Sangkara - Predator and Prey

To be a Red Priestess in Andrala was simple. If you could survive in the Garden then you earned the privilege to cast your hair and body in blood and ochre, to sing the songs, and do the rituals. Of course, the Garden was, by many measures, one of the most ferocious jungles in all of Qalan.  Many of its beasts were gargantuan, twisted monstrosities. Many of its waters were poisoned by disease or flora. But these were just some of the threats even known. There were dark crags in the Garden that led deep into the Mountain, places where rivers flowed endlessly into an abyss, where crept the black perils of the Deep. Though hundreds of square miles on its surface alone, the true extent of the Garden might never be known.

To face this constant peril, each Priestess was more than a shaman or medicine woman, they were huntresses and warriors in their own right. They were more instinctive, more feral than humans. They moved like a pack. The Temple of the Hunter was more of their “territory” than anything else. They were both part and masters of the Garden. They co-existed with the beasts of the jungle, sometimes as predators, sometimes as prey, and sometimes as equals. It was in this way the Garden expressed a certain wisdom, a kind of lesson and philosophy. Though the Red Priestesses were clearly feral from their seclusion and isolation, having spent so many generations living this way had an interesting effect on them. Traditions had survived here that were eons old, clearly from a time when there was no spoken language among people. There was a certain purity in them and their actions. Each Red Priestess was a personification of the wild, of some divine nature spirit that had existed long before any man had laid carved stones or wood to make permanent shelters.

However, there was something older in the Red Priestesses than mere tradition. Though the majority were women, a precious few were hermaphroditic, making no efforts to hide this. They appeared as women athletes in almost every way, if not slightly taller. And yet many of them had male endowments so great they would put other men to shame. It was strange to see them here, in the open. Andrala had no shortage of hermaphrodite myths. They were feared and venerated, but they had been all but reduced to just that: a myth. Seeing them in the flesh here was perplexing and stirring, but one was not to ask where they had come from, or why they were only here. They were simply here.

It was difficult to ask the Priestesses anyway. Speaking without being spoken to as an initiate was severely punished, as a misplaced word or sound or movement in the Garden could have you killed where you stand. Learning not to speak unless absolutely necessary was a practical matter of life and death, and the initiates had already done well learning this just to survive their journey to the Temple. But it was more than that. The Priestesses had adopted their own philosophy about communication. Understanding was not brought to the Priestesses by mere questions or a simple exchange of words, no matter how artful the conversation. It was meditated upon by long observation. It was discovered by the personal journey of revelation. It was imparted unto others by action and ritual. They spoke with their eyes, with their bodies, with their spears. Clearly this was a language that was born from necessity, from some ancient prehistory, but beneath the Red Tree here in the Garden it had developed its own sophistication that dwarfed simple spoken language. It was for these reasons and more that the Priestesses spared few spoken words. With each other, they hardly used them at all. Most of the sounds they made were guttural, feral noises like the growling of wolves. With the initiates, the spoken word was used only as a means to an end, to be discarded soon so that they could return their ears to the winds and the wild.

But it was not the purpose of the Red Priestesses simply to survive and make sacrifices as a tribe in the Garden. Their purpose was as a conduit to Zuraxes, the closest of his pack, the readers of his will. As Sangkara and the others searched for a chieftain or matriarch of the Red Priestesses, it became clear that there wasn’t one, more so that there hadn’t been one all this time. This long lost chieftain of their tribe was meant to be the Empress of all Andrala. Why this figure had not been chosen for generations and how they intended to choose one now remained a mystery to the initiates. Their only charge was to hunt and to bring their kills back to the Temple.

The initiates examined their every move around the Priestesses as they hunted, searching for a sign, looking to succeed where so many had failed. None searched themselves more than Sibiren. She had been a model of ritual and political advantage, but now she doubted her every move. Was a huntress seeking to be empress to search for the greatest kill in the Garden? Was she simply to provide for the Temple? Could she satisfy her own hunger or did all belong to the tribe? Perhaps the task was a trick, a distraction given to subservient slaves meant to be nothing more than new followers of the tribe and not their leader. They had to replenish their ranks somehow. Perhaps they did so with those that fell short of true grace and majesty. Something more lay hidden in the Garden that was meant for a better breed of royalty to find, and perhaps it simply didn’t occur to any initiate before to go out and find it. She intended not to be passed over. Leading was for the strong. And she was strong.

