Chapter 2

writer's note: So please ignore any literary faux pas in this story like redundancy and horrible writing. We're supposed to send our inner editors on a break so I refuse to go back and read what I wrote too seriously. Unless I need to get my head back into the game. Why am I doing this again?

“Lisha,” Mentor yelled at me, “Stay behind and organize your drawings. I’ll go out and observe the Orin.” I pressed my lips together and nodded.

Mentor had been drinking his special drink again and didn’t want me around to witness his ranting. I sighed once again and turned back to the work of organizing the pictures that were in containers with dates and a table of contents, knowing I would have to track him down and carry him back later, when he had worn himself out. This time around he had seen a Priest entering his beloved’s home after coming back late, when the rest of the tribe had been abed for hours.

I woke with a jerk, spilling the sketches I was studying to the ground.

“No, no it can’t be happening,” I muttered, running from our house. It was the alien thunder. I do not know how I knew but I had never heard this sound before so there was truly only one explanation. It had to be the Orin. Maybe Mentor had brought one to life.

“But they’re bones, only bones.” I raced with the best Warriors to reach the Orin first. They couldn’t kill it. You’re not supposed to dismember the dead, except to eat. They can’t do that to the Orin. We can’t eat them and they’re dead. We needed to study them, Mentor and me, they couldn’t rip them apart. They can’t rip another poor girl from the one she loves.

“Kill it! Kill the beast before it wakens the others!” screamed a Priest standing at the edge of the clearing. How did he get out here so quickly? I was the fastest runner, faster even then the Warriors.

“No no no, don’t hurt it!” I screamed. The Orin was only purring it seemed to me, like a jaguar perched peacefully in a tree after a kill, licking its chops and trying to decide if it is hungry enough to go through the work of catching you.

I ran past the advancing Warriors, who were all in attack position with spears or bows pointing at the rumbling Orin. I reached the feet of it and saw a sight that brought me up cold—my Mentor twisted three different ways. Two sets of footprints, one with an odd bar at the base of the balls of the feet.

“The Apprentice would speak such blasphemy in front of a Priest?” he asked, spittle flying from his mouth. The Warriors seized me and a long, keening scream burst from my throat as the dismembered the inert Orin until one hit me on the back of the head. Occipital bone I thought as the black stars clouded my vision and then darkened my senses until I had none.