Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [2]
The gargantuan before him had legs like tree trunks, and shaggy moss grew on its back and flanks. Its most salient features were its tusks: four enormous prongs that swept down from its mouth and up into the air in front of it, each ending in a point tapered nough to punch clean through Ajani’s chest. The beast’s tusks swung back and forth as it bent and grazed on whole trees. It enveloped the foliage of a few trees in its mouth, then pulled back its head, stripping a mass of juicy branches with scraping teeth. The crunching sound as it chewed was deafening. Occasionally it bellowed contentedly, tilting its massive head from side to side, and the sound made the lianas around Ajani’s hiding place shudder.
Ajani had been the hunted himself, once, although he hadn’t been an oblivious target like this. He had been pursued through the jungles and fields of Naya like a wild pig. Humans didn’t usually hunt his kind, but they had seemed to single him out. He had been special to them, somehow—special in that they had wanted him dead.
Maybe he was just as bad for singling out the behemoth. Ajani could think of plenty of reasons to leave. But he knew it had to happen, so it was probably best not to think too hard about what he was about to do. Ajani had tracked the beast since morning, shadowing it at a distance for hours after encountering it, keeping careful track of the wind direction so as not to alert the beast of his scent. His patience had paid off; the gargantuan hadn’t discovered him, and in fact had managed to tuck itself into a dead end of sorts, a sky-exposed clearing surrounded by a glade of thick trunks too massive for it to smash. Ajani could press the attack, and the behemoth would have nowhere to run. Although its size would be less of an advantage in the clearing, facing a gargantuan of Naya solo was still likely to be suicide. Yet again, Ajani questioned what he was doing and why.
He picked a burr out of his stark white fur. That was why. Either he earned his pride’s esteem by the monumental hunt, or he would leave his pride behind forever.
The white fur that covered Ajani’s lionlike body was his distinction and his curse. Where most of the nacatl race bore fur of mottled and striped gold, ochre, black, and gray, Ajani’s fur was pure, luminous white. He glowed against the dappled foliage of the Naya jungle, and like a brilliant torch in crowds of his fellow nacatl.
The scorn of his kin had been immediate and was never-ending. Ajani’s pride was a community of warriors, the proudest and fiercest pride of nacatl in all of Naya, But to him they were a community of tormentors. Like the day when the humans had hunted him: when the furless ones had given chase, his pridemates had left him behind. The humans didn’t pursue the others—only him.
It seemed everyone wanted to single out the white-furred cat.
His brother Jazal—the pride’s leader, thank the spirits—had saved him that day, and on many other occasions. As the kha of their pride, Jazal was the only one Ajani looked up to. If it weren’t for him, Ajani would have left the pride, and struck out on his own a long time before. That’s what his tormentors wanted, he wondered, why not just give it to them? But that would bring even more shame on his poor brother, who had shown him nothing but respect and love. Ajani owed it to Jazal, the kha and his only kin, to show the others in the pride the determination he carried under his shameful hide. He would show them that the hunted white cat could become a worthy hunter in his own right. In fact, he would show them that he could be the greatest nacatl warrior since the hero Marisi himself.
The breeze changed, and Ajani felt the fur on his back rustle as he faced the behemoth. Ajani had no time to move with the wind; the beast had fallen suddenly silent, its massive jaws frozen in mid-mastication. It huffed and sniffed as Ajani’s scent wafted toward it. He was about to be discovered. If he was going to do it, the time had come.
Ajani sprang from the foliage and sliced at