Flashback Wasted Efforts

[Oresnya Cacao]

Wasted Efforts
Spring the 29th, 517 AV
The coast of Kalea, near Kalinor

Waiting. That was the worst part of anything. Of everything. Once something was set in motion, one had to wait for the plan to come to fruition. Oresnya wasn’t fond of waiting.

But she was hungry. It had been two weeks since she had left the comforts of Kalinor, and the food she had brought with her had run out after ten days. Her knowledge of edible fruits of the area was nonexistent, and the only fruit she could recognize she had been told was poisonous. Her trips out of the city had been few and far between, and during them, they had never had to forage for food. For that reason, she had no idea what to look for.

The one thing she had been taught about was hunting, and she had not taken to it well. In fact, it had ended with her vowing never to take another life as long as she lived. But oaths were the product of belief and emotions. They were part of a moral ideal, and as such, they were fragile. Hunger was a law, one that had existed since the beginning. It would not be ignored, and Oresnya needed to eat. An oath could be remade. A law like hunger could not be broken.

Digging through the many forgotten things gathering dust in her memories, Oresnya remembered the simplest form of hunting, a snare. One of her uncles had showed her how to tie a simple slip knot. The only thing Oresnya remembered about snares was how to tie the knot, and even that, a few attempts proved, was hazy at best. Her first fifteen iterations of that knot ended up in knots that remained secure, that didn’t have the characteristic slipping motion that gave the knot its name.

So she had tried one last time. With the free end of her little length of rope, she made a half loop around her free hand, then wrapped the free end of the cord around the main line one full time. Then, she just stared at the lines in her hands for nearly a quarter bell, trying to remember wat her uncle had told her to do next. It was a moment of instinct that told her to grab the main line with her free hand, the one she had looped the rope around initially, and to pull it through, tightening everything around it. To her surprise, it worked.

Her curiosity made her want to undo the knot to see what she had done right, but she wasn’t confident she could repeat the process. Instead, she set the little snare out and waited.

And waited and waited. There had been rabbits aplenty while she had been hoping for a ship over the past two weeks, but now there was nothing. That was when she realized she was hovering far too close to the snare.

An idea formed in her mind, not a great one, but it was all she had. When her uncles had hunted, she always remembered them coating themselves in mud and grime to cover up their scent. To that end, she had dug up some of the loamy earth with her thick, black claws and rolled in it, covering herself from head to toe as best as she could. Then, she set out the snare and piled up the greenest grass she could pluck in the center. With her trap set, she took the other end of the rope in her mouth and scaled a nearby tree, the tiny hooks in her hands making the motion effortless. Once she was up the tree behind some branches, she wedged herself in place by pushing up with her feet from the trunk to press her back against a branch. The tiny hooks ran all over her body, and extending the ones on her back out, she felt her position become even safer. One hand helped secure her hanging position from the tree while the other held the snare line.

And she waited.

The wait seemed insufferable. For half a day, she waited, the bells passing in their relentless march while her muscles slowly began to ache. Her thighs and her shoulder were hurting from the unending effort to keep her suspended. Every chime now, she had to shift her weight from one leg to the other, so each leg could find at least a moment’s rest.

Oresnya found she was not good at waiting, and that patience was not a virtue. It was wasted time and wasted effort.

She was just about to give up when a rabbit hopped out from behind some bushes, nose twitching curiously at the scent of the fresh picked grass. Popping up on its hind legs, it lifted its snout in the air, sniffing the air for predators and scanning the skies for shadows. Not finding any, it dropped back down and hopped slowly forward, nose pulsing to draw in the many smells all around it. Step by hop step, it grew closer, but a few steps from the pile of grass and the snare, it stopped and began eating a sprig of unclipped grass instead.

Oresnya cursed the little creature in her mind and was, once again, left waiting. It was the worst part of the hunt.

[Oresnya Cacao]

The next bell was filled with more waiting, and as the rabbit hopped nearer and nearer to her trap, Oresnya’s legs began to burn like the glands in her cheek that were working overtime with the thought of a possible meal. Each hop, Oresnya was certain the rabbit was going for her pile, but always, the little creature turned aside to something unplucked. Her back was holding some of the weight, but that didn’t stop her legs from hurting.

