WAR
The bark shield-wall shatters in a spray of dry splinters. The Sheonni pour through the gaps, their faces smeared with ochre, wielding lethal flint. Sugea feels the soil tremble under his feet—the hard, wet thud of birch-bark boots packing down earth that just this morning was consecrated for growth.
Sugea is a shaman for the wheat, not a trophy for the enemy. To be taken alive would be a rot no spell could scrub away. For years he has trained to serve Daghnu, the Wheat Father, chanting and spilling blood into the dirt to make the grain rise. But with the Sheonni breaking through, the priest is gone. He wants to be a man. He rips away the heavy straw mask and tears at the itchy costume. He will not stand in the background like Daghnu’s shadow, shouting holy words while braver boys are butchered.
To his left, Zoreon—a seasoned warrior who had danced beside him for the harvest blessing—takes a mace full to the head. His peaked leather hat collapses into a bloody mess.
The air doesn't smell of burning husks anymore. It tastes of wet, hammered slate, sour sweat, and greasy cowhide. Boys Sugea envied only moments ago fumble blindly in the press, their wooden spear shafts slick with sweat, sliding right through their fingers.
A rope-turbaned Sheonni raider, reeking of the wolf-pelt on his shoulders, lunges at a fallen Leva boy. His movements are heavy, efficient, punctuated by a blunt grunt of effort. All the prayers for rain and the old litanies for the Wheat Father disappear. The earth isn't asking for a neat bowl of bull’s blood anymore—it is drinking everything his people have.
Sugea grips his greenstone axe until his knuckles turn white. The head is cold and smooth, polished by weeks of sand-rubbing. Flint-tipped arrows zip through the air, hunting for Leva skin. He lunges, swinging in clumsy, heavy arcs that pull at his shoulder. He aims for the face of a Sheonni boy who looks just as terrified as he is.
Then, something slams into the side of his head with a sickening crunch. His vision goes black. His knees fold, and he hits the stony ground hard. The last things he sees are the wheat stalks he was supposed to protect, swaying in the wind as if he weren't there at all.
When he comes to, a Sheonni warrior is urinating on his face. Sugea twists, fighting the rough ropes binding his wrists.
He spits his curses up at them. ‘Dung-eating wildborns! Clanless wolf-stinkers!’
They just laugh at his Leva tongue, kicking him with their birch-soled boots. They bind him spread-eagle inside a clay hut. For three days, their crones enter at their leisure to beat him and defile him.
By the third day, the fever takes hold. His body is broken, filthy, and reeking so badly that their Sun-priestess deems him unworthy of a proper Ireslari sacrifice to her pits. They drag him out and dump him onto a midden heap at the edge of the settlement, leaving the strawman priest to rot into the soil of their wheat gardens.
But he refuses to die.
He crawls from the stinking refuse mound. Weak, burning with fever, and unable to stand, he drags his useless legs out of the cultivated plots and into the margins of the dark forest. Among the trees, surrounded by the fallen fruits of the autumn wilderness, his breath slows. As soon as his legs will bear his weight, he sucks air through his swollen throat and limps north, toward the wilds.
Sugea remains a thou.