Callisto

Words wreathed in flame

She sat on the edge of the village, arms crossed, knees huddled up, and staring off into the distant skies. Staring into the infinite nothingness that was her destiny.

The tribesmen said that when they watched her meditating alone, entranced by some unknown force. They'd heard the stories. They knew she was special. She was marked for something momentous. That was the sole reason a child like her was afforded respect by her fellow hunters and huntresses.

It was also the reason mothers shielded their babes from her sight and retreated into their tents at her passing.

In truth, she wasn't staring blankly at the crimson canvas stretching out above for miles and eventually met the shifting sands at the horizon's edge. No – she was staring at the great tree set into the ground like an entombed blade, hilt up, at the five-meter perimeter of the Hanakh territory above the Great Canyon. The birthing tree.

It was said the antlers of the Great Spirit had touched the dead branches of the sacred tree at the beginning – when the tribe was nothing but Father-Mother and a few trusted confidantes who had escaped the fires the Old Ones set against the world. The Great Spirit had come upon the Hanakh people in their time of exodus and told them they had been guided here for a purpose. He stamped his hooves into the warm, dry earth and proclaimed them the chosen Children of the Wastes – the inheritors of the New World called The Deadlands. Here must they live, and by the Great Spirit's tree must they bare their children. Above, he would watch and calm the mothers of the tribe in their time of agony as they delivered new life into the world.

But he hadn't done this for Rain-Born's mother.

She often thought about this as she looked out at the tree, stretching out her arm and flexing her fingers, imagining the lightning that had struck the tree on the day of her passage from the ethereal Garden of the Great Spirit to the material world. Her mother sacrificed her own life to bring her into this world that day.

And here she sat – a failure and a reject. A girl with no power at all. A girl who didn't even know how to be a part of the tribe she was supposed to belong to naturally.

She clenched her hand into a fist as these thoughts of failure played like an evil song in her brain. She imagined instead the power of the lightning flowing through her veins, down her hand, and into her heart, filling her with its cleansing, killing light.

She'd use it to destroy the Guthra. She'd use it to do what she was born to do. That was what Father-Mother wanted from her. That's what her mother had died for. She had to be what they dreamed she would be.

She dug her nails into the soft skin of her palm till her whole hand shook. She could do it. She could end them all. She just had to be stronger.

Otherwise, how could she meet her mother on the Hunting Grounds of the afterlife? How could she look upon the woman that had borne her for eight months of her life only to have her own life cast aside in favor of her child's?

"The tree is defenseless, child. What has it done to deserve your scorn?"

Rain-Born turned suddenly to meet Ragged-Brow's form towering above her, his stick firmly planted into the dry earth at his feet. She made to rise, but he waved away her attempt.

"Stay seated, child," he said. "Lessons are better absorbed the closer one is to the sands."

He crossed his legs beside her and breathed deeply like he was filling his lungs with completely new air. She double-blinked at him and then returned her attention to the tree. Whatever nonsense he had come here with, she would let it pass in one ear and leave through the other.

"You seem fascinated by the birthing tree."

She nodded. Still, her stare did not waver.

"Why?"