She was ushered to a corner and given a pitying look by the delegate. “Foolish girl. I must thank you though. Your sacrifice will ensure that I can maintain somewhat good relations with the tribe. I’ll make sure you’re amply rewarded.”
Harper looked back in irritation. “What do you mean sacrifice? Isn’t this just a duel with her?” She jerked her head towards the young efferan woman who was seething and being scolded by her elders.
Amice Green pursed her lips. “You don’t know? It is a duel, of sorts, but one you are unlikely to win.”
Harper relaxed. “Is that it? I don’t know if you heard about my duel with the Governor’s son, but I dismantled him easily. Fighting that buffoon will not be a challenge.” She was confident in beating almost anyone her age in a straight duel. Some savage from this backwater was hardly worth mentioning.
The older woman looked at her sternly. “Do not underestimate them. The are capable and clever. They’re fighting styles may not be nearly as refined or efficient as our own, but to them it doesn’t matter. They rarely fight in their original form, only to kill less powerful creatures, in fact.”
This made Harper pause, a disturbing thought occurring to her. “Wait, you don’t mean-”
“I do.” The delegate leader interrupted. “You will be fighting in your Aliuses. Not only that, this tribe in particular holds most of their sanctioned fights in the lake itself.”
Now Harper understood the severity of what she had gotten herself into. She looked back at the other woman. It hurt her pride, but she put on a pleading look. “Could you cancel this duel. They look unhappy enough with it that it could surely be done.” Harper motioned to the elders still scolding the defiant young woman.
Her hopes fell as Amice shook her head. “I cannot. Not only would it tarnish your reputation with them, and worse, hurt my own, we would be right back to where we started. There would be no good solution to that either. I would most likely end up in a duel myself. If I lost, I would look weak and it would be much harder to negotiate with this tribe in the future. If word spreads, my reputation with other tribes will degrade as well. If I won, they would be very bitter towards me, even more bitter that they already are.” She gave a glance of regret towards the nearby arguing group.
“What has made them so upset? Harper demanded. She had a right to know, considering that it seemed she’d bear the fallout.
Amice arched her brows at her tone, but she still supplied the answer. “I told them of the upcoming colonial expansion, and how they are expected to move further south. If they don’t abandon their ancestral home,” she gestured around them, presumably at the lake and floating hovels, “then the elites of the next colonial settlers will force them.”
Harper understood their plight much better now. She even empathized with their situation. It would be difficult, abandoning all that you know at the whim of a greater and foreign power. Still, it was necessary. Their population was much sparser and so did not have need of such a large amount of land. Better they join their brethren to the south.
The young woman adopted a resigned expression, though internally her nerves began to crumple. “Very well. I presume that you will pay for the materials needed to repair my Alius at least?”
The delegate leader’s look turned back to pitying. “I will, and more besides that, but you will need to do more than just repair it. You will need to rebuild it from scratch.” Before Harper could interrupt, Amice confirmed her sudden fear. “It’s a duel to the death.”
<hr>
Harper held out a hand, it was shaking. Willing it to stop did nothing. In just a short time, she would face near certain death.
Well, she in the form of a snake would.
Dying in one’s Alius did not mean death in one’s real body. Instead, the artificial creature body was killed and had to be regrown. However, there were consequences beyond this. The core she had absorbed would be damaged. If she were fortunate, it would recover in a couple of months. If she wasn’t, she would need to find and absorb a new core entirely. This was not what made her shake though. No, what she dreaded was what she would feel.
Pain.
To no one’s surprise, dying, especially violently, was painful. Real body or not. It was said to be so painful that many were left permanently damaged. One in three that lost an Alius never grew another. A small amount were so traumatized that they never saw combat again. No one was left completely unscarred.
Harper’s father had lost his Alius once. It was as a new Magnate. He had just absorbed the core of a wyvern and thought himself invincible. An officer in the conflict in northern Magnon, he had ample opportunity for combat. He attacked when he shouldn’t have, and while it won the battle, a major victory for which he received accolades, he lost most of his squad and nearly lost his own life.
Her and Corvin’s father had only recounted it once as a cautionary tale to the two of them. It was something he clearly did not enjoy reliving. She had never seen her father with such a haunted look before or after his warning. It succeeded, instilling an aversion in Harper to think of her Alius as something expendable. And yet, here she was.
She stood on one of the rafts, which had been moved to the edge of a large open space in the floating village. Her opponent stood on one of the larger hovels opposite her. Harper once again considered begging for the delegation leader to step in or attempt to forfeit the match.
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If she absolutely refused to do so, she guessed that she could stop the fight. They couldn’t make her transform into her Alius and participate. She seriously doubted that the delegation leader would let her be harmed. Even if she wasn’t a noble, letting her die at the hands of the efferans would be a major scandal when it could be prevented.
Not that she thought the efferans would kill or harm her for not participating either. They had too much to fear from the Governor and the colonies. Nor did she think they killed people out of hand, savages they may be. She wasn’t willing to risk her life on her assumptions though.
There were two reasons she was willing to go through with this. The first and most important, refusing could jeopardize her future. Even ignoring how poorly she would be thought of among the efferans, something she didn’t care all that much about, her reputation would still be in tatters.
A reputation for cowardice could follow her the rest of her life. Maybe even back to Magnon. Her parents were already displeased her, such a mark may lead them to disinheriting her entirely. It was not just pride on the line, but how she would be perceived from here onwards. Losing a fight with an efferan on their home turf was significantly less humiliating than begging to be spared the pain.
