

THE ELEMENTS OF FREEDOM



by M. C. A. Hogarth


Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 M.C.A. Hogarth

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"But I'm not an ambassador," Carevei protested, her hands on the edge of the desk flexing as she stared at the wallscreen. "I don't even know these people, or anything about them!"
"We sent an ambassador. He didn't do much good," the tired human male in charge of the ad-Ciracaa Embassy replied. "Maybe if we send a scientist instead, they'll listen."
"But why me?"
"You're the one who discovered the fault line." One of his pepper-gray brows rose. "Do you want those people to die?"
Carevei's muscles tightened through her back. "Of course not."
"Then go out there and convince them to get the blinding fire off that piece of land before it's too late. They'll listen to you, EarthHunger. You know what you're talking about."
Her ears flicked back against her skull. Carevei closed her topaz-colored eyes and said, "All right." She heard the chime that signaled the connection's close, and tilted her face slightly to the right; the warmth of Ciracaa's brilliant yellow sun painted the inside of her eyelids red, touched her lips and drew the moisture from them. She turned away to pack.
Sixty-two hours later, the Tam-illee foxine leaned against the window of the dragonfly and watched the endless gold plains rush past. She'd taken the assignment to Ciracaa after four years of wandering Tam-ley, frightened of the path that had beckoned her. Her intention had been to become a chemist, but halfway through her schooling an errant elective on seismology had seized her attention so tightly she'd been unable to resist the inevitable change of curriculum. Her father would have called it flightiness, had he known. Carevei herself didn't understand what about the breaking of the earth attracted her so, but three years later she'd emerged from school a seismologist on a planet with few earthquakes and several hundred thousand fellow earth scientists.
The university-sponsored job on Ciracaa, then, could have leaped out of a dream. It still seemed like one after seven months. The Ciracaana had proscribed high technology across most of their homeworld in an effort to preserve their ancient culture; only in the Twins, the two starport cities on either hemisphere, could off-worlders and natives alike partake of the Alliance's vast technological harvest. Carevei lived in Nguva, the northern city, but it was the wilderness that drew her--the broad oceans rimmed with pale lilac sands, the low blue mountains streaked with silver-gray, and above all, the endless plains of sun-bleached grasses, hiding beneath their velvet nap the corrugated, secret heart of a violent earth.
In all the months she'd spent on Ciracaa, Carevei had met few natives, and all of them in the city. As the dragonfly drew her ever closer to her drop-off point, she felt a moment's cold doubt--that she would fail to convince the tribe living there to move, that it would be destroyed by the earthquakes she'd predicted would begin as soon as a month from now, that somehow, her having discovered the fault would make her responsible for any lives it claimed. The Tam-illee splayed her hand against the glass of the window and let her temple rest against it.

