The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]]

[Twinflame]

K'ile Tia was ten malms from camp when the smell of burnt flesh first overwhelmed the stink of ash and cinders. Small trails of smoke were mingling together, weaving themselves into a great pillar of shadow cast skywards from the camp. The Sagolii Hipparion Tribe, isolated in the deep deserts of Southern Thanalan, should have been safe. They had left it safe, secure, prosperous, plentiful. Their goal had been to protect it. But the moon, the dragon, the fire: it had reached so far. How could they ever had thought to fight that? How could they ever have understood?

It seemed that not even a single piece of cloth had escaped the fire. Every tent looked as though it had been burnt down, and only a small handful had been rebuilt. Great, tattered sheets had been lain on the outskirts of the camp; K'ile did not have to see beneath them to smell the charred corpses they concealed. Had there been no time to bury them yet, even now, a week since the Calamity? The dunes blowing in, would bury them on its own before much longer.

 

The light of the Warden did not show mercy to hem this day. It was hot, an echo of the fire. Melted sand shimmered in the distance. Great swaths of the cliffs had been turned black. The camp was silent, and still, oppressed by the heat. K'ile heard hushed voices. He heard the howl of someone in pain, voice choked by audible injury, and did not listen. He could pick out the smell of family members, mingling with fire and ash and pain.

 

The smell of terror lingered in the ruins like rot over a bog.

 

Even the shadows of the tens were unmercifully bright; the light reflecting off the sands burnt his eyes. He lifted a hand to shade his face; the flesh of his fingers was tattered and bound in bandages. K'ile swayed in the stinging hot wind of the desert. The pain in his body recalled the battle at Cartenau. He ignored it. His body was a small thing.

 

K'ile Tia's eyes flicked about the camp. He couldn't have known the mad look in his eyes, the desperate pose of his features and limbs, like a ravenous man in search of food. His emptiness was complete, and yet in the pit that remained of his heart, that darkness somehow boiled. The absence, the strange insanity of loss, frothed against the back of his eyes, clearly visible to those around him.

 

"They're back!" Someone called, a woman who smelled to K'ile like fire and sweat and terror. "They're back from Cartenau!" She ran up to him, slowed at the look in his eyes, and looked past him. "There's so few of you. Where is everyone else?"

 

Had anyone followed him. Maybe Yohko and some of the others who had survived the battle. Most had not. There wouldn't be any others. But he didn't say this. He reached out and grabbed the woman by the arm, perhaps accidentally hard. She didn't make any sound or seem offended. She appeared to be sleep-walking. Maybe she already knew where the others were: in the ground. Everyone who hadn't come home was in the ground. "Where's K'piru?" he said, and he couldn't hear his voice. He felt his jaw shivering like a dead limb.

 

The woman averted her eyes, breathed, and didn't answer at first. "So many are hurt," she muttered, finally, and then, "K'piru... She is..."

[Naunet]

At some point, the panic and terror that had left K'piru shaking and huddled amongst the rocks in the cliff rolled back. It had to, with so many dead, others caught in their own agonies as seared flesh peeled from muscle and bone, there was no time for her own fear, no time for her own grief. She would look at their strained faces and note only the degree of their pain, or if they had gone slack with death or, mercifully, sleep. The children were the worst, but she couldn't allow herself to see them in any different a light than the rest. The groans and ragged breaths of the wounded were swallowed up by the hide walls surrounding them, one of the few tents they could scavenge from the remains of their camp.

 

So few would survive.

 

A thin arm, skin an angry red and blistered, was stuck out in front of her vision, its small hand held gently in her own. As she smeared cool, sticky fluid on that arm, K'piru reminded herself that their supplies were low. She wondered if she could spare the hours it might take to locate more aloe plant, and without even realizing it, she began to organize those remaining by who was most likely to survive.

 

Her hands took a moment to run through the thin, short hair of the child with the burnt arm, brushing behind his ears, but she didn't linger. She tried to form a prayer for his healing, but the words that she had crafted easily for decades died before they could work past her throat. The child's strained, puffy eyes were not something she could bear to watch, so she moved on.

