Chapter Text
Terminologies Used In This Chapter
Eywa
The Great Mother; the deity of Pandora.
Ikran
Mountain banshees; large dragon-like aerial predators. Na'vi clans use them for traveling long distances, for hunting from the air, or as war mounts.
Kuru
Neural queue; an appendage that is part of many species' anatomy on Pandora, including that of the Na'vi - which for them is always protected by their braided hair. It functions similarly to a biological ethernet cable that allows organisms to make the bond with various flora and fauna, and with Eywa. The bond allows organisms to access each other's consciousnesses, as well as memories stored at sacred sites such as the Tree of Voices and the Spirit Tree.
Mangkwan
Ash People; Hostile Na'vi clan that worships fire and resent Eywa.
Nantang
Viperwolf; hyena/wolf-like carnivore that has 6 legs. Moves in packs that can mass together into a highly cooperative hunting party.
Na'vi
The People; a species of sapient humanoids who inhabit the lush moon of Pandora. Blue Cat Monkeys~
Pa'li
Direhorse. Six-legged horse. A single Pa'li can be mounted by different Na'vi. They're unlike Ikran - which once tamed, will only have one rider for life.
Pandora
The "Earth" of the Na'vi in the Avatar Universe. It is a moon to a gas giant.
[Author: But for the sake of better understanding of the timeline and story pacing, I will use descriptive earth terms for the setting such as: dusk, sunset, moonlight, etc.]
RDA
Resources Development Administration; a corporation based on Earth that manages interstellar resource harvesting. Serves as the main administrative body for human operations on Pandora and stands as the main antagonists in the Avatar franchise.
The Na'vi refer to the humans as Sky People.
Recombinant
Recom for short; human-Na'vi hybrids with implanted human memories used by the RDA as soldiers.
Terapatxi
(te-ra-pa-tDIH)
Na'vi clan of indigo-skinned nomadic warriors of the plains and forests. They have similar bodies to the forest clans however their biology is different; they heal injuries at twice the speed of an average Na'vi.
[Author: However, My OC and her brother had the blue pigments of their indigo skin bleached out from experimentation which is why their color leans closer to the red spectrum rather than indigo's deeper blue spectrum. Hence the reason why I use 'purple' for description. And yeah I made this clan up.]
Tsaheylu
"Bond" or neural connection; the physical process by which The People, Pandoran flora, and fauna mentally connect to one another by the use of their queues.
Tsahìk
Spiritual leader of a Na'vi clan, and the most important member next to the clan leader. The job of the tsahìk is to interpret the will of Eywa, guide the clan spiritually, and perform important ceremonies.
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CHAPTER 1: THE CHASE
"Run! You can outrun them! Go!"
The command echoed in Hiraya's mind, a frantic rhythm to match the hammer-blows of her heart against her ribs. Her screaming pulse thundered in her ears, born of unbridled panic and the instinctive, desperate need for sanctuary. She needed to get away from here. To somewhere. Anywhere. So long as it meant safety. So long as it meant preserving the very life her brother had bought with his own.
She lunged through the suffocating undergrowth, her feet skidding over slick roots that sprawled interconnectedly through loam and moss and rotting leaves. The forest around her had dimmed into red-tinged shadow and dying light. It was the sort of encroaching darkness that temporarily, but devastatingly, chewed at her already-meager chances of a successful escape. The kind that seemed to chant for a time-consuming stumble, for a lethal slip, for her gruesome end. The tree trunks and skin-grabbing flora had turned into black silhouettes against the sickly oranges of the retreating sun filtering through the canopy. Their disinterested shadows watched her stumble across a raised root like an anhedonic audience, unable to do anything but forcibly await the outcome of her pathetic struggle. Twilight was still only approaching; the bioluminescence meant to better illuminate the increasingly treacherous path had yet to wake.
Hiraya didn't dare look back. Fear had already turned the terrain into a harsher deathtrap she had to spend every bit of her adrenaline-enhanced focus on. Every boulder she leapt across from became a mountain. Every bush she pushed through was a scraping wall. Every leaf was a hand pulling her back, obtusely asking for a fraction of time she had none to spare. Even the very air seemed to work against her as she pushed forward through the stray, dusky wind; it seemed to tax the same effort of wading through murky water.
Behind her lay the sharp, slinging thrum of Mangkwan boleadoras and the relentless crashing of bodies through the brush---harrowing sounds that bore the malicious promise of blood-dipped blades, teeth tearing through flesh, and the mountainous reality of grief against reluctant survival.
Thwack---!
