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[b]Kur-Laka[/b][/center]

There was a wild man who dwelled in the uplands. He did not have a name, for he’d spurned speech long ago. He lived in the grass and trees alongside the herds of beasts, and was content there. He smelled nothing of smoke or civilization, so the animals saw him as a friend and shared watering holes with him. Sometimes they roamed together on the flats.

He had no possessions save for a handful of berries gathered the day before. He did not worry about clothes, for the days were warm beneath the new sun, and wherever he chose to lie down, there were caves and shallow grottos enough to shelter him from wind and the crispness of night.

In those distant days, when the sky had been dark and choked with ash and even streamwater tasted bitter, life had been harder. When the fruits of the land and the easy prey animals had all vanished, ur-humans had turned to scavengers, or worse. Now everything was verdant and the land had grown prodigal. Trees flowered, bore fruit, and then dropped it to rot within days, only to do so again and again. Life had become easier, yes, but danger had not vanished with hunger.

Daybreak had just come, and the dawn was beautiful: droplets of dew topped the grass and glistened in the sun like glass, like precious stones that the wild man had no knowledge of. Yet he sensed that something was very wrong. The birds were not all singing. It was not a deafening silence, but one by one voices were leaving the chorus. He saw a distant flock in the sky turn away. The insects still hummed oblivious, but something had come into the uplands that did not belong here. Some of his smaller friends, furred and four-legged creatures that had shared the thicket with him through the night, had stilled themselves by instinct. A small mouse was trembling; he spared a moment to stroke its back to calm it.

It was easier for such creatures to hide in undergrowth, but the wild man understood that he was too exposed. He straightened up from the thicket, fingers still sticky with dried berry juice, and shifted onto the balls of his feet. Slowly, he turned his head to sniff at the air.

The breeze changed direction and suddenly carried a noxious scent: there was smoke, but it wasn’t the fresh kind that came from a brush fire… this was old smoke, the stale and greasy kind that clung. Beneath that was something even worse, a layered reek that he knew too well.

The wild man did not have words for the other ur-humans, the ones that burnt trees and wore other creatures’ skins, but he remembered their smell and old scars reminded him to flee from it. In one moment he’d been drowsy from sleep and still, and in the next his body was flooded with fear and he was running. His feet hit the ground hard and fast, his toughened soles feeling nothing as he sprinted toward a grove of thick trees.


The grove was closer than it had first appeared, but still too far. He plunged between the first ranks of trees, ducking beneath low branches, instinctively making his way into the densest growth. Leaves slapped against his face and arms. Thorns tore at his skin. He welcomed the pain because it meant speed.

From close behind him rang out one sharp, eager shout. Another answered it, then another, voices overlapping, not panicked but delighted.

A stone whistled past his ear and struck a tree ahead of him with a dull crack. He swerved hard, stumbled, caught himself, and ran on. His breath came ragged now, chest burning, legs screaming.

The grove ended too soon.

He came to the end of the treeline and encountered a shallow ravine choked with brush and fallen limbs. He leapt down without thinking, hit the ground, rolled, and came up limping. There was a wetness on his hand thicker than sweat; he looked down and saw his palm bloodied from some scrape that he hadn’t even noticed. He ignored the tingling pain and began climbing up the far side of the ravine.

A hunter’s hand seized him by the ankle before he reached the top, dragged him back down into the ravine, and slammed him into the dirt. He fought back savagely, biting, kicking, and clawing. It was in vain because there were too many of them, and they were strong. A knee was driven into the back of his spine, forcing him prone. With all the might that he could summon, he rolled and tried to surge back upward. A hand seized him by one wrist and another one by his long hair, while a foot stomped down hard to pin his other arm to the ground by its elbow.

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[i]The Hunt[/i][/center]

The wild man thrashed and writhed for a moment longer until someone struck him across the face with a heavy club. A sound that was not a word tore its way out of his mouth. Sparks filled his vision, but through the flashing and the haze, he finally beheld them: the man-hunters’ chests were all painted with ochre; about one’s waist was belted a strip of hide from which hang bloodied scalps, around another’s neck was draped a string of teeth and finger bones. There was one great brute of a man, wielding the club, that had a singular great bulbous eye set above his nose, but his was not the most fearsome look. 

One figure that must have been the leader of this band came to stand over the downed wild man. This hunter was not especially large, but his face was painted with ash and dried blood. He held a chipped stone blade no longer than a handspan. Rough hands held the wild man still even as they all began loudly shouting and quarreling among themselves. The one-eyed brute rapped the wild man’s thigh with the wooden club. With little more than a grunt, the knife-bearer made a small incision to mark that leg. Another one pointed at the arm, and the knife-bearer obligingly carved a line there too. They kept making marks even as the world narrowed and went black.

