An Elusive Wolf, a Relentless Wolf

::: section Heat from their fire and shelter from the old tree had kept it from them, but after days now of unbroken sunless overcast, a chill is rising in the land, while drizzle and damp air is falling. As Awelah departs into the woods, she wonders if the fog is gathered thickly enough for her spear to stab through it. Proximity to the creek couldn't have helped, when it comes to how bad the fog got. As she walks Awelah hears it rush over rocks and slam into mud. The waters are dark, and it isn't just shadows. The creekwater isn't safe to drink, not so soon after a wispfall. A wispfall in the mountains behind them, where all this water is runoff from? Still, enervate is sensitive to temperature --- it didn't get hot, not in the way matter does, but it nonetheless didn't stick around after boiling. Ooliri had remarked that it's odd the water remained so enervated. Black nerve seeks denser matter, and sand is preferable to water. Emusa, it turns out, had noticed the same thing. She'd determined it was an excess of water-affine enervate in the wisps. Something like that. It's far beyond the lessons Awelah had thus far retained. Affinities were a distraction, anyway. That much she knew --- the Asetari are above such things. Were above such things. Will be above. Ugh. Awelah is reprieved from distracting thoughts soon after, when the taxites clear and in their absence, moss thickly overtakes the ground. Soft and growing, it didn't keep tracks as well as mud, and she gives up following through, and starts fanning out, checking the perimeter of the clearing, and then any mud patches within, for anything to follow. The haphazard search pattern means that when she feels the relief of at last finding more tracks, it's dashed seconds later as she realizes they are her own. Doesn't matter, she thinks, I don't need this to be so easy. She is a hunter. The mantis uncurls her antennae, short things from which locks of gray-purple setae curl off. She runs dactyls through them, combing away dirt and dead hair. When she extends them again, she lets her eyes pale as she focuses on the world in scent. Diamantids had eyes better than any other kind, so it's just efficient for Awelah to focus on what she sees. But as a nymph, Awelah had spent so long playing with her family's roaches. There was a type of game played in basement rooms with none of the torches lit. Noble roaches had longer, more sensitive antennae than diamantids, and even with all her experience, Awelah had been a handicap on any team that had her. (Once, Awelah had asked her dad to have her antennae cut in a way to make them more sensitive --- he had pat young Awelah and told her how pretty her antennae were, and how it'd be unbecoming for a bane line Asetari to look like a roach on top of all the things the clan already says about us. She didn't get many chances to play with the roaches after that.) She'd learned enough, though. To your antennae, everyone is a bright lamp, illuminating the world in 'light' that traveled like something thrown instead of instantly. Your antennae didn't have lenses like the dewdrops on mantid eyes, so everything was mixed together and unfocused. Lingering, too --- as if everywhere you held your antennae, it gazed upon photographing chemicals that'd sat exposed for too long. You have two antennae, though, and so much length. It's like a string of these photographs, each subtly different. The image of scent had foremost the expected elements --- of wet vegetation and mosses crushed or split open by her steps, of trace enervate which seemed to sting even when so faint, and the pheromones of lesser insects --- but behind them all was the putrid, metallic, unnatural scent she seeks. She doesn't think anything could mask it --- direbeasts and bloodbanes didn't always stink so strongly, not when resting, but active ichor metabolism did. Those erotyles had fought back, it seems, and the dog had doubtless licked the blood in its wounds. Awelah waves her antennae through the air, and the world seems to gain new a depth. She feels the diffusion of the oldest scents, and aligns her antennae right along that gradient. Her surety only grows in her next steps. Her hopes were unfounded, and her fears hold true. Her prey is still here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Far to the west, and earlier that day, Makuja leaves the camp in the opposite direction, and she too walks along the banks of the creek, distracted in the depths of her thoughts. She hears Awelah call out --- to Ooliri, perhaps, who trusted her more. Attention, not alarm, and what would Awelah want attention for? To brag about another successful hunt? There's a briskness to her pace, and a tension in her tightened raptorials. She doesn't want to go back to the camp, to talk to either of them. She's felt this before, when another pawn had done something to get a satisfied nod out of master and so she killed