Aberrant: The Middle Children of History - Hunting Grounds

[Tannin]

People say the world is too crowded. 'People' obviously haven't gotten out much.

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For more than a hundred miles in every direction is the pure, inhospitable wilderness of the Gran Chaco. Tannin hasn't seen any sign of human beings in days - which is just fine, as far as it's concerned. Before the Chaco was the Pantanal, the world's largest wetlands (which was, admittedly, a bit more crowded with humans, though not by much), and before the Pantanal was the Cerrado, the world's richest, densest, and most biologically diverse savannah. And before all of that? The Amazon, which needs no description.

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The world is too crowded? What planet do these so-called 'people' live on?

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But Tannin knows the truth, which is that humans instinctively crowd themselves into as tiny a space as possible - believing that there is "safety in numbers" (the foolish creatures) - and then try to convince themselves that these tiny, used up, smelly places constitute "the world". And then - after working so hard to build up their precious societies and civilizations - they complain about overcrowding.

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Humans... They can't live with each other. They can't live without each other. Even after the Almighty Himself came down from heaven and smote their greatest city, scattered them to the four winds, and made it virtually impossible for them to communicate amongst themselves, humans still insist on crawling all over each other like ants in a nest, never seeing, understanding, or appreciating the vastness and beauty of the world that surrounds them. What a waste.

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Still, even Tannin has to admit that this Chaco is a hard land, and that baselines - tiny and frail as they are - are probably wise to stay out of it. The Gran Chaco is nearly six hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers in size - large enough to hold the entirety of France with space left over. The parts of it that aren't a full-blown desert are covered over with cactii and impenetrable thornbrush forests (and yes, that is as unpleasant as it sounds). Water in this land is so scarce that most animals have learned to get by with very little and to get what little they can out of the cactii and the so-called 'drunken trees' that call this place their home. The predators of this green hell get all of their water from the hot blood of their prey; a simple and cruel adaptation that Tannin can only admire.

In the 1930's the Chaco War was fought in this place, which can reach temperatures of more than 120F - and hold it for months on end - between Bolivia and Paraguay because of a mistaken belief that immense oil deposits lurked under the surface. The war lasted four years, and was very brutal, but during those four years more men died at the hands of the Chaco than at the hands of the enemy. Ironically, the Chaco did turn out to be a rich source of timber and tannin (used to make tannic acid, which in turn is used in tanning animal hides into leather, which is itself where the term 'tannin' comes from - though it is not where Tannin got its name).

All of this is incidental however, and Tannin itself is unaware of most of it. What matters is that Tannin is here, and that it is being followed. Has been followed for the past two days.

Initially, Tannin simply attempted to lose its pursuer(s), not really caring why it was being followed, but only that it was being followed. Despite its size, there were not many creatures on the planet capable of tracking Tannin for long, and even fewer who could keep up with it as it blazed its way across land and sea. But as the hours turned into days, Tannin was forced to admit that, whoever its mysterious pursuers were, it would not be able to lose them. So it was time to deal with them.

"Chaco", as it turns out, is the Quechua word for "hunting grounds". How appropriate.

[Tannin]

Guilherme Abreu, better known within the Teragen as The Hare, sprinted across the thorny wastes of the Gran Chaco at several hundred kilometers an hour, kicking up a surprisingly small amount of dust and debris as he did so. The Hare, as his name more or less suggested, looked a lot like a giant, bipedal rabbit - a white one, to be exact. He was one of Orzaiz's boys, a Casablancan, and though his soft, fuzzy looks made him seem harmless enough he was in fact extremely good at what he did. Though if you were to ask him what he did, he probably wouldn't be able to give you a very clear answer.

The Hair was, above all, possessed of extraordinary sensory capabilities, especially in regards to hearing (and yes, he did have the long rabbit ears to prove it). But he was also possessed of great speed and fortitude, as well as a few other desirable traits for one of his profession. It was his vast senses however, combined with his speed, that made him ideal for this particular mission. Only a handful of novas on the planet had the ability to reliably track The Dragon, and of those even fewer could keep up with it. Guilherme, the Hare, was one of those few.

Not that he was particularly happy about that fact at the moment. Being sent on a mission to track down and deliver a message to The Dragon, as it was more and more often referred to inside the Teragen but outside the Harvesters (the Harvesters still called it by its chosen name of Tannin, and everyone else still called it the East River Dragon), was not a job the Hare relished. It was, almost literally, like sending a rabbit to speak with a python, or at least that's how it felt to Guilherme. He'd heard the stories about the Terat's eating habits and predator-like persona, and he couldn't help but wonder if he'd even be given a chance to speak when he finally caught up with Tannin, or if it would mistake him for a tasty snack and eat him before he got the chance.