A thrown hatchet bit deep into a tree trunk inches from her shoulder, the vibration shivering through the air. It made her curse under her breath---a tiny, helpless effort to ground herself in the rush of her escape. The neck hairs on her purple skin spiked like prickly needles. Her vision was darkening at the edges as if they were sinister, obsidian smoke coaxing for her surrender, to accept her fate the same way a child playing tag with their mother would inevitably, but forgivingly, get caught by tender hands.
But sadistically so, this was a game. Not to her---but to her ashen pursuers. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Hiraya screamed for the impossible, that this was all just a terrible nightmare she was bound to wake up from. That if the ghoulish Na'vi behind her did catch her, she'd open her eyes to Taran. That her brother would have his arms around her anchoring her. That she would feel him still breathing, still warm, still whole.
Her foot accidentally slipped on wet fungus, her equilibrium tilting for a split-second before she caught herself and corrected it. She regained her balance with every step she forced her feet to take---stubbornly maintaining the distance between her vulnerable form and the Ash People. She didn't even have the time to process it. She could only feel herself buckling from the overwhelming tension, from the relentless fear of getting caught by the very hands that had stolen from her just as much as the Sky People had.
Hiraya flinched violently to the right just as a volley of arrows hissed past her left ear. One didn't just pass---it kissed the skin, a jagged streak of ice-cold friction that instantly bloomed into a searing heat.
Her ears rang with a high, hollow whine, drowning out the forest's roar. She reached up instinctively, her fingers coming away slick and crimson from her mangled earlobe, but the pain was a distant, secondary thing. Adrenaline was a cold fire in her veins, pushing her forward. She couldn't stumble. She couldn't tire.
Her resolve repeated in her head as a reverent, but defiant mantra: Keep running. Keep going. Taran had bought her this head start with his life, and she refused to let his final breath be wasted in the dirt.
Her brother's screams still vibrated in the marrow of her bones---a jagged sound that had been swallowed by the deafening, hollow silence of his kuru being severed. Then came the laughter: the shrill, manic shrieking of the Mangkwan as they claimed their prize. Taran's neural queue, a braid of black and white hair identical to her own, was no longer a connection to the world; it was a trophy, destined to be strung around the neck of the Mangkwan Tsahìk.
The thought ignited a white-hot coal of fury in her gut. She felt the urge to turn, to scream, to let the grief consume her---but the wet, excited howls of the warriors behind her snapped her focus back. They weren't just hunting; they were enjoying the sport.
"Eywa, please," she gasped, the prayer hitching against her panicked breaths. "Great Mother, hear me. Help me."
Tears of raw rage and terror pooled in her eyes, threatening to melt the forest into a blur of dark green and gold. She hissed through gritted teeth, blinking them back with a violent shake of her head. She couldn't afford a hazy world. She needed every leaf, every vine, and every shadow to be sharp.
Around her, the amber-dipped forest of gradually-dimming light and shadow reigned in sophistication, sitting in all its majesty with its gloaming design. Strong vines spilled from the canopy like leaf-adorned snakes. Trees rose in columns like looming titans. Pink and blue shelf fungi decorated crusted bark; their shallow dishes holding honey-like sap and beads of collected moisture. Herbacious plants sprung from the ground like textured rows of wild, green geometry; each leaf and stem containing pigments of highly-saturated reds and magentas. The flora was still locked in its transition toward nighttime visibility, still preparing its mythical, heavenly glow in response to the introductory call of twilight. On other days, Hiraya would have thought the sight breathtaking. But in this particular moment, it was painfully obscene.
She stormed past ferns curled in dreamy swirls, her hurried limbs brushing against them uncaringly, inevitably withdrawing wet latex and pollen on her sweat-lined skin. The sudden disturbance caused six-winged insects to launch themselves mid-air. They settled like an abrupt cloud of yellow-green critters Hiraya quickly left in the dust. Vibrant chalice plants stood tall on one side ahead of her, waiting for her to pass them by. As she did, they looked like ironic, celebratory cups blurring in layered, latitudinal lines of color; the pitcher plants appearingly eager to exchange offensive toasts to her end.
'Almost there,' she told herself, the mantra drumming in time with her feet. 'Almost there.'
The saffron glow of the dying sunset bled through the thinning canopy ahead. The cliff's edge was right there---a jagged line of gold promising a violent, beautiful escape.
Hiraya's breath hitched in recognition. In anticipation overruling logic. In reluctance overriden with desperation. This was it. One reckless but necessary jump for a better chance at freedom.
Then, the world tilted.
A bolt of white-hot agony lanced through her thigh, staggering her mid-stride. Hiraya slammed into the parched, unforgiving earth, the impact knocking the air from her lungs. She drew a sharp breath a heartbeat later. The metallic smell of blood mixed with the woodland scents of grass and geosmin filled her nostrils with every trembling inhale. She was already fighting to push herself up as she looked back. A choked sob caught in her throat; an arrow was buried deep in her muscle, the shaft quivering with the force of its entry. Dark, viscous blood began to map a grim path over her purple skin.
