Timestamp: 7th day of Summer, 514
The humidity hung oppressively over the Dhani. The heavy moisture felt suffocating, maybe slowing her pace. She didn’t know anymore. Sseth lay coiled safe within his basket. The basket rested upon Ssemet’s backpack and shoulders, tied around her neck with her sash. She had been worried some predator of the sky might see him upon her shoulders and feel it a fit meal. Sseth would surely kill such a predator with a bite but that might be all too late for his own health. Trudging through the brush proved time consuming, Ssemet imagined if she turned around now she might reach the path again before dark, if she could ever find it again.
The viper had the vaguest sense of direction. If she took a chime to stop she could still point in the way of her nest, which was in the east… or maybe it was south now. Ssemet tried not to think about it because the desolace of being irrevocably lost might be just another reason slowing her steps.Instead she used this sense to keep her path straight, straight towards somewhere had to be better than circles towards nowhere. The traders had insisted there were Dhani in this jungle, somewhere in this green world were sisters who had a song she might learn.
When the caravan she had traveled through Kalea with moved on through the pre-dawn hours, they had left her with all the advice they knew to give. None of them had dared go far into the jungle but all seemed to know one cousin or another that surely had. The performer knew a tall tale when she heard one, but some advice did sound sensible. One driver had sold her tall leather boots, broken in by bigger feet than hers, that would keep her legs safe from the dangerous ground cover. The eldest of the party, a matriarch in spirit if not in power, had sold her a foul smelling oil to rub upon her face to keep the biting bugs away. At the time it had seemed a scam, some poltrice of bat dung more likely. It had only taken an hour pushing through the brush to understand what a pittance the gold coin she had paid really was. The last item had been a gift from the youngest member hardly old enough to call a snakeling, had given her a large sturdy stick he had found that morning. It was knobby and twisted, if in truth the Dhani put her full weight on it the stick would snap. Again, this gift she had underestimated, on numerous occasions the stick had served to prod questionable ground and vegetation that Ssemet had no desire to test with her own feet.
In return the viper had left the caravan owner with twenty of her gold mizas. She and Sseth had kept the rodents and small vermin from their food stuffs and provided entertainment in the night. In exchange she had paid a lesser fee for the safety of numbers.
Before leaving the caravan she had satiated her curse. Ssemet had made it a priority not to inflict the travelers with her pain if she could help it, but before walking into this unknown she had no alternative. On the road marauders occasionally attacked or she might catch a creature and force it to writhe in agony before becoming her supper. Still the mute slave’s death had been a necessity. Deep in the midst of their journey the caravan had not been accosted in three days and the headache and chest pain had progressed almost to beyond her tolerance. Dozens of seasons with the curse had allowed her to continue the march until camp was made that night. When the skin on her elbows began to split, Ssemet realized what was required. She had left his body in the deep forest where scavengers would feed on his corpse in a way she could not without delaying her journey. His soundless screams had been almost more horrifying than the blood curdling counterparts she had seen so many nights over. Yet again, her headache had begun a new with the dawn.
It had only been dawn when the path had faded into infinite greenery and now she couldn’t even say the time. The sun was still up, but light diffused through the tree tops and all of the world seemed tinted green. This, the musician imagined, was what foreigners must feel like in the desert. When the desert made images out of nothing but heat and thirst. It was disorientating like not knowing the time and suffocating on air. Never had a land seemed so openly hostile. Surely the Dhani had known in-hospital settlements but never an area where the very land seemed to stalk her. She hunched her shoulders and soldiered on.
After a number of bells the very taste the air became less offensive. The sweaty film of decay as the undergrowth died to give birth to new plant life became less abhorrent. It was during this acclimation that Ssemet’s sense finally allowed perspective of another change. Though the clatter of the jungle life had not quieted, there was a stillness to her surroundings that hadn’t existed earlier. As she slowed to a stop besides a tree straining under the weight of serpentine vines, the basket on her shoulders shifted as Sseth grew unsettled. Sitting low in a crouch the Dhani devested herself of her goods at the base of the tree.
The basket fell still again as the woman pulled her limbs into the slimmest silhouette. Her arms fusing together with her sides and her legs taking singular shape. Slow in times of danger but fast by any other standards, Ssemet’s body coiled in upon itself until the slender white viper slithered from her pile of clothing. She coiled her length and reared up into the air, whatever was out there her best hope of meeting it was as a snake. She was fast, she was venomous and she could amplify a bite into pain so blinding it could debilitate the victim while her venom stole their lives. Every day it was her curse but some days it was her gift, today might be such a day.
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