I N T R O D U C T I O N x S O L O
Warbleroot Boy
Warbleroot Boy
Despite being only the tender age of six, Mahikel had already taken to exploring the area around his home. From the settlement they lived on the outskirts of, to the deep, dark jungles as he moved farther and farther away, Kel enjoyed the land where he was born. As a toddler it had been impressed upon him how dangerous Jauhar could be. The plants were poisonous, the beasts were carnivorous, the Alkidike natives were malicious, and these were things that were well beyond his control. They were things that even adults ought to be wary of, things grown and trained warriors could still fall to. The jungle wasn’t safe. He needed to be careful and stay close to home.
However, the stories and fears of others had never quite managed to radiate as strongly with him as his father might have hoped. Teslaron wasn’t from Jauhar. It wasn’t the land of his ancestors nor the land of his birth. He’d never lived here at all before Kel and his little brother, Ezrah, had come into the picture. The Matorian man did deserve to be a little frightened, as far as Mahikel was concerned, since he could not possibly have the innate knowledge that came from being of Shifter descent and of living his whole life here.
But Mahikel did.
So as long as he wasn’t foolish in his expeditions, and as long as he held a respect for (if not a fear of) the powers around him, he would be safe. The young hybrid boy wasn’t frightened of his home. He never had been. And so nor was he especially mindful of his parents’ warnings. Instead, he was an adventurer, sure-footed and eager in his exploits.
Being a nagging mother bird, Tes tried to keep him near as often as could be managed, but Kel’s scaredy-puss daddy had other children to tend to and chores to accomplish, and simply not enough eyes and attention to keep Mahikel wrangled in at al hours of the day and night.
If he dropped his guard for even a moment, Kel would be off.
It happened frequently enough that the little boy already had a decent understanding of the lay of the land in all the space from his house to the market, and then also a slightly less deep understanding of the wilds the skirted out from the opposite direction. Even if he wasn’t frightened of the jungle, Kel still found that many of his most entertaining experiences tended to involve others, and not many others wanted to travel far out into the forests without a specific reason. If he was very fortunate, he could sometimes convince Ezrah along for the ride, but…
Well, their father was always particularly upset when Kel and Ezrah both managed to escape, and that frustration always rained down especially hard on Mahikel. As an older brother, he should be setting a positive example. It shouldn’t be his goal to drag his sweet younger sibling out toward danger. What if something horrible did happen to them? It would be Kel’s fault. Was that what he wanted? Was it?
It wasn’t, of course, and Mahikel always insisted nothing bad would happen to Ezrah. He’d be sure of it. He wasn’t a fool, and nothing would bother them.
Still, even though he could be overconfident and flippant when speaking with his old man, and even though he was sure he could protect his baby brother, the threat did occasionally manage to inspire a thread of anxiety such that Kel couldn’t convince himself to take Ezrah on every expedition with him, and even less frequently to the jungles, rather than something less treacherous like the market or riverbed…
Sometimes, he just needed to go alone. So he did.
When Mahikel departed his house, he did so stealthily: out his bedroom window, barefooted so as not to clod loudly against the wooden floorboards of their home, dressed in dark, swaying fabrics that flicked about his skin like liquid shadows. He slipped from the room with all the grace and fluidity of a serpent and touched down on a heavy branch outside. Escape was easy once he was fully out from under his family’s watchful eyes, and Kel slunk through the trees farther and farther from his house uninhibited.
Though he doubted he’d ever really be able to take every step in this great expanse of trees that would allow him to see every sight and overturn every stone, and Mahikel wanted with a great intensity to be certain that he missed nothing of interest when it occured, not every adventure had to be about exploration. Sometimes it was enough to enjoy what he’d already discovered, particularly when it was an anomaly of exceptional beauty.
Many things in Jauhar were, but sometimes Kel found something of interest that was just slightly harder to come by.
Warbleroot was not a seasonal flower. It blossomed in cycles, as many plants did, but it did not do so in ‘only’ spring or ‘only’ summer. Instead, different patches erupted at different times of the year and not even every year. Warbleroot flowered rarely because once was enough to sustain it for nearly a decade. Coming upon a blossoming patch was as much luck as it was misfortune for those who were unprepared. They were beautiful, sunset-pink-and-orange shimmering flowers with tall, slim, tubular petals. They were a particularly bright source of light in the otherwise dark forests, and animals and insects were drawn to them.