#

"Stop!"
Carevei stiffened where she crouched in the high grasses. Her dusty taupe fur would have been perfect camouflage had she not had a head of hair the color of a panther's back. Moving silently through shifting grass wasn't one of her most practiced skills anyway, and she had absolutely no desire to disobey such an aggressive voice.
"Stand up...slowly!"
She rose, inch by painful inch, above the ears of wild grain.
Twenty feet away, a barbed spear as long as she was tall traced a circle like a reticule over her distant rib-cage. A ripple of amazement traveled her body at the sight of the Ciracaana warrior who held it; the civilization cradled to the breasts of the city natives had obviously never touched him. He was a tower of wiry muscle at almost ten feet tall, his lower half the supple four-footed body of a brown feline with splotches of gray, white, and black, his upper half a bare-chested foxine biped's, complete with a thin demi-muzzle and black-backed triangular ears. His golden hair fell braided over one shoulder, wrapped with scarlet leather cords; gold armbands flashed from his biceps as he moved, and a crude but ingenious harness around his lower barrel and second chest supported a number of variably-sized pouches.
The phosphorescent blue eyes, accented with whorls of white and crimson paint, had fixed on her with the intensity of a laser. She felt oddly overdressed. "Do you under the protection of another tribe travel?"
Carevei repeated the ritual phrase from her Embassy reading session. "I travel alone. I am a Starfallen."
He lowered his spear, and she gradually deduced from the tension of his ears and mouth that he scowled. "Another off-worlder. Have you come your disgraced cousin-member to retrieve?"
"I have come to speak with your Sun Mother," Carevei replied.
His mottled tail lashed once, disturbing the grass around his lithe body. "You have come to us to lie as your cousin-member has?"
"I have come to speak with your Sun Mother," Carevei said again, beginning to tremble and ignoring it to continue firmly, "My words are for her, not for you."
His hiss startled her so much she jumped backwards before she realized he was laughing. "You do not know what you walk into, Starfallen, but you may the path you have chosen follow, good or ill. I will to the camp of the Lifehawk escort you."
"Thank you," Carevei said. The words shook only a little.
An hour through folds of grass-felted earth proved long enough for her escort to deposit her on the edge of the camp. He vanished before she could thank him, leaving her disturbed at how quietly he had moved. Turning her gaze back to the path before her, Carevei cast aside her seven-month-old innocence and looked for the first time at the seasonal camp of a tribe of the Ciracaana. A score of octagonal hide tents was arranged haphazardly in a cleared-away space; their painted sides fluttered in a faint breeze, glistening with images of birds and animals in ocher yellow, clay red, mineral green. Eight-sided designs of rocks outside and to the right of each tent's entrance resolved with further observation into deep, small firepits.
The Tam-illee hesitantly walked into the cleared area, detecting no signs of habitation until she became aware of the rustling of feet and the low murmur of words, contrasting strangely against the city-dialect she'd learned. Beyond a cluster of tents, she stumbled onto a round area bordered on almost all sides by grasses higher than her waist, and there--bodies, movement, tension. Thirty-odd of the natives, their hides striped and spotted every color from white and pale rose to slate blue and black, sat restlessly in a rough circle around a solid female of their race and a biped male who was not. Carevei moved forward, sandy ears rotating towards them.
"It is for the off-worlder time to leave," said a ruddy male with geometric patterns painted in white across his second back. "Of his talk we have enough heard! He has no words to us to say."
Low, angry murmurs rose at this comment, to which the off-worlder in question, a wolfine Hinichi, said wearily, "I've told you the truth again and again. If you won't listen to reason, then you will have to listen sooner or later to reality."
Carevei's ears folded back. Ambassador or not, even she could be more tactful. She stopped a few lengths away from the circle and called, "He's telling the truth."
Thirty-odd faces whipped to face her, braids flying, spears digging into the ground. The sudden object of their attention clenched her taupe-colored hands and said, "My name is Carevei EarthHunger. I'm a seismologist from Nguva. I discovered the fault your camp is sitting on."
"Another Starfallen," someone muttered.
"You must move to where it's safe," Carevei said. "This place will not fit that criterion very soon."
"Those are the words of the other off-worlder," a young female said. She stepped out of the circle to look at the Tam-illee, her green eyes a shock of color against the black-striped white of her pelt. "Why have you been sent the same words to say?"
"Because no one wants to see you hurt," Carevei answered. She grasped her courage steadily in hand and strode to the circle's edge, facing the female in the center, the one decorated in paint and medallions that splintered the sunlight into the shapes of hawks and deer. "Are you the Sun Mother?"
"You address her."
