Chapter Text
Aloy’s skin is crawling. It feels like there are ants beneath it, biting, trying to get out. Her nail beds burn and itch as if poison ivy had gotten inside the flesh of her fingertips. Her bones ache with a pain that throbs in time with her pulse. Her fucking teeth feel like scraped knees inside of her gums. Her tailbone lances with a sharp stabbing pain every time she takes a step.
And it isn’t even evening yet. She glances towards the late afternoon sky. The sun blazes, still bright and fairly high. Barely visible to its right was the moon, low in the sky, just starting to rise. It’s hard to make out, but she knows, even without squinting to check- it is full and round.
If she doesn’t get through the gates of Barren Light before nightfall, it would be another three days of pointless waiting for that damned moon to rise and fall, rise and fall, before she’d be able to attempt to get them to open the damned gates again.
A hand falls on her shoulder, and she wants to sink her teeth into it, she’s so on edge. Only the calming scent of Varl stops her- filling her nostrils with the minty smell of his hair oil, tanned furs and leathers, and the fallen leaf smell he’d acquired on the long road- that they both had- on the many nights spent sleeping rough. He tightens his fingers on her shoulder in a brief squeeze, to acknowledge he’d known she’d wanted to snap at him, and had stopped herself.
“If we get through tonight; we get through. If we don’t… then it’s the wilds for me and you for a bit. Won’t be so bad. Good boar hunting in the Daunt,” he says, in his easy, soothing voice.
“I don’t have three days for this bullshit ,” she gets out between clenched teeth, and can hear the growl trying to claw it’s way up her throat. She chokes it back, her fists tightening. She feels a prick of pain and opens her clenched hands, to see four red crescent shaped cuts on each palm. Shit . She wipes her hands on the leather pants beneath her tassets to get the blood off, examining her hands again. The shallow cuts are already closing.
“If we can’t get through by sunset, you know we have to go, right?” Varl asks, and it sounds like he might be pleading with her.
“I know,” she snaps back.
It makes her even angrier to see Varl standing there, so calm, so human , so close to the night of full moon. How did he do it? His skin had to at least be itching, didn’t it?
She glances at his face, his eyes are steady, pupils only slightly dilated, his stance loose. She does notice him flexing his fingers though, as if there’s a tension there. He sees her gaze on them and gives her a lopsided smile. Caught. It’s not just her.
Aloy spends the next hour pacing the fort, with Varl quietly dogging her heels like her damn shadow. She knows he’s just trying to help, trying to prevent her from doing something profoundly stupid and dangerous, knows that she is liable to do so without his presence, yet she resents the need for it.
When her restless wandering takes her back to the gate, lowered and barred, she smells Erend before she sees him. He reeks of ale. He’s always smelled a little like ale, a bit. It’s part of his scent, but this is something different. He is well and truly soused, to be giving off fumes like that, overpowering his other smells; the tang of metal from his hammer, his armor, the grease he uses to keep it polished, the pine smelling soap that all the vanguard smell of, when they aren’t giving off the reek of the road.
Aloy tries to unwrinkle her nose before she turns the corner and comes into Erend’s line of sight.
He wants to talk to her, and also, doesn’t. Wants her to apologize, and wants her to hurt him, to say something nasty to him. She can smell the despair on him too. She’s never seen him quite like this, even after Ersa. She knows this has to do with her- is probably her fault, at least in part, knows she just… just left. Knows she should probably try to make things right between them, but, she just… can’t. Not right now.
Not with the sun sinking and the moon rising, not with the ants biting beneath her skin and her nails lengthening and shortening with each clench and unclench of her firsts. Not with the blight threatening and this goddamned gate still fucking closed because of some political bullshit between the Carja and yet another tribe they had wronged.
Right now, none of it matters, Erend and his grief, the fragile peace between the Carja and these… Tenakth she’s heard so much about. None of it matters . All that matters is that she gets through that damn gate before sunset.
If she can save the world, if she can stop literally everyone from dying, then, maybe then, there will be time… but. Not now.