 

When someone came and whispered low in one ear that their warriors had returned from battle, K'piru tried to feel relief as she stood. The woman she'd been treating looked up at her, confusion briefly overriding her pain - she wasn't in quite as bad a condition as others - as K'piru wordlessly set aside her tools and moved to the tent's entrance.

[Twinflame]

His red hair lay flat against this skin, held there by the sweat that pulled about his eyes and on his cheeks. He should be covering himself, conserving his energy, trying to keep from sweating too much. But he didn't have the mind or the care for it. The fire of the battlefield didn't claim him, so what hope did this desert have? If Dalamud had spared him, what hope did Azeyma have? How could he ever again see the Warden as having any power to protect or hinder him, after this?

 

There was no way to describe what parts of his mind and spirit had been burned away by the Calamity. It had left him with his body, burned and battered and cut, on the verge of crumbling, but it would heal. The spirit would not. Time did not mend all wounds, especially when those wounds were infected.

 

K'ile Tia could smell K'piru before he saw her, and to him, it was like the scent of a medicinal salve, or a wave of oncoming sleep to sate exhaustion. This had a strange impact upon him. The world which had begun to shrink so quickly as Dalamud fell, suddenly focused to a pinprick, to just that woman. In the mix of scents that described the shaman, he could pick out the lingering smell of K'thalen Nunh, his brother, her mate. He could smell the wounds of others on her hands, of herbs and poultices, sweat and blood and desperation.

 

For a moment, in the heat and the dry air, K'ile wavered on his feet. Weakness washed over him, and the pain from slow-healing wounds that dappled his flesh in great number clamored at his senses.

 

He cursed them, and turned his gaze on K'piru as she exitted the tent. K'ile could barely see her. So bright was the light, and his vision so vexed by pain, sweat in his eyes. He didn't need to; it was her, his brother's woman. The hearts of K'ile's brother, Thalen's children, and K'piru, all pumped the same familial blood as surely as they were attached in their veins.

 

K'ile approached the woman quickly. He might have run. He couldn't sense his own limbs. But he couldn't say anything either. What could he say? Where in the world was there a language that had words for times like this? Some cursed place, with a cursed tongue. Whatever realm it was that had birthed words such as Dalamud and Garlemald. Surely that place would have words for this moment.

 

Without pause, as soon as he could, K'ile blindly let himself rush over K'piru and wrap his arms around her, clutching at her in desperation. The smell of her,as he did this, chased out all other sense. Even in this there was the stench of fire and fear, though, for they wrapped her as sure as anything else. He took her in his arms without word or preamble. He could not have done anything else.

[Naunet]

K'piru had barely adjusted her eyes to the blinding sun before muscled arms enveloped her, pulling her to a bandaged, bloody chest. Her nose pressed against warm skin, she at first thought it K'thalen and leaned heavily into the embrace. Her shoulders shook.

 

But when she breathed in, though she caught smooth, comforting edges of K'thalen's scent, it was distant. More than just the char and blood - things she'd smelled so much of the past days that she felt certain they were permanently seared onto her senses - there was the smell of someone else, familiar but different. She brought her hands up to grip the other's elbows.

 

"K'ile," she breathed out, and her tail curled tight against her leg before she lifted her face. The hollowness of his expression, what she could make out of it, chilled her, and her voice shook as she tried to form the question she wanted, "Where is...?"

[Twinflame]

His brother, K'thalen. K'ile could recall the man's silhouette cast against an otherworldly horizon made of fire and smoke. He could see it when he closed his eyes and glanced upward; it was etched upon the roof of his skull. There his brother, the tribe's greatest Nunh, stood dying beside a collage of other such images. Some he had names for, many he did not, and while he felt his head overflowing with images of death still there was a mad artist scrabbling along the cracks that battle had left in his mind, and each time K'ile looked the devilish mural had expanded.

 

He didn't even look for the words to answer K'piru's question. K'ile had gone to war with K'piru's Nunh, and he daughters, and he had come back without them. Couldn't she read what the battle had written into his wounds? Couldn't she feel the way he held her, now, so different than he'd ever touched anyone before? The way she had leaned into him at first, shook freely beneath him, had made him think that she did, but now, maybe not.

