Tribes of Venara Read online

  At the head of the group stood a tall and heavily muscled man with jet-black hair that hung down to his too-broad shoulders. His pelt was a darker, blackish-blue, the wolf head hanging down his back like the hood on Jason’s favourite sweater from his pre-migration days. The man couldn’t have been any older than Quin, yet he gave Jason a feeling of danger that was much more intense. He had a savage look to him as if he were someone who thrived off the pain of others. His devilish grin made it obvious that he hadn’t come with good intentions.

  “You ask who dares?” the big man bellowed, shouldering a metal battle-axe that was similar to Quin’s in size. “Why don’t you open your useless eyes and see!”

  The young man stepped past the fractured palisade wall and began to approach Vade and the Redfox villagers. Most of the people that had been working in the orchards had run to hide behind Vade and the other warriors, but a few still whaled from their injuries where they’d fallen to the ground, not having the strength to make it back to the group. Four of these people had been working side by side by one of the trees, and they just happened to be lying around in each other’s blood on a patch of grass that directly intersected with the young man’s path. A casual swiped of the large axe instantly bisected the group.

  Jesus! Jason was aghast. He just killed all of those women! Even that little girl!

  “Bastard!” one of the men in their group pounced on the young man, but a quick sidestep and another swift strike left him in the same state as the four harvesters.

  “I am Hale of the Netherwolf Tribe. You should know why we are here!” The young man’s voice was loud and provocative. “Did you think we wouldn’t notice that you were all preparing to flee? I guess we didn’t set a good enough example with the other tribes in your area.”

  “W—why would it be him?” Nyla’s fists had clenched tightly enough for her nails to cut into her flesh and bring forth a dribble of blood in each hand. Face pale, with jittery limbs and a mixture of hatred and fear swirling in her eyes, there was not a trace of her usual proud and straight-forward demeanor.

  Another villager stepped forward with his weapon raised, but Vade stopped him with an outstretched arm.

  “Have you come to war with us?” he asked the opposing man.

  “War isn’t the word I’d use.” He raised his axe-holding arm and addressed the group behind him. “Same as the others. Leave none alive!”

  At his word the people of the Netherwolf Tribe sprang forth with surging momentum and crashed directly into Vade’s group, slaughtering anyone in their way as they instigated an all-out brawl.

  “Don’t think it will be so easy!” Vade raised his own axe and led the Redfox villagers to defend against the invaders.

  More and more warriors from the village were arriving every second, and by now their numbers had swollen to nearly seventy men. Despite having a numerical advantage, it was easy to see that their opponents held the upper hand in terms of strength.

  Vade had already killed two of Hale’s men and had just removed the arm of a third with a clean and powerful chop of his axe, his movements noticeably faster than those around him. The fight was so rapid and intense that Jason could hardly keep track of any one motion, as if he were fast forwarding an action movie.

  The most frightening person was easily Hale, who’d cut down over ten of the Redfox villagers by the time that Vade had downed five of his men, his great axe a blur of silver as blood splattered like paint on a canvas with each of his deadly swings. The dangerous young man had allowed a shallow cut on his left forearm while defending against the joint efforts of three men, but he was quick to send the one of them flying into a nearby fighter with a ruthless kick. He disposed of the two remaining villagers just in time to witness one of his men fall limply to the ground about a dozen paces away. He kicked off of the ground with a light grunt and soared over the mass of bloody bodies to barrel straight into Vade with an arching chop of his axe, which his target only barely managed to avoid.

  Vade was forced back with each blow that he exchanged with his enemy until the weapon in his hands was abruptly knocked aside, his face smashed in with Hale’s heavily muscled shoulder. The bear-pelted man toppled backwards while his mouth sprayed a rain of bloody teeth. Before he could regain his footing, his head was cleanly severed from his body as a cold, steely glint flashed in the evening sunlight. After disposing of his main opponent, Hale immediately dove into the fray and led his men in a merciless offensive that took the life of every Redfox warrior on site, much to the horror of the non-combatants that remained.

  When all was said and done, the Netherwolf tribesmen had lost eleven men, with not one remaining among the warriors of Redfox Village. At some point the constant flow of warriors arriving on the scene had ceased, but the reason was quickly made known by the arrival of the village head and over fifty fresh fighters, who must have held off during the conflict in order to form a substantial force.

  “It doesn’t matter how many of you there are!” Hale looked truly nefarious as a big smile parted his blood-stained lips.

  Seeing the Netherwolf tribesmen standing in a bloodbath of their comrades, the village head and the other warriors hesitated.

  Hale gave everyone in the orchard a quick sweep with his gaze and then raised his arm, evidently to issue another command. As soon as he spotted Nyla, his eyes widened in genuine shock and then quickly narrowed in avarice. “Wait!” The big man let out a joyous laugh as if this were one of the most wonderful moments of his life. Even the vicious expressions of the men behind him couldn’t help but lighten up in shock. “If it isn’t the youngest daughter of Patriarch Ravenwing!”

  The surroundings quieted and all eyes in the area turned to settle on Nyla’s trembling figure.

