Calm down, he ordered himself. Not the time. Not the place.
He focused on the words instead of the man.
Chief Tharun pointed a thick, scarred finger toward the dark, looming jungle line.
"But do not mistake this peace for permanence," Tharun continued. "Out there... there is no safety. There is no mercy. It does not care about your name. It cares only if you are fast, and if you are strong."
The silence was absolute. Even the birds seemed to stop singing. Tharun’s expression darkened, his eyes sweeping over the faces of the youth, landing heavy on those who had lost family.
Sol’s eyes narrowed in grudging appreciation. He’s good, Sol thought cynically. He really knows how to work a crowd.
"Do you remember?" he whispered, his voice dropping to a gravelly growl that carried to the back of the square like the rumble of an approaching storm. "Do you remember the night the moon turned red? Just one year ago?"
A collective shudder ran through the crowd. Sol felt a phantom pain in his chest.
"The Vorakh came," Tharun bellowed, his voice rising with fury, manipulating the volume perfectly to spike the tension. "From the frozen north, they came like shadows. No warning. No honor. Just stone axes in the dark."
Sol’s grip on his spear tightened until the wood creaked. The memories assaulted him... the smell of smoke, the screaming. He saw the flash of a stone axe. He saw his father, a man of peace, trying to hold the line against three invaders. He saw his mother throwing her body over his to shield him from the killing blow.
"They slaughtered us!" Tharun roared, his face twisting with the memory of the carnage. "They burned our homes. They butchered our kin like cattle. We were weak! We were unprepared! We stood on the brink of extinction!"
Distracting himself from those memories, he took a deep breath and watched the faces of the youth around him. They were mesmerized. Their fear was turning into anger, their grief into bloodlust. Tharun was taking their trauma.. the worst night of their lives... and forging it into a spear to point at the jungle.
If this guy was in the modern world, Sol thought, a dark smirk touching his lips, he’d be a senator. Or a cult leader. He knows exactly which buttons to push.
"And what saved us?" Thraun paced slowly. "Was it our strength? Was it our prayers?"
He stopped, looking out at the jungle with a mixture of hatred and reverence.
"It was a nightmare," he hissed. "The Thornmaw."
The name echoed in the air, as everyone remembered that nightmare of a beast.
"A beast of the old world. A horror of fur and fang that walked out of the darkness and tore the invaders apart. We survived not because we were strong, but because a greater monster decided to eat the lesser monsters."
Tharun turned back to the youth, his eyes blazing with a charismatic fire.
"Never again!" he screamed, slamming his foot heavily onto the ground. "We will never again rely on luck! We will not be the meat in the middle! You must become stronger than the Thornmaw! You must become the nightmare that the darkness fears!"
The speech ignited the air. The crowd roared in approval.
The fear in the eyes of the participants was replaced by a hot, boiling rage. They remembered the grief. They remembered the humiliation of being saved by a monster.
Even he had to admit that the chief was really good at hyping up the crowd.
"The mission is simple," Tharun commanded, his chest heaving,riding the wave of their emotion. "Bring back a trophy. A head. A claw. A heart. Kill a beast of the wild. Do it alone. Do it together. I do not care how you do it. I only care that you survive and conquer."
"If you come back empty-handed... you remain a child. If you do not come back at all... your name will be spoken once, and then forgotten."
"Shaman Zula," the Chief nodded respectfully to the silver-haired woman standing silently beside him. "Bless them. Make them predators."
The Shaman stepped forward. She didn’t shout. She raised a wooden staff topped with a skull and countless other trinkets, like stones and crystals.
She began to chant... a low, rhythmic language that was different from the one he knew, and it sounded like stones grinding together, ancient and unsettling.
She reached into a pouch at her waist and threw a handful of glittering, purple dust into the air.
Whoosh.
The dust didn’t fall. It swirled, as if carried by an unnatural wind, drifting over the line of participants like a living fog.
When the dust touched Sol’s skin, he felt a jolt.
Zzzzt.
The Ash Gray energy in his chest flared violently, as if reacting to a foreign intruder. It surged up, swallowing the Shaman’s "blessing" instantly, neutralizing it before it could take root.
Analysis, Sol’s mind raced as he tasted the metallic tang of the dust in the air. That wasn’t a blessing. It was definitely something like a chemical agent. Maybe a stimulant, he didn’t know yet.
He looked at the others. Vurok and the rest looked energized, their pupils dilating, their breathing accelerating. Their fear and sorrow were being chemically replaced by a manic, frothing aggression.
It stimulates adrenaline and suppresses fear, Sol realized. It weaponizes the trauma the Chief just invoked. She’s drugging us to fight harder. To kill without thinking.
He suppressed his own energy, feigning the same rush, widening his eyes and gripping his spear tighter, panting slightly to blend in. But his mind remained ice cold, calculating the odds.
"The sun is high!" Chief Tharun shouted, pointing it at the open gate.
"THE HUNT BEGINS!"
The drums exploded into a frantic, pounding rhythm.
"RRAAAHHH!"
The sound acted as a trigger. The tension in the air snapped.
And finally, the great horn sounded. A deep, mournful note that signaled the start of the Rite.
The crowd screamed in unison. The line broke. The youth of the tribe, their blood boiling with the memory of the massacre and the Shaman’s dust, surged forward like a tidal wave. The eager ones... the sons of elites, the ones with better weapons and leather armor... sprinted faster for the gates, howling war cries, desperate to be the first into the green hell.
They wanted the glory of the first kill. They wanted to impress the Chief, and perhaps more importantly, the silver-haired white moon of the tribe.
Unlike them, Seluna walked slowly, as if it was all just a boring game for her, but not without glancing once towards Sol’s direction.
Of course, Sol didn’t scream, or sprint blindly.
He gripped his spear, his knuckles white.
He watched Vurok and his lackeys disappear into the brush, heading East... the traditional route for heavy game, where the trails were wider, and preys were relatively bigger, and it was cleaned up a bit for their safety.
A/N: Guys we are still short of reviews, heck we don’t even have minimum 10 to show rating, so please can you spare some time and give it a good review? I’ll be grateful and it will help me write even better.