Initiation
by Nyohah

A woman lay still in the forest, twigs and weeds tangled in her cocoa hair, the foliage's broken edges tracing tiny scratches on her copper skin. Each of her muscles was motionless to an extent that most would swear could only be caused by death. But death had not yet touched the woman; such a lack of motion was a necessity when so close to one's target. Her goal was to direct death toward another.

Her name was Mistral, and she was a hunter.

On the opposite side of a valley, another woman climbed. She was shorter, her hair a shade lighter, her body a touch slimmer, less muscular. The rocky incline she scaled was steep, the rocks jagged, but on every falter and slip her legs were protected from lacerations if not bruises by her tanned leather pants.

For her size she seemed heavily laden by the wooden bow more than three-quarters her height strapped beside the quiver of arrows on her back and the pair of wooden tonfas—thick wooden rods the length of her forearms affixed with a handle about a third from one end—strapped to her thighs. Her every quick, agile movement attested to her comfort with her load, one she had carried often for years.

Lundiy, too, was a hunter.

Mistral waited, her hands braced against the foliage on the ground as she watched her target in the clearing beyond, her spear lying on the ground with her right hand pressed over its handle, ready to clutch it and spring in the moment of attack.

She needed an opportunity, the extra split-second that would ensure her attempt did not end the very instant it began.

Her target was far too alert. It would flee the instant she moved.

She waited.

One more push and a swing of her left leg and Lundiy knelt on the plateau at the top of the cliffs. Ignoring the fire in her shoulders, she pulled her bow from her back with her right hand, then shifted it to her left and reached back again for an arrow.

Somewhere amongst the rocks, her target lurked, itself a hunter, with a hunter's senses and reflexes. It was sharp; her task was to be sharper.

She fitted the arrow onto the string of her bow, but did not pull it back, creeping forward to track her target.

A warble split into the idyllic calm of the forest. Not the delicate call of a songbird, but a caw of terror and pain, the death-call of another hunted, and the victory of another hunter.

But Mistral did not pause to register the noise. Her target jerked its head in the direction of the sound and she lunged, pushing herself from the ground to leap toward her target, her body nearly horizontal.

Her target's head turned back to her and it took the time to blink at her twice before dashing away, bounding over a log and tearing through the forest with extraordinary speed.

Mistral sprinted after it, her feet ripping through weeds on the ground that sought to slow her and the tip of her spear disturbing the calm of the branches overhead.

She was fast, but it was faster.

A tiny smile creased Lundiy's lips and she shifted into a kneeling position. The target was just ahead, upwind, totally unaware, and a simple shot for any experienced archer.

She readjusted the arrow on her bow's string, extended her left arm, and pulled with her still-aching right.

It creaked.

Her bow creaked.

Not a loud, obtrusive creak that would annoy the other Kitsune who still slept while she practiced each morning, but a tiny little betrayal of the wood she'd used to craft her bow.

But it rang like a clap of thunder in her ears, and her target shot one glance in her direction and began a leap into the air.

She loosed her arrow and it whistled through the air, catching it in the hip even as it fled.

With an annoyed shake of her head, she slung her bow and chased, climbing over treacherous rock formations with as much ease as she could manage. It was escaping her, more familiar with the layout of the land and more at ease on the rocks than she could ever have been.

As she trailed just behind, it reached the cliffs that led into the valley, much shorter than those closer to the Kitsune headquarters. It fled to the right, leaping with feline prowess down a curved series of rocks to land in the lush valley below.

Lundiy ran to the edge of the cliffs, and tossed one glance to the incline. A little farther than she would have liked. No matter.

She jumped.

Her foot caught on a root and she nearly fell, but regaining her balance, Mistral continued to bolt after her fleeing target. It crashed through the underbrush yards before her, and gaining, then leapt, almost without warning, into a grassy field that lay outside the forest's abrupt ending.

Mistral gladly jumped over the fallen tree trunk and into the grass, doubling her speed in the easier terrain. With an inarticulate grunt, she tossed her spear aside. Her target also benefited from the change of turf, continuing to pull away from her, and the spear only hampered her movements; she'd retrieve it sometime later.

