Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

Tayel grimaced. Shy could have mentioned the open space. Or the lack of towels. At the very least, none of the Varg seemed to pay Tayel any mind. She undressed as modestly as she could and stepped into the basin with haste, leaving her bandaged arm to rest along the lip of the tub. The initial shock and pain at the intense temperature ebbed away, leaving her body in all-encompassing warmth.

Her muscles loosened, and she closed her eyes, cozy enough to sleep if it weren’t for the small crowd. The crowd, and the truth of what Shy said earlier: there was a lot going on. With the war pack meeting happening soon, Tayel didn’t have time to dally. She scrubbed until the water turned murky gray, and dried herself off with her old clothes before slipping into the new, fur-lined ones.

She plucked a wire brush out of the bucket by the base of the tub. Mats of white fur were stuck in the teeth. Nice. She dropped the thing back in place, and ran her fingers through her hair instead. Dry, dressed, and with hair somewhat combed, she grabbed a shard of mirror out of the same bucket and turned it toward her face. Her own eyes widened back at her.

Her skin had tanned, and a smattering of light brown freckles were newly painted across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Her stare had a harder look to it, more narrow and capped by thicker, untrimmed eyebrows. She touched her fingers to the scabbed-over split in her bottom lip, trying to remember when it might’ve happened. This was not the face she last saw reflected months ago on Delta. It was just one more thing that changed.

When she arrived at the dining den a few minutes later, she found Fehn, Jace, Shy, and Locke already at a table. She met Shy’s eyes as she approached, a mixture of fear and elation twisting inside her. Fear at the possibility of everything between them being a dream, elation at knowing it couldn’t have been.

Jace waved her over to the open seat beside him.

“Hey,” she said, falling against the fur-lined bench. “Sorry I’m the last one here. I guess I took more time than I thought.”

“Well, I only got here a couple minutes ago,” Jace said. “Here. Grabbed you a bowl.”

“Thanks.”

“Might want to put a bit more kick in your collective steps,” Locke said. “We do have a meeting.”

“You just want to hurry up so you can get back to prodding me,” Fehn joked.

“Prodding you?” Tayel asked.

Jace paused bringing the fork to his beak. “Oh yeah, the shield prototype. How’s that going?”

“The poking is going well,” Fehn mused. “Needles are sharp. Restraints could be tighter.”

“Restraints and needles. Please,” Shy said. “You spent the whole night launching aether.”

“How else does one test a shield if not by hitting it, princess?”

“Don’t call me princess.”

“We need to go,” Locke said, eyeing his watch. “The Varg alpha isn’t going to let us in if we’re late.”

He hoisted himself up with his cane, and the rest stood after him. Tayel ate what she could of the remainder of her meal as she followed them to drop off their dishes, and then half walked, half jogged out of the den as Locke set an expedited pace toward the war room. For a man with a limp, he moved fast.

She matched the others’ silence as she wound through the complex, the rumbling ground the only sound beside the occasional flicker of torch fire. After seeing the outer wall yesterday, it was a miracle the outpost still held. It was hard to imagine how long the Varg had been fighting. No wonder the outpost’s halls seemed to demand the solemn quiet.

Rounding a bend in the corridor, Tayel picked up the murmur of conversation from the only room at the far end.

Worry edged into her mind. “Are we too late?”

Locke shook his head. “No. They have been meeting for some time already, and will likely continue after we leave. You have been granted an audience, not a full tactical overview.”

The crowd of armored Varg turned to observe their entrance. Tayel lowered her head under their stern gazes.

“These are the outworlders who desire to fight alongside our war pack?” one said.

“Come now, human,” said another, “you promised help — not pups.”

The pack barked in unison, their chests rising and falling with laughter.

“Make room,” a voice boomed from the concealed side of the war table.

The barking dissipated, replaced by claws scraping along the stone ground as the Varg reorganized themselves to make space. A Varg two heads higher than the rest stood at the table, his two pointed ears each bigger than Tayel’s hands. His blue eyes narrowed as she fell into step beside Shy and took her place at the table. The Varg towered all around her, and she lost sight of the edge of the room.

“It is difficult, understanding you outworlders,” the blue-eyed Varg said. “Children should not be in war.”

Tayel didn’t often feel like a child, but in a room full of imposing warriors twice the height of any Varg she’d seen so far, she started to. Even Shy shifted slightly beside her, her head craned upward to match their assessor’s stare.

“They are already in war,” Locke said. “Disallowing their assistance will not change that.”

“But will they be worth the inclusion?” another Varg asked.

“You’ve taken worse bets than on a group of so-called children who have fought off a Rokkir firsthand.”

“That would not be so impressive,” said another warrior, “if our true enemy did not cower behind your father’s lackeys.”

Locke leaned forward, his grin splitting ear to ear. “And so you have to imagine how very threatened a Rokkir would have to be, to come out of hiding and hunt down a handful of children .”

A murmur of growls echoed off the walls, and Tayel thought involuntarily of Ruxbane. She couldn’t have been a threat to him. She couldn’t have been a threat to any Rokkir. She was just some refugee from a ravaged planet.

“Enough,” blue-eyes barked. “I agreed to these outworlders’ presence. We will not waste more time snapping at their heels. Our walls crumble around us.” After the dawning silence, he said, “I am Balcruf. Long have I been charged with protecting Kalanie Outpost, but as we approach what I fear is extinction, my duty is now to all the people of Modnik. I welcome you here to review our war plan, outworlders, but you will find your own place before I allow you to join it.”

Tayel broke his gaze to look over the map in the center of the table. Archaic paper — not even a flexi-screen. A drawing of an enormous city — much larger than what she’d seen of Kalanie Outpost from the sky — took up a majority of the parchment. A foreign word labelled an ink smear on the side of circular city walls, but she suspected its meaning. The smear rested halfway between the inner city and outer wall — undoubtedly meant to denote the Delta shuttle crash Locke had confirmed the night before. She took a steadying breath.

“We’ve known for moons the only way to stop this siege is to deal with the mothership above Cryzoar,” Balcruf said. “It sends countless dispatches of ships and raiders, and those Varg who are abducted in battle are taken there. To date, none of our weapons dent it. Nothing gets through even their shields. Even our magis — or aetherions, as you outworlders call them — can’t harm the vessel. Additionally, while we do not have skycraft of our own, a pack tried to board the ship using Locke’s raider vessel, but the mothership’s anti-air assault proved too powerful to contend with.”

Shy crossed her arms, one idea obviously out the window.

“Their technology is too advanced,” Balcruf continued. “It is impenetrable from the outside, therefore our one hope is to destroy it from the inside .”