  They seem to know each other. Jason could understand Nyla’s fear. After the heartless killing spree that had just occurred he was shaking more than she was.

  Hale made his way toward Nyla with an air of unrestrained glee, the occasional step kicking up a splash of scarlet. “To think that all this time you’ve hiding away in some small tribe of the Northern Plains! This is perfect. I’ll bring you back to my father and then take you on as my fifth concubine.”

  It was almost impossible for Jason to keep up with the string of unexpected developments, though he was certain of one thing. Nyla would be in for endless grief if she ended up in the hands of these people, but what could he do? Without thinking, he grabbed Nyla’s hand and sprinted away toward the orchard’s exit. He hadn’t gone far when he rebounded to the ground as if he’d run straight into a brick wall, and looked up through the glittering stars that spun in his vision to see Hale standing before him with a detestable look on his face.

  “An Otherworlder?” Hale scooped Nyla up and tossed her over his pelted shoulder, leaving a bloody-nosed and red-faced Jason choking on the ground while gasping for air. “They truly have the strength of children. To kill you would be a mercy.”

  “Nyla…” Jason’s vision began to fade.

  Hale returned to his group of warriors and then looked at the village head. “I’ve had a change of heart. For now, I’ll take this girl back with me and leave you all to your business. Consider yourselves lucky.”

  Hale led his men away with an excited expression, their group leaving an ominous tension in their wake as they disappeared beyond the hole they’d created in the palisade wall. Only once they were out of view did the Redfox villagers lower their guards.

  Large splinters and chunks of wood lay scattered about the orchard, mixed in with a cesspool of butchered bodies that invited a rustic odour to hang in the air. Most of the observers rushed over to the dead and dying as soon as the tension began to fade, the region rife with cries of mourning within minutes.

  Although the villagers had suffered a terrible blow today, they had also escaped a violent calamity. It was true that they had lost over five percent of their people, but the hundreds that remained had been spared a gruesome death at the cost of a singl
e person who had only moved to their community in recent years. None of that mattered to Jason, who could care less about the villagers at this point. The only thing on his mind was the fact that Nyla had just been kidnapped by Hale and the Netherwolf tribesmen.

  He forced himself back to Nyla’s house, limping all the way. There was only one thing he could do in this situation. His only hope was to wait until Quin snuck back into the village and then tell him about what had happened to his sister. If Jason sat around and did nothing then the kind and compassionate girl that had taken such good care of him and Nolan was likely to spend the rest of her days in cruel torment.

  Chapter Nine: The Ancestral Body Technique

  Ten days was an awful lot of time to spend alone. At this point Nolan was convinced that he would never leave this glade, but he had more pressing problems to deal with than thinking of a way to get back to Redfox Village.

  He was constantly worrying over whether or not he would get sick from eating the raw flesh of the demonic fox carcass that was the only source of food in the area. The blood was still warm and none of it had dried, and as much as Nolan was ashamed to admit it he didn’t mind the taste of the uncooked meat. He’d gone three days before he succumbed to munching on a flap of fatty meat that he’d torn from the inside of the fox’s stomach, and he’d been getting by on two meals a day since then. It had been a troubling and desperate decision but he’d long since come to peace with it.

  The water from that wonderful fountain in front of the dusky cabin was always cold and refreshing, not to mention strangely invigorating. With so much energy and nothing to do with it, Nolan was antsier than ever before.

  Most surprising was that although the ring had entered the cut on his palm and tunnelled all the way through to his heart, his arm was completely fine, in fact it felt better than ever. There wasn’t even a trace of the scar on his hand. He’d been caught off guard after inexplicably waking up in a new location for the second time, so he’d initially overlooked the absence of any pain. Ever since the first day, he’d actually felt quite good, surprisingly so when he thought about all of the abuse that his body had recently taken.

  Dressed in his freshly laundered robe, Nolan meandered out to a particular spot in the field. He was currently standing over the demonic mantis’s corpse, particularly the severed, scythe-like arm. Judging by the length of the shiny metallic blade he was convinced that it could definitely be made into a weapon. Not that he’d be capable of using it, but it was likely that such a thing could earn him and Jason a fairly desirable status in the village despite their comparative feebleness. With nothing else to do, why not give it a quick inspection?

  He bent down and tried to lift up the huge arm. The blade portion alone would be level with his nose were it set upright, but he decided against it after discovering its heavy weight. Since he’d barely managed to get it a few centimetres off the ground, he instead decided to trace his finger along one of its flat sides. It was cool to the touch, the chilling, orange glow still present on the surface despite having significantly dimmed after the creature’s death. He touched a finger to the lower part of the arm out of interest, but pulled back with a light yelp when the plated exoskeleton cut a thin line into his finger. He couldn’t believe that the small ridges which looked particularly dull were actually so sharp on the surface.

  Not to mention any bandages, Nolan didn’t even possess a spare strip of cloth. With nothing to wrap around his hands, he could only abandon his earlier thoughts of harvesting materials from the mantis.

  He trudged back to the courtyard out front of the cabin and headed over to the dazzling fountain. He then dipped his finger in the shimmering water to cool it down and clean off the blood, marvelling at how it managed to glisten without the presence of any sunlight.

