Callisto

Ours

- One week later –

They said that war had a smell.

It was the incense of righteousness. A stench that reached through the nostrils and rested deep in the bowels, making you feel full. Some said drunk. But that wasn't the right word. The aroma of battle brought a sense of satiation, not escapism. It was real, pure, and it was good.

That was what his Elders had said from back before the Deadlands became part of his reality. That was what his inquisitive eyes had seen on the hunts for a place where the clan could rest, as they silenced the beasts whose voices sang on the evil winds.

That was what they said. That was what he knew.

So then why now, as he stood on the precipice of the greatest battle he would ever fight, did the air catch in his throat? Why did he look with fear at his brothers and sisters in the battlefield beneath him, smeared with the ink of their forefathers, the Old Ones...

Ragged-Brow looked at his own painted hand, and it was as though the crimson liquid bubbled on his skin in the high sun of noon.

The drums had been playing since morning when he and his scouts had returned with sights of the Guthra prepped for war. Not a skirmish, or a campaign of conquest. He had come close enough to their forward camp deep in the canyon, where the bodies of the Stalkers had littered the ground. They had left their homes, their faces painted with ashes of their sorrow. He could see them even now: bloodied hatchets, spears, and arrows gripped in their grit-filled hands. They faced the warriors of the Hanakh – including some of the children. They had run after their fathers and mothers, still coughing with pestilence, having grabbed what sticks and stones they could. He looked upon the two armies down there in the canyon and, for a moment, thought he could see the end of it: a river of blood that would flow through the Canyon, linking them all in death. Then forevermore the canyon would be empty. Nothing but the sand would remain, and he would look on it alone – standing above the graveyard of his people.

That is what this was, Ragged Brow knew: it was to be an extermination. Not a battle. And standing above it all was he and Father-Mother.

He felt their eyes lingering on him. The other Elders had gone to war. And yet here he was, electing to defend his Elder against any attempts at assassination. He held his blade close to him, expecting...what? He wondered.

"You have been a faithful instrument to us, Ragged-Brow. You have been tested, and have not staggered."

He heard the withered burden in Father-Mother's voice. Yet still part of him thought that maybe there would be a way to avert the destruction that must surely follow soon. Was it really the destiny seen in the Great One's eyes that they be destroyed? All of them?

He licked his dried lips, tasting only death.

"Do you hear them?" Father-Mother asked suddenly, and he was struck at that moment by the sigh of exhilaration that passed from their mouth. They had come here in their full headdress – the dyed feathers they wore during councils of war, and the embroidered cloak decorated with a single blood-tinged eye at the cuffs. They were a symbol of authority, and of death, and just by looking at them Ragged-Brow was suddenly transported back outside his mind's anxiety to the world that lay beneath their feet.

The Hanakh were singing.

The Guthra were singing.

He knew the Hanakh words, and scraps of the Guthra. But the intention was the same. The blood-crazed ballad of battle was sung by the throats of the young, the old, the infirm, and the able. All of them were poised and ready.

"They wait," Father-Mother whispered. Ragged-Brow turned abruptly and saw that their eyes were closed, pupils darting under the wrinkled skin of their eyelids as though prospecting a chronicle not yet written. "Like animals caged by a humanity thrust on them without purpose or cause. They are the remnants of those that came before. This life they have lived is as cruel as one could conceive. Now, The End comes. Finally."