She pumped her now-empty arms relentlessly, spurring her legs at a yet faster pace.

Lundiy fought the urge to close her eyes and forced her muscles to slacken. The ground hit her loosened legs with unbelievable force and she tumbled forward, tucking her head and rolling through a forward somersault before lurching back to her feet. She pulled her tonfas from the restraints on her legs and began to chase her target, which limped more with each stride and began to wobble weakly from loss of blood.

Even so, she had never been the fastest sprinter, and it stumbled into a gully before she caught it, an eight-foot cliff of crumbling dirt blocking her view of the forest on the other side of the valley.

She swung her tonfa at its head, but it dodged and struck back viciously with the desperation of the doomed. Lundiy evaded the swing and rolled through the grass to lunge again, meeting only another slash in her direction.

Mistral panted, sweat pouring from her body, running down her limbs and spraying off with every movement. Her target still ran, tantalizingly close, closer than before, but its stamina taunted her, as her muscles began to tremble.

Before her the ground broke, causing a short drop that her target leapt over without fear and that she followed it over without hesitation. But what she found in the little gully startled her.

A medium-sized young woman, similarly attired to Mistral herself, fought a cougar that bled profusely from a wound in its hip from which an arrow's feathered shaft protruded. She ducked and rolled away from the cougar's claws as he fought in panic.

Mistral's target whirled in fright as the cougar turned instinctively to slash at him. It doubled back and passed close by Mistral, as she took three swift strides on an intercepting course and jumped onto its back.

Lundiy had begun to fear for her life, having underestimated the fury of her target, when a huge buck, possessing exceptional antlers, dived into the gully, followed by a tall woman who looked to be part of Lundiy's own clan. He took two steps too close to her target, who lunged after the buck.

She plunged into the grass, rolling in the direction her target had turned and leaping upward at the end of a somersault to craft a tremendous swing with her tonfa as her target began to turn back to where Lundiy had been standing.

Its neck broke, finally, and it fell.

Dropping her tonfas, she fell backward to sit on the ground with a soft thump.

Mistral grabbed her target's antlers then pushed off its back, dropping to the ground and wrestling it down with her. Avoiding its kicking hooves, which thrashed with a wild ferocity known only to those on the brink of calamity, she pulled her knife from its sheath on her thigh and slit her target's throat.

Stopping to catch her breath as her target's thrashing lessened and ceased, she wiped the knife on the ground and plodded back toward the forest to find her spear.

Neither spoke as they worked, although they were mere feet from each other. Mistral carefully removed the impressive antlers of her buck, leaving the rest of his carcass for the scavengers, and worked carefully with the extra leather she had wrapped around her arm. Lundiy used a small knife that was always strapped to her right boot to cut further into her cougar's body, removing and cleaning some of its bones, then using an even smaller knife—one unusually thin—that she had stashed in her quiver for such a purpose to carve them.

And hours later, their headdresses were completed, proving the rite had been fulfilled, and the two warriors victorious.

The buck's antlers had been attached to leather bands and securely affixed to Mistral's head, adding considerably to her already great height. Although they seemed somewhat ridiculous at first glance, they seemed so naturally a part of her that they only served to add to her an aura of august strength and authority.

The cougar's jawbone sat proudly on Lundiy's head as a tiara, the pointed teeth mimicking cut jewels. Her wavy brown hair was also pulled back, some of it in braids, the rest in strands decorated with carved cougar-bone beads. She was smaller and less intimidating than Mistral, but the bones decorating her head served as a subtle reminder that she was a warrior and an accomplished hunter.

The stood a long time in the valley, almost equidistant from the cliffs on one side and the forest on the other, studying one another without making a sound. Both recognized the other as a definite member of her clan, but not a friend, and not someone whom she had seen often.

Eventually, Lundiy nodded to Mistral, and Mistral to Lundiy, and they began their journey back to headquarters side-by-side, neither taking a step ahead of the other as they walked with the painful eagerness that they would finally be full-fledged members of the Kitsune, a rank that each had striven to attain most of her life.