 

Swallowing the air the hung about Antimony, one as much of death as it was of the only hope and connection he had left, K'ile said, "They aren't here." It was the simplest observation he'd ever uttered, but the only thing he could have said.

[Naunet]

The day the sky had filled with flames, their Warden's light and heat bathing them in an incomprehensible destruction, flashed across K'piru's mind. She watched the sweat beading on K'ile's cheek and heard again the screams of children, of elders, of family. In the dirt and blood smudged on his features, she saw tents wreathed in flames, dark silhouettes fleeing and catching alight themselves. Their shrieks of pain echoed like cracks of lightning between her ears.

 

She hardly realized the scream was her own.

 

Hands pressing flat against his arms, K'piru pushed back against K'ile, crying out, "No! They're just coming up behind!" And made to flee, in the direction the tia had come. She couldn't feel her limbs swinging, only the shuddering of her heart in her chest. She couldn't see the sand beneath her feet, only wavering mirages bathed in fire.

[Twinflame]

The strength and suddenness of K'piru's reaction caught K'ile off guard, and in his own disorientation he couldn't be sure if she was pushing him back or if something else was pulling him away. As though with a rush of wind that threw him back, the brightness and heat of the desert flickered around him, and the smell of the woman he'd anchored himself too was stirred up and mixed into the smell of death and fire.

 

For a half a second, K'ile was lost in a maelstrom of senses that confused and stung every bit as much as the sandstorms of the Sagolii, but when he came out of it he still stood. One arm was stretched out, holding K'piru at the elbow, as she struggled to run away from him. His hand, paralyzed in its desperation, had not let go of her. K'ile couldn't let go of her. He'd run all this way here from Cartenau, feverish in his need to reach K'piru. And she was trying to get away from him.

 

His hand felt as though it had fused into a rigid fist and would never uncoil. K'piru seemed to dangle sideways against her own weight. "Please," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! They aren't..." he could feel the grief and guilt churning within him like an illness. He hadn't expected the guilt. It had waited until now. "I tried! I'm sorry! Please, don't...!" He didn't have the words for this. He didn't know the language for this.

[Naunet]

"Don't lie!" The words tore her throat ragged. "Don't you lie to me!" Her arm ached all the way through her shoulder as she continued to strain desperately against K'ile's grip. She could see them - all fiery read hair and tanned skin, bruised from battle but grinning, relieved. She could see them; they crested a far dune, tiny shapes rocking with heavy steps on the horizon. They were coming, and she had to meet them, to welcome them home and clean their dirty faces and care for their hurts and help them rebuild their lives.

 

"Don't lie," K'piru sobbed and doubled over herself and K'ile's arm. "They're here. He's... he's coming." The words tumbled from her mouth in broken splinters of sound.

[Twinflame]

When she fell, he did too. She was the gravity that pulled him down. He leaned forward so that his knee hit the ground next to her and he put his other arm around her. He could feel the bones that her thin muscle wrapped, and the way they shivered under the immense weight of the things he had no words to say. "I'm sorry," was all he had. "I tried. I did everything I could! I couldn't." He coughed the words with feverish disregard. He vomited them from his lungs and gut. They rushed out of him like blood. "I'm sorry. I couldn't bring them home."

 

He could hear mingling in the camp. He didn't listen. Those coming home from Cartenau, like him, bearing news of death like he did. Those very same people, who had gone to fight, being told that those they'd tried to protect weren't here waiting for them. They exchanged the news of death, taking turns handing off terror and despair, and each new hand and breath magnified it. It was a hideous process. K'ile didn't listen.

 

He squeezed K'piru as though she might slip away into the sand. She might have died. What would he have done, if he had returned and she was dead? Or dying? What would he have done?

 

Someone howled in the tent nearby. Someone who smelled familiar writhed inside their charred flesh, and their breath rattled and seized.

 

What would K'ile Tia done if he had come all the way home just to watch K'piru die, slowly, in grief and pain? He shook his head viciously. She was alive. k'piru was alive.

[Naunet]

Each word he spoke sunk into her chest like arrows, with all the fatal accuracy of their family's greatest hunters. She writhed in the sand, in K'ile's arms, her limbs struggling to claw their way towards those shadows she could see so clear and so far in the distance, black spots, like ash. Like charred bodies.