She must have said something, must have snapped out some words about the gate, because Erend is calling up to the commander, demanding he let her through. She thinks how futile this is, is ready to turn and leave, to find a way around the wall, or to just let go and let the ants out, let it all out, and tear through that gate with her bare hands. But shockingly, it works. Erend’s words, slurred though they are, sway the commander, and the the wooden doors are being swung open by the guards, the metal grate clanking upward with a rhythmic thumping and scraping of metal chains turning. The sound is overwhelming, like needles in her ears, but she is practically ducking under the half raised grate with Varl just a step behind her, not even attempting to slow her.
She strides towards the columns and the men and women gathered there, forming up in a line to block her way.
The first thing she notices about the Tenakth is their smell. Maybe it’s because the full moon is climbing higher in the sky, or maybe it would have struck her just as hard any day of the month. They smell like clay, like the earthen pots from back home in the Embrace, and the claybeds by the river they got their material from. Wet and earthy and dusty all at once. The smell twists around something bitter and strange, and she thinks maybe it’s the pigments they seem to have slathered over every inch of their bodies.
The second thing she notices about them is how they move- as one. Like, well, like a pack. Taking positions without any words exchanged. The way they stand, separate beings and yet, like one, greater animal. It's unmistakable.
Varl notices it too because they both glance at one another, as if to check their eyes have not deceived them. His dark eyes lock with hers, and she knows he can feel it too. The familiarity to these Tenakth . Aloy sees Varl flare his nostrils and take in a lungful of air through his nose, holding it for a moment, eyes half closing as he analyzes the smell. After a moment he lets it out and gives a tiny shake of his head that only Aloy notices. Not wolves. Not pack. Not like them . Just… something similar, like an echo. But they are only human.
When the last of their “marshals” arrives, a swagger to his step radiating confidence, Aloy and Varl both find their eyes drawn to him. The something about the Tenakth, that reminds her of the packs of home, has them both eyeing this newcomer, assessing him for rank, noting his cocky smile and the way he holds himself. He smells of pigments and clay, like the rest, and sweet from the road, and… something . Aloy isn’t sure what. She glances at Varl, but his gaze has moved to the High Marshal, having correctly assessed him to be the one in charge, despite whatever authority this new man might have among his people.
As Aloy attempts to talk her way through the line of warriors, and Varl attempts to stop her from giving up on words altogether, the sun sinks further, staining the sky orange, the moon looming larger. Aloy’s eyes are drawn back to the confident one, her nose pulling her eyes back to him again and again, even as she tries to reason with the others.
When the attack comes, Aloy is relieved. This, right now, she can do. She lets go, just a little, and feels her nails lengthen, harden, round, sharpen to points, feels her teeth grow in her mouth, until it’s an effort to keep them behind her lips. She feels her ears shift just that little bit, moving up her head bare centimeters, and their ends grow just a bit pointed. Her nose twitches and she can feel the tug in her skull, her face wanting to lengthen into a muzzle, but she holds back.
The mounted lancers charge them, and Aloy is leaping onto the side of a charger, digging her claws in for purchase, damaging as much wiring as she can with one hand, while the other reaches for its rider and grips her by her chest plate, wrenches her bodily off the machine. She leaps free of the careening machine and lands atop the downed lancer, scrabbling for her dagger, lance lost to the malee. Aloy’s is about to sink her teeth into the woman’s throat when Varl rams bodily into her side, knocking her off the woman and slitting the lancer’s throat with his knife, all in one smooth motion.
He looks up from her bloody corpse and stares straight into Aloy’s blazing green eyes, his teeth bared at her in a snarl, his canines just a bit more pointed than they should be. She wants to snarl right back, and for a moment, she does, but then, she drops her eyes, and turns her back on him. She feels him fall into step next to her, and then they are moving as one, lashing out with spears and knives, and sometimes, claws. They down machines and kill their riders, like a well built-machine themselves, back to back, a whirl of deadly movement.
When the battle is over, the air smells only like blood and machine oil. All else is drowned out. The dead and dying are everywhere, and the wounded. Aloy feels pulled, like a cable at her navel, to leave, to go off into the wilds she can see awaiting her and Varl beyond this killing field, but she find her eyes drawn back to the Tenakth with the strange smell. His left arm is in sheds, ribbons of flesh and fragments of bone hanging in a tangled, bloody mess. Someone is tying a rough tourniquet around it, and he cries out, not loudly, but the noise shouts in Aloy’s ears.
