Mt. Sensan-Ghi

Act Four - The Eave of Hunting

The sun was setting slowly as Zambina and many like her prepared for the task ahead. Most of them had never participated in the hunt but all felt drawn to it, could feel their senses heightening as the scent of cooling air and night time slowly enveloped their world.

The world was large, insurmountable and so vastly unexplorable that it would take more generations than any of her people could fathom to explore but a minuscule fraction of it despite their ability of flight. All of her people seemed either born with the knowledge of this truth or completely blind to it; either way her people never truly embraced any sentiment other than survival because of it. At this they were masters, they had existed in relatively similar shape even before the eons of the great immortal dwellers began, off of which they fed themselves compulsively now and at great risk to themselves.

They survived in numbers to allow for this now necessary habit to continue. Before the time of immortals they lived in a world of plenty and called themselves the Mozimme. While survival has always rung true to their sense of purpose throughout the eons, once upon a time they lived off of the bounty of the land, as many of the tribes did across the generations. But then at some point in their long history, greater creatures revealed themselves to exist upon the world and destroyed their habitat simply by existing. Some fought, some fled, many died regardless, but nothing they did had any impact on the immortals at all.

Some of these creatures were bigger, some more grotesque, some slower in their inevitable destruction; but always their presence was unanimously felt and feared across the vast world.

As night was turning full, the air was filling with the scent of the hunt; a totally intoxicating miasma of heavy smells that told the present Mozimme that immortals were going dormant. Not all would be dormant at the same time, but the majority did and the stench the dormant ones emitted was so strong and foul that it attracted Mozimme attention from beyond the visual range. They were tiny and completely neglectable compared to the ones they were hunting, but this was the way now, it was all they could do to survive.

Zambina was one of the first to arrive within viewing distance of the dormant colossus at the centre of the miasma. Many more were gathering, forming a cloud around though staying firmly clear for now. This was the calm moment before the storm, where all Mozimme still sane enough to fear would get melancholic and philosophical while the ones already driven mad by the smells were simply waiting for someone else to charge first.

Zambina herself had been part of only one hunt prior and stood on a mental knife edge between dread and lust.

This compulsion is horrible, she thought to herself, so few of us will make it.

She was referring to the hunt she had been a part of and was fortunate to survive, along with only a fraction of this hunt's participants.

Dormant, as everyone knew, was but a concept, a spawn in a mind slowly losing to uncontrollable need for action. While the immortals barely seemed to register anything or anyone as they reshaped the environment to their whims, they generally reacted with deadly force towards pestering. The nature of the hunt was barely a nuisance to them, while to the surviving Mozimme this was a slaughter.

The children, she thought as the last Mozimme reached the cloud that had now assembled at a safe distance around a mountain-like silhouette, my children...

This was the last sober thought she could muster before she, like an increasing number of her peers, succumbed to a luring drum beat. She charged in becoming lost in the swarm that had become the drunken Mozimme tribe.

Zambina didn't know why this ritual that felt engraved into their existence was necessary, and neither did anyone else alive. Not even if they had more time between hazes for survival could anybody have figured it out at this point.