl that sat atop their only table. “These Otherworlders have the strength of children. I’m surprised he even lasted this long.”

  “They’re the only ones who are truly sincere to me,” she said. “I don’t care where they are from, or how strong they are. Don’t forget that we are strangers here too, Quin. It’s only been two years and yet all this time…”

  “What are you hoping to accomplish here? Did you learn nothing from what happened in the Southern Plains region?”

  Nyla’s face went dark. She grabbed Jason’s hand and dragged him into the room on the left without speaking another word. Her eyes were a bit moist, but she didn’t cry after hearing about Nolan’s death.

  Jason had always been able to tell that she had enjoyed Nolan’s company over his own. The boy had been a bit rough around the edges, but he’d also been an unexpectedly brilliant guy. It had only been a little over a month and the kid had already practiced the local language to the point of near fluency. He could always spot an unkind gaze in a crowd and had a knack for knowing who might be willing to speak to them on a given day and who to avoid. He had been the only person to look out for Jason since everything had gone to hell, the only person aside from Nyla anyhow.

  The smaller room had a fur bedroll laid out along one of the walls, a simple trunk sitting open beside it that was overflowing with trimmed pelts and soft robes. Several books sat on the floor in a corner of the room, alongside a handful of scrolls, a small inkpot and a purple-feathered quill. A light flowery smell clung to the air, in addition to a subtle smell that could only be describe
d as Nyla’s pleasant scent.

  She pointed at the bedroll once they had entered the room. “Sit.” After he complied, she asked, “What happened?”

  “Demon animal.”

  Jason tried his best to go over everything that had taken place since he and Nolan had first gone to the cook fires to get some food. Nyla apologized again and again throughout his choppy explanation, grief-stricken at not having shown up with breakfast as usual.

  It turned out that she and Quin had been called over to the village head’s residence at sunrise the day before, and they had been confined there for most of the day. After arriving at their home in the early hours of the night the siblings had been visited by Vade and the village head, who instructed them not to leave their home until after the envoy from the Netherwolf Tribe had come and gone. Luckily one of Nyla’s friends had stopped by to ask her about something and happened to mention that she had seen him and Nolan leaving with Bron and his kin, so she immediately told her brother about it and begged him to go make sure that they were safe.

  Nyla didn’t stick around for much longer once she’d settled Jason into her room. She fetched him a stone basin the size of a salad bowl, and also a rag and a fresh peasant robe of the same brown material as his current one. After that, she left without a word.

  Although it was a far cry from his modern home back in Toronto’s suburbs, Nyla’s living quarters were still lavish in comparison to the destitute little shack that he’d been sharing with Nolan. The wooden floors were almost entirely covered by thick rugs of shaggy fur, and there was a small hearth on one side of the room that housed the fickle glow of a gentle flame.

  Finally alone, his mind began to drift off to a dark place. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t have to sleep in dirt and straw tonight, or that the pleasant warmth of a fire was there for him to enjoy. Jason had never felt so terrible in his life. In the end, he spent most of the night mourning his dead friend.

  When his puffy and bloodshot eyes finally drooped down, memories of the past month began to replay in his mind, of all the times that he and Nolan had seen something strange for the first time and shared the same reactions. He recalled the multitude dangerous moments in the forest while fulfilling their roles as gatherers, the peaceful afternoons harvesting olives with Nyla in the unpopulated orchards, of the chilly nights within the hut passed by with the aid of boring games like twenty-one questions or eye-spy.

  Nolan…I swear to God that I’ll never forget you. You were actually a great guy. He thought of that giant fox, of the fear its predator’s appearance had evoked in him. I couldn’t do what you did. It must have been so scary. Why did you have to save me? You might have stood a chance if you just looked out for yourself. Damn it. I’m sorry Nolan…I’m so sorry!

  Jason woke up late in the morning with his eyes swollen over and encrusted with remnant tears. After yesterday’s traumatic turn of events there was no way in hell that he’d go out to pick fruit and vegetables with his group, or volunteer to help them weave their shitty baskets. He was more than okay with accompanying the siblings in their unexplained house arrest.

  Nyla walked into the room a short while after he awoke, two steaming bowls of pink olive soup in hand. They shared a meal together on the wooden floor of her bedroom, neither saying much to the other, mostly staring off into space. The day slowly passed in a similar fashion. Nyla tried to strike up a conversation with him several times but he wasn’t in the mood to pretend that everything was fine, so he lightly brushed her off.

  He hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of Quin all throughout the day, so figured that the beast of a man was in his room just as he and Nyla had spent most of the afternoon in hers. He found it a bit strange that the big guy didn’t mind him spending so much time alone with his beautiful sister behind closed doors, but then he remembered that his weak self was as undesirable as they came in this world, something he and Nolan had often teased each other over.

  Late into the following night he heard someone stumble in through the front door and followed an eager Nyla out into the main room. Quin stood by the fire where he was wrapping a deep gash in his abdomen with a long strip of white cloth.

