[center][h3]The First War[/h3]
[i]The Hills of Western Nalusa[/i][/center]

“A second time,” one of the men spat, gripping his crude club so tightly that his tanned knuckles became white as bone.

They found this group of men and women just like they’d found the first: skulls cracked, half their ribs shattered, tongues torn out, and the mangled corpses crudely thrown down and abandoned atop a nearby bluff in the dead of night. This gruesome display was the work of monsters, and yet not the work of mere beasts. Beasts wouldn’t have gone to such effort to mutilate and maim or to drag corpses up a hill, and moreover, common predators would have eaten their kills. Some of them already had, actually; the circling of so many vultures and a feeling of renewed dread had been what drew them to this hillock at dawn in the first place. 

They all turned to their prophet. Some had eyes of fear, others of disgust, a few with steely resolve or even vacant emptiness that suppressed something else. “It is as I feared,” Kartar stated flatly.

Two of the eyes locked upon Kartar were filled with rage – something that not many knew in those early, distant days, in the time before all men even knew of the plough, before calendars, writing, metal, and war, when the ovens and kilns had first been lit.

Those two eyes alight with fire belonged to one Atash. Atash was a very strong man. As a boy he had slain a lioness with a spear, and as a young man its mate had finally tracked him down and attacked in the dead of night for vengeance. Yet Atash had awoken and strangled the tremendous beast to death in the darkness of the night. He wore their pelts always as his prize, and in so doing became perhaps more lion than man. Admired for his strength and courage, he was, even if they called him the Lion of the Night; he would have been respected and perhaps followed too, if not for his wild and crude mannerisms.

That all changed on this day, when Atash demanded that their tribe’s leader and prophet answer for his failings. 

“So you say that you Saw who killed our hunters three days ago,” the Lion of the Night began, “and when I said that I would lead the hunt to slay these monsters, be they lion or worse, you said that they were no beasts; that you had Seen their killers a people like us, and that they might be reasoned with. And here these of our people have died for nothing, the folly of your weakness, your short-seeing Sight, your desire to speak to our enemies. I will suffer no talks with whatever things did this to my brethren. I will slay them and wear their hides! I swear it by the sun and by moon!”

There was dead silence, and then a dozen murmurs at once. Such oaths were not to be taken lightly, and his tone and words to Kartar were not at all becoming. “Do not speak to the prophet like that!” a brave man cried even as he reached out to try and grab Atash by the shoulder, but the Lion brashly and easily pushed him away. “Let the fool speak for himself,” Atash declared to the one who had objected to him, and also in sight and hearing of the ten others who had thought the same but feared to challenge the Lion.

Kartar scowled, but he paused to contemplate a response. Atash raised his arms, a lion on each shoulder, as if to show all those assembled that they ought to take this brief silence to be something like foolishness, something like a lack of an answer. But Kartar gave his answer soon after, “Others have walked that way before, and returned unscathed. There is surely a message of some sort to be uncovered here; we may not need to fight the folk of that hill, if only we can come to understand them!”

Atash had no words for Kartar; his lips only quivered while his nostrils flared. He lowered his arms, and Kartar stood triumphant for a moment, thinking that his wisdom had prevailed. But Atash turned his back upon the prophet, looked to the others, and softly spake, “So you have heard his words. You will know why I must do this; if not, then perhaps [i]you[/i] are cowards and weaklings too, and deserving of the same fate.”

Then Atash spun about and raised an arm once more, only this time to strike Kartar. Once, twice, across the face and in the gut he struck the man. He battered the prophet, and he knocked their disgraced leader to the ground. They all bore witness to the scene: some had eyes filled with spite, others with fear, and yet others with agreement. But in the end, none had stopped the Lion of the Night from seizing the prophet’s place and casting him down in shame.

They returned to the rest of the tribesfolk at their camp, and King Atash reiterated his vow and his vendetta tenfold. That night they began making all the necessary preparations, knapping sharp new spearheads and carving even more heavy clubs.

[hr]
[center][i]In the nearby foothills, not long prior[/i][/center]

Garza frowned so much that he was known as the Frown. His mouth was always set in a straight line and his brows were ever furrowed so that he always looked - at the very least - deeply unimpressed by whatever he saw. All who knew him considered it a great mercy from the Magnificent Sleeper that the maramoda lived in the darkness belowground and so could by and large avoid the torture of seeing his constant frown while lazing in the warm depths of their burrows.

Still, no one living in a community - maramoda or otherwise - could get away with wearing a frown all the time unless they could impose it with force or fear. Garza had mustered both. 

It had occurred on the day he shed childhood and became a maraman. He was sat outside the burrow, as one does, staring off into the distance and wearing a deep frown when one of the others, an established warrior called Utu who had hunted an elephant or two in his time, walked by him. Utu gave Garza one look before slapping him round the face and hissing at him in a barely audible whisper to, “get that frown off your face.”

Shocked and startled, Garza looked at him with wide eyes and a deep scowl, which caused Utu to strike him again, harder this time. Incensed, Garza rose and shoved his face into that of the other, and they stood flaring their snouts and glaring into one another’s eyes. Utu shoved him with a shoulder, but Garza was hardly moved and, leaning back, smashed his broad forehead right into the other maraman’s snout. Blood exploded from Utu’s nose, who then raised his claws and slashed Garza across the forehead. Catching Utu’s offending hand before it could be withdrawn from his bleeding forehead, Garza headbutted him again across the snout, then again as Utu flailed and tried to shove the scowling maramadman away.

Once he had bashed him so much that Utu was on his knees before him, Garza proceeded to hammer at Utu’s face from above with the side of his fist, at points jumping and bringing his fist hammering home with all his bodily force. No matter how hard Utu flailed and blocked with his one free hand he could not stop the excessively violent onslaught. He took it all in silence, however, not a squeak or shout of pain escaping his lips; he would have sooner died than give off the squeak that awakened the Magnificent Sleeper and his wrath.