An amalgamated variety of emotions raced through her; increasing alarm, suffocating despair, and furious denial. But just as quickly, her heart began reassembling itself in the familiar, rugged shape of tenacity.
Behind her, the Mangkwan's howls shifted---no longer a hunt, but a celebration. They were closing the gap, their shadows stretching long and monstrous toward her. The nearing sound of them drowned out the natural chirps and clicks of the forest, narrowing Hiraya's auditory senses to the pathological delight of her pursuers as their lone prey in the woods. Her determination flickered, the heavy reality of her impending capture making her feel small and despondent.
"No, no, no..." she whimpered, pleading with her body to move and for the universe itself to still, the word a frantic litany in the golden, scenic backdrop of her doom.
She forced her hands into the dirt, her fingernails clawing for purchase as she dragged herself upward. Every nerve in her leg screamed, sending arcs of fire up her spine, but she refused to listen. Fueled by a desperate, final surge of adrenaline, she heaved herself into a lurching, stiff-legged sprint. She wasn't running anymore; she was escaping the gravity of a fate much worse than death.
She reached the precipice just as the brush behind her exploded. The Mangkwan lunged, fingers outstretched like talons to snatch their second trophy of the day.
Hiraya didn't hesitate. She threw herself into the void.
The whistling wind swallowed her scream as she plummeted toward the churning depths below, a silent prayer directed at the Great Mother that she would find the sanctuary of the water---and not the cold embrace of the jagged rocks waiting in the mist.
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Hiraya broke the surface with a ragged gasp, her lungs burning as they pulled in the cool evening air. She scrambled toward a jagged outcrop of rock, her fingers clawing at the mossy stone for purchase.
She was a vessel of pure agony. The impact with the river had felt less like water and more like a collision with solid earth, leaving her body bruised and her head spinning. Below the waterline, the river tugged cruelly at the arrow still buried in her thigh; faint, wispy ribbons of crimson spiraled away into the current, marking her trail for anyone watching from above.
The sky was a bruised, harrowing orange, bleeding into a deep, arterial red. Night was falling fast---a double-edged blade. In the dark, the forest became a geographical menace for an injured, unarmed girl, yet the shadows were the only shroud thick enough to hide her from the ashen predators who hunted her. They didn't just want her life; they wanted the blood in her veins, a resource to be drained and exploited.
Forcing her breathing to steady, she leaned her head back against the stone and looked up at the towering silhouette of the cliff. Her vision had gone wobblingly fuzzy from agony and exhaustion; she narrowly missed the couple of Mangkwan heads peering over the top edge like starving Pandoran ants scanning the dark waters for lost grain, relentless in their search for her. The sound of rushing water almost drowned their stymied yips and whistles echoing overhead as the rest of their group summoned their wings.
She counted the seconds, measuring the distance she had put between herself and the ledge. That reckless, terrifying leap had gifted her the benefit of obscured position---hopefully buying herself a few precious minutes of silence until their eyes found her once more. But in this forest, silence never lasted long.
The shadow of an ikran swept over the water, the snap of its wings like a whip crack in the silence. Hiraya caught the silhouette of the Mangkwan rider hunched over its neck as it zipped past her left. Adrenaline surged again, cold and bitter, as she submerged herself to the chin, pressing into the frigid, rushing current to vanish against the rocks. Painted in ash and blood, the creature's hidden colors should have declared it proud and sublime in Eywa's name. Instead, molten light glinted off the ikran's spiky war-helm---the crown of thorns branding its very being as possession without identity. Branded not as a dignified mount, but as a Mangkwan's living equipment for the sole purpose of airborne mobility. Even from afar, Hiraya could see its uncanny, gummy smile of unretracted teeth---where forced mutilation obeyed its rider's vanity for threatening appearances.
'Just go away,' she thought. Her soul was hopelessly pleading with whatever invisible, universal force pitted the blasphemous Ash People against her exhausted, bleeding form. Her jaw tightened until it ached; the frustration was a physical weight pressing down on her spine. 'Leave me alone and let me go.'
She scanned the shoreline with the jagged, practiced eye of a survivor who had exchanged pleasantries with death more than enough times to believe the specter of it was flirting with her. But the forest wasn't done with her yet. On the riverbank to her right, a pack of nantang---viperwolves---emerged from the shadows. Their obsidian forms moved with a fluid, terrifying grace; six legs churning through the silt, snouts curling to reveal wet canines as they sniffed the air.