As quietly as she could, Oresnya bent one knee up to her chest, then tried to straighten it straight out from her body. She wasn’t very flexible and, with the added tension in the muscles now, quickly felt a tightening of the muscles in the back of her thigh, followed by the sting of stretching muscles. Holding the position there, she allowed her body to get used to the stretch until it finally released and relaxed and the stretch deepened some. It wasn’t long before the burn in her other leg made itself unignorable. Finding her grip with her stretched leg, she swung the other up toward her chest.

The tree shifted with the shifting balance of her weight, and the ancient wood groaned in protest. Oresnya froze. So did the rabbit. Slowly, the sway of the tree trunk subsided as did its creaking, and when it came to a rest, nothing moved. Not Oresnya in her pinned position. Not the rabbit hovering over its little clump of grass. Not the boughs of the tree itself. Nothing.

Bit by bit, the prey animal grew brave and lifted its little nose to sniff the air. Not sensing anything, it stood on its hind limbs and looked about, sniffing once more before running its front paws over its nose a few times to clean it.

And then, it finally seemed to take notice of the pile Oresnya had made. Keen interest was in its eyes as it approached slowly. A step shy of her trap, another stride from her snare, the rabbit stopped and looked about warily again. It sensed something was off. Oresnya was about to curse the little creature again when she sensed it too. Instinct hadn’t been completely diluted out in the Symenestra. Her tired muscles tensed.

A shadow flashed across the clearing. Oresnya gasped. The rabbit darted and screamed for the merest fraction of a tick. A blur of feathers and talons descended past the canopy faster than Oresnya could catch and silenced the tiny scream forever. The sudden strike of the raptor caused Oresnya to jerk her free arm, moving the snare beneath the pile of grass. Furious and suspicious that something was lurking to still its kill, the big bird flared its wings and hissed. When the world remained silent at its challenge, the bird took the rabbit in one foot and took off in the lumbering style that birds had when encumbered.

Oresnya stared at the empty clearing beneath her in disbelief. If the little bastard had just walked into her trap instead…

Then it would still be dead. She laughed at herself and her ridiculous expectations of the world. There was no reason it should have fallen into her trap any more than it should have fallen prey to the bird or any more than it should have lived. Today, she was not the world’s greatest predator, and that meant she’d go hungry again. Her stomach growled.

“Well, shit,” she muttered in her native tongue. Symenos was too flowing for most of the curses. None of them sounded like an expletive, but Oresnya used them anyhow. She sighed and relaxed the few muscles she could while still holding herself suspended in the tree. Her eyes wandered out past the branches of trees to the open water. It was more beautiful than she had imagined. The endless blue of the water meeting the endless blue of the sky occasionally broken by a stripe of white cloud or wave.

And the white of a sail.

“Oh, shit.” She said it in Common this time, because it had more bite that way. As quickly as she could, she scrambled down the tree, nearly falling off at one point. Only the grip of microscopic hairs kept her from slipping, and she slowed her descent enough to keep herself from tumbling down. Once her feet hit ground, she ran through the short amount of trees until she hit the open beach.

Flailing her arms above her head, Oresnya shouted at the top of her lungs, trying to get the attention of anyone aboard the vessel, but in her fear of being found by a predator, she had remained silent since she had left the safety of Kalinor. Her voice had suffered with its lack of use, and as if it had forgotten itself, it cracked in a gravelly sort of way and had nowhere near the volume she knew it was capable of. But that didn’t stop Oresnya for trying. She had started now, and if there were any predators nearby, they were now aware of her.

Her eyes weren’t sharp enough to catch what it was, but she did see increased movement on the boat. Her hope swelled, and as the wind buffeted her words back down her throat, she yelled and flailed all the more, certain she looked like a mad woman. That didn’t matter though, as long as it worked. She watched and waited while she flailed and shouted, but nothing changed. Her hope faded as the breeze died down, and still the ship showed no sign of slowing or changing course.

She spent fifteen chimes doing nothing but that, and her voice was quickly growing hoarse. Her focus was on the boat, so it took her several chimes to see the things as they approached her. To be fair, they were the dark blue and green of the waves, and their emergence was slow. Oresnya was amazed she saw them at all, but there was a change in the corner of her vision. As the creatures rose slowly from the waves, the rise and fall did not occur where they were. The lack of motion was what gave them away.

