Marquan searched the forest with bow drawn, seeking prey that didn’t seem to be there. The deer were absent. The rabbits, too. Even the birds, usually a last resort, did not perch in the trees.
Though dusk had not yet fallen, it seemed as if it had, or as if a darkness not bound to the cycle of day and night dwelt in the depths of this woodland into whose depths Marquan drew.
It wasn’t a loud sound that broke the silence that had fallen on Marquan, but due to the nature of silence, it was deafening in its mere presence. Its suddenness and isolation alone were enough to make it terrifying.
He turned around, trembling. He searched around with his eyes, and groped with his ears, fumbling for any semblance of that indistinct crunch.
He calmed himself down by contrasting this situation to fables he’d heard in his tribe, of creatures other than human who would take humans away to keep as their own, whether as slaves, or adopted children, or even lovers. He even managed a small chuckle, as the absurdity of the juxtaposition between this situation and those tales. Though, of course, none of these precise words ran through his head. His tribe spoke a rough and harsh tongue that was not so developed as to talk of such things as irony or humorous context, but the same ideas, or at least their forerunners, did exist in his mind.
Yet as the back of his mind pieced together what was hiding within the woodland’s woodwork, his mirth swiftly faded. His eyes grasped sight of a creature neither beast nor human, though it bore a noncommittal semblance of both.
It was tall, and its frame had the same basic structure as a human’s, but its proportions were not the same, being far taller than a human, albeit of about the same width------long, slightly bent limbs with enough muscle to evince mobility but apart from that bearing little more than bone. Indeed, the bones not only were visible beneath the creature’s bark-brown skin, but where they protruded, the skin darkened slightly, as if somehow joined to the bone.
It had a head reminiscent of an animal’s skull, with a thin, translucent layer of that same wood-brown skin coating it, tightly hugging the skeletal face, and muscle connected its jaw was clearly visible. Marquan couldn’t recognize the exact form of the skull, although it seemed somewhere between that of a bear and of a deer, and had a fan of antlers. Over its teeth, the skin extended in a somewhat looser, yet still translucent form, and by means of this skin and the muscle underneath, it was able to convey the same eerie smile that its skull face already seemed to bear. Though it had most of share of skin that an animal would on its head, it lacked eyelids, and, indeed, eyes—at least, normal ones.
It had empty eye sockets, but not the hollow cavities of a skull, nor the pink, fleshy pits of an animal with its eyes gouged out. These were shaded in a seemingly preternatural fashion, empty voids that seemed to capture the light from the very air. Yet within them, there shone two white lights, two glowing sparks that had oddly hard edges, not quite circular yet failing to be circular in a manner that was doubtlessly familiar. They had the very same outline as that of human eyes, ones bearing a kindly, yet strangely distant disposition.
Its hands, like the rest of its body, were of the basic structure of a human’s, yet their features were between that of an avian and a raccoon, ending in claws like the former but skin like the latter.
Its legs were digitigrade, like the hind legs of a quadruped, ending in talon-like feet akin to its hands.
It had a long, skeletal tail, brown skin adhering tightly to it, apparently with muscles so compact that they barely altered the shape of the vertebrae.
Its odor was like leaf mold, with a hint of pine and leather.
Most bizarre of all, however, was its smile. It had human teeth, but large, and nearly doubled in number, a wall of molars in the corners of its jaws, and a a few extra premolars, leading up to disproportionate canines between which were the normal number of incisors.
It slunk towards him, and as soon as he saw that it did, he knocked an arrow and fired it, the arrow landing between two of its protruding ribs, yet not piercing more than an inch. The creature looked at him with an expression that resembled disappointment, but it pulled the arrow out of itself, and then, leaning towards him, it held out the hand in which the arrow was clasped.
Stunned, he took it, before he asked, “What are you?”
The creature’s expression changed, though Marquan couldn’t place how, but, driven by what he could only put down to an impulse to self-preservation, he amended his question: “Who are you?” he asked.
The creature let out a slight breath, the pine mold stronger in its scent, before it whispered, murmured out, "Kyla.**" Its voice was somehow both smooth and raspy, like polished stone upon which there was sand. It was deep, yet not masculine, and somehow both melodic and monotone at the same time.
Without warning, the creature—‘Kyla’ seeming to be its name—drew close, and stood over Marquan.