 

The wail that broke from her lungs and throat pulled roughly on her spine, curling her against K'ile's arms. Her fingers first dug into the sand, tearing into the rough grains, and then into those arms. She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe. Her life, her blood, so much of what she'd cared for, and everything she had cared most for - it was all gone.

 

Her stomach twisted until she felt ill, but when she coughed and gagged, only thick, wrenching sobs that shook every bone in her body worked their way out. She clambered desperately at K'ile while simultaneously recoiling from his scent, from their scent.

[Twinflame]

He was there. She was alive. They were both broken but alive. So much had been destroyed, and the massive world had suddenly become so small, but they were alive. He held K'piru, felt her body and her fear and her sadness, and her suffering, and he tried to hold her together. She felt like she was about to fall apart and he was just trying to hold her together even though he had no idea how. It was the only way to keep himself together. It was the only way to make sure that the world, everything that had ever been real to him at all, did not crumble around him.

K'ile's mind turned around to a memory of the battle, of an otherworldly landscape littered with bodies and weapons. It had been something so far beyond any stories he had ever been told as a child, something far more terrible than anything he could've dreamed. The memory of the nightmare rolled in his mind, and he could remember his brother laying down in the midst of it. No laying down, no, but thrown down. Smashed against the ground. Burned and broken.

 

Shaking as he held K'piru, K'ile said, "I'm going to take care of you. I promised that." The words felt weak coming out of his own throat. He wished he could say stronger words, but there was no language for that either. All sense of language failed him. He just couldn't speak what needed to be spoken. "I'm going to be here. I'll do what I have to. I'm sorry, but, I'll be here."

[Naunet]

Her sobs stopped with an unnatural suddenness, the sounds stilling though her body still trembled as though it were about to shake into a million pieces. Her limbs did not feel as part of her body; her head sagged as though her neck were nothing more than limp tendon and skin. Her tail writhed still, painting vicious contortions in the sand, but its actions seemed well beyond her control.

 

K'ile's words sounded from very far away, warped and muffled and echoing strangely in her skull. She knew he still held her, but she couldn't feel his arms. Something choked in the back of her throat, but whatever words or noise she had attempted to form died before she could even think it.

 

She still looked to the horizon, past a blurry wall of hair, but she could not find those approaching silhouettes. Their absence left her utterly numb.

 

Her only response to K'ile was a complete cessation of everything.

[Twinflame]

"I'm here. I'll be here. I'm sorry. I tried. But I'll be here." His words became a disconnected string of statements, of promises and apologies. That was all he had left, and each of them was infinitely weak. There was nothing he could think or say, and not a thing he could do to change what was still happening around him. She stopped crying, went limp, and he took the chance to pull her close. He felt like she was something he had to protect, or maybe something broken he had to mend, but she was also the one thing left of any value to him. K'piru, the tribe, these charred people and toppled tents.

 

K'piru was limp in his arms, and he wondered if she had fainted. It would be merciful if she had, but her tail betrayed her wakefulness. He couldn't guess what was going on in her mind or her heart. Those were things he could touch or sense, had never been able to, even though K'thalen seemed to manage. K'ile held her body, uttered his apologies and promises, but there was nothing he could do for her. He was helpless under the shadow of the smoke, through which burned the pitiless eye of Azeyma, reticent and unyielding.

 

Maybe she had broken. Maybe he had broken too. Maybe they would just stay there in the sand, unmoving, as the dunes blew in to cover them up. Just like the bodies vaguely shrouded just outside of camp.

[Naunet]

Her light, her life. She couldn't find her light.

 

In her silence, K'piru screamed.

 

***

 

The two were not alone in their displays of grief. As K'ile and K'piru bowed against one another, the weary atmosphere of the tribe dragged further into desolation. The wounded ground and shook in the pain of the bodies and hearts, and those shadowed word-bearers shook with them. Throughout it all, Azeyma watched, ever aware, ever distant.