  “Did you find him?”

  Quin looked into her hopeful eyes and snorted. “No sign of your pet, but I did run into a pack of red-maned wolves. The pack leader was a few years into its demonization. I spent the past two days running around in the forest trying to lose those mangy dogs!” He spat on the hardwood floor. “No more of this. Accept it, your pet is dead. Just be happy you still have the other.”

  It was the first time that Jason had heard Quin speak more than a few passive comments, and also the first instance where the solitary young man snapped at his beloved sister in so harsh a tone.

  Two streams of silent tears glistened in the warm firelight.

  “When did my sister become such a weakling?”

  Nyla ignored her brother and stomped off into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her hard enough to shake the frame. This development left Jason in a tough spot. She clearly wanted to be alone so he had no choice but to remain in the common room. He took a seat on the floor at the opposite side of the room from the fire. He chanced a look at Quin, whose face was twitching in irritation along with whatever thoughts he was having.

  Ten minutes passed without either of them saying a word, all the while Quin’s expression grew uglier by the minute. Just as Jason was wondering whether or not he should say something to ease the tension, the big man stood up with a frustrated grunt, grabbed a nearby chair and smashed it into the wall in an explosion of wooden bits and pieces.

  The following silence was too painful for Jason to bear. “Women, huh?”

  Quin ignored him and walked into his room.

  Why do I even bother? He turned his head to share a look of skepticism with Nolan, and instead found empty space, grief and regret. He curled into a ball by the fire and cried until he slipped into a dreamless sleep.

  Nyla didn’t speak to him much the following day, which he wasn’t too sorry over now that his new peasant robe was struggling to hide the fact that he hadn’t bathed in weeks. He didn’t understand how others could still smell like flowers, pine needles, or the musty fur pelts that they wore, when they hardly ever bathed.

  He was tired of taking stealth shits in the wooden bucket behind the cabin whenever he thought that nobody would notice, always reluctant to hurry to the big pit a few minutes’ walk from Nyla’s home where he would empty his waste like the other residents in the area. He’d then toss a handful of pungent flowers into the hole from one of the many baskets around the site and then hurry home with that rank little bucket dangling from his grip.

  As angry and insufferable as Quin had been the night before, he had still ended up sneaking out of the village early in the morning to continue his search for Nolan. This, however, was no cause for hope. Based on the situation they’d been in, he couldn’t see any way that his friend might have survived when even Bron and that female warrior had not.

  That evening as they sat down to a plate of roasted meat and, of course, pink olive soup, Jason couldn’t help but ask Nyla why she thought Nolan might still be alive. He knew that he was being insensitive but he figured that it would only hurt her more if she kept living in denial.

  Rather than answer, she stepped away for a moment and returned from her room holding a dirty bundle of cloth that smelled like death. She handed it to Jason.

  “Me robes?” He didn’t understand.

  “Look carefully. Tell me, do you think that this is Nolan’s blood?”

  It took him a few moments to realize why she had asked this question. “Why purple?”

  “There are many demonic beasts whose blood turns purple a few days after it dries. This blood did not come from a human.”

  Why would there have been that much demonic beast blood on the ground? Was there even anything out there that could hurt that giant fox?

  “Quin returned to the spot
where he found you and saw that enough of the blood had dried and turned purple for him to determine that none of it came from a human.” A hopeful light flickered in Nyla’s eyes. “If Nolan died then it was not where Quin found you.”

  As Jason was wondering what the hell had happened back in the forest after he’d lost consciousness, a series of loud and destructive bangs resounded throughout the village.

  The two of them shared uneasy looks.

  “What that?” Jason said.

  “Let’s go see.”

  Jason followed Nyla out of the cabin and down a path that led them toward the source of that ear-piercing sound. Many people were already hurrying in the same direction, with many warriors darting between the homes and disorganized pathways with speed that would impress the Olympic athletes of his world.

  Shouts of alarm and screams of pain became increasingly distinct as they drew closer to the east side of the village. A thin cloud of dust was slowly rising up from the backside of the olive orchards where a section of the great palisade wall had somehow been smashed to bits. The dozens of women and children that had been harvesting olives from the pink-pedalled orchard had fled into the crowd that was slowly forming about fifty metres away from the breach in the wall.

  A few of those closest to the commotion had been injured by splintered wood and were now screaming as they grasped at the large fragments that had pierced their bodies. The dust cloud wasn’t thick enough to hide the group people that loomed near the opening in the wall.

  “Who dares to attack this village?”

  Just as the dust in the air began to settle, dozens of warriors from the village arrived and mixed in with the ten or so that had already been standing in the area. At the head of the warriors of Redfox Village stood none other than the darkly dressed Vade, a murderous glint in his eyes as he stared at the intruders with lethal vigilance. They faced about fifty robust and dangerous-looking men, all of them dressed in the same pelts made from peculiar fur of a hypothermic blue. The wolf heads that the men wore struck a fearsome image, giving them the appearance of a large pack of armed, bipedal wolves.