  His finger felt a bit better after the quick soak, which miraculously stopped the bleeding and mended a small portion of the cut, which had shrunken to half its original size. That the waters had partially healed his wound was nothing short of amazing. Even so, it didn’t matter how astonishing the fountain’s mending properties might be, for at the end of the day he was still trapped here with no knowledge of where he was or why he’d appeared here.

  I need to keep looking around.

  He ignored the lingering sting of the cut and began to pace around anxiously, his blood boiling from frustration at his inability to find a way out of this glade. He eventually ended up at the odd slab of polished dark stone on the far side of the courtyard. He’d spent a significant amount of time in front of this wideset stele in recent days, enough so that he had memorized nearly half of the curious depictions of ambiguously drawn people in peculiar stances, mostly out of boredom. He’d even imitated them a few times, but only until a few minutes passed and he felt it too silly to continue.

  Tracing his finger over the smooth engravings as he’d done countless times before, Nolan flinched as a fresh drop of blood slipped out of the small cut on his finger and dribbled into the grooves of one of the depictions. He cursed and withdrew his hand, turning around and heading back to the fountain. He hadn’t made it halfway when a great cracking sound stabbed through the eerie silence of the desolate courtyard and made him jump on the spot.

  What the hell was that?

  A vibrant beam of white light shot out from the fine slab of black stone and pierced straight into Nolan’s forehead. The amazing fountain and the simple cabin, the ageless courtyard, the glade and its monochrome borders; everything abruptly disappeared and was perturbingly replaced by a dismal, pervasive blackness.

  Where am I?

  He couldn’t feel his limbs, or see them for that matter. It was as if he’d fallen to the bottom of an eighty kilometre trench where light held no domain, and all of his nerve endings had ceased working.

  Not ten seconds had passed when several small streams of colour began to approach from the indeterminable distance, and the trickles of light soon became a river of rainbows that momentarily washed over the entirety of his environment. The colours mixed like a mass of spilled paint until a sudden coagulation saw them rapidly distort before abruptly settling into a recognizable reality.

  A car horn blared in his ears and caused him to snap back into awareness.

  “Get out of the way, kid.”

  He was standing in the middle of a familiar street, the heat of heavy sunlight bearing down upon him with the full strength of a summer sky.

  What the…?

  The horn sounded again.

  “Get out of my way you little shit!”

  He belatedly retreated to the side of the street, his jaw slack and his eyes wide with disbelief as he stole several glances at his surroundings.

  My neighbourhood? Why am I here? He stumbled backward and tripped over the curb and off to the sidewalk. His heartrate increased tremendously and a panic attack ensued. What the hell happened? Don’t tell me all that was a dream? No, he’d spent over a month in Redfox Village. Such a lengthy dream was impossible. What if I was brought back to Earth the same way that I was taken from it? It’s possible that the villagers had no clue what they were talking about when the village head brought up the Interspatial Migration.

  He slowly turned his head toward the third house on his right, the single-storey home of red brick and brown, sandpapery shingles. An old bmx bike sat in the centre of the small front lawn, a jungle of neglected grass that would soon reach the height of a man’s knee.

  T—Thomas’s bike…

  His legs quivered for a moment before he sprinted for the front door, the eyes of several of his neighbours drawn to his bare feet and roughly spun robe. He tried the door but found it locked, so he immediately kicked over one of the five plastic gnomes that habituated their dying garden and quickly retrieved the spare key that had been sitting beneath it.

  He flung the door open hard enough for the opposing side of the door handle to leave a sizeable impression in the drywall that stood adjacent to the entranceway. He took five steps into t
he house and then froze on the spot, his pupils dilating and his breath pausing as he laid eyes upon his sandy-haired brother.

  “N—Nolan?” Thomas dropped the bowl of cereal that he’d clearly just fixed himself and a large mess spattered across the carpet at his feet. “Where have you been?”

  He ran further into the house and pulled his brother into a heartfelt embrace. “What did I tell you about leaving your bike on the lawn. It’s not like when we were kids anymore.”

  “Whoa, I’m happy you’re back but do you have to cry so much?”

  Nolan stepped back. “Where’s Steph?”

  His brother sucked in a quiet breath. “She’s in her room.” He grabbed Nolan’s arm as he made to run past. “You need to call Mom and let her know you’re okay. She’s been freaking out for weeks.”

  “I’ll call her in a sec. I want to see Steph!”

  “Do you understand how serious this is? You’ve been gone for over a month, Nolan. There are posters of you all over town, you’ve been in the news like five times, and there have been fundraisers to help hire private investigators. You need to call Mom, now.”

  He gave Thomas a loving pat on the shoulder. “I missed you more than you’ll ever know, man. I love you like a brother.”

  “We are brothers.”

  “Exactly, which is why you’ll understand that I do this with love.” He gave Thomas a hard shove and the lean boy crashed onto a nearby couch. He strode past him with excitable steps, toward the back of the house.

  “Don’t go in her room, Nolan!” Thomas caught up almost immediately. “She’s with her boyfriend.”