Hiraya let out a low, guttural growl of exasperation, irritation overriding burnout and fear. She was a hurricane of overwhelming fatigue, unprocessed grief, and mortal terror‐--held only in check by the immediate call for survival. The clock was ticking. She studied the nantang for one second. Two seconds. In any other circumstance, she could have fended them off, but weaponless and bleeding, she was nothing more than a crippled meal. She glanced at the current; the river pulled toward her left, carrying her scent and the trail of her blood away from the pack. It was a small mercy from the Great Mother, but a fragile one.
The river's roar against the stones was her only shield, masking the sound of her labored breathing and the splash of her movements. In a wide berth around her, multi-finned river fish swam against the current, looking like impossibly-suspended, scaled flags of silver and cobalt untouched by the water's momentum. Tiny shelled-creatures inched along the banks, the snails leaving a glowing trail of cyan-green slime that was hardly visible under the quickly-fading, but lingering daylight.
Hiraya knew the moment she dragged herself onto the bank, the game would change. The water hid her scent, but it wouldn't hide the sound of a limping girl in the undergrowth. To survive the night, she wouldn't just have to be fast---she would have to be a ghost.
She looked down at the shaft protruding from her leg, her lungs hitching in a series of sharp, steadying beats. "Alright," she whispered, the word more a challenge than a comfort. "Let's do this."
She locked one hand around the jagged rock, her knuckles white and straining. With the other, she gripped the fletched end of the arrow. Just the action of settling her hand against the wood lightly jostled the embedded tip by a centimeter, sending inflated jolts of fire through her entire leg.
Her mind was a chaotic battlefield of reasoning, bodily response, and emotion---each part of her practically pulling at her hair, screaming at her to stop, to get it over with, to breathe, to just surrender. For a heartbeat, Hiraya hesitated through the searing, painful flare steadily blossoming from her thigh. She forcibly calmed herself, dissociating.
'It's not my body. It won't hurt.'
With a sudden, violent snap, she broke off the feathery tail. A jagged grunt escaped her, her features twisting into a mask of pure agony, but she didn't let herself stall. The first part was done. And now to the next. She knew the rhythm of survival: move or die.
Taking a final, lung-bursting breath, she lowered herself into the river until the world was nothing but cold, rushing green. She needed the water to be another timer, a ruthless blade to kill the hesitation pleading for her to reconsider, an unbreathable threat that would only grant her the mercy of a gasp once the job was done. She needed the water to swallow the sound of what was coming.
Beneath the surface, she gripped the broken shaft and pushed.
She didn't have the time to process her thoughts in the excruciating reds of her fracturing mind. The muffled roar of the river couldn't drown out the sensation---a bubbling, white-hot scream that reverberated through her very soul. The serrated arrowhead ground against the carbon-fiber reinforcement of her bone, a sickening vibration that hummed through her entire skeleton. She couldn't prolong the hellfire. With a final, nauseating thrust, the tip punched through the skin at the front of her thigh.
She clawed at the blood-slicked point, dragging the rest of the wood through the exit wound until it slid free.
Hiraya breached the surface in an instant, gasping. She collapsed against the stone in a heap of trembling limbs like a discarded, half-submerged ragdoll bitterly remembering the hands that created her, the hands that used her, the hands that broke her. She clutched the splinter of wood---its crimson stains already washed away into non-existence. The broken arrow was now her only defense. She let the sound of the rapids wash over her, finally allowing the quiet, ragged sobs to crawl out of her throat. For a single, hollow moment, there was nothing but the water, the cold, and the salt of her own tears.
The sobs came freely now, a messy outpouring of the trauma she'd suppressed since the first scream in the forest. She was a hollowed-out shell of a girl, shivering violently from the mountain runoff and vibrating with the sheer, exhausting effort of staying conscious. Her fingers, white-knuckled and cramping, locked around her stone anchor as she clutched the splintered arrow---her grim, makeshift prize.
'All that agony for a pathetic scrap of wood,' she cursed silently, her mind dark with bitter irony. The dismal humor was a quiet attempt of emotional recalibration---a way to coax her mental state to stabilize enough to see through the end of her chase.
But the agony was already shifting. Not dulling, but sharpening. Intensifying. Beneath the water, the jagged holes in her thigh were already puckering, the flesh knitting itself back together with unnatural speed. It felt like scorching lava had somehow replaced the narrow, hollow space where the arrow had been. The ferocious, focal point of agony had divided itself into two; Hiraya could almost picture two crawling worms of craggy rocksalt inching their way out through both the entry and exit wounds. Less than a minute later, the pain ceased---and so did the evidence of it, leaving only behind involuntary muscle twitches from the recent trauma.
