He learns this lesson watching from a distance as an Azgeda blade sinks into his father's chest, spilling blood like wine. Look out, it's a spy! It's a spy! he's screaming as he runs, but for all his training, all his skill, his legs don't carry him there fast enough.
Fathers die too easily protecting sons who don't notice the danger lurking in the forest until it's too late.
Before that, he'd learned many other lessons growing up as one of the Trikru clan. How to fight, how to hunt, how to skin his own kills, how to fletch his own arrows. How to be strong. How to say goodbye to a mother who succumbs to fever in the night.
But the hardest lesson of them all is watching the last of his family die in his arms and knowing it could have been prevented, knowing scouts from the Ice Nation shouldn't have been in their territory. It teaches him to hate. He pleads his case to the leader, that Trikru must strike back for this, for shedding blood, his blood, but it falls on deaf ears. His father had been considered odd, even by their standards. A quiet, independent man with his own ideas of how things should be done. Not someone worth fanning the flames of war over. The day he learns the Commander hopes to start a Coalition with the plan of bringing all tribes into the fold, even Ice Nation, the last thread holding him to the clan starts to fray.
(A blossom of hate sprouts in his heart for Trikru that day, too, when they agree. It feels like a betrayal. The clan's toward his family, but also his own if he should stay.)
So he leaves. Packs his bag and slips out in the dead of night. He'd been taught well--well enough to survive on his own. If word of murdered Azgeda along the border lands start to pass from mouth to mouth, he's long gone before anyone thinks to look for him. When the Sky People arrive, one rogue warrior becomes the least of Trikru's worries, besides.
They crash to the ground with strange weapons, these Sky People. Like the Mountain Men, they attack with fire and explosions and sleek black guns that sometimes rattle gunfire in the distance like melodic growls of thunder.
He stays out of the fighting. The clan's Ice Nation allies are his enemies. He has no reason to make the clan's enemies his, too.
It's happenstance that he'd retreated into the familiar, deep Trikru forests surrounding Mount Weather (he's gotten faster the last couple of years, but still not fast enough to prevent an arrow from lodging itself in his flank, an injury that taken weeks to heal up from) just as Anya and Tristan send three hundred warriors to their deaths. The black sky lights up with hellish reds and ugly oranges. The air around the Sky People's camp gets so hot that sap boils and bubbles in the trees, popping like gunshots.
And then in a matter of hours, it's over. Flecks of ash float in the wind, carrying the scent of death. By morning, the silence in the forest is almost deafening.
Those who'd known him back before--when he still had a home and clan affiliation and went by his old name--would have said curiosity was one of his faults. He never could stay away when something teased his attention, and though he knows it's dangerous beyond measure, his feet take him toward the battleground out of a sense of need to tend to the dead and look for the living.
What living? Even before he reaches the camp's perimeter, he sees black. Black smoke. Black bones. Black earth. His stomach goes cold at the quiet desolation. Nothing could survive this, he thinks.
That's when he hears it. A rustling in the bush.
Trikru survivor, he thinks next, and leaves his knives sheathed assuming friend, not foe. He couldn't be more wrong.]
Grounder AU, set post-1.13?
He learns this lesson watching from a distance as an Azgeda blade sinks into his father's chest, spilling blood like wine. Look out, it's a spy! It's a spy! he's screaming as he runs, but for all his training, all his skill, his legs don't carry him there fast enough.
Fathers die too easily protecting sons who don't notice the danger lurking in the forest until it's too late.
Before that, he'd learned many other lessons growing up as one of the Trikru clan. How to fight, how to hunt, how to skin his own kills, how to fletch his own arrows. How to be strong. How to say goodbye to a mother who succumbs to fever in the night.
But the hardest lesson of them all is watching the last of his family die in his arms and knowing it could have been prevented, knowing scouts from the Ice Nation shouldn't have been in their territory. It teaches him to hate. He pleads his case to the leader, that Trikru must strike back for this, for shedding blood, his blood, but it falls on deaf ears. His father had been considered odd, even by their standards. A quiet, independent man with his own ideas of how things should be done. Not someone worth fanning the flames of war over. The day he learns the Commander hopes to start a Coalition with the plan of bringing all tribes into the fold, even Ice Nation, the last thread holding him to the clan starts to fray.
(A blossom of hate sprouts in his heart for Trikru that day, too, when they agree. It feels like a betrayal. The clan's toward his family, but also his own if he should stay.)
So he leaves. Packs his bag and slips out in the dead of night. He'd been taught well--well enough to survive on his own. If word of murdered Azgeda along the border lands start to pass from mouth to mouth, he's long gone before anyone thinks to look for him. When the Sky People arrive, one rogue warrior becomes the least of Trikru's worries, besides.
They crash to the ground with strange weapons, these Sky People. Like the Mountain Men, they attack with fire and explosions and sleek black guns that sometimes rattle gunfire in the distance like melodic growls of thunder.
He stays out of the fighting. The clan's Ice Nation allies are his enemies. He has no reason to make the clan's enemies his, too.
It's happenstance that he'd retreated into the familiar, deep Trikru forests surrounding Mount Weather (he's gotten faster the last couple of years, but still not fast enough to prevent an arrow from lodging itself in his flank, an injury that taken weeks to heal up from) just as Anya and Tristan send three hundred warriors to their deaths. The black sky lights up with hellish reds and ugly oranges. The air around the Sky People's camp gets so hot that sap boils and bubbles in the trees, popping like gunshots.
And then in a matter of hours, it's over. Flecks of ash float in the wind, carrying the scent of death. By morning, the silence in the forest is almost deafening.
Those who'd known him back before--when he still had a home and clan affiliation and went by his old name--would have said curiosity was one of his faults. He never could stay away when something teased his attention, and though he knows it's dangerous beyond measure, his feet take him toward the battleground out of a sense of need to tend to the dead and look for the living.
What living? Even before he reaches the camp's perimeter, he sees black. Black smoke. Black bones. Black earth. His stomach goes cold at the quiet desolation. Nothing could survive this, he thinks.
That's when he hears it. A rustling in the bush.
Trikru survivor, he thinks next, and leaves his knives sheathed assuming friend, not foe. He couldn't be more wrong.]