Meanwhile, Sangkara looked out upon her mission with a similar contemplation. Was she merely meant to follow? Being given the charge to roam the Garden now as a hunter and a slayer gave her a strange sense of freedom she had not felt in a while. For so long this place had been harrowing, but now there was something meditative about the struggle. She had been thrown in here to learn something, and now it felt as though it were her turn to reflect and absorb that lesson. A choice was being placed in front of her, whether she could see all of her choices or not. She told herself that she would not simply kill outright, or search for a valuable prey, or seek out and disturb some sleeping monstrosity. She wanted only to feel her way through the jungle, explore hidden ruins, creep through treetops, swim in marshes, delve in valleys and caverns, and to look out on the karst landscape from a spire. She would be both intrepid and patient and watch for the right quarry.

At times Sangkara felt as though the Garden was as large as it wanted to be, some unquantifiable urge from a primeval past made it expand and contract, twist and undulate. Sometimes, if Sangkara were still enough, she could almost feel the writhing of the earth beneath her feet. Perhaps this was true everywhere. Perhaps the Garden was merely the center of this phenomenon. It was this subliminal force she believed that tampered with her fate here in the Garden.

It was in a peculiar moment such as this that Sangkara lay like a python draped across a single rotting bough of a dire kapok tree in the moonlight, saddled in between the strangling vines draped across it where she was comfortable. The moon carved out the definition of the jungle in soft detail, the untamed wild around her took on a cool blue color. 

Though her resting spot was a fallen log, she was still lofted above the saplings by the rotting giant, high above the forest floor. Beneath her, some tens of meters away, a group of lions tore apart the fresh carcass of an animal among the herbs on the forest floor. She could hardly see them of course. Even in the daylight, the forest floor was nearly dark as night, and tonight there was hardly a full moon. But sound revealed this drama unfolding in perfect detail, even if masked somewhat in relief by the gentle haze of a river not far away. Every morsel that was torn, even bone that was broken, registered in Sangkara’s ears above the threshold of the living jungle around her. 

This savagery was the beauty of the Garden, and the longer she spent within it the more she understood, the more familiar it all seemed. There were no differences between her and the beasts of this place. Humanity occupied no privileged position in all the world. In fact, here there were many more superior to her in agility, strength, sight, smell, hearing, even cunning. She envied them for that. She had long held a deep humility for the wild jungles and the seas which she had roamed with her tribe, but in being alone since she came into Andrala and to the Garden, she found she meditated and contemplated on it now more than ever.

Still, there were at least some more refined things about humanity Sangkara could appreciate. She was grateful for her ever clarifying picture of the world, for so clear a picture of the kill being massacred below her. She found she could empathize both with the hunted and with the hunters. She wanted to feel the blood on her muzzle drying, the soft, still living meat between her teeth and pouring down her throat. Though she clutched her rocking heart at the thought, she did not deny herself the thrill of the thought of what it meant to be eaten, to be carved up and unmade, piece by painful, bleeding piece. 

It was at that moment something stirred deep in the moonlight, a silent slinking that had only just passed the threshold of her peripheral vision. Being careful not to move too fast, Sangkara turned her eyes to look. She saw nothing but the gargantuan roots, the heaping clumps of moss and ferns. She was perplexed. The movement almost seemed to come from a fallen log itself. Something with the strength to shift dire tree trunks had just done so, she though. Perhaps a behemoth had come to poach the kill from the lions beneath her, as the laws of nature usually dictated. She followed the trunk, looking for an elephant or a rhino with the strength, but they did not usually move in the night and none revealed themselves now. She kept searching the length of this strange tree root as it wound around. Perhaps it was a vine laid like a cable over the forest floor. At some points, it receded into darkness, but there was enough length that it returned to her sight. 

Suddenly her eye met with a scarlet reptilian jewel inlaid in the hide of the root she had been following with her gaze. In an instant, it shut as quickly as she had seen it, but she could not mistake it. Then she withered with dread as she realized she had not been searching the length of a tree root, but instead the body of a titanic serpent, studded down the length of the sides of its massive body with eyes. Sangkara now had the misfortune of knowing that down the length of the dire kapok tree on which she laid, perfectly still as the jungle around her, was the head of this alien horror. There it had been, a moss-covered leviathan coiling all night in the darkness where she could not see. 

A scowling seam parted across the face of the serpent revealing rows of scimitars for fangs. All the while it remained silent as the grave itself, but it was then that Sangkara noticed it had not chosen this moment to reveal itself just to strike at her. 

A shudder through the trees. The silent change in the wind. She had done well to hide in her blind spot, but Sangkara already knew who it was. Even in her prone position, Sangkara was ready to defend herself, but she could not have done so at a later moment. Within an instant, Sangkara was on her back. Both she and Sibiren were face to face, the points of their spears crossing. Each was at the other’s chest, though Sangkara’s thudded with the beat of her heart. It sang so loudly and so quickly it sounded as if someone were plucking a string on a guitar.