It was as the Hare was thinking these things, still barreling through, around, and inbetween thorn scrub that it suddenly appeared in front of him. From - literally - out of nowhere, a locomotive-sized dragon stepped directly into his path, it's long serpentine neck twisting around and down so that its eyes (and teeth) were level with Guilherme's.

It looked like he was going to find out whether he was a snack or a welcomed brother rather sooner than he'd expected - or wanted.

[Tannin]

Guilherme slipped and slid to a stop, like a baseball player trying to steal homebase, and finally came to rest less than twenty feet from the enormous predator before him. He'd never seen The Dragon in the flesh before, and was shocked at how truly massive it was!

It looked as though it were at least twice the size of a full-grown African elephant, but the Hare knew this was largely an illusion caused by The Dragon's long muscular neck, longer tail, and the enormous leathery wings that kept half unfolding and refolding at its sides. However, where an elephant was built like a bus, Tannin's build was sleek, graceful, and feline and obviously built for speed. It's head was crowned by horns, some of which were as long as the Hare was tall, and every one of which ended as sharp and deadly as a spear, and its mouth was filled with razor-sharp teeth far larger than any Guilherme had ever seen, even on the Discovery channel. The entire ridge of its spine, from the tip of its tail to just behind the horns on its head, was covered in evenly spaced spikes of lethal appearance. In fact, it seemed as though every joint, the length of every limb, and any other part of Tannin's body that wasn't vital for unobstructed movement had at least a few deadly horns or spikes protruding from it. In short, The Dragon was the most lethal thing the Hare had ever seen - or wanted to see.

It was also far more magnificent than the pictures and descriptions of his fellow Terats had led him to believe, and Guilherme realized suddenly that The Dragon must have changed in recent months - become greater in some respect, more awe inspiring and... well, beautiful wasn't quite the word, but it was close. This wasn't very difficult for the Hare to accept, because if the rumors were true then Tannin had been a nova for longer than almost anyone, and had been at the forefront of nova evolution since the very beginning. The Hare found it strange that, so far as any Terat knew, The Dragon had never undergone Chrysalis. He found it difficult to understand how it had managed to forge so far beyond baseline humanity without the aid the Teragen's greatest tool, and it frightened him to wonder what might have changed inside of its gigantic and unfathomable mind after having gone through so much unaided change on the outside.

Picking himself up, the Hare forced himself to look The Dragon in the eye and said, "hola".

"Hola", returned The Dragon in a surprisingly rich and smooth voice that nonetheless sounded as large and dangerous as its owner.

A curious fact concerning The Dragon was that no one had ever yet spoken a language to it that it could not understand and respond in. Whether this was because it literally spoke every language in the world, or simply because it spoke so many that no one had managed to stumble onto one of the few that it didn't was anyone's guess. A bigger mystery was where it had learned all those languages to begin with, as it was not known as a particularly verbose individual even with the Teragen. Regardless, it spoke very good Spanish, just as the Hare had heard, so that was the language that he spoke to it in.

"I've got a message for you", he said, "from-"

The Dragon cut him off. "Before you say any more, little nova, you should know that we are not alone." Its long serpentine neck stretched up and away as it looked off in the distance at something unknown. "I had thought that you were the only one tracking me, but I realize now that I was mistaken..."

"What? Are you certain?", asked Guilherme, but then his long rabbit ears twitched once, then twice, and he looked in the same direction as Tannin. "I hear it now! Who is it?"

"I am not sure", it answered, "but I suspect it is yet another representative of a strange group of novas that has approached me on a few occasions before now. It is almost as though they wait for me amongst the wild places of the world. Like this one..."

"They?"

"As I said, it seems to be a group of them. A different nova has approached me each time." Tannin was still staring off in the distance, as if it had already spotted "them", and was watching their approach. Distractedly, it said, "there is something... not right about them."

Suddenly it's tree-trunk-sized neck swung back around, and it fixed one of its eyes on Guilherme. "You should go. We can meet again elsewhere, afterwards."

With bravery he did not feel, the younger Terat answered, "No! If you are in trouble, I can stay and help. My message is no good if you aren't around to hear it! The Cou-"

"Silence!", hissed The Dragon, its gaze hard, "we may be as far from the ears of Civilization as it is possible to go while still on land, but that does not mean there are no ears to hear what you say out here! Speak no names here that you do not wish compromised!"

"I-I am sorry! But I would still like to help."

Tannin's gaze softened somewhat, and it replied, "I have no doubt of that. Not to put to fine a point on it, however, but I do not need your help." The Hare did not quite know how to respond to this, but he couldn't argue with it either. This was Tannin he was speaking to, after all, one of the only novas to have taken on a branch of Team Tomorrow alone and emerge undefeated. Who was he to offer this creature his help?