Once Oresnya became aware of their presence, she stopped shouting. Her gaze swept their way, and seeing they were found out, the things stood to their full height, not towering by any means but taller than her. There were two of them, one masculine in form, the other feminine, but neither were anything like any person Oresnya had ever seen. They were anthropomorphic in shape, but they held more of the ocean in them than they held similarities to people. The feminine one was the dark green of some sea water while the masculine one was the deep blue of others. Their skin was smooth like that of paintings she’d seen of sea creatures. As they rose up, she could see several belts and harnesses strapped to them, and in each of those rested several knives. When their feet hit the dry sand of the beach, both drew two blades each.

Her terror and awe at these new creatures broke at the sudden realization of the immediate threat they posed. Scrambling backwards, Oresnya found a piece of driftwood and drew it back behind and over her head, ready to swing it if they should advance on her.

[Oresnya Cacao]

Rather than charge her, as Oresnya had expected them to do, the creatures let their hands fall to their sides and looked at each other as if trying to decide what they should do next. The male shrugged, then sheathed his knives, and his partner followed in short course. Where their mannerisms had moments ago been hostile, they were now showing signs of peace and benevolence. The male held his hands up, showing that he meant no harm. Or intending to show that. Oresnya didn’t trust them. She kept her piece of wood held up, ready to swing it at either of them if they came for her.

The male opened his mouth to speak, but Oresnya didn’t understand the words that came out. She couldn’t be sure if it was because the words came out garbled due to the creature’s oddity or if it was just a language she had never heard before. She said as much, her words flowing out in the soft, slow seductiveness of Symenos. “I don’t understand.”

The male looked to the female with another shrug. The female replied to him with a single word and a returned shrug. This one, Oresnya recognized. “Symenos?”

The male shrugged again and said something to the female, and in the midst of it, Oresnya caught the word Symenos again. A short, whispered conversation was held between the two in the oddest sounding language Oresnya had ever heard. When it was finished, the female fish person smiled and took a step toward Oresnya. Unsure of their motives, Oresnya bared her teeth and swung her piece of wood back and forth between them several times to fend them off.

Stopping to ponder the strange, fanged woman before them, the fish people held another brief conversation in their odd clicking, crying language. The female turned toward Oresnya again and reached into a pouch, bringing out something wrapped in seaweed. This time, the woman spoke with words Oresnya recognized, and in recognizing the Common language, Oresnya realized just how beautiful the fish woman’s accent was.

“Food.”

Oresnya still didn’t trust them yet, but she was excited by the chance to be able to communicate with them. She responded in her not so fantastic Common. “What are you?”

The female smiled again, showing off her own set of sharp triangular teeth. “That’s a rude question. I think what you meant to ask was who are we. I am Ularu, and this is my mate Ayar. What we are is Charodae, the people of the water. You must have lived a sheltered life if you’ve never heard of us, dear.”

Oresnya had heard of them, but when she had heard them called the people of the sea, she had only thought it meant people who lived on the ocean, not people who came from beneath the ocean. She wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was the woman’s slow and beautifully accented Common or if it was her demeanor or if it was the rumor that the Charodae were pacifistic, but she found herself trusting the couple that stood before her.

“Can I trust you?”

Ularu smiled again, and Oresnya wondered how such dangerous teeth could belong to pacificists. The Charoda spoke gently. “I would tell you yes, but both benevolent and malevolent people would give you the same answer to that question.” She held out the seaweed wrapped object again. “Food?”

Hunger was a powerful force, and it overpowered her fear of the unknown, of strangers. Oresnya let her guard down and extended her hand in trust. Ularu laid the food in her hand and stepped back while Oresnya unwrapped it and began to eat. Ayar waved out at the ship and then wandered the beach, gathering wood together for a fire.

“Who are you?”

Oresnya smiled around the mushy food that was in her mouth. It was already well squishy enough for her delicate digestive system to handle. “I’m Oresnya, of the Cacao Web.”

“And what brings you here, Oresnya?”

Swallowing her food before responding, the Symenestra thought about how beautiful her name sounded in the foreign accent of the Charoda woman.