Submitted for the November 2023 prompt: Feasts with the Beasts

He lay there, deep in the riverbed. I doubt he would have been if I weren’t there at the right moment; the river would flow again, if the rain ever came. But he was there, almost as if he were waiting for me.

 

I had prayed that morning. “We all must pray every day, Leotie, and thank the spirits,” Elder Mother would say. And I did for a while. Until Father died, at least.

 

That day I prayed, though. Prayed for a sign that the Gods still looked down on us with favor, that we weren’t alone in the prairie. That they would bring the bison back to us so we may make pemmican and need not rely on the arid fields and dead rivers, that the sickness would pass from our people, that we may live in peace, and not fight for survival each day. I prayed for much, expecting nothing, except there he lay.

 

His skin was not ours, not of the wood or earth, but a deep and vibrant red-orange like the pessamin fruit. A curtain of ice covered him from top to bottom, but it did not feel cold to touch. He was light, too. Much lighter than his length would betray. Although my hands were stopped short by that ice of his, it was firm and I could carry him back to the Elders. For weeks he slept, no food, no water, but alive.

 

The smell of smoke. Furious thunder. It was nature herself who came to strike us down, or maybe it came for me. A swirling storm of chaos with the pessamin man at its center.

 

* * *

 

“Wait, no!” I plead. My legs scream in pain as I bound through the tribe, listening to the cries of my people and the warrior yell of our protectors. “Stop!”

 

I stumble and fall before him, my hands out in supplication, my head bowed.

 

“Where have you taken me?” a strange voice asks. I look up in disbelief. “What is this place?”

 

I can see his mouth move and make shapes I could not understand, but the words that came out, words that didn’t match his mouth, those I knew.

 

“You speak Tsalagi?” I ask.

 

“No,” he lies.

 

“I brought you here, from the great river. You weren’t awake.”

 

His eyes widen, and his arms trace shapes in the air. He looks as if he were searching for some divine truth, like me.

 

* * *

 

“You seem to be adjusting well, Nunnehi.”

 

“I told you that was not my name, Leotie,” he responds.

 

“It is the name our people have for you; the Traveler Spirit.”

 

His arms rise again, and I see the little helpers stream from his wrists. Nanobots, he calls them. The word aligning perfectly with his mouth as he speaks it. Those helpers, spirits to me, call down clouds from the sky and soak the selu, toya, and iya. Crops that struggled to grow before Nunnehi. Looking over the fields now, I see nothing but vigor and life. Everywhere he touched, Nunnehi made the prairie thrive.

 

“You are a strange people.”

 

“Yet you help us; do things only the Great Spirits can.”

 

“I told you it is only technology,” another mouth-word, “not divine.”

 

“To us, who cannot fathom the depth of this tecknolologee, it is divine. You are a gift from Unetlanvhi,” I say. “Plus, you have helped us; saved us even. We were on the brink of death.”

 

“It seemed the kind thing to do,” Nunnehi says. “I’ll have others looking for me, Leotie. I received a warning about it last night.”

 

“More Travelers like you?”

 

“Maybe, probably not. Not all of my people are kind. My imprisonment here was not of my design. It may not be peaceful.”

 

“We are no stranger to battle, and Nunnehi is with us. A noble spirit of battle, who fights for our people.”

 

“I am not–” Nunnehi starts.

 

“You are.”

 

* * *

 

“Heriobim! Come out,” a voice booms from the plains beyond the tribe, a noise as if the Earth herself cried out and demanded attention. Nunnehi’s head twists so fast I’m amazed he didn’t break it. We were still tending to the fields, preparing for harvest already; but that voice stops us.

 

Before I can open my mouth, I see Nunnehi run off, his shimmering ice swirling to life around his body, draped in the native clothing of our people. The tanned leather coverings melt away until only his pessamin colored garb is left. I give chase, losing ground to him every second but knowing where he was heading.

 

Just at the edge of the tribe is a party of orange-red men. Each holds his own ice around him, like Nunnehi did. I try to approach, to be beside Nunnehi as I had been these last weeks, but his arm stops me just short. It is trembling.

 

“Heriobim, finally,” one newcomer says. He stands tall at the center of his party, broad-shouldered and firm. A War Chief. “You have hidden from us long enough. It is time to return home and finish your sentence.”

 

“Alright.” Nunnehi, or Heriobim as this new man calls him, lowers his hand and walks away from the tribe, away from me.

 

“Nunnehi, no!” I cry out, lunging forward, until I see the arms all rise in front of me.

 

“Leotie!” Nunnehi screams, spinning towards me and throwing his arms wide out to the side. A brilliant gulf of white-hot flames explodes in front of me, colliding against a wall of air surrounding the tribe. When the fires recede, I see Nunnehi; nothing but a pillar of ash.

 

As it ends, the pessamin attackers look amongst themselves, distracted. “Note: Heriobim sentenced to death upon resisting arrest,” the War Chief says.

 

They don’t notice the shimmering ice that now covers me, this forcefield as it calls itself. The last gift Nunnehi left behind. They don’t notice until they, too, are nothing but ash, consumed by their own weapon.