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"This is the fifth time this moon, olo'eyktan, we cannot ignore this"
He gave a solemn nod of his head, his hairless brow creasing into currents of worry.
He had himself at a bit of a predicament, staring down at the product of a treaty signed many a season ago, when his turn of being chief was fresh, when it seemed too far away to matter for anything. The poor man coughed out a pained wheeze, the teal points of his ears pressed flat to his head and the broad of his tail tucked in the valley of his thighs. It was quite unusual for a warrior to show cowardice like this, especially one of his standard. Txanai certainly was no coward. Far from that; he was on caliber with the very best of his profession, with courage near matching those of the warriors in the tales told to generations of Metkayina infants.
Now he lay on the floor of the tsahik's marui, battered, dazed, traumatized; crimson pooling rapidly at his bruised side as Ronal scrambled to patch up his wounds.
They were pretty grave.
He was shot off of his tsurak, with half the length of an arrow plunging through and embedding itself into the flat of his stomach. Not one of the Omatikaya arrows or one his own people used to spear through fish on hunts, no, this one had a distinction about it. It was smooth, slim, like most all he'd seen; with its slender body ending in a sharp tapering point, invisible from where it disappeared into the man's flesh. Only, instead of stiff, bright feathers like those used by the forest dwelling Na'vi, this had barbs. Short, jagged points sprouting out of its body, poking and scratching at any hand trying to tug it free from whatever it was buried in.
These arrows had a distinct smell, too. Putrid and pungent. Smoky, like the payoang when left hanging over the controlled fires to collect smoke under the sweltering heat of the day. Dank and musky, bitter on the tongue, like tar.
It smelled of burning. Of a thousand angry roaring infernos, fueled by the cruelty of their sadistic rage. It smelled of fire.
Their fire.
A deep groan of agony roused the Metkayina man from his musings, he blinked his blueberry eyes a bit as they adjusted away from the visions of his mind.
Things weren't looking good.
A bead of sweat ran down Ronal's teal forehead as she worked over him, dosing the already dazed man with bucket loads upon bucket loads of pongu pongu- a drink usually reserved for celebration or to let one's mind unravel and go numb after a long hunting venture. This was no cause for celebration. It was being used to quell Txanai's suffering; and it was doing very little of a job.
The man's groans and hisses of pain set a feeling of discomfort within his own stomach, as if he himself had been impaled with the arrow instead of him. He felt sorrow take over his heart; he'd been the one to oversee Txanai's training when he was a boy; all tousled curls of hair and explosive energy, eager and excited to get out onto the water and destroy all the akulas he could.