 

Enough time passed that the sun had traveled a great leap across the sky when someone finally approached K'ile and K'piru. She came from the tent they had packed the wounded into, bare feet leaving sluggish gouges in the sand behind her. The cloth wrappings she wore were stained with the reds and browns and yellows of death, as K'piru's were, and when she spoke, it was with a quietness that dared not disturb their solitude.

 

"Leeka took a turn for the worse," she began, blue eyes shivering over K'ile's back. "We need... I don't know what to do. K'piru..."

 

The motionless woman in K'ile's arms did not respond save for a weak twisting of her tail.

[Twinflame]

Holding K'piru against him, K'ile lay over her weakly. It was rest. It was the very first moment he'd taken since long before the battle had begun, to rest. The only thing that enabled that was K'piru, still beneath him, even though he could almost feel her crumbling. If she just rested like this, stayed still and calm so he could hold her together, she would be fine. He could take care of her. He was sure. There was nothing else, in the entire world, that he cared about.

 

K'leeka Fidar, mother of K'yohko Nunh, was dying. K'ile Tia couldn't bring himself to care. How terrible was that? Even his brother's other women, K'nirha and K'eyrah, were not worth his attention. All he cared about was K'piru, alone in the entire world.

 

K'ile Tia pulled K'piru against him, squeezed her, and glanced up at the woman who had come to seek K'piru's aid, and said, "I don't think she can." If K'piru hadn't moved yet, she wouldn't. Maybe K'piru was like K'ile, and couldn't manage to care. Maybe K'piru was like Azeyma, and could neither care nor speak, just hanging there over the sands to be sought but not attained.

[Naunet]

The woman who had come seeking further aid for the wounded left shortly after, returning to the tent with its heavy scents of medicine and blood and fire. K'ile and K'piru remained frozen in the middle of the ragged camp for some time, bodies supporting one another as though they were the only things keeping them from sinking into the sands and becoming lost forever.

 

K'piru already felt lost.

 

At some point, K'ile stood, pulling her up with him when she made no move to get up on her own. She couldn't feel her legs moving as he guided them both out from under Azeyma's eye, and the eyes of the tribe. Her feet drug through the sand as foreign instruments. She strained briefly when they turned away from the horizon, but went quickly limp, once more numb.

 

They curled up under the shelter of the rocks, and there K'piru cried again for a short time. They were quiet tears, her body trembling but making no sound as they burned tracks down her face. They soaked her skin and cloth as her daughters' blood, as K'thalen's blood had soaked their own; they fled her body like the blood of her family.

 

***

 

When the shadows of the cliffs merged with the shadows of night beyond, K'piru finally stirred. She hadn't slept, but her mind had fled. It returned to her there in the cool crevice K'ile had brought them to, and she blinked slowly, feeling course sand along her side, a warm body at her back. She breathed in his smell, and her heart clenched.

 

Body unmoving, her eyes roamed towards the open sands, catching on a few, tattered remnants of tents set up to ward off the elements and then shifting to gaze past them, further into the dunes.

 

A faint shudder echoed in her skull and deep in her ribs and in slow, deliberate movements, K'piru pushed herself up. K'ile must have drifted to some shallow, troubled sleep briefly, for he didn't move when she stood, her legs unfolding shakily, feeling as weak as a newborn.

 

She kept her eyes on the dunes ahead and let her feet carry her forward.

 

Once moving, she didn't stop until she'd crested one of the dunes a short distance outside the camp and dropped down into its valley. It didn't take long, as though her movements were outwardly calm, they were also quick. There at the bottom of the dune, she fell to her knees in the sand and turned her face up. Her features shivered with a strange, hopeful desperation that she was only half aware of.

 

Any moment now, her children and nunh would come bumbling over those dunes. K'thalen would give some half-hearted excuse for their delay, some silly adventure he'd prodded her girls into playing along with. K'airos would be sheepish but happy, and K'airi would be vibrating with a sense of victory, the kind of rush she always seemed to have upon returning from a hunt.

 

They would return soon, and K'piru would be here to greet them.

[Twinflame]

Night was merciful. Azeyma hid her face in shame, unable to face the failure of the Twelve. K'ile Tia did not hide. He had not been able to bring home K'thalen and his daughters, and that was something he had to bear. It needed to be acknowledged. He would wait however long it took for K'piru to acknowledge that.