Even the stinging graze on her earlobe had vanished long ago, leaving only a muted, phantom ache. The skin was as smooth as if the arrow had never touched her. As if injury was an invitational dance in hell it could simply leave from after delivering a single twirl on the dance floor. Her body was a marvel, a biological miracle that was as much a curse as it was a gift---the very reason she was being hunted.
The sky fractured again. Another Mangkwan rider swept overhead like death making its rounds to rap its knuckles on her door. She pressed her small, amethyst-hued frame tighter against the shadows of the rocks, holding her breath until the beat of the ikran's wings faded into the distance.
The wind blew for a moment. Softly, gently, but enough to turn the liquid beads lining her skin into biting frost. A reflexive shiver coursed through her, tightening her weary muscles into steel cables using her nearly-depleted strength---bodily energy that was quickly ebbing away the longer she remained cold. She couldn't stay in the water. Hypothermia would claim her before the Ash People did.
Fighting the leaden weight of exhaustion, Hiraya began to strike out toward the bank. Her eyes darted rhythmically between the treeline and the nantang pack. The viperwolves were restless; some lapped at the water while others paced the silt, their pale eyes scanning for the slighted ripple of a river critter or fish.
Hiraya kept herself low in the water, never a hand away from the nearby formation of granite-orange and basalt-indigo boulders jutting out of the water like seated, hunched trolls having a slow bath. As the water shallowed, a new dread settled in her gut. The riverbank wasn't soft mud; it was a mosaic of colorful, sun-bleached pebbles and smooth river stones. To the viperwolves' sleek, sensitive ears, a single misplaced step on that loose shale would sound like a landslide. One crunch, and the shroud of the river would be gone.
Fortune, it seemed, had no interest in her survival.
Just as her foot met the shoreline, the silence was shattered by the sharp clack of stone on stone. An arrow hissed from the sky, burying itself in the pebbles inches from her toes. She flinched. Her heart stopped.
"Over there! I see her!"
The shout tore through the evening air---a Mangkwan rider, banking his ikran low over the canopy. He pointed down at her with a predatory cry, signaling the rest of the war party.
"Shit!"
The curse was a ragged explosion of breath as Hiraya bolted. Her sudden, frantic movement was the dinner bell the nantang had been waiting for. The pack erupted into motion, their six-legged gait a rhythmic drumming against the forest floor as they pivoted toward the sound of her flight.
Now, the trap was complete. Above, the ikran riders tracked her through the thinning leaves like hawks over a field; below, the viperwolves wove through the gnarled roots with terrifying speed. Hiraya dove into the deepening shadows of the woods, a girl caught between the talons of the sky and the teeth of the earth.
She felt the heavy shadows of doubt and negativity claw at her once more, pulling her back, tempting every cell of her being to just sink into the dirt. Give up. Go to sleep. Just let it end. She shook off the voices, gripping the wooden shaft tighter in her hand; the tips of her fingernails pressed so hard against her palm, it left marks. She had survived that treacherous leap. She had survived that arrow and the self-surgery that followed---she certainly wasn't going to give up now. And she most definitely wasn't going to insult Taran's sacrifice like that.
Where light had been swatches of gold and tangerine in the forest above just minutes ago, the lower woods before her had become taunting scarlets against deepening shadow. The ancient trees stood like a cultish community of meditating giants, their limb branches raising the canopy in morbid worship of the darkening sky. Nighttime flowers were half-opened, sitting like petulant, self-conscious fairies unsure of their evening dresses. The cyan and neon pink bioluminescence in them were barely visible, still yawning and stretching in preparation for the long hours of night ahead.
Hiraya jumped over a patch of mushrooms dotted with liquid beads of peridot on their blue caps. She landed on the curved, ankle-high grass past them, her next step immediately placing her weight on a fallen log slick with moss. She almost slipped‐--if not for the hanging vine nearby. She instinctively grabbed hold of it with her free hand, swinging herself forward to resume her speedy pace.
She could no longer hear the other sounds of the forest. There was only the overhead scream of banshees, the hounding hoots of the Mangkwan, the vicious, hungry snarls of the pursuing viperwolves behind her, the sound of her own body crashing against greens, and the ragged, painful breaths she pleaded her body to keep taking despite its scream for total collapse.
She was fast---she had always been swift---but the exhaustion had become a physical anchor dragging behind her. The forest continued to blur into a streak of emerald and shadow bathed in red, a fever dream of a harrowing escape. She couldn't stop. Not after the months of blood, and certainly not after the ghosts she carried.
Every ragged gulp of air tasted of the acrid smoke from the Mangkwan fires. She and Taran had been kept as prized slaves, used as bait for their hunts and entertainment for their warriors. Even now, the frantic rhythm of her heart seemed to echo the screams of her kin in the sterile, white-lit halls of the RDA labs.