Marquan was in a dreamlike daze, and in this state he was unable to flinch, to run, to fear. Instead, he saw what looked like a stuck-on piece of debris, maybe a leaf, maybe a shed flap of skin. It was on the thing’s upper torso. He reached out, and pulled on it, only to realize there was more of it than he had noticed, more rising as he peeled it off.
As Kyla said “Yes. Go on.”, he realized what he was doing. Before he could withdraw his hand, though, it------she------clasped his hand in hers, and led him to pull it off.
Two dark brown nipples were plastered onto the brown skin under the cloth, which were surrounded by a slight softening in the emaciation around them, two flattened buds which had half sprouted into what was, if nothing else, an interruption of the creature’s skeletal physique.
The feeling of Kyla’s claw on Marquan’s hand was chilling, literally. He felt his heat draining into her, and looking down on her hand, he saw the feeling matched in the color of her hide, a much paler brown than that of his own hand, which was flush from the cold grip.
She yanked his hand down to meet her stomach, pressing it in deeply, before dragging it down, to pull off another strip of cloth he hadn’t noticed.
He was unable to prevent himself from looking between those long, muscular, yet stick-like legs, to the draped leather----not leather she was wearing, except in the sense that any being ‘wears’ its own skin----which only confirmed her womanhood with greater unambiguity.
As her claw released his hand, and reached towards his own loincloth, he pushed away from her, and pulled his spear from his back, lunging at her. He had been taught before that the only way to fight a spiritual menace was with the spirit to fight. Yet it proved insufficient, as she grabbed his spear, and snapped it in two.
Kyla batted Marquan’s face with a backhand, and he dropped the end of his spear. She then lifted him up by his shoulders, her grip feeling like it would crush his shoulderblades.
She breathed in and out slowly as she held him in the air before her face, her breaths entering into his nose. Her gaze was at first somewhat agitated, but it soon softened into fondness as he stopped struggling.
Then Kyla set Marquan down, gently clasped his throat in her claws, and breathed out with a sort of whispering hiss into his nostrils that smelled even more of leaf mold than she already did, and he lost consciousness.
He regained his consciousness in a slight clearing, insipid sunlight filtering through grey clouds, as Kyla hunched over him, panting in his face. He noticed her thick tongue was a grey that looked bluish when seen in contrast to her wood brown skin, and sometimes pulsed with a more explicitly blue-green color, and thick ropes of slobber sometimes rolled over it.
She then straightened up, and as she did so, she helped Marquan to his feet, after a fashion, by grabbing onto his hand, and tugging him upwards by it. He scrambled to put his feet beneath him and push upwards, so that he wouldn’t lose his hand or at least break his wrist.
Then she led him over to a tree, in which there was a similar, yet different creature, a bird-like humanoid, reddish-brown skin stretched over his beak-like face. In the corners of his vision, Marquan saw other things moving, gathering around in the surrounding forest.
“Do you claim him?” asked the birdman, in a harsh, nasal voice.
“Yes.” said Kyla, in her smooth, almost choral voice. “I do.”
“Then do you choose him to cleave to?” asked the birdman.
“Yes, I choose him.” said Kyla.
“Stretch out his hand.” said the birdman.
Without warning, Kyla jerked the same hand she already had ahold of, and forced it to grasp a large branch, before lacing her fingers through his in a collective hold of the limb. The birdman descended to the ground, and, plucking a quill from the back of his head, slashed around the joined wrists, circumscribing the union with blood. Kyla’s blood was a darker brown, almost like mix of charcoal and mud. As the two’s blood touched each other, the two outflows seemed to be sucked into each other, to blend with each other.
Marquan cried out at the slashing, but Kyla hushed him.
“Now and for life, you are each other’s. Whoever violates this will come under the judgment of the other.” said the birdman. The sun seemed to brighten, and Marquan felt warm, just as the the blood rapidly congealed after having commingled, and the cut underneath healed spontaneously.
“Wait, what?” asked Marquan, before he realized with exceeding horror that the tales were not fabrications. He had been taken, he had been claimed, and now, he was not his own.
“It’s okay.” murmured Kyla, as she led Marquan away, Marquan himself gibbering with the force of the revelation. She continued to lead Marquan away, going nearly half a mile west and eventually reaching a campsite with him. It was as complete as his tribe’s own camp, with a firepit, a pot and a tent, but based on its size and singular tent, it had only been inhabited by one. Her.
“It’s okay.” she said again, as if to convince Marquan by repetition.
“Why? What’s okay about this? Why did you do this?” asked Marquan.