It happened that warbleroot was a predatory species. The flowers were lures, bright, enticing, and disarming to conceal the circular network of its root system. It bloomed in ‘patches,’ such that there were a nice array of flowers to span a good several footlengths, but it was all one individual plant, fed by an outer ring of stinging, venomous thorns.
Prey stepped near, and even a p***k of those thorns could hold enough toxin to paralyze even a grown radaku in a single minute. Stung but unsuspecting and not feeling injured enough to retreat, the warbleroot’s prey lingered inside the ring of flowers, perhaps making a meal of them, or maybe just admiring. Either way, by the time the direness of the situation revealed itself, those beautiful flowers were already secreting aa acid-like substance that dissolved the body of the unsuspecting creature right in the midst of that patch, breaking it down into a liquid that permeated the ground beneath it and fed the roots that had stung it.
But then, satiated on a single meal, the flowers died and wilted away, and the warbleroot plant became little more than a patch of twigs until it needed to feed again. Which, depending on the size of the meal could be as soon as the next season, or as distant as the next decade. There was no way to know.
Fascinating.
Mahikel expected there was a certain uniqueness to everything that lived in Jauhar, but to be dangerous without having to do anything but be pretty and alluring… That was a special trait. Remarkable and interesting. Worth sharing with his brother, certainly.
And there was a patch blooming near enough that Kel had managed to find it before they’d fully blossomed. He’d visited the plant a handful of times while it grew, always keeping a respectably safe distance, but now, if he wanted something, it was time to go after it before something stepped into that trap and the plant withered away again.
Fortunately, and despite his age, Mahikel was a smart boy.
Smart, sure-footed, and fearless. The warbleroot’s toxins could only harm him if he stepped on its roots, located predictably along the outside edge of the plant’s flowers. Stepping in the middle was safe, prey wasn’t supposed to be frightened once it was inside that ring. But Mahikel didn’t think he was interested in touching down to the ground at all. The thorny roots would be too wide and unpredictably placed for him to jump over, so he wasn’t about to risk being stuck.
Instead, he’d brought a rope with him. He would stick to the trees until he was just above his quarry, tie the rope to the lowest branch, shimmy down, pluck up a handful of flowers to give to his little brother, and escape with all his limbs and his life fully intact by climbing away.
Mahikel smiled from his perch, beaming down at the bright, glowing petals beneath him. He was fairly certain its acidic secretions came from its root mass, so they hopefully wouldn’t be dangerous once plucked.
He tied his rope and arranged and knotted himself so that the cord was wrapped around his waist and leg in such a way that if his fingers failed him, the rope would tense enough to catch him for at least a moment while he righted himself more properly. Hopefully. Kel didn’t actually have that much experience with knot-making, but if there was ever a time to give it a try, now would be it. Then, he began his descent.
Down was easy. Climbing was something he had years of practice in, already. Mahikel had always loved scampering about in the trees, one branch to the next, so it wasn’t as if his far-from-fully-developed muscles were even doing something unusual.
Once near the ground, he shifted his weight, angling himself sidelong so that he could wrap himself up in an entirely new pattern as he dipped upside-down, fingers reaching toward the ground, and-
The ground came toward him with no warning.
There wasn’t a noise to signal his rope snapping, no whoosh of anything flying through the air, no sound from his own lips as he tumbled. Just silence and a gut-lurching drop as first Kel’s fingers, then promptly his face collided with the soft earth. Once he’d made contact, there was slightly more commotion.
First from himself in the form of a pitiful squeal and a suddenly absurdly shameful sharp intake of several breaths. How had this happened? Had his knots failed? Would he be able to free himself? The plant must already know someone had stepped into its ring. It would only be a moment before it started spitting acid at him… He could jump away and risk being pricked by the thorns and have only a minute to find shelter in the jungle until the toxin wore off. If it ever even did. He didn’t know. This had been foolish, foolish, foolish.
The thoughts whirled in a haze of panic through his mind, so quickly that he couldn’t discern one rational thought from the next until the second notable commotion pierced through them.
“s**t, it’s a kid.”