[hr]

The wild man woke to the smell of smoke and rot. The odor was so putrid and overwhelming that it triggered his gag reflex. His head throbbed and his mouth was parched. Fresh and sharp pains traced the lines they’d cut all over his skin earlier. He lay on his side, wrists and ankles bound by crude strips of leather. Below him was packed earth; beneath his chin he saw that it was black with old ash and darker stains he did not recognize. He was not alone.

A camp was all around, sprawled across a shallow basin like a wound that refused to close. Fires burned everywhere, clustered and competing, their smoke hanging low and choking. Hovels of bent branches and stitched hides rose up all over like sores, but they sagged under their own weight. Between the crude dwellings were shallow middens where bones had been discarded without care: gnawed ribs and skulls cracked open and cast away like nutshells. Those waste-pits were latrines too; the stench and swarming flies made that clear.

Humans and strange almost-humans moved through it all, scarred and altered. One picked at his fingernails, all twelve of them. A woman sat near a fire, poking at embers, but her jaw was too wide, teeth exposed even when her mouth was closed. The cyclops from the hunt sat atop the fence around a small pen that contained some mangy animals. A sheep approached the brute and bleated a short and dry cry that the wild man at once understood to mean that the animal was thirsty, but the cyclops only threw a stone at the animal to quiet it.

The wild man had to escape this terrible place!

He bent his head and began biting at the binding around his wrist. The old leather tasted foul, but desperation lent him resolve. Near one of the bone heaps, a rat scurried between shadows. With a few gentle, breathy grunts, he called to it with the sounds he used with the smaller creatures of the grass. The rat paused. It sniffed the air, then approached. It did not fear him because of his smell and slow breathing. It scampered to his feet to gnaw at the bindings there.

The rat worked quickly. Its teeth were small but tireless, and the leather at the wild man’s ankles began to fray. He lay still, breathing shallowly, willing his body not to tremble even as he chewed at the wrapping around his wrist. Face pressed against the dirt, he remained vigilant, turning to look toward what seemed to be the center of the camp. There was some kind of tumult there.

Placed in the middle was a vessel unlike anything else in the camp, or anything the wild man had ever seen. It was squat and wide-bellied, and it looked like it was shaped of some stone that’d been darkened by age and soot. No fire burned beneath it, yet heat poured from its mouth in steady waves, like the hot exhalations of some slumbering beast. The air around it shimmered. Within, something thick and foul churned: a slow, viscous stew.

There was a man tending to it, large and big-boned. He had a long and unkempt beard, curling like a briar bush, matted with grease and filled with small bones and bits of food that he’d never bothered to pick out. The cook stirred the pot’s contents with a bone ladle that might have been made of someone’s femur. “Lykaon,” someone addressed the cook as they approached with an offering in hand. Lykaon nodded, and the offering was cast into the pot.

The tumult came from nearby. Not far behind Lykaon, the wild man saw the bloodied knife-bearer from the hunt working over a stone slab, performing the grisly task of butchering some beast. The greatest part of its body was passed to the cook Lykaon and cast into the stewpot, but here and there a flank or leg was carved out according to the marking lines and set aside for others. 

There was some angry brute with horns protruding from his forehead, standing beside the slab shouting. The butcher answered back in kind; their voices rose, sharp and overlapping. The wild man did not know their words, but he recognized the tone and the rhythm of dispute: the sounds of wanting to take, of refusing, of challenge, of promise-to-harm.

It came to a head when the horned one reached towards the butcher’s slab and seized a cut of meat; like lightning, the knife-bearer slashed at his arm and the bloodied chipped stone blade ate at flesh. The injured man howled and dropped his stolen prize; he backed away clutching his wound, but looked to the butcher with eyes that promised death. By now the commotion had the whole camp watching. A dozen raucous shouts and cries came out at once from everywhere, but Lykaon left his place by the cooking pot to approach. His coming and the stare of his sunken, unblinking eyes choked out the tumult and the argument like a fire that was suffocated beneath sand.

“You took more than you are owed,” Lykaon stated simply. The wounded one tried to stammer out some justification, but Lykaon’s voice spoke over it in a tone that brooked no argument. “I will not suffer it. Cut him apart!”