The Terapatxi nomads had survived the wild for generations, only to be harvested by the Sky People. Her people had been treated as biological scrap, sacrificed piece by piece until their blood was no longer just life---it was a cursed, rapid-mending ichor. She and Taran had been the only "successes," the final products of a gene-mutation project that had turned their uncommon regenerative gift into a death sentence for their clan.
She hated the cold, calculated madness of the humans. They hadn't seen a culture; they had seen a puzzle to be solved, a shortcut to the perfect, self-healing soldier. They had wanted frontline avatars and recombinant soldiers that wouldn't stay down, and they had carved that ambition into her very marrow.
Hiraya's toes stubbed against a raised root, making her inhale sharply with a bite of her lower lip. She pointedly ignored the throb of it like a gnawing beetle she had no time to flick off her foot. Glaring ahead, a spear of red, sunset light engulfed her vision for a blinding heartbeat, her eyes aligning with the dying sun peeking through the canopy. The memory of the facility's end flickered in her mind---the roar of the fire she and Taran had set, the sight of the developing purple husks in their pods shriveling in the heat. They had burned it all down with the help of Dr. Elias, the only human who had looked at them and seen children instead of specimens.
Huffing through her sprint, Hiraya's face contorted as she remembered the burns on Elias's leg from the escape. She had reached for him, her heart breaking because she could heal her own punctured lung in minutes, yet she couldn't do anything to mend a single blister on his skin. Their biologies were alien worlds, separated by an unbridgeable chasm of chemistry and air.
His injury had slowed them down---a fatal drag in a world that had demanded speed. When they had stumbled into the path of the Ash People, the end had been swift. Fate, with its cruel sense of irony, had claimed the doctor---who had survived the lab fire---in a fiery sacrifice at the hands of the Mangkwan Tsahìk. The priestess had spared the siblings only after witnessing their "miracles," claiming them as the tribe's most valuable slaves.
Behind Hiraya, the sound of the hooting Mangkwan grew louder in layers, seemingly multiplying. The other flyers had finally converged on her tail, gathering all of them just above the snarling viperwolves below their mounts.
She gritted her teeth. Eight months. She had endured eight months of being a living trophy, a biological oddity to be bled and tested by savages instead of scientists. Taran had given his life to break those chains. She wouldn't let the forest, the nantang, or the Mangkwan take the freedom he had died to give her.
Died.
Taran had died.
She stated it in her head like a fact in the same way she would say air was dry, ground was hard, and water was wet. But she had been talking to him just an hour ago. He had been scolding her in their tent just this afternoon. She had started this day warm in his arms. It didn't feel true. He was alive. He was dead. He survived. None of it felt true.
He was just gone.
'Yes. Just gone for now.'
Hiraya pushed past a wall of tangled stems and cordate leaves. Coiling beanstalks climbed the branches, their wild pods hanging in low violet lines. A burst of colorful fanwings shot into the air, spiraling in an instant. Hiraya barely noticed them as she ran past; she was still swallowed by the distracting truth of Taran's status as she ran on autopilot. All she knew was that the last she had seen him was minutes ago. He had shouted at her to run. And she was running. She didn't see him actually die. Part of her believed that she would still regroup with him somehow. That they would find each other again. They had to. She will see him again.
'No, you won't.'
The sound of his dying screams echoed deafeningly in her ears as if a pair of pocket-sized gremlins had climbed onto both her shoulders to physically stab at her eardrums with sharpened sticks. Her eyes stung. She stumbled. Then stumbled again.
"Shut up," she muttered under her breath as she pushed herself up. She swiped at her eyes mid-stride, resuming her pace. "Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."
The trees finally thinned, spilling her out into a wide clearing heavy with the thick, earthy musk of a pa'li herd. The animal scent hit her like a physical blow---warm hide and crushed grass.
Time fractured as Hiraya skidded into the clearing, her instincts screaming. The peaceful direhorses were a magnificent display of idle strength and sleeping speed. Their powerful forms were clothed in striped skin, each horse graced with its own unique pattern. One bore the colors of hot magma, its bright oranges flaring from its neck and kissing its top ridges like a vertical crown of living flames. Another was tundra-like, its white stripes mimicking glacial patterns drifting in neat rows against ocean-blue skin. A third one seemed born of flowers, blessed with a rosy palette mottled with teal spots that mimicked rows of unblinking eyes.
Hiraya didn't slow down; she dove into the sea of muscle and bone, weaving through the towering legs of the direhorses. Her arrival was the spark in a powder keg. The herd erupted as the shadows of the ikran swept over them, the great beasts rearing back with shrill, panicked whinnies.