“I know this was sudden for you, but it was not for me. I’ve been watching you for some time. It was painful to my heart when you attempted to pierce it with an arrow. But now it’s okay. We are bound, and no hurtful misstep of yours can change that. It’s all perfectly fine, and I can make you happy now.” said Kyla, sitting crosslegged and pulling Marquan into her arms, opening her mouth as if to stare at him with the roof of it, breathing on his face as he did it.
“Is it truly bound? Are we? Truly?” asked Marquan.
“Yes. It’s every bit as solid as what your tribe may have carried out between a human man and a human woman. Maybe even more so. But now they’re behind you. Your life now is with me.” said Kyla, stroking Marquan.
“Are you really saying you’re my, my wife?” asked Marquan.
“I did not feel it necessary to say it. But even if I did, I would not merely be saying it. We have already made it so.”
“I never got a say in this.”
“Do you contest our marriage based on the fact that you were never afforded a chance to hurt me by denying me?”
“How old even are you?”
“The answer to that would tell you nothing useful. We do not age as you age. But physically, mentally, consider me to be twenty-two. And you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Lovely. Full of life, warmth, energy, emotion. And other things. Hungry inside to experience so many things, things I will be there to lead you through. I will provide fodder for all of your hungers, except the literal, of course. You will continue to hunt, as is your profession. But I will sate you in every other way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the expectations made of you will not change, except for the expectation to love me. And I will give my all to enliven everything that comes with that.”
“How can–can I–be free of you?” asked Marquan, his hope crumbling midsentence.
"Never." said Kyla, coldly and harshly. Then, with what sounded like condescension or smugness but might have been something else, “You might as well look for your happiness in this, because you will never be rid of it. While you still have that pubescent, overly-excited body to play with.”
After a moment of silence, Marquan asked, “But how old are you, really?”
“Chronologically, I am. . . eleven.” said Kyla.
This revelation sent Marquan reeling, but as he was taken it in, Kyla walked straight up to him, eliminating all personal space, and loomed over him.
He shook, ready to faint, or sob, or simply die where he stood. She was seven and a half feet tall, and every inch of her would be terrifying on its own, but knowing that this creature had gone out of its way to make itself his ‘destiny’–to make his calling in life the service of a forced bond to it–was too much.
“Am I not mature enough for you?” she asked.
“That’s. . .” Marquan said, feeling as though his soul were nauseous, “that’s not it.”
“I see.” said Kyla, further bending down over Marquan. “I suppose you’d like to sleep alone, tonight? That’s fine. I won’t force my presence onto you just now. Since you seem so disgusted by me.” Her voice on that last addition sounded like it was calibrated to induce guilt, but all Marquan could feel was a sharp, almost shock-inducing relief.
Kyla, meanwhile, stomped off----as much as her oddly-light claws could stomp—and came back with a deer that Marquan realized was still alive, yet paralyzed in fear.
With a swift, brutal motion, Kyla degloved the thing’s entire body, save for the head, dropped the pelt on the ground, and belatedly put the beast out of its misery with a decisive, crushing bite to the brain stem. She threw the sorry carcass against a nearby tree before proceeding to lick all the blood from the inside of the pelt, before flapping the pelt a bit and lowering it onto the ground, and then walking over to Marquan, picking him up under the arms and then trying to lower him into the pelt. At first, he flailed a little, but with a surprisingly domestic little burst of censure, Kyla made him let her slide him into the skin, now bereft of blood but full of her somewhat viscous saliva. She then craned over him, and scruffed not his neck, but the back of his head, as she pressed her cold teeth, as cold as anything else left out in the elements in this forest and at this time of year, against his lips. Marquan’s eyes remained open, and he could see hers staring into them.
The irony was not lost on Marquan: Even though she was preparing him his own bed to give him space, she still not only did so in such a way that he would have to wallow in her own bodily fluids, and now she disregarded the very sentiment she had tried to express by taking this liberty, by forcing this travesty of a kiss upon him.
Kyla let out a little noise at his reciprocation; it could be called a moan, or a grunt, a little ‘Mmm’ that was an audible, perhaps automatic reception of his capitulation to her rather forcible advance. Then she let him go, letting him lay down in the foul bedroll. She strutted away to her tent, swaying her concave, almost skeletal pelvis in a way that Marquan, to his shock, mild revulsion and near disbelieving laughter, realized was an attempt to make him change his mind about accepting his solitude.
As Kyla slunk off to her tent, Marquan settled into his unhappy slumber, retreating deeper into the pelt to compensate for the lack of a tent covering him up from the cold winds.