Perhaps the heavy silence and anticipation after that command lasted a second. It felt like longer but couldn’t have been, for the wild man missed just one breath before the knife-bearer lunged forward to stab with practiced efficiency. Someone else grabbed the horned offender from behind to slam him down upon the stone slab, right beside the half-butchered animal, and from there the work commenced at once. Lykaon returned to his place by the pot in silence and without looking back. The wild man couldn’t bring himself to watch; he turned his head the other way and kept chewing at his bindings over the sound of gurgling and then of bones snapping and flesh being torn.

Bits and pieces of beast and man alike were dragged to the stewpot, the blood dripping from the chops leaving more dark streaks in the dirt. With a nod from Lykaon each piece was cast inside, man and beast flesh alike. There was hardly even a splash; the stew drank unceremoniously and then its smell grew richer and obscene. The smell was enough to lure many flies, but the heat radiating from the pot was enough to overpower the bugs such that they dropped from their flight to be enjoined in the soup as crisps. Lykaon kept on stirring with the femur-ladle.

The bindings around his wrists and ankles alike were frayed enough that the wild man ripped free as the rat scurried away. He readied to make his escape, but to his horror he realized that the commotion was already over as quickly and unceremoniously as it’d begun, the cannibals returning to their places around the camp. He’d missed his chance.

But something changed. First there was an uneasy silence that set in as something great drew near; just as the songbirds had gone quiet one by one, the talk, laughter, and sounds of work around the camp all died down. A long shadow stretched down the dirt path before the wild man, and while he did not yet see what hulking figure was casting it, the shade of that shadow seemed to burn with heat.

Some cannibals fell on their knees and cast their eyes down, gasping a sound. Those were the ones that were reverent at once; others were murmuring, unsure of what they saw. A giant came to a halt halfway down the dirt path, eyeing Lykaon and the pot, standing right beside the wild man. And as the wild man tried to behold this terrible ones visage, his neck craned up and up.

[hr]

Sarhush’s gaze was fixed squarely upon the Me of Cooking that Lykaon stood over. For a long, pregnant pause, nothing happened.

The god did not roar or strike. He did not even look at the people who cowered or whispered at his feet. His eyes, bright as hot coals, traced the curve of the vessel, the shimmer of heat rising from it, the bone ladle stirring its contents. The stew burbled on, ignorant of judgment.

[color=#9E5020]“This,”[/color] he spoke at last, one hand gesturing at the sprawling camp while the other clutched some massive cloth sack, [color=#9E5020]“is all that you have made of what I gave you?”[/color]

The sound of his voice was like two stones grinding upon one another; it carried without effort and pressed against ears and chests alike. It was heavy enough that even those at the edges of the camp heard and fell silent. Lykaon straightened slowly. He did not kneel. He did not flee. He planted the femur-ladle upright in the pot and turned to face the god, eyes hooded, expression unreadable beneath the weight of his tangled beard.

“Great Sarhush, I remember when you gave us fire,” Lykaon answered. “You showed us how flesh is changed by it. We have done as we were taught.”

Sarhush’s lip curled.

[color=#9E5020]“You have done little, even with such abundance. Your laziness is wretched. You squat inside of hovels that leak when it rains and collapse in the wind. You kill one another over scraps. You make a sport of hunting lesser creatures while the world I remade lies untouched all around you! You have failed to shape it.”[/color]

His gaze finally moved, sweeping the camp in a single contemptuous arc: the sagging dwelling, the bone heaps, the crouched figures clutching weapons and grisly trophies alike.

[color=#9E5020]“You live here no better than a den of wild beasts,”[/color] Sarhush concluded.

A murmur rippled through the camp, confused and uneasy. Some of the younger generations, twisted changelings, shifted and snarled. They did not have living memory of Sarhush, and so were uncertain whether to bare teeth or bow. The older ones like Lykaon were heavy-eyed, and they knew their god and so remained still and trembling.

Lykaon said nothing as Sarhush strode forward.

[color=#9E5020]“I fashioned the Me of Cooking so that man would cease feeding as beasts,”[/color] Sarhush continued. [color=#9E5020]“It was meant to teach patience, preparation, and measure. You have made little more of it than a trough.”[/color]

Sarhush reached out, and with a single motion, he closed a massive hand around the rim of the vessel. The Me of Cooking came free of the earth without resistance, as though it had never belonged there at all. The god lifted it up and overturned it, boiling stew cascading out along with bones, dark chunks, and even a few skulls.

A cry went up; this was not of protest, but of sudden, animal panic. Several of the cannibals surged forward instinctively like a swarm of vultures. They wanted to try scooping up the stew before the ashy earth drank it, but they stopped themselves halfway and shied from nearing Sarhush too closely lest he be provoked further.