The second reason was perhaps overly optimistic. She thought she may have a chance to win. Her Alius would fare better than most, being of a creature that spent quite a bit of time in the water. The efferan woman opposite her was of a similar age, and was likely new to her Alius as well. Maybe not as unpracticed as Harper, but she would take what she could get.
Besides, it didn’t take that much fine control to wrap around something and squeeze until something gave.
Looking to the left for reassurance, Amelia shot her a smile, or an attempt at one at least. It was closer to a grimace, and her pale skin did not help Harper’s impression. To her right was Amice. She wore a resigned expression, as if Harper’s incoming death was a particularly annoying task that needed to be done.
On the other side of the make-shift arena, Salamander jumped in. Stressed as she was, the loud splash startled her and she jumped into the air, letting out an embarrassing squeak. Abashed, Harper focused on the ground, beginning her transformation. She was not confident enough to do so while swimming.
A process that usually felt like it took forever, she was displeased to find it happen all too fast this time. First her form become insubstantial, a feeling of weightlessness overtook her. Her senses faded and her mental faculties became blunted. The most similar sensation she could compare it to was being in a half-asleep state. Conscious enough to idly think, but not coherently. It took her three tries and a little over a minute to successfully complete the transformation. Her nerves were growing out of control; she did her best to suppress them.
Harper’s Alius wasn''t even halfway grown at this point. She had taken the form a few times over the past couple of weeks. It was an odd sensation, and the reptile''s senses were completely foreign to her human ones. Moving the serpentine body was an excursion in frustration, even with the built-in instincts helping her along.
She stuck her tongue out, preparing for the barrage of weird sensations that would follow. Sure enough, the odd scents of the lake and people inhabiting it struck her like a cannonball. Focusing her attention, she scanned the water.
Surprisingly quickly, she picked out the glow of her opponent in the blues, greens and oranges that was her vision. She was an indistinct shape swimming towards the center. Harper didn’t want to even think about how awful it would be to use the senses of a mundane snake.
The senses of an anaconda with a Domain were bad enough. It was the thing she looked forward to the most in more powerful creatures. Dragons were said to be able to distinguish the shade of green on a leaf from miles away. She was a long way from that.
Harper carefully lowered herself into the water. She had practiced enough to swim in the strange undulating way snakes do, if not well. Still, she was at least able to pick a direction and go in it.
Harper kept her head above water and approached to a short distance from her opponent, clumsily treading in place. This close, she could see what manner of creature she would be facing, it wasn’t much of a surprise though. The efferan convention of adopting the name of the type of creature they had as an Alius was well known.
A salamander was treading water in front of her, seemingly glaring at Harper. She was a light brown color with deep black eyes. Webbed claws worked to keep her in place. Harper heard a voice yell out. She was unsure if that was due to her distorted senses or if it was in another language. Perhaps both. Either way, it was clearly the signal to start. Salamander launched forward.
Harper was not adept enough to swim backwards, if that could even be done in her current body. She did the only thing she could, met the other woman head on. At the last moment, the salamander jerked to the side, making Harper miss the bite she attempted and giving her a mouthful of water for her trouble.
Pain shot through as the amphibious creature latched onto her neck. She felt her claws begin scoring at her newly grown scales. Harper shrieked and whipped around furiously, trying to shake her off. Finally coming to her senses, Harper did what her anacondan instincts were screaming at her and tried to wrap around her prey. Before she could bend around and tighten her grip around the smaller creature, Salamander dipped away, out of her grasp.
What followed was not dissimilar to her own fight with the anaconda weeks previously. Salamander continuously wounded her before retreating, using her speed and experience to navigate the water in a way Harper couldn’t hope to achieve.
She felt herself grow tired. The water around her was red and stained in blood. She was surprised she lasted this long, not having the energy reserves of an adult anaconda. No! She thought. I will at least hurt this moon-cursed savage.
The next time she darted in, overconfident with her success, Harper used her renewed resolve to jerk her head to the side. She was successful, clamping onto the other Alius’s back leg with her fangs and refusing to let go. Salamander gave her own shrill shriek of pain.
Nothing had ever sounded so sweet in Harper’s life. She held on no matter how hard the salamander thrashed, trying to get away. Another spot in her previously pristine scales were being savaged, but Harper couldn’t find it in herself to care. Forgetting everything that wasn’t relevant to being an anaconda, she wrapped herself around the smaller body and squeezed, eager to crush the life out of something that had hurt her so badly.
That was until she realized that she couldn’t. She did not have the energy to exert much pressure at all. Her missing energy was all around her, in her missing lifeblood that painted the surrounding waters crimson.
Harper vision began blacking out. She strained with everything she had, but it was not enough. She was too far gone. As Harper and Salamander sunk deeper into the lake, she felt something snap. Pain become her world. At some point that transitioned from a soundless cry in her own mind to a gurgling choke.
Harper could not stop herself from letting in the water. She lacked the presence of mind. The combination of pain, trauma, and drowning was too much. For the second time in only a minute, Harper felt herself blacking out, in her real body this time.
She later wished she could say that her last thought was of something profound, or she could see her life flash before her eyes. None of that was true. At the time she was certain death was near. It was mostly terror and blind panic that followed her into the dark.