"Protect your message", it continued, "Disappear into this wilderness and wait. When I have finished dealing with my pursuers I will continue West and South as I have been. You can track me, as you have been, and we will meet again at a safer - and unmonitered - location."

Looking every bit the nervous rabbit, Guilherme asked, "Where?! Where will we meet?"

"Speak no names, remember? Don't worry so much, brother; we are novas of the One Race. To such as ourselves, even a pathless wilderness such as this should be no obstacle. We will speak again, soon enough. I promise."

Guilherme took personal comfort in hearing The Dragon speak like this; it bolstered his own belief in their shared philosophy, and gave him the courage and assurance he needed. His ears and nose still twitched nervously, but finally he nodded once. "Goodbye", was all he said, and then the Hare was gone once more, a swiftly settling cloud of dust following in his wake.

Tannin watched the younger Terat go, and then it turned its thoughts towards those 'others' who had, once again, come out to treat with it. It would not have long to wait.

[Tannin]

For some time, only the sound of Tannin's approaching pursuer could be heard, with no sign of the pursuer him/herself. Tannin's hearing was extremely accute, but even so, it was apparent that the noise was quite loud and that he was hearing it from many miles away. It was a strange sound that defied easy description; a kind of humming, droning, howling sound that rippled periodically with a higher pitched outburst mixed into and around the general cacaphony, as though many different vocal chords were wailing in unison. Tannin eventually decided that it bore a resemblance to the braying or yelping of a large pack of dogs, but its hyper-sensitive ears could tell that the noise was originating from a single source rather than from many.

While it waited for its pursuers to finally appear, Tannin lay itself down and reclined amongst the rocks and the sand and the thornbushes of the Gran Chaco, like a gigantic reptilian lion basking in the midday sun. These meetings had always unsettled Tannin, but they did not frighten him.

The sound his pursuer made as it approached had been tugging at some memory buried in Tannin's distant, pre-eruption past, but try as it might, it could not worry loose the memory that the sound was recalling.

Until its pursuer stepped straight out of Arthurian Legend and padded onto the top of a rise some half kilometer distant. Then Tannin almost laughed - if dragons did laugh - as it recognized the noise as the 'bark' of the mythological Questing Beast, otherwise known as the 'Barking Beast', whom King Pellinore and his ancestors before him had sworn to hunt and kill. Of course, this was no mythical beast, but a nova who merely resembled one, as Tannin resembled a dragon.

Though it was over five hundred meters away, Tannin could observe it as though it were right there beside the creature. Its form was a strange, but beautiful amalgamation of different animals, much as the original Questing Beast had been. Its head was part canine and part snake, with a very wide mouth filled with many sharp teeth, attached to a long and definitely serpentine neck. This was attached to a powerful feline torso covered in short, silky, glistening black fur. Its legs were also the sleek and powerful legs of a big cat, but (and here - as well as in the coloring of its fur - the nova's form was different than that of the Questing Beast) its fore and hind feet were those of a giant bird of prey, gnarled and dangerous in appearance and tipped with enormous talons. It also had a very long tail, the last portion of which seemed to be covered in brightly colored red and green feathers.

All in all, it looked to be about eight meters in length from the tip of its snout to the end of its long tail, and more than two meters in height at the shoulder. Which made it larger than Tannin's sometime companion Monster, but noticeably smaller than Tannin itself. Riding on its back, and looking like a small child in comparison to the Beast, was a dead woman. Many years ago, when Tannin had first been approached by another nova while out in the wild places of the world, it had been the corpse-woman who had done so, and it was not surprised to see her now. She called herself 'Ginny'.

Ginny pulled thick strands of long greasy hair, colorless with grime, away from her milky eyes and looked in Tannin's direction, smiling a wicked smile. Her skin was a sickly green and yellow color, and her smile held even more teeth, and sharper, than the Beast's mouth did. Tannin could smell her rotting flesh from where it reclined, despite the distance between them.

After a short pause, the Beast began padding down from the rise again, moving towards Tannin at a brisk, but by no means rushed pace.

Tannin became aware of a brownish mist that it had at first mistaken for dust, trailing along the ground in the wake of the Beast's tread. But the mist moved with a purpose and, as Tannin's ultra-acute eyes scrutinized its movements, it began to discern tiny faces in the mist's shifting whirls and vortices. It was a third nova, whom Tannin had encountered not too many years in the past, and it was glad the nova had not taken his true form, as it was most disturbing. Like Ginny, the mist also gave off an odor, but it was not the fresh putrescence that hung like a cloak around the dead woman. It was much more subtle than that, and would most likely be unnoticeable to a baseline until they were very close to it. Incongruously, the odor made Tannin think of stink bugs and hopelessness. During their previous meeting, the mist-nova had given his name as ‘Merodach’.