It is Varl, hand on her arm, who pulls her away, pointing to the sun, low in the sky, and dragging her away towards the wilds, and release.
Aloy keeps glancing behind her at the injured man, and wonders why she cares. She’s seen worse. Left worse to their fate. But his muffled cries seem to echo in her ears, even when she knows he’s long since stopped making them, no doubt subsumed by unconsciousness.
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We walk into the woods just off the open field filled with blood and metal. We pad on our two feet next to our pack; our brother. He took our kill from us earlier, when pack fought pack, and we, caught in the middle, rained down death. But he denied us our right; to sink our fangs into the throat of our prey, to taste their life’s blood on our tongue. To end that life we’d brought crashing down off her metal mount.
The part of we that is me , wanted to fight our brother. To bare him down to the ground and place our jaws over his throat, snarling. We would never bite down , would never hurt him. Would just show him that we could . But we did not. I was held back, shoved down, away, chained and muzzled. As before, it is again. And we suffer for it.
But now the sun has set below the horizon, and the moon is high and full in the sky above, and we follow our brother into the trees of this new land. We, me, can be caged no longer.
I claw up through the darkness, and our eyes shift, nighttime coming alive with light and movement, and we see as one. I push up, out, and our bones begin to crack. Our face pushes out, our nose turns wet and cold and the smells of this new territory flood us. We smell unfamiliar pollen on the wind, the scent of prey unknown. Our teeth lengthen and grow, push past our tightly clamped lips, gums aching.
The pain is familiar to us, though. For me, it brings freedom. I relish it, though it pains us. We grow impossibly in size, becoming bigger than just ourselves, our spine popping as our tail grows and lengthens. Our skin itches and we want to claw it off, and then, our fur is pushing out, covering our soft human skin with a thick red coat, red like our hair.
We did not remove our clothes, had no time left, and as we grow, we rip through them, stitches and armor bindings snapping as it futility tries to hold us back as we grow and grow, bigger than the sum of our parts.
Our ears, now long and atop our heads, twitch, swivel, taking in the nighttime sounds around us- insects buzzing, small creatures moving in the underbrush, an owl hooting in the trees above.
Beside us our brother is taking off the last of his human things. Our brother who is not wild and mad and caged, like us. He smells of calm and of anticipation, and we see his nails behind to lengthen, his back to hunch, fur to sprout. He falls to all fours beside us, his bones crunching, and he grows too, bigger than the sum of his parts, although not quite as large as ourselves.
His fur is a rich black, shot through with chestnut on breast and muzzle and paws and tip of tail. His eyes aren’t like mine. They have changed, and are now a striking yellow, reflecting the moonlight back at my own, unchanged green eyes.
We tip back our head and howl, the sound ripping from our throat in a song to frighten the weak, warn the strong; we are here . We are .
We don’t know, can’t imagine, what it might sound like, from the outside. But from the inside, it reverberates through our chest, like a creature tearing its way up and out of us, to be free at last, out into open night air. Our brother tries to hold back. He is wary in this new place, cautious, but he cannot. His voice joins ours, and together our songs twine around one another, chasing, nipping, running for joy. Our feet follow our voices, and we and our brother begin to run, worry left behind in that field of blood and metal.
We are hungry. The change has us starving, but before we hunt, we simply run. Our mouth open, tongue lolling in canine smile. We glance over and our brother’s face matches our own. He is caught up in our wildness, and we and him chase one another down to the valley floor, like pups, nipping at each other’s heels and relishing the burn in our lungs, until we are both heaving like bellows, two deadly shapes playing beneath the moonlight.
We frolic like children before getting down to the business of hunting, weaving in and out of herds of machines, machines that see us, but no not see us for our other selves. As we run after our brother, our mind is drawn back to the killing field by a faint scent on the wind, blowing down from the heights into the valley below. The smell of death, blood, machines, and of the strange pack-not-pack; Tenakth . To the man with the swagger and the smirk and his strange smell that made us want to go back, to find out if he lived or died, had survived his wound. We want to lick it clean and curl our great bulk around his small body, to share our warmth; make him well.
But then our brother is off after the small boar-like creatures that inhabit this place, and we are swinging our great head around and bounding after him, to beat him to his prey if we can.