Mahikel’s gaze swiveled toward the sound, limbs tense and eyes wide as if he were a prey animal himself, searching for its predator. What he found was… decidedly not what he’d been looking for. Two men emerged from the bushes, each carrying a bow. Immediately, Mahikel suspected an arrow had been the cause of his fall. Had these scuzzbags been shooting at him? One of them was a Shifter, skin as dark as Kel’s during the daytime and hair a shining silver. He was dressed as might be expected of someone accustomed to the treetop lifestyle: airy, loose-fitting and ill-covering clothes. No shoes. His companion was another story altogether.
Though their settlement wasn’t one that shunned outsiders, there were still fewer of every other race than there were Shifters. This one was an Ice man. Though ‘man’ was perhaps an overstatement. He looked more like a teenager than anything else, and he was dressed in fully-covering, tight-fitted garments that would protect his unaccustomed skin from the insects Kel’s people were much less prone to falling ill from.
It was the Shifter, though, he was making the commotion. “Just a boy, a child. We could’ve killed him and-” A strangled gasp sound emitted from his throat, and he stabbed a finger in Kel’s direction. “Warbleroot flowers. Oh, we’ve killed him.”
Mahikel grimaced and thought this must be what a rodent would behave like if it were born a man.
“He’s not dead,” the Ice man groused a little more roughly. “But he is lucky for it. You know,” It was then that his full attention turned to Kel, eyeing him up and down while Kel sat in a ring of flowers that were likely about to try and digest him. “You looked like a bug, dangling about like that.” And then he kept looking, golden eyes darting from each individual speck of blue on his face, out to his ears and dark hair. “But you’re just a hybrid.”
“And you must be blind and stupid, to just shoot at anything that moves without looking properly at it.” Heat spread through Kel’s cheeks, and he knew he wanted to say more and be angry at being thought of as a ‘bug’ or ‘just a hybrid,’ but also he didn’t have time to just sit here arguing with a dumb man. So instead, he averted his gaze away and crawled toward the outer ring of flowers, carefully surveying each spot before he settled his weight into it.
It was the Shifter who edged closer. “What are you doing in there? How did you get- And why? Don’t you know-? You must know, or you wouldn’t have been dropping from up there… Don’t get near the thorns!”
“I’m not dumb,” Kel snapped, though he did feel marginally less prepared than he’d initially thought he was, and it was impossible to ignore that his arms were shaking now, especially noticeable since he was crawling. “If you hadn’t shot me, I’d probably be done by now and on my way away! So thanks a lot!”
“What’s going on now?” Icy lumbered forward.
The jittery Shifter man launched into an explanation that involved a lot of finger jabbing in Kel’s direction and sharp glances toward where the young hybrid had huddled himself near the edge of the root matrix, and some shrill sounds of panic and dismay because he was just a child, and what could they do?
“Just… thorny roots…?” The Ice man questioned slowly. His golden gaze traveled down, first from his own companions face and toward his feet, then the same for Kel. “So if you were wearing shoes...”
The embarrassed heat that had been previously present (that had started to slowly morph to something to felt more like illness than embarrassment) returned with a jarring vengeance. “If I’d been wearing shoes, I wouldn’t have made it through the trees at all!” He snapped back. “I wouldn’t fallen! The grip on those things is- It’s very bad!”
“Yeah, it would’ve been horrific to have not made it out here. Alright, alright! Just be still. I’m coming to get you.” And so he did. The plant that was the subject of so much of Mahikel’s fascination was trod on by a pair of Zenan fur boots and the danger and mystery of it felt so entirely diminished that the young boy almost felt stupid and ashamed for thinking it was worth coming out here at all. Then the Ice man picked him up in his arms to place him on the other side of the thorns, and Kel didn’t feel just ‘almost’ stupid and ashamed. “So, you wanted one, right?”
Mahikel scrubbed his fingers down his arm, assuring himself that he just wanted to be sure nothing had gotten on him, but really it was an awkward situation all around. He blinked up at the man. “What?”
“A flower, you wanted one, right?” Mahikel blinked. Without waiting for a response, he leaned over, plucked one from the ring of blossoms, and then returned his attention back to the six-year-old boy. “Here.” He held the still-shimmering, golden petals beneath Kel’s chin. “At least the adventure wasn’t wasted.”
That was the first time he met Nishrin Valmourn.
x
x
Results: On an expedition to retrieve a present of a beautiful flower for his brother, Kel meets a stranger from the kingdom of ice.
Word Count: 2651