Marquan eventually enjoyed the half-warmth and half-cushioning of the pelt, the hard, root-streaked ground underneath still felt underneath them, hard beneath his back and head. In the coziness he now felt, everything went still and settled, and all the discomfort was, if not forgotten, at least come to terms with enough that his mind, too, stilled. The memories and considerations of the day were simply pushed aside in favor of seeing to one of the basemost needs of the body, past hunger, thirst and breath.
Yet, just as Marquan’s half-comfort congealed into a restful unconsciousness, the amber light of the day, to which his consciousness jumped in his perspective after the fact, with his dreams having been forgotten, did not come with peace, as he realized he was being dragged. When Marquan looked to who did so, who else could it have been, but Kyla, dragging him back to her campsite?
She stopped pulling when he was before her tent, and squatted over him, instantly realizing that he was already awake. “Time to wake up.” she said.
“Why did you take me here? I thought you wanted to give me my peace?” asked Marquan.
“I said that of the night. Now is the day, our first whole day. Now, rise! Kill for me!” Kyla said, before pressing Marquan’s spear into his hand.
Marquan looked at the weapon, slowly looked up, nodded, and walked off further west, hunting for deer.
He managed to kill three, even without his bow, as he hurled the weapon with all the force of his frustration behind it.
Working off the same frustration, he slung all three deers’ bodies over his shoulders. He truly was one of the strongest among his tribe of birth, at least of his generation, and remembering this struck him with guilt and shame of having let himself be captured and lost to his tribe, on top of his original despair.
As he trudged into Kyla’s campsite, she smiled at him, subtle though the expression was on her face.
“You’re back.” she said, and though her statement was simple, her tone was full of a shocking depth of affection and adoration.
“Yes. I am.” said Marquan, his voice contrastingly flat. He did a sort of aggressive bow, as he threw the three carcasses over his head. Kyla wasted no time in tearing off the skin of one and beginning to bone the carcass. She looked up at Marquan and said “I’ll be a while in cooking this. I suggest you wander. The forest has been my home. It’s yours now, too. Just, one more thing.”
Marquan asked, “What?”, but he got it out no sooner than Kyla lunged forward and pulled off his loincloth, and threw it into the fire. “You don’t need to hide under that anymore, love. Your body is as beautiful as you are.”
“I’ll freeze to death.” said Marquan.
“You survived long enough in just that. It’s not that cold.” said Kyla.
Marquan knew Kyla was beyond reasoning, and walked off, feeling ridiculous in his bareness. He did indeed wander, but when he tried and succeeded in finding a familiar hot spring nearby, he froze as he saw a woman bathing.
Marquan felt sick. He knew if he walked up naked, it wouldn’t look good if he, a naked man, approached a woman from a separate territory who was bathing. Wars had sprung up over less.
He had hoped against hope that his tribe would be here, that it would be like waking up from a nightmare, that no one would expect him to hold to a forced marriage with a monster in the woods, that he would be taken back and never think of this again, past a collective hunt to kill Kyla.
But here was a woman, not of his particular tribe, and already undressed.
Marquan could only stare at first. The woman was human, unlike Kyla, her skin was rich and not grey, the brown of jasper and not of bark, unlike Kyla, and her figure was dense and soft, unlike Kyla’s. Eventually, Marquan slumped to the ground, cried, and masturbated.
The day slipped away, and the girl left, and then a shadow fell over Marquan, and of course it was the only one who seemed to exist to Marquan anymore.
“I finished preparing the meat. In good time, too. Since you seem hungry. It might still have a bit of blood in it. But it’s only fitting. Since you’re willing to spill mine.” Kyla said.
“What do you mean?” asked Marquan.
“You were muttering your thoughts aloud, Marquan.” said Kyla. “You don’t understand a thing.”
“Enlighten me.” said Marquan. “What don’t I understand?”
“I. . . love you, Marquan. I love you enough to kill for you. The love that’s in my heart is more alive than all the life I might seem to lack in my flesh, though even in my flesh I am very much living, very much natural, however much my face may frighten you. I am willing to be everything that you could expect of a wife, and you aren’t even willing to give me a chance. I know you know nothing, Marquan, because if you knew all of this, the extent of it, the viscerality of it, and still didn’t want it, you’d at least know you’d need to kill me to be able to have a human wife without fearing for her life in every waking moment of your life.” Kyla said, her voice like a stage whisper, one shaky in tone but steady in pace.