 

He wilted in the sand and stared at her back. It was as though he was tethered to her, and she had dragged him out here without noticing. There was nothing like sleep to calm his mind, not now. He did not have to sleep to experience nightmares, though, and he had spent the day assailed by phantasmal echoes of the battlefield. K'piru was little comfort to him in her current state, though the presence of her breath helped him to continue breathing himself.

 

For a long time, he stared at her, and she stared away. Then he was beside her, and his legs were foled at his side, as though he'd fallen in the sand. He touched her numbly. K'ile said, "It was sudden. The fire that took them. It was so fast, and there was nothing I could do. I saw. And after, Yohko and I found them. I don't know about K'airi, but Thalen and K'airos, we found them, and lost them. We know. They aren't coming home."

 

He felt himself pull at her arm, "K'piru, come back to camp. Come back."

[Naunet]

"Why would--" The words hurt, as though she had spent an entire age in silence and her throat had forgotten the sensation of sound. K'piru choked, coughed, could not pull her gaze away from the dunes ahead. Her ears shivered, straining along with her nose as she sought for signs of her approaching family. "Why would you say such things?"

 

She hadn't noticed K'ile's approach, was numb to his touch on her arm, and though she had heard his voice, she wondered if perhaps he was not really there at all. Perhaps none of them had come back, and she had called up the sound and scent of her mate's brother as a messenger of a nightmare.

 

"Why would you say such things," she repeated, voice low and tenuous. The blue-white light of the moon through lingering smoke cast odd shadows on her upturned face. "They'll come back. I am waiting for them. They'll come back."

[Lyraciilee]

[align=center][/align]

 

"He's dead." The voice was flat and deep, a familiar voice but not a comforting one. Messy and singed purple hair stepped into sight from behind the large sand dunes. His face was battered and bruised and burnt, but most of it now had been bandaged to heal. K'yohko had always been a quiet man, a man who stayed away from people's personal affairs, so his sudden intrusion to what was obviously a personal matter was very unusual for him. Furthermore, it was not the form of K'yohko that appeared behind the two. He was holding a body in his arms, a body with scorch wounds and the smell of medical salves and magical fire and death. The nunh knelt down and placed the body on the ground, a body that quickly became recognizable as his mother, K'leeka.

 

With a tenderness K'yohko had never openly displayed, her brushed his mother's clouded dead eyes closed and pushed a bit of her hair from her forehead. A gentle kiss to her forehead before he stood again. His hands that had moments ago show tenders, clenched into bloodied fists of rage.

 

"Just like Leeka. Take a good look at her K'piru. Take a good look at my dead mother." K'yohko's voice wavered from its usual deadpan, showing glimpses of his torrent of emotions. A torrent of emotions not even K'nihqa had managed to soothe. His only consolation was that she was minimally injured and a few of the less experienced healers could tend to her. "I want you to look at her K'piru, because I want you to look at the people you've killed today." K'yohko continued, his voice cracking under the strain of holding it all back. The horror of Carteneu, the bodies of his fellow tribe members, of Thalen and his daughter, and now of his mother and so many others in his family. "K'leeka, K'eyrah, K'hodia, K'nirha, K'ali, K'hangi, K'lian, and should I go on K'piru?" K'yohko's voice had raised to an all time high as he spout out the name of every family member's body he was getting ready to bury. And he was going to bury them all around K'piru. So that she might sit in the middle and look at the faces of everyone that died because of her. "You could have saved them! You could have saved them all K'piru! And you did nothing." He spat the word at her like it sickened him. Furious violent eyes gaze down upon the pathetic woman with all of the hatred within him. By now his broad form was shaking with anger, and his face which had failed to emote in even the slightest bit for anyone but K'nihqa twisted into an ugly look of rage. He waited for K'piru's response. The nunh could give a shit about K'ile's presence. He was just another grain of sand in the ocean.

[Naunet]

She thought at first he was another imagined voice, born from whatever nightmare had seen fit to grip her family. K'yohko had left with the others for war. How could he have returned and Thalen not? How could he have returned while her daughters were still gone?