[color=#9E5020]“I reclaim this,”[/color] Sarhush said, turning the pot in his grip as one might inspect a flawed tool. [color=#9E5020]“Left with it for too long, it has held you back. You have learned only the easiest lesson: that flesh can be cooked and softened.”[/color]

He dropped the Me of Cooking unceremoniously into his sack, then he looked at Lykaon again.

[color=#9E5020]“But you,”[/color] Sarhush said, and there was something like grim interest now, [color=#9E5020]“have learned something else. You hold the rest of them. For that much, my disappointment is lessened.”[/color]

Lykaon met his gaze. Slowly, deliberately, he inclined his head.

Sarhush exhaled and the air thickened and grew hot. [color=#9E5020]”I command you to build something that will endure. Cut a scar into Ashuru that will never fade. Achieve this, and when next I return, it will please me.”[/color]

From the ground beside Sarhush manifested three shapes, dragging themselves free of ash and stone as if being remembered into existence. The first was a massive wedge of some stone, black as night as impossibly hard and smooth. Sarhush lifted up the Me of Masonry, placed it upon the bloodied butcher’s slab in the center of the camp, and struck the back of the wedge with his palm to demonstrate. The great slab of stone was sundered into a hundred smaller pieces. With a few casual flicks of his wrist, Sarhush had stacked a few of them atop one another to assemble a small wall.

[color=#9E5020]“What is hewed from stone endures.”[/color]

He allowed a few dozen of them to touch the Me, trembling at its revelations, before he picked it up to place into his sack.

The second of the three Mes that he had manifested looked like an oddly shaped rock that was colored the deep-brown of dirt. As Sarhush picked it up to hold it high enough for them to see, it molded around his fingers amorphously like wax. He fashioned it into a shape that resembled the pot that had been the Me of Cooking, then he breathed on it, and suddenly it became as rigid and hard as stone. But a few moments later, it softened again and began to sag.

The Me of Pottery crashed to the ground with a wet thud as Sarhush dropped it for them to touch. [color=#9E5020]“Flames can cook more than flesh,”[/color] Sarhush shared from his own revelations. [color=#9E5020]“Fire can transform and harden the earth itself. Shape the world with intent! Then harden it in fire.”[/color]

The Me showed them the ways of clays and pottery, of kilns and ovens and crude furnaces. Sarhush eventually put it into his sack too, once a sufficient number of them had been endowed.

He finally turned to the last of the three Mes that he had just created. This one was a great curved piece of timber, with a leather strap hanging beneath it, fashioned to both ends. It was a massive yoke, for harnessing beast or man alike. 


[color=#9E5020]““And this,”[/color] Sarhush said, his voice dropping low as he lifted the Me of Slavery high for all to see, [color=#9E5020]““is how you will order yourselves and avoid such wanton waste. I do not begrudge that the weak are fit for little beyond meat. But those with strength? Set them to toil.”[/color]

The Me struck the ground right at Lykaon’s feet.

[color=#9E5020]“Not all will wear it,”[/color] Sarhush went on. [color=#9E5020]“Only those who must. Strength must be directed. Mercy is waste; compel labor when it does not come willingly.”[/color]

He looked over the camp once more, at the savages covered in scars and painted with ochre and ash and blood, the old eyes and the young changelings that watched him with hunger and awe alike. He reclaimed the Me of Slavery to place into his sack too; these tools were far too crucial to be hoarded by any one group of man.

[color=#9E5020]“I bestow upon you one gift that you may keep,”[/color] he began, and the already enraptured tribe leaned in even closer. [color=#9E5020]“I give you a name. Your people, this place: I call [abbr=wild lands of the tearers][b]Kur-Laka[/b][/abbr]. Go out from here; take and subjugate all that there is. But return here, for I consecrate this place as a center of civilization. Build it into something worthy. This is the seat that I shall judge.”[/color]

Already, Lykaon had gathered up a few strips of leather to fashion some crude collar in imitation of the Me that was a yoke. His eyes swept across the camp, searching for the wild man that had been captured that morning, but the creature was gone! His anger lasted only a moment; there would be others like that one, and one loss made little difference.

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Wild man. Cannibals! Sarhush mad. Takes away Me of Cooking. Offers few other Mes. Ooga-booga!


[b]CONVICTION EXPENDITURES:[/b]
0 conviction to create the Mes of Masonry, Pottery, and Slavery (in-domain lucid actions)

1 conviction to ‘consecrate’ Kur-Laka; under Lykaon’s rule, ordained by Sarhush, they will rise in prominence as slavers and brutally dominate the surroundings until or unless challenged by somebody else (in-domain hazy action).
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