Kyla’s hands suddenly clapped around the sides and back of Marquan’s head, and she lifted him up to his feet by it, his body and limbs scrambling so his neck wouldn’t break.
“I love you,” Kyla said, and repeated, over and over again as she drew Marquan towards herself, before she nuzzled him and then locked her mouth to his and forced her tongue into his mouth and down his throat, her mouth smelling of sweat and flowers Marquan had never smelled before. The feeling of her tongue down his throat, or perhaps more accurately the feeling of whatever her tongue was putting in him as it writhed down his throat, put shockwaves of shameful ecstasy shuddering through his body. He felt sleepy, and he fell asleep.
Before he knew anything more, he was in Kyla’s tent with her, his torso flush to hers. She was angled away from him but hunched towards him, compensating for their difference in height, and she looked down on him fondly.
“I forgive you, Marquan.” she said.
“For what?” asked Marquan.
“Did you forget? Or did you not realize you did wrong? You wanted someone else but me. I’m your wife, Marquan. You hurt me. But I forgive you.” she said, verbally knocking the words into him like a crude attempt at indoctrination.
“Oh.” said Marquan.
“I can see you still don’t really understand. Maybe you don’t see me as a person, maybe you don’t see my kind as worthy of equal standing, maybe you think my people’s ways are unworthy. But in my care, all will be seen to in due time. Except what has already been rushed to before it could be spoiled by your callous desires.”
Marquan looked down at their naked bodies. “You. . .” he said. Their tongue did not have a word strictly for ‘rape’, but there was one for the act, almost exclusively toward women, (and even when not, almost exclusively by men,) of taking people as spoils of war for sexual gratification, and by extension for the fulfillment of that purpose after the fact, and it was this word that Marquan used of what Kyla had done to him.
“I already did when I wed us. I did when I carried you home. I just finished it early when you betrayed me. That is all I required in order to forgive. Not everyone would be so giving, Marquan. Understand that. But it’s because I love you. I loved you even when I saw you for the first time, a year ago. I wish I could have watched you grow up from birth so that my life could encompass yours and make it all the sweeter when I take your flesh, that I saw grow, into mine I love you, so much. And you are mine.” Kyla said.
“If you love me, then why did you do this to me?” asked Marquan.
“Because you clearly don’t know how to love me back. Even if you can’t remember, I still taught your body how to act like you do. Maybe this way, the rest will catch up. But, if you’re feeling like I ruined you somehow already, there’s surely no harm in reciprocating willingly.” purred Kyla.
Marquan stared, his breath halting as if his lungs were filled with wax, before resuming normally as his shoulders slumped and he leaned into her clavicle.
Marquan gave Kyla what she wanted. He realized, to his horror, that he actually liked it. He actually felt warmth in the tent, even though her body itself–except for her birth canal, which moderately surpassed tepidity–was still slightly colder than room temperature. As they peaked, Kyla put a hand to his cheek and licked his face with her tongue, which he realized was oddly phallic. Then she put it in his mouth again, though not as forcefully, and he realized he loved the taste of her ropy saliva, such that he swallowed a bit of it, and every feeling in his body softened, every passive ache smearing into nothingness while every pleasure spread across his body. Everything felt warmer and his body felt more eager in what it was doing. He kissed Kyla’s neck and came in her, Kyla letting out a murmur of approval as she gently worked out the remainder of her part of the embrace with her hips, grinding against him gently enough that he scarcely noticed it as anything other than her taking her time in settling in against him. Marquan, meanwhile, fell asleep again, Kyla cradling him once she had finished.
When Marquan woke up, they were elsewhere, and Kyla squatted over the tree where they had been wed against his will, and. . . vomited something black, out of her womb. It wasn’t a living thing, or at least not in the sense of being a live, fully-developed child. It was black, fluid, seemingly a bit viscous, and yet it soaked into the tree’s roots, being pulled in as if drawn there. It smelled awful, like a mixture of his semen, coagulated blood and something else, something not dissimilar to the smell of Kyla’s breath.
“Wha-” said Marquan, sitting up, and startling Kyla, “What are you doing?”
“Oh! Marquan, I hadn’t intended for you to see this. It’s somewhat embarrassing.” said Kyla.
“What is that?” asked Marquan.
“How we are to birth children is not how you do. For ordinary people of your kind, it’s enough that a man and a woman have flesh ready to leave them, though that of the woman shall not until entered by that of the man and then grown. For a union such as ours, that which of you entered me was ready to leave much sooner, as that which is of us collectively is ready to enter that which lies under the tree, just as what you gave me entered my own womb.”
