{Author's Note: Be warned! Exposition and World history ahead!}
Kael knew from the moment his fingers touched Aeron’s neck that he was going to kill him. The battle had been fairly even up until that point—but a quick swipe to Aeron’s face had leaked blood into the older male’s eyes, giving Kael the split-second it took to wrap his hands around his opponent’s throat.
The duel hadn’t been supposed to go to the death—it had been absolutely formal. Kael had requested the privilege of challenging Aeron from the village Elders, Aeron had consented, all traditional laws applied. Until third blood is drawn—that was the Elders’ mandate. The fresh wound on Aeron’s face had been the third hit, the third blood; that should’ve been the end of it. But Kael couldn’t stop himself… or, rather, he didn’t want to.
His parents had named him for the Datra word for duel; káelr. All the males in his family had been hunters, warriors… it was in his blood to go for the kill. And yet, as his grip tightened and he felt Aeron’s life slowly leave him, it was all he could do to ignore that protesting voice in the back of his mind. To push aside all guilt, all remorse as the body of his would-be stepfather grew limp and lifeless. He dropped the corpse to the ground and stared down at it—he didn’t feel well, he felt disoriented, strange… and as the other males of his village began to converge on him, Kael felt terror wash over him in a cold wave.
The sharp talons of his brethren tore at his flesh—Datra men who had only that morning joked with him about the frailty of his opponent were now shrieking at him like a flock of angry birds. Kael didn’t stop them; numbness solidified in his stomach even as the weeping wounds on his skin burned. He let his wings hang limply at his sides as those of his attackers beat against the stale air in their anger. The Datra rarely used their wings outside of the hunt those days—the beating of wings no longer signalled flight, but fury. Kael didn’t even think of using his to escape.
The men were gradually pulled away—by what, Kael didn’t know. A booming voice gave him a clue.
“Brothers!” it cried, “don’t give him the mercy of death! A far greater punishment awaits those who kill in cold blood!”
Kael lifted his head. “Give it to me now, then,” he said weakly to the wizened Elder who had rescued him. He didn’t allow himself to feel guilty—but, at the same time, he didn’t want to be given the chance to see the pain on his mother’s face. She had wanted to marry Aeron, the one responsible for the death of Kael’s father. Kael didn’t regret taking his revenge… but he would always regret hurting his mother.
The Elder grabbed him by the hair and, with astounding strength for one so old, dragged him away from the crowds of weeping and wailing Datra. They were joined by the rest of the Elders—who, except for a few exceptions, weren’t very old at all. Kael was dragged into the Communal House, where he was finally allowed to stand up.
“Follow us,” one of the Elders, a middle-aged female, said crisply. Kael did. They led him to a room at the back of the Communal House, past the stoves and the dining tables. It was small, and made entirely of metal. A bed lay in the middle, and several nasty-looking instruments hung on the walls. Only the female Elder remained in the room with him.
“Lay down,” the female Elder said. Kael did, shivering as she fixed him to the bed with leather straps. When she had finished, he watched her approach a thin, glass rod hanging from the wall. She stared at it blankly. “Do you know the First Tenet of our tribe, Kael Pemei?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. His tone was flat. He didn’t know what was going to happen to him, but the numbness he had felt while being attacked had spread throughout him. He no longer cared. He felt as if he was in a dream—he hadn’t killed Aeron… he couldn’t have killed Aeron. Aeron had done nothing wrong, mother had said so…
“The First Tenet,” the female Elder went on, “is that which says; kill naught, but in an act of war… correct?”
“Correct,” Kael felt dizzy again. There was blood on his hands—Aeron’s blood; the blood of a gruff old hunter who had only wanted to marry Morwen Pemei and be a father to her ungrateful son.
“Was your duel an act of war, Kael?”
“No.”
The female Elder took the glass rod in her hands. She smiled grimly. Kael felt the numbness begin to recede.
“Then why,” his interrogator asked, “did you kill Aeron Tewit, Kael?”
“It’s happening too fast,” Kael murmured. Aeron had been alive less than ten minutes ago; Kael had been mauled, he had been dragged into this strange room in a matter of moments… how had it happened so fast?
“What was that, Kael?”
“Nothing,” he breathed. The numbness had been replaced by a fierce self-righteousness. Aeron had deserved to die!
“Why did you kill Aeron?” the Elder repeated. Kael’s face burned.
“My father is dead because of him!” he growled. “Aeron was supposed to take the left flank—it was his job! My father died to protect that old fool!”
The Elder didn’t say anything.
“Wolves,” Kael laughed bitterly. “Would you believe it? The best hunter in the village, and he was killed by wolves. But at least Aeron brought back the pelts. You know he tried to give my mother those pelts as an engagement present?”
The Elder pressed the glass rod against Kael’s left temple. It was cold, and he flinched. “Kael,” she said, “do you know why it is the Datra command such powerful magic?”
“We can access the energy in every worldly thing,” he quoted from his boyhood lessons, a bit confused, “and manipulate it.”