“I always knew you were just waiting for your chance,” Sang seethed with contempt. “You couldn’t stand not being the best,”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Pluck,” Sibiren spit under her breath, “You were never meant for this game.” So many questions Sangkara would never get to ask flew through her mind. She wished only to stall now, for the serpent to make its move. She would have to choose it perfectly, not an instant too early… or too late.

“All the same, we wear the same colors,” Sangkara said, unable to hide how terrified she was. “I would remind you that striking a pack-mate and sister is a grave sin to our matriarchs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t matter to you.” With her last shred of sentimentality, Sangkara even wept, “We relied on each other--”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sibiren struggled, pushing her spear point closer. “You’re an insult to the Way of the Hunter.  You’re diseased, deformed, unfit to live, let alone serve,” Sibiren sounded as though she were trying to tell herself. “I mean to rule these people. There are many in the Temple that support my claim to the throne of Andrala even now. Had I my way, I would not allow an insult like you to live and shame the Hunters, but since we are here, I offer you this one courtesy, mongrel,” she said with distaste, “Wander off, be banished from the Temple. Go and die with honor by tooth and nail and end the dishonor you do yourself and your people by living. The next time my huntresses or I see you in the wild we will put you down no differently than the beasts that roam this place.” 

“You may regret comparing me to the beasts of this place, Sibiren!” Sangkara made her move. All the tension Sangkara had built up in her muscles sprang loose as she threw herself to the side to fall from the fallen tree trunk. A fraction of a second later, a spearhead landed right where her chest had been. The resulting shock tremored through the kapok bough and the serpent rocketed forth with such lightning speed, Sangkara could feel the shockwave of the wind as it passed by. 

As Sangkara fell she could see the ropes of the serpent body drive forth with remarkable speed in a parabolic motion, rocketing upward almost as high as the canopy. Before she could be amazed, however, she had fallen onto the wolf carcass surrounded by the lion pride and their feeding frenzy. Even though in disarray from the mighty serpent looming over them, Sangkara stabbed and thrashed her way through them, meeting claws and terrified jaws with spear point and pole shaft. 

Having lost the element of surprise, the serpent opened its wide array of eyes, glowing like spotlights down either side of its massive body. It also revealed a deadly and lethal vigor as it wound its way from tree to tree with lightning efficiency, crushing branches and snapping vines as it barrelled its way through. 

Sangkara swiftly made for cover, being careful to run with the lions in the hope that their confused movement would provide her cover. She wasn’t alone. Sibiren had brought with her the other initiate girls whose arrows now flew blindly into the lion pride. Try as she could to bolt through the ferns, one arrow was true and struck her in her left arm, pinning it to her side as the arrowhead met with her ribs.

Sangkara caught a single glimpse of one of her attackers let loose another arrow before the maw of the serpent swallowed them and the branch they were perched upon in a spectacular spray of red mist that glittered in the moonlight. 

For a moment Sangkara believed the serpent was on her side before she realized that she and the lion pride were its next target. Moving unimpeded like a nightmare, the serpent drove forth uncontrollably with lifeless eyes. The earth was shredded beneath it as it opened its mouth wider and wider. Sangkara’s heart thundered to near bursting as she ran harder, her muscles burning with nothing but acid and adrenaline until there was nothing under her feet. 

In the darkness, Sangkara had found a cliff that descended into a black abyss. The razor fangs of the titanic serpent missed all but a few hairs on her head, and she descended. For one brief moment she felt weightless and serene before realizing she was falling like a meteor into the teeming mass of jungle below her. 

Finally, she made contact with a tangled net of vines, breaking through them with force, and plummeting further still through thorns and tangled reeds. It was the water that broke her fall, flowing with a current so quickly it was just soft enough to receive her but shallow enough so that her body hit hard on the rock and tree roots just beneath. She was barely conscious enough to pull herself to the surface and try to stay there. Each one of her limbs suddenly felt as though they were twenty pounds heavier.

All she could feel was the ringing, still feedback of pain throughout her body, the numbness in her arm, the daze and warmth of hot blood streaking over her eyes only to be washed away by the rapids she was lost in. She realized then she had broken the arrow shaft still buried in her arm and ribs. She could see nothing but utter blackness and only feel the rough water tumble her about. Was that a rock she had brushed by, or the hide of some creature? Was she being hunted even right now? She had no way of knowing, lost in this seemingly endless torment. 

All she could do now was protect her chest. There were so many broken, rotting logs for her to become impaled upon, but even a simple glancing blow to her chest could be fatal. She was exhausted, losing the will to keep her head above the surface with every second. She threw her arms over her heart and found only the blinding, numbing pain of her heart quivering. She had been hit and shocked so hard that she was still conscious enough to realize she was in cardiac arrest, her heart bruised. She knew in that agonizing moment she was drowning.

In that last second before descending into the insulating black tomb of unconsciousness, she gripped her heart tightly and slipped away.