Mark was confused, especially by her vague phrasing, but after a while of looking lost, he settled on “What’s under the tree?”
Kyla shifted her weight in her squatting position, nervously. “That’s not important—well, it is, but not important for you to know, now.”
Then, Marquan noticed that the light had changed far more than he had previously realized.
“How long was I asleep?” he asked.
“About a day.” said Kyla, and then before Marquan could even absorb this information, she added “I was able to gather some things, and in that time I left you here. This is a safe place, believe me.”
“O-oh.” said Marquan, bewildered but unwilling to deal with the number of questions running through his head, especially given that he couldn’t sure there would be much return on asking them, given how cryptic Kyla was being.
“Unfortunately, your village is no more.” said Kyla.
“What?” asked Marquan, and after a while, he managed “By whom?” The news itself was earth shaking, but Marquan also felt at this point that maybe whatever Kyla had secreted in her saliva (if indeed it was a material and not some preternatural, miasmic taint carried through her spittle) had not entirely subsided from him, and was clouding his thoughts.
Kyla led Marquan back to his village, so that he could gather up any possessions that he wanted. To his dismay, she had already buried the dead, such that he could not see his brothers or father one last time—his sense of propriety forbade him even to consider exhumation.
After Marquan took his father’s spear, Kyla led him back to their camp. As they walked, he noticed that she seemed less. . . hard, than before. Her body was not so severely emaciated, it was as if it had learned to grow fat, if ever so slightly, enough that she looked less like a corpse and more like a woman, ominous skull face notwithstanding.
Later, in the night, close to Kyla again, he observed that her skin, too, was different—more flexible, and somewhat smoother, skin still leathery, but perhaps like leather produced less crudely.
Marquan actually began to find her comforting. He found her familiar. He was almost ready to unfurl the tightly-wound wrappings of his initial revulsion, alienation from his own people, and emasculation from being forcibly married to another who then treated him more like a wife than a husband, and surrender inwardly to actually loving his. . . his wife! Even if she was alien to him, monstrous to him, perpetually curt and degradingly controlling, she was strong, she surely had some love for him—or else all this, this effort would not make sense—and most of all, she was there, she was there when he had lost everyone else. Yes, she had taken from him the chance to be with his family in their final days, but it might be that his days only extended beyond theirs because she had taken him.
And with that in mind, for a few days, a few weeks, maybe a month—time blurred for Marquan—they were happy.
But then, one day, when they were at the threshold of sleep, Marquan complimented Kyla’s change, and she muttered, absentmindedly, “And all it took was a few women.”
Marquan shot up, and with barely any interrogation, Kyla admitted to killing and eating both the girl Marquan had been spying on, and then most women in Marquan’s tribe, leading to a rapid escalation of paranoia and infighting. At the end of it all, Kyla came back to devour the dead, and the children who would die on their own. Their forms Kyla did not use, but Kyla did not like to see rot, and took pity on the little ones.
Marquan gagged, realizing Kyla’s new ‘beauty’ was essentially not that different from skinning people and wearing their hide as if they were animals, except that it was more mystical, not taking physical flesh but copying form itself, if only being able to mimic rudiments of each individual victim. When he saw beauty in Kyla’s form, he had been enraptured with dead women.
Kyla leaned in and kissed Marquan, but he planted a foot on her down-turned sternum and ran off for his father’s spear. His tribe was not especially religious in inclination, but they believed in spirit, and that weapons grew with those who owned them. It was the only explanation for why even makeshift hunting implements would sometimes last for decades—though this no makeshift implement. It had a sturdy, dark wood handle, and carvings up and down the shaft.
Marquan charged Kyla, and pierced on of her floating eyes, before she, letting out a cry, flailed one of her arms, grabbed his right one, and tore it off.
In a moment, that same arm was pressed against his bloody socket, as with her other arm she picked him up and began to take him somewhere, somewhere. . . familiar.
“You do everything you can to hurt me. . .” said Kyla.
“An eye for an arm? When you have another eye? Fairly uneven, in my eyes!” said Marquan.
“Obviously, I didn’t mean bodily! I just don’t know what I need to do to make you understand and feel what I feel!”
“You actually think I’ll believe you love me at thi-” said Marquan, before Kyla bit down on his shoulder and breathed erratically, Marquan realizing she was crying, lukewarm tears rolling down her face.