“Correct. This is also how we hunt, is it not? How we have survived all these years. And yet, we retain only a fraction of the power we once had…” she loomed over him, her eyes cold. “Our punishment for those who break the First Tenet is severe,” she told him. “I shall cut out your tongue. I shall clip your wings. And I shall take from you,” she gave him an unsympathetic smile, “all ability to access energies.”
Kael felt his stomach lurch. “No, please, no!” he cried, but it was too late.
All of him was burning—a great surge of fire leapt to his temple, where the glass rod touched his flesh. Pain shook every orifice of his body, and he screamed louder than he’d ever screamed before. If it weren’t for the straps, he would’ve convulsed like a madman.
Near the end, his world went black. Whether or not that was the end of the procedure, he would never know. All he knew was that, when he woke, he could no longer speak, nor fly, nor feel. Kael had never been a magician… but he felt as if he had gone blind.
⥈
For millennia, the natural order had dictated constant rivalry and war between the demonic species, the Creatures, and humankind. The Datra, a species who had always been indifferent to such wars despite their Creature ancestry, stood on neutral ground. With the body of a human, the wings of a raven, and the face of a demon, they were considered abominations by both sides in the war, and so retreated into the forests and mountains to create their own civilization. They had once been wise, and ruthless, and powerful. Their advancements in technology had once rivalled that of the humans. But with the coming of the Matron’s Child, everything changed.
The story of the Matron was an ancient Datra legend—she was a creature of the Wasteland, the spawning ground for all the lowest forms of Creatures. Unlike her peers, the Matron possessed emotions happier than those of sorrow, anger, and fear. This drove her, according to the tale, to abandon the Wasteland in order to find a place of beauty. She stumbled into a lush valley—and as she began to relish in the purity of this new world, the evil that was built up within her had tried to escape.
The Matron coughed it up in the form of a black clot—the clot infected the valley and began to destroy it. Eventually, the Matron escaped the infected area, only to come across a human village. She kidnapped a little boy so that she would have something to love, but ended up killing him in an attempt to keep him from running away. Then, in her sorrow, the Matron returned to the mountain border that separated the Wasteland from the valley, and in a cave, she simply lay down and died.
A continuation of the tale showed the elder brother of the little boy travelling out into the woods and finding his brother’s body. In his sorrow and rage, he carried the corpse through the valley, searching for the murderer.
Finally, he happened upon the part of the valley that had been infected by the Matron’s clot. Overcome with a strange idea, the older boy took the clot and fed it to his brother’s body. The child came back to life, but he was twisted—the evil that the Matron had expelled from her own body had corrupted his, and he killed his brother in a fit of bloodlust. The boy was distorted until he resembled a great, black, centipede-like Creature—and as he grew in size, so did he grow in intelligence.
The Child drank the blood of his victims—but, as he quickly learned, the blood of the innocent was poisonous to him. And so he learned how to assume the shapes of different beings; he learned how to infect the minds of others, to drive them to do horrible things to each other so that he might drink their blood. He might’ve simply searched for those who had already abandoned their innocence—but the Matron’s clot had twisted him so completely that he felt no satisfaction in a kill unless he corrupted the blood himself.
It was then that the Datra banded together with humankind to drive back the Child—for he hadn’t acknowledged the unspoken truce that existed between the Creatures and the Datra; he had preyed upon both human and humanoid. The humans and the Datra managed to kill the Child and cut out its heart—the only way to ensure that a Creature stays dead for more than a day—but that was not the end of their alliance.
With few rare exceptions, the many species of Creatures (ranging from beasts and parasites to shapeshifters and imps) were greatly unintelligent, possessing little more than basic cunning and a great capacity for violence. The coming of the Child, who, being a hybrid, was uncharacteristically smart for a Creature, gave them enough incentive to launch an all-out, co-ordinated attack on the humans and the Datra. Despite the haphazard nature of their organization, the creatures were vicious enough—and the humans and Datra powerful enough—to wipe out nearly all civilization in the world during the course of the battle. Twenty years did the conflict last—until, finally, the humans and Datra were able to beat back the last of the Creatures. Licking their wounds, the Creatures retreated into the Wasteland of legend, never to emerge again.
That had been two-thousand-three-hundred years ago.
The Datra had long since returned to the old ways. However, as the humans thrived, the Datra slowly deteriorated—their ferocious pride, their intelligence, their magic; all began to fade into a shadow of what they had once been. Even their division from the rest of the world began to weaken; when a Datra was convicted of a crime, they were robbed of all inherent magic and banished to the human cities.
Soon, two species of Datra emerged—those who clung to the old ways and remained in their villages, and those who had descended from those criminals of old; unable to access the magic in their blood, and integrated completely into the society of humankind.
After Aeron’s murder, Kael Pemei, silent, flightless, and numb to all magic, was banished from his village. He was thrust into the world with no assets, no hope of survival—with a heavy heart, he set out in the direction of the human cities, where he might join that second species of Datra.