 

Then the sands shifted next to her as something settled on the ground. She recoiled at the smell, half curling towards K'ile, and the firm warmth of his body dragged her thoughts away from the dunes, away from the horizon and an endless wait.

 

K'ile was here. K'yohko was here. Her beautiful girls and the light of her soul were not.

 

She screamed, a short, choked sound that broke off into a sob, and scrabbled back in the sand. Wide eyes flicked to the body, then away, and she sought to hide. "They're not here," she wailed, pulling her arms to her face to ward away the sight. She didn't know what K'yohko wanted of her, why he would show her yet another corpse - there had been so many already! - and why he would speak those words. Her girls were not here. Thalen was not here. She could think of nothing else.

[Twinflame]

For a grain of sand, K'ile was hard to ignore. In a flicker of movement almost quicker than the spark of a new flame, the Tia's fist crashed against K'yohko's skull with all the force of muscle and bone too numb to know pain or restraint. His jaw opened wide, like a barking maw, when he shouted, "Coward! Don't bring this here!" His teeth clicked with every word, breath shuttering. "You didn't save Thalen! You didn't save anyone! You protected no one! Useless!"

 

His movement had outpaced the sand he'd stirred up, his accusations faster than grains that were still clattering around him. The fire-red hair on his head shook, unsettled, his soft face creased deeply with fury that broke as suddenly as the surface of Dalamud. There was calamity in his blue eyes. Sweat and blood shone on his skin, marred by dirt that he'd carried with him all the way from that nightmare-scape called Cartenau. On both wrists, bracelets of shells and flickering red stones clattered.

 

"Do not dare speak against her again," K'ile spoke in an unmistakable, bestial growl. "Or I'll take your place as Nunh and leave you in the sand right beside your mother!"

[Lyraciilee]

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K'yohko had not been expecting K'ile to lash out like he did, but then again he was not sure what he was expecting. The fist collided with his head painfully and he staggered to the side, pressing a hand to his temple. He could feel other head wounds reopening, but his anger far surpassed any pain. He could not pay attention to the pain, only to his anger. His head snapped back up to look fiercely past K'ile at K'piru. K'ile could not protect her from his wrath. No matter what violence he resorted to, K'ile could not protect her.

 

"The only coward here is K'piru!" K'yohko shot back angrily, emotion for once fully possessing him. "I saved no one, but neither did you K'ile! You watched them die! Then you ran back to find comfort in your dead brother's mate! K'piru is just as much of a coward as both of us! She watched the rest of her family die, not caring for anyone but herself and her own pain!" K'yohko sharply moved to step past K'ile so he might speak directly to K'piru. He did not care for the flame-haired Tia. He did not care for K'piru's pain. He cared that she had let the rest of her own family die because she was selfish.

 

"Thalen and your daughters are not your only family Piru! What about my mother? What about your nephew? What about the others? Or don't they matter? It's only Thalen and your damned daughters that matter? Kin-killer! Murderer! You murdered them! You let them die! You let your own family die because all that's ever mattered to you were your stupid daughters and Thalen!" K'yohko yelled at K'piru, the anger and rage in his voice twisting it to something that did not sound like himself. "Murderer! You're a murderer and a coward! The tribe has no use for kin-killers! If Thalen and your daughters are the only thing that ever matter, go join them in death!" The words were spit with such ferocity and hatred that K'yohko almost seemed possessed with them.

[Naunet]

She couldn't speak for lack of breath, and the desert spun around her. She brought her hands up to press desperately at her ears, but they could not block out the fury of those accusations, the hatred and horror fueling K'yohko's every gesture and eruption of word. K'piru curled in on herself in the sand, quaking beneath each blow that landed with greater weight and pain than if he'd struck her.

 

Kin-killer. Murderer. She could hardly comprehend the words, and so she didn't. Instead, she retreated fully, away from K'yohko's vengeful rants and K'ile's scent and the family that still had not found their way over the horizon. Face down in the sand, K'piru shuddered.

[Twinflame]

K'ile Tia did not permit K'yohko to speak. Not on purpose. At the very first insult, K'ile committed to silencing the man. Never in his life had he sought to harm another member of the tribe; it was not something he would ever do. But, in his mind, K'yohko was no longer a member of the tribe. No member of Thalen's tribe thought or spoke this way. To him, K'yohko had exiled himself.