Chaos reigned. Nantang darted between hooves, only to be met by the bone-shattering force of powerful hind kicks. Above, the Mangkwan riders snarled, raining arrows down into the thick of the herd. They were indifferent to the lives of the animals; they wanted their prize, even if they had to pin her to the earth through the carcass of a beast.
Through the war cries, the animalistic snarls, the panicked and pained whinnies, Hiraya saw her impossible opening---a massive direhorse bolting toward the tree line. Its twilight-indigo hide was striped with ashen-white, the underside of the direhorse a surface of crimson as if its heart were bleeding out without evidence of a wound. The sight of its colors felt like a mirror to her own soul‐--perhaps a coincidence or an otherworldly sign she had no time to think about right now.
With a desperate, lunging leap, she flung herself onto its broad back. Her fingers---slick with sweat and river water---fumbled for the creature's neural antennae. She moved with a ghost's memory, mimicking the fluid, certain grace she had watched her father command a thousand times in the golden plains of her childhood.
The tsaheylu sparked to life---a sudden, electric rush of shared pulse and thundering hooves. For the first time, the bond was hers.
Behind her, the clearing was a mess of rearing hooves, wet canines, flying arrows, and rhythmic gusts of wind kicking up dried leaves and dust. The smell of chlorophyll, soil, manure, animal musk, blood, and ash mixed altogether, turning the air thick with the presence of nature, innocence, hunger, and malice. The superior volume of banshee cries cut through the pandemonium, drowning out every other sound made by the terrified pa'li, the snapping nantang, and the yipping Mangkwan.
Hiraya shifted into a low, secure seat atop the galloping beast, her body snapping into a crouch just as a nantang vaulted from the brush. She pulled back immediately. The creature's jaws snapped at the empty air where her throat had been a second before. Its momentum tugged a trail of wind behind it that lightly kissed Hiraya's skin---another violating, close encounter with death that would have earned a slap from her if the entity had a face to hit. As another nantang pounced from her blind side, she threw her weight backward in a half-twist, intercepting the predator mid-air. With a guttural cry, she drove her jagged arrow-splinter deep into its eye socket, abandoning the weapon as the beast tumbled into the dust.
A Mangkwan arrow hissed past her temple, missing her by a hair's breadth only to thud with a sickening thwack into the flat, bony ridge of her mount's neck. Hiraya jerked back an inch, her eyes widening at the narrow miss. Through the neural bond, she felt the animal's agony as if it were a white-hot iron pressed to her own skin. The direhorse's panic spiked, his stride becoming erratic as he threatened to bolt into the thick timber.
"Mawey!" she cried, her voice a raw command against the wind.
Be calm!
She didn't just speak; she flooded the connection with her intent, pushing her own iron-willed resolve into the creature's frantic mind. But the bond was a two-way conversation---not a rider's tyrannical passage. The direhorse rebelled in a stubborn blend of panic and confusion; after all, it didn't trust her. She had come out of nowhere, brought along threats to his herd like a sprawling cape on her back. Why should a regal, free-spirited creature like him bow down to her will?
But Hiraya shoved through his resistance, desperate to steady his stride. She leaned forward, pressing her chest against his heaving mane of leather on hard muscle. 'Be calm,' she insisted again, delivering her sincerity as their frenzied heartbeats settled in the shared rhythm of two bonded survivors. 'I have you. Just look forward.'
The direhorse's frame gradually steadied under her, his fear sharpening into a singular, focused drive as it accepted the reassuring conviction of her thoughts. Together, they became a blur of purple and muscle, a single spear of defiance cutting through the moonlit dark.
Hiraya risked a glance over her shoulder. The clearing had fallen away, replaced by the deep, bioluminescent glow of the forest as it fully surrendered to the night. The towering trees no longer loomed like unsettling giants. Instead, they looked like felicitous guardians of viridian green and shadow looking down at her with pride, offering banners of vine that held reddish-pink bell-flowers swaying in the evening breeze. Though they were silent ornaments, Hiraya could swear she could almost hear them ringing a congratulatory tone. The woods breathed in a subsiding calm, the neon ferns and shining mosses shimmering as if to forgive the violence that had just trampled through them. The fully-darkened sky was empty; the Mangkwan riders had finally lost her trail in the dense canopy.
There was no sound of screeching banshees. No wet snarls. No hostile hoots and yips. There was only the distant chirps and clicks of nocturnal fauna inhabiting the twilight forest. There was only the sound of tiny flitting wings from annoyed insects, whose leafy homes had been disturbed as her six-legged companion galloped past. There was only the whistling songs of Pandoran birds calling for a mate. There was only the sound of hooves drumming the steady song of freedom.