something or gathered some rare poisonous flower, and reminded her who the most useful was. In a practiced motion, the red nymph tosses up a stone, and casts it into the dark waters of the creek with vespertine force. It feels like she let out more than just the black nerve that fuels the spell. She wants to do it again, see the stone smash apart against the streambed. A technique she'd discovered --- not invented, such a simple permutation of signs had to be something well known for centuries. There's more to getting it right than just the order of the signs, though. She'd spent hours to figure that out, getting it down to consistency, and then --- "Why would I need to fling rocks? I have better techniques." And the Asetari did. Throwing rocks, and creating an autonomous projection --- who would choose what Makuja could do? It's simply a worse tool. What did she have that could compare to what the Asetari could do? (She knows exactly what the answer is, and that makes it worse. "Do you know the tarsigns for the wretched raptorials?" she'd asked Ooliri. And the boy had no idea.) The creek isn't a straight thing. It curved when it ran into the old tree they camped in, and here, upstream of that, it's winding to the north. The metataxites have grown more numerous around the red nymph as she walks on. Makuja is in the middle of imbuing the next stone to cast when she hears the sound of branches bending, sees the movement in between thick trunks. The Asetari wasn't lying or embellishing, then. Ahead of her stands a cicindela --- a wild tiger beetle. If I can catch this... She wants to see that look on the Asetari's face even more than she wants to see this rock crack open against the earth. A glance down finds the near-forgotten thing already splitting and liqued from partial imbuement. Hmm. She knows tarsigns aren't needed. Nervecasting with or without them is the difference between digging with a shovel and clawing at the ground. She doesn't want to do anything big, though, and doesn't know if there's a sign for what she wants. Whatever discharged enervate into her palm... can it go the other way? Can she un-imbue? She knows what it feels like for black nerve to flow into her tarsi. Maybe if she focuses on that sensation, or imagines some kind of pull. It doesn't all come back, but she sees --- and feels --- the enervate escaping the rock, and new coldness seeping into her, slithering up her forelegs. She doesn't know the right word --- pulling, pumping --- but she draws the stuff further up her arms, as if to return it all the way back to her abdominal core. But the farther it gets from her hands, the more her control frays, and by the time it's descending her thorax, she's not sure if gravity isn't doing most of the work. No matter --- perhaps this way, it'd be quicker to expel later. Makuja shakes her head and looks up. The cicindela is still there, long legs lifting it up where it licks the algae from a metataxite's shelf-like limbs. Makuja is patient. She would watch, poised for the right moment to strike. When the beetle's head turns, and its forward-facing compound eyes would no longer catch the red nymph, she slips into motion. Swiftly lunging across the ground, she feels the returned enervate in her thorax. It feels different from that which had not yet left her. Then, as if gravity continued its work, the enervate flows into her legs as they bend and straighten, and it settles there. Makuja stalks the cicindela as it trots directly away from the creek. She is silent, unseen, and by all rights, the tiger beetle should be hers to capture. She didn't do anything wrong. She's sure there could have been no error on her part. And yet it all goes wrong anyway. The tiger beetle spooks. Its antennae flare straight up, and then it bolts to the west. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Making tarsigns took time, Awelah is learning. The fight with Klepé had been sobering, in that regard. She'd applied the lesson in her next fight, but even though she'd won, she'd sat up reflecting, and decided she had learned the wrong lesson. Making tarsigns took time, yes, and knowing that, you have to adapt your tactics to that momentary time commitment --- or did you? Umbral body projection isn't like the other spells that they had in their arsenal. Why should Awelah take the time in a fight to cast her projection --- why, when she could have it out before the fight even began? The technique had many more tarsigns than bane blast or apparently the spell Makuja had invented. (Why is Makuja of all mantids inventing spells! Awelah had been a bane for longer --- hours longer, but still. Is she falling behind this soon? Why couldn't Awelah invent spells? "Why aren't you as quick as your cousins, Awelah dear?") She felt the projection growing inside of her, the spellform taking shape and she reached the sign which seemed to push it further, making that cold sensation envelop her body. She