Callisto

The Harrowing

The dry heat of the desert winds kissed her shoulders and caressed her braided hair.

She closed her eyes and listened. It was said that the songs of the Old Ones traveled on the winds of the Deadlands. A Hanakh huntress almost instinctively knew which song hinted at triumph and which foretold death. Truthfully, Rain-Born often wondered if these two things might be the same – for the triumph of one being always meant the death of another. That was the way of The Deadlands.

As she listened, she heard no words. The Great Canyon was insisting on silence today. Only the dead wind blew across its desolate no man's land, penned in by its monolithic walls. A lesser hunter would have seen the eerie silence as an omen. They would feel the claustrophobic sense of impending doom signaled by the canyon walls that pierced the heavens even more keenly.

But a smile played across the young Rain-Born's face as she opened her eyes. Silence was the hunter's greatest weapon, and the ancestors had quieted the winds to aid her. It was a sign that her path was a righteous one.

Rain-Born watched the being in the center of the Canyon's floor with unblinking eyes – a mass of hair, teeth, and six gyrating limbs that ended in pincers. It was a Canyon Stalker. One that was feasting on the scrap of meat she'd laid out for it. Its snapping jaws tore into the soft flesh of its meal with wild abandon, throwing blood across its serrated horns and the mattered fur of its torso. Its six legs skittered around, kicking up dust in the sand of the canyon floor.

She watched it from her hiding place – the small cave she'd prospected the night when her Harrowing began. There had been a storm then. The winds had not been kind. They had lashed her with their acidic rains and sent arcs of lightning down into the earth – rods of fury thrown at this interloper who dared to stalk the Great Canyon. It had been a bad omen. It was a message from the Great Spirit that her Harrowing was to be one without mercy.

But Rain-Born had breathed relief when she found the dim cave in the night and sequestered herself among the dark stalactites of its interior. It was as the Elders said: even the brightest snake seeks the dark.

Now she watched the great six-legged predator of the canyon gorge itself on the present she'd laid out for it. The trap had been a simple one. A Yamrah cat had strayed too far from its den, no doubt hunting for its younglings. Rain-Born's arrow had found its neck in a swift strike that killed it instantly. She had stripped it and set her trap precisely, leaving it outside when the sun was highest in the sky so its stench would attract the corpse-devouring Stalker.

She nocked her Yak-feathered arrow and drew it back in her bowstring, keeping her eyes focused, watching her arm falter, and cursing herself. She had to be better than this.

She loosed the arrow and watched it fly towards the feasting Stalker. Her breath caught in her throat as she heard it yelp and immediately scratched at the perforation the foreign projectile had cut into its abdomen. Its viscous, green blood spilled from the tear in its flesh as she nocked her next arrow.

At that moment, the creature's kaleidoscopic eyes found her.

It raced towards her cave just as she loosed the shaft of her thin missile, and with inhuman speed, the Stalker skirted around the arrow"s trajectory and bore down on the cave entrance, its jaws snapping at her through the hole that it couldn't fit through, throwing acidic spittle across her face. She grimaced as she felt the skin on her cheeks burn. Her whole world was consumed by nothing but the spit's pain and the vision of the creature's manic crimson eyes and teeth as it desperately thrashed toward her.

She threw her back against the cave wall and fired her next shot down its throat. It did nothing but scream and then reach out with its tongue to grab her bow – its spume-covered muscle wrapped around the refined wood of her weapon and broke it apart as she screamed in terror.