Her freedom.
She had done it. She had shaken them off.
Her gaze drifted down to the ridge of her mount's neck. The arrow was still there, vituperatively embedded halfway into the bone like a parasitic, horizontal flower of feather and sharpened stone. Through the tsaheylu, she could feel the dull, rhythmic throb of the wound---a steady, nagging ache that mirrored her own fading adrenaline.
'I'll help you,' she whispered into the creature's mind, the thought a soft, pulsing tether of gratitude. The direhorse bobbed its head slightly in acknowledgement, already cognizant of her intent through their tsaheylu.
Hiraya reached forward, her hand steady despite the tremors racking her body. With a single, decisive motion, she gripped the shaft and wrenched it free. The pa'li let out a sharp, pained whinny that vibrated through Hiraya's own chest, but the beast didn't falter. He kept his stride, his hooves drumming a steady rhythm of survival against the damp earth, trusting the girl who had turned a desperate flight into a shared victory.
Holding the fresh arrow, she breathed once, steeling herself for the grim ritual she had been forced to master during her months of captivity. She pressed the jagged tip into her own palm, dragging it across the skin until the crimson began to well---a deliberate sacrifice of her own ichor.
Her torn flesh was already sealing in on itself the moment it opened. The bleeding edges hissed, millimeter by painstaking millimeter, blazing steadily with the familiar, amplified torment of her regeneration. Through their connection, the direhorse felt her self-mutilation as his own and found it both terrifying and confusing. He snorted---a wordless protest of harsh concern sliding through the bond---as the walls of doubt she had just conquered began to rise again.
Without hesitation, she pressed her bleeding hand firmly against the pa'li's wound.
The tsaheylu flared. Through the bond, she felt the creature's agony like a lightning strike to her own nerves. The direhorse flinched, jerking his head at the sudden bloom of searing heat, their galloping pace turning uneven and erratic. But Hiraya held fast.
Her bioluminescent markings began to pulse---a rhythmic, frantic blue light that bled into the animal's own glow until their radiance was one. As their neural queues sparked with the transfer, she channeled the volatile energy of her own biology into the beast. Beneath her palm, the shredded muscle and skin began to pucker and knit, closing with the same unnatural, rapid-fire speed that ran through her own veins.
She knew the sensation of flesh mending that quickly was a different kind of torture---a searing, itching fire. To spare her mount, Hiraya mentally opened the bond to its breaking point, yanking the creature's pain into her own mind. She became the vessel for his suffering, drawing the fire into her marrow and leaving the pa'li in a cool, peaceful void.
By the time she withdrew her hand, the miracle was complete. Her own palm was already unscarred, and on the direhorse's ridge, only a drying smear of crimson remained to mark where the arrow had bitten deep.
Hiraya stared at it in absolute stillness, wholly spent. With the absence of threat and adrenaline, her mind had gone... blank. For a long moment, they simply ran. The silence of the glowing woods swallowed the echo of their flight, leaving only the sound of one heart, one breath, and a sudden, hollow absence of pain.
The direhorse leapt over low shrubbery, or perhaps a cluster of boulders---she couldn't tell anymore. The sudden jolt jarred her back to the present.
'It's over,' she thought, the movement forcing her mind's fractured thoughts back into focus. She adjusted her seat, clinging tighter to the ridge to keep steady. 'It's finally over.'
The relief was an overpowering tide, temporarily drowning the reality she still had to face. Someone was gone. It had to be addressed. He had to be named. She had to accept---
'No. Not yet. Not right now.'
Blinking the thoughts away, Hiraya leaned forward, directing her fading attention back to her robust companion. She patted the animal's muscled shoulder. In return, a wave of wordless gratitude washed through the tsaheylu, warm and grounding. She took a shuddering breath as the forest fully surrendered to the night, the bioluminescence blooming into a neon tapestry of violets and teals. Her strength, finally spent, began to ebb like a retreating tide. She shifted her weight, draping her upper body completely over the creature's neck.
'I will trust you,' she whispered into their shared consciousness, her eyelids growing heavy with the weight of a thousand miles. 'Please... take us somewhere safe.'
The forest blurred into a shimmering river of light. Her mount began to slow, his strides transitioning from hurried compliance to careful accommodation, keeping her balanced on his back. The powerful gait of her pa'li became a cradle, rocking her toward a void where the shrieks of the Mangkwan and the smell of blood could no longer reach her. The last thing she felt before the darkness claimed her was the steady, rhythmic thrum of the creature's heart---a life she had fought for, a single heartbeat saved in a world that had taken everything else.
[Original Publish Date: Jan. 27, 2026]
[Chapter Revision Date: May 29, 2026]