 

He did not feel his arms, and could not sense his breath. When he hit K'yohko, he could almost feel the blood-vessels burst in the man's eye. And with another hit, he could feel the man's teeth giving way under the pressure of his fist. He felt the man's nose crack, made his skull clatter about at the end of his spine, and yet the senseless Nunh spoke on.

 

"Kin-killer!" The man accused, and K'ile broke the man further. "Murderer!" The Nunh shouted, and K'ile lay cracks into his skull. "You murdered them! You let them die!" K'ile took hold of the man by the hair on the back of his head, and held him. And still the man frothed, as though all sense of sanity had fled him. If it had, K'ile might show pity, but no.

 

"If Thalen and your daughters are the only thing that ever matter, go join them in death!"

 

Finally, K'ile tore the man down by his head and lay a hard fist against he throat. There was an audible crack when his fist hit, and it was satisfying. If he died, so be it. In the least he would be silent. K'ile threw the man backwards, at the corpse of Yohko's own mother. The Tia shouted, "Every word you say is a lie! If the Nunh can only deal with death by abusing the women of the tribe, then he isn't worthy to stand as beast, much less a man! I would challenge you for the right of Nunh, but you... No, you don't deserve a challenge." He pointed at the man, "Stay there. Do not stand, or you will be dead before you have both feet beneath you!"

[Lyraciilee]

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The first hit did not phase K'yohko's tirade, but it did hurt him. And it made him aware that he could not simply ignore K'ile. Not if he wanted to live. He wanted K'ile to be punished for attaching another tribe member, but he did not want to die in the process. Or rather, he refused to die to that piece of walking refuse that called himself Thalen's brother. Thalen was a good man. K'ile was hardly a man to begin with. While K'yohko had never before had a problem with K'thalen or K'ile, he had always thought them a bit too full of themselves. He had always thought K'thalen doted on K'piru too much and the trouble their daughter K'aijeen had brought to the tribe boded ill to him. K'ile was worse than K'thalen, as he was not even fit to breed. A lazy arrogant Tia, but even still K'yohko had never made a comment. He had always treated them well, because they were family. But this was not what family did. They supported one another, not tried to kill them. They hung on to one another during difficult times, not sit down and let their kin die.

 

K'yohko brought his forearm up to meet with K'ile's second fist, preserving his teeth and spoke on. Another forehead blocked the blow towards his nose, and he spoke on. K'yohko was a fighter by nature. He was stronger than K'ile by nature, or so he thought. He had fought the other Tias and Nunhs and prevailed and he had fought many things and prevailed. His pride rested well on his ability to fight, and his ability to put Tias in their place. Yohko's forearms bruised and cracked with every block to K'ile's punches at his face, but K'yohko did not break under the assault.

 

The upper hand strike at his head caught Yohko off guard and it struck mightily at his already injured head. Pain crushed his body, but it did not quell his anger. His arms came up on impulse to protect his head and luckily, his hand got in the way of K'ile's attack to his throat. The deafening crack was not that of Yohko's throat, but of his right hand which broke messily and made bone stick out at awkward angles. In the disorienting pain, K'yohko was thrown backwards and tumbled down on the ground next to his dead mother.

 

A moment passed and his eyes flickered open to see her face. Beautiful even in death was his mother. Her face was serene, as if it might have found peace with Azyema. For a moment, K'yohko wished that K'ile had indeed struck a fatal blow. Then perhaps he might have found peace besides her.

 

But the moment passed and K'yohko rose to his feet again, bleeding from his head wounds and his hand, but alive.

 

"I do not abuse K'piru. I can only speak the truth of what I see. I can see our family dying, and more than needed because of K'piru! You Thalens think too much of yourselves. It is not the Thalen Tribe, it is the Hipparon tribe! K'ile, I am your brother and my mother was as much family to you as your brother and K'piru! If I am not right to hold the title of Nunh, as a brother I would ask you to strike me down so I might not do any further damage to our family!" The rage had lessened from K'yohko's voice, but not from his eyes. His eyes which were stained red with the blood running down his face burned with the same fury he had yelled upon K'piru with.