[Part 1 here]

[A quick rough of more or less what Massani went through before she joined the D&D party]

Surviving in Moravia proved to be a feat in itself, but surviving alone across the savanna fields while suffering blood loss, dehydration, and the weight of losing family proved to be worse. But the tracks of her family’s killers stained the landscape with clear footprints or, when the ground grew too hard to accept such changes to its face, she could smell the stench of urine as they relieved themselves, or the faint whiff of something else–an aroma not native to Moravia. Something sweet, something that danced around her head as if tempting her to follow them further and further from her home. She need only take the pelts. Once the pelts returned to ashes, her family would be free to enter the afterlife. Until then, their souls remained contained inside the hunters’ trophies, unable to move on. 

The hunters did not always know where they were going, evident by how often she discovered a trampled section of grass where the group seemed to argue where to go next, before taking a curving path into the grass once more. Their navigator must have been slain at camp. Massani wished for them to die lost. 

Still, she could not catch up, her body weary and her supplies meager. Despite the hunters’ frequent stops, she managed to remain the same distance away as when she began, resting often beneath the straws of foliage, curling beneath brush, drinking what little water she had left. Two weeks of tracking them passed until, at last, she crested a hill and found, below her, several hours away, the sea. It glistened with the afternoon sun, the smell of salt and fish spilling up the hill to rush through her fur. As the grass below began to give way to sand and rock, she spotted a ship, anchored off the shore, and a small rowboat being filled with people and furs.

The ivory pelt of her Matriarch shone as a beacon. Massani bared her teeth, dropped to all fours, and ran.

She ran towards the ship, towards her family’s killers. Towards the water, where the hunters pushed away, where they inched ever closer to the trade ship. Her lungs burned and her head swam, but she did not stop. She smashed her hands and feet against the ground, taking great bounds and leaps in order to reach them. To reach them before they left her grasp. 

Massani skidded to a stop before the water, chest heaving. The ship sat as a speck on the horizon. The tracks of the hunters tainted the shore with their footsteps, with a few loose hairs off the backs of her family. She dug her claws into the sand and threw her head back to roar.

A hoarse, single note, deep within her throat, coated the air with her torment. The wail found its way to becoming eerie, unnatural. No animal she knew could make a sound as this, not even the deathly throws of prey cried in such a way. Massani pressed her hand to throat and tried again, lower this time, but the same note came out. She sat back on her haunches, attempted to speak her family’s name. She could click her tongue, purse her lips, grit her teeth–it mattered not. The single note spilled out, sometimes muddled with the lifting of her tongue, the baring of her fangs, but nevertheless, it sounded the same. She could not speak. 

Massani looked towards the sea, watched its waves for several minutes. She had a decision, then. Did she hunt her hunters, track down their pelts, and free her family into the afterlife? Did she doom herself to never hearing her mother language again, for years at least, and leave the land she knew? Did she enter a place where she could not speak the language even if she tried, a place that hunted her people for their bodies, and do so alone? She looked back the way she had came. Or did she seek out a new clan with Pride leaders that would take her in? Did she doom her family to their fate, knowing one day their pelts would be destroyed through age alone, and be released? Did she find a place here, and seek to commit herself to a new life, a new family? 

Her thoughts turned to the Matriarch, to Uma. To Chidi and Haji, to Davu and Ode and Kojo and Shaka. The youngest of them had not yet begun life. And Shaka did not deserve to have his decades of survival turned into a trophy for some half-orc and wicked mage. A growl rose up in her throat, spilling from her lips as a sort of hiss. She turned her eyes to the horizon, remembering the face of the half-orc, of the mage’s sunset eyes. She shoved herself to her feet, dusted off the sand, and started walking south down the shore. The trip would take months alone to reach Anderim. But she would reach it. She would find her family’s pelts. And if she was given the opportunity, she would kill the hunters who failed to slay her.