And die he would have had Garza had his way, but the rest of Utu’s party soon appeared and, seeing the sight, rushed forth and parted the crazed scowler from the unconscious Utu. One of them, a veteran and elder called Urma, tapped his temple sharply at Garza with a frown - [i]are you mad?[/i] 
Garza looked away with a scowl and huffed, flicking his wrist towards Utu - [i]it was his fucking fault.[/i] 
Urma scoffed and gestured at Utu with his snout while drawing a claw across his throat - [i]you nearly fucking killed him![/i]
Garza rolled his eyes and raised his brows briefly - [i]he deserves it.[/i]
Shaking his head, Urma left Garza where he was and gestured for the others to drag Utu inside before moving to follow them. He glanced behind him and signalled for Garza to get back to keeping a lookout, and the young maraman rose and looked at Urma with a deep frown… then nodded. 

That frown never left his face after that, though it was many years later - when he threw the chief Sagma and nearly cleft his head in twain with his claws, and so usurped the title of chieftain for himself - that everyone came to call him Garza the Frown.

He was sat above one burrow entrance, a habit he had kept to since the day he pummelled Utu, when the furless aboveground urchins had come shouting and screeching in their fleshy, wet language. That was all some days ago now. He had seen them long before he heard them, of course, but contented himself with leaning on his fire-hardened spear and watching until it became clear that they were heading right for the burrow, at which point he signalled to one of the lookouts below to send a warning through and gather a party to intercept the furless urchins if the need arose.

On any other day, he would likely have led an attack to disperse and warn them off long before, but he was in a rather good mood on that particular afternoon - despite his perpetual frown. That quickly evaporated when the urchins started screeching as they came near enough to begin their ascent towards the burrow entrance, and Garza leapt from his high vantage point and charged without a word. The party that had gathered at the burrow entrance followed him after a few seconds, charging down the hill on all fours with their tails wrapped about their spears. They raised them high as they charged and - but for their breathing and the pounding of their heavy feet against the ground - the charge was most notable for its deathly silence.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, panic overtook those humans and they failed to even make note of that perilous silence. Not knowing what offense they had committed, the foremost emissary raised up his empty hands and cried out for peace, shouting that he meant no ill. His companions had brought arms, though. Even for such a mission of peace they remembered well the grisly fate of the hunters who had been slain in these hills, and it would be foolish besides to ever roam the Nalusite plains without something to fend off lions and other beasts. Some of those brandished their clubs or spears high in warning even as they held fast and advanced no further. With wavering resolve, one of the younger lads looked back over his shoulder. He was visibly shaking, and terrified of the prospects of meeting the charge of the maramoda. In that moment, he contemplated fleeing.

The lumbering giants of the marmot race left him no time, however, as their well-fattened forms came lurching forth and then - rather unexpectedly - leapt to close the final distance between them and those furless urchins. In that leaping second spears switched from tails to hands, and the maramoda rained down like a hail of fleshy spears upon the hapless lot.

The spears of the maramoda found their targets well, and when the spears of those noisy enemies managed to dig into a maramoda they sunk into well-fattened forms and left little in the way of serious injuries. It was less a battle and more a swift race to silence their raucous screeching. When they were done, however, Garza the Frown was in a foul mood. He walked among the dead and where he found the slightest signs of fading life he snuffed it out with fleshy hammering on heads, necks, faces. He wrenched mouths open and clawed out tongues. Seeing this, the others swiftly started imitating him, bashing even the heads of the dead. Crossing one who looked rather young - with no fur but wisps on the upper lip - Garza took the corpse’s head up in his two hands and, stepping on a shoulder for leverage, pulled with such force that the head came tearing off with a good bit of spine. He inspected his gory works for fleeting seconds before letting the head drop and moving on. They returned to their burrows and mates drenched in blood that night, and the marawomenfolk had to use all their powers of will to restrain their cries and moans as those bloodied victors celebrated their triumph night-long.

When the sun rose, Garza was on his perch to greet it, his eyes scanning the plains. He paused on the bodies of the urchins every now and then, and huffed in irritation. When they had become such an eyesore that he did not wish to see them anymore, he signalled to one of his warriors to gather up a party and go throw the corpses on some far off hill where the smell would not disturb them and the sight would not mar the view, and so they had done just that.

[hider=Summary]
[i](This post was written in collaboration with my friend Kho, who helped with the maramoda.)[/i]

There are many bands or tribes of humans wandering Nalusa, not just the two under Darius or the late Medes. We see one such band that lives somewhere in the western parts of Nalusa, and who followed a prophet named Kartar. Some of their hunters wandering into new grounds and were found brutally slain.

Kartar apparently was able to See with his prescience that this was the work of a nearby people – a group of maramoda. Seeking peace and answers, a delegation of emissaries were sent, and they too were slain, their mutilated bodies dumped on a nearby hill with tongues torn out.

Furious at this turn of events and at Kartar’s naivety and pacifism, a rather brutish hunter by the name of Atash – sometimes called the Lion of the Night – overthrows the prophet in a manner that parallels the rise of Darius, only Atash is much more violent about it. The Lion swears vengeance and intends to skin every last one of the culprits.

Changing perspectives to the maramoda, we see their chieftain is named Garza the Frown. Unlike the Tribe of Joy, this group of maramoda believe that the Magnificent Sleeper, their creator and god, is still asleep and that they must [i]always[/i] be quiet to avoid waking him and earning his scorn. As such, they whisper and use sign language, and the reason for their attacks is that they were gravely offended by the trespassing humans’ noisy speech.[/hider]