The nova that Tannin still thought of as the Questing Beast had not yet covered half the distance between Tannin and the rise that the creature had first appeared on, when one of a stand of palo borracho trees (the famous 'drunken trees' of the Gran Chaco) nearby began to tremble and shake with such violence that it started to crack and splinter, shedding leaves like dandruff all the while. The tree's swollen trunk, the 'drunk's belly' from which it took its name, began to throb and swell in a way that a tree trunk should not be able to. Tannin had met the nova responsible for this phenominon only a few years previously, and so had seen this sort of thing before, but even so it wasn't quite prepared for it when the pulsating trunk suddenly burst open, cracking up its length and sending splinters of shivering wood everywhere, and spewing forth a wet bloody mass that looked almost like a cluster of thick roots and almost like human entrails. Perhaps it was both.

The shattered remains of the dying tree collapsed in on istelf and crashed to the ground, its 'guts' falling all around it in a gory mess. Tannin spared a glance at the Questing Beast and its dead rider, and saw that they were much closer now, and the brownish mist was beginning to coalesce into a recognizably humanoid form. It sounded as though the palo borracho was having its trunk and each and every one of its branches, branchlets, and twigs systematically cracked and broken, and when Tannin turned its eyes back towards the tree it saw that this was more or less what was happening. The bloody entrails had insinuated themselves throughout the tree's breadth and length, slimy red tendrils wrapping up and crushing its wooden form into something else. Something that was not recognizably humanoid, but that did seem to have the same number and kind of appendages. It was already quite large, larger than even a full grown palo borracho could account for, and it was obviously growing larger still.

The tree-thing rolled over and used what passed as its arms and legs to pull itself to what passed for its feet. What had once been a simple tree of slightly comical appearance was now a gigantic horror shaped from jagged wood and bloody entrails. It stood at some fifty feet or so in height, making it the only nova Tannin had ever met that was larger than itself. Instead of a face, there was only an enormous and ragged mass of torn entrails from which blood dripped in steady rivulets onto its wooden body and onto the ground far below. Another, larger mass of bloody guts hung from where its belly would be, and dangled obscenely between its pillar-thick legs. The nova had never given Tannin a name when they had met previously, but Tannin privately thought of him as 'Humbaba'.

The single most disturbing thing about Humbaba was his 'face'. For to anyone looking at it, it seemed as though portents and signs and secrets could be augured from the patterns of entrails and intestines and roots, and from the blood that dripped from it all. But the portents were always of calamities that would befall the viewer, and the secrets were only of betrayals and painful truths. Tannin looked into the face of Humbaba, and what it saw there sent a shiver up its horned and ridged spine.

The Questing Beast and Ginny had arrived, and Tannin saw that Merodach had finally materialized - which was unfortunate. Merodach was nearly as disturbing to behold as Humbaba. His head was normal enough in shape, but his face was inhuman with an enormous mouth, lipless and containing row upon row of needle-like teeth, no nose, and four enormous bulging eyes with black slits for pupils. Beginning under his outer set of eyes and continuing down towards his neck were many tiny, screaming faces, their twisted mouths emitting a sound so high up the spectrum that even Tannin had difficulty hearing it. Under his chin were more faces, barely visible from Tannin's perspective, and two tiny arms with tiny five-fingered hands that twisted and writhed, the fingers constantly tearing at the empty air. His body was of about average height and build (though his muscles were very defined and wiry), but his skin was slick like that of a frog, and wicked spines jutted out from odd places on his body. Merodach's skin was greenish-black in color, and he was naked.

It had occurred to Tannin that in times past, when one of these novas had come out to meet with it, they had come individually. This was the first time in the fifteen years since Ginny's corpse had first found Tannin and spoken to it in the Balkan wilderness that more than one of this strange group had appeared to it at once. The dragon did not need its formidable intellect to understand that this was most likely a bad sign.

Ginny slid from the Questing Beast's back and stepped forward towards Tannin. As she did so everything went silent. As utterly and completely silent as the void of interstellar space, as an ancient tomb, as the depths of oblivion. And then from out of the silence came a voice like something borne on a diseased and pestilential wind, and Ginny the dead woman addressed Tannin the dragon.

Her grinning, horrible mouth did not move as she said (in English, but in a thick Eastern European accent), with a tone that was part good humor and part mockery, "Greetings, oh mighty dragon of the river. We have come to treat with you once again."