Carevei bowed from the waist. "Sun Mother, the danger is real. I am a scientist. It is my job to know such things. Please, move to a different camp this season."
"Are you willing yourself to prove?" the female said. Beside her, the Hinichi male frowned, tail freezing in exasperation.
Taken aback, Carevei answered, "Of course."
"You are willing then, to undergo the rite your tribe-cousin would not?"
Her stomach seized into a knot. "What...rite do you speak of, Sun Mother?"
The Ciracaana stared down at her. "The rite of the Vessel. You will seek of a totem its approval, and become of its wisdom a receptacle. Only then can we of your truth be certain."
Carevei glanced around at the inscrutable faces, then at the sullen ambassador. "Is that the only way you'll listen to me?"
"Yes," was the implacable reply.
The Tam-illee foxine bowed again, feeling the sun on her back through the thin fabric of her white blouse. "Then I will do it."
The circle erupted into cacophony, the Sun Mother's strident voice reigning over it. "Ylriasna, take to the tent the Starfallen and prepare her! I will the bones of the elements make ready."
Carevei found a white hand encircling her upper arm as the striped female who had spoken earlier answered, "Yes, Elder!" and began to direct her out of the furor. Once around the corner, the Ciracaana said, "Come! I will in a tent place you, and help you make ready." A spark of excitement edged her words.
"Ah...thank you, Yl..Ylriasna?" Carevei worked her mouth around the name, ears falling at her poor pronunciation.
Ylriasna only hissed in what the Tam-illee took to be a giggle, leading her toward a large octagonal tent near the outskirts whose taut sides displayed leaping grasscats in titanium white. "Do not be worried. I find peculiar your name, as much as you do mine. What did you say it was?"
"Carevei EarthHunger."
"Is that your tribe's name?"
Carevei shook her head, dark hair moving over her shoulders. Her blouse was already streaked with sweat. "It's what my people call a Foundname. When you discover something that has changed you completely, you name yourself after it."
"And why did this name you choose? EarthHunger?"
A chill coruscated across Carevei's spine. "I'm not sure. It's what I chose to do. I learn the earth." Knowing how little of an explanation it was, she said, "I hope I haven't offended your tribe as my...cousin-member...did."
Ylriasna pulled open the flap. "Do not over your conduct be worried. You've already this camp pleased with your willingness to do what your cousin-member would not."
"I see," Carevei said, wishing she did. She walked into the tent, aware that the far taller Ciracaana was ducking to follow her. Inside, a hammock stretched diagonally from the center pole to two of the eight shafts forming the outer perimeter. The interior was far larger than she would have imagined smaller biped nomads building. Several blankets of tanned animal hide had been meticulously folded to display the geometric designs dyed on them to best effect. A small wicker chest sat against the wall nearest the entrance, and most incredibly, a lamp hung above it, glowing a pale green that provided a soothing illumination for a tent whose deep shadows seemed inappropriate to the summer afternoon outside. The Tam-illee walked to the contrivance, touched her fingers to its base. Octagons of real wood formed the top and bottom, and between them a skin thin unto translucence provided the light's egress.
"How does it work?" Carevei asked, her fingertips gently probing the edges. She heard Ylriasna sit behind her.
"The light-cages? We put in them worms with some food. In the dark, they glow."
"Amazing," Carevei murmured. She stared at the lamp. "You really made these? The wood...where did it come from?"
"It did not from the sky fall," was the bemused reply. "We for the wood trade with the tribe of the Longfoot. The worms live in wood longer." Ylriasna folded her arms. "Why are you with the light-cage so fascinated? It is a simple thing."
"But it's not," Carevei murmured, surprised at her own interest. She shook her head, trying to define the emotion and failed; she said again, "It's not."
Ylriasna studied her for a few moments, then said, "Come, Starfallen. About the Vessel's Rite I  must speak and to this telling you should listen closely. Would you like to sit?"
She realized abruptly that she would very much like to sit. Carevei lowered herself to the ground and folded her legs beneath herself, resting the sides of her wrists on her knees. She trained her gaze on the Ciracaana, observing briefly the almost flawless verticality of the stark stripes that girded Ylriasna's lower and upper body, even in her mane. Zebra, she thought suddenly. Terran zebra.
"The important thing in this rite for you to seek is the approval of the totem," Ylriasna said earnestly, leaning forward. "You will know that this you have gained when you are given of his visitation a tangible sign."
"Like what?" Carevei asked.
"Like a feather. Or the hairs of a tail, or a broken tooth," said the Ciracaana. "Something to us you can bring back to show."
Surprised, Carevei said uneasily, "Then I'm supposed to actually see one of these animals?" She'd detected none of the local fauna while walking through the grasses toward the village.
"Just so," Ylriasna answered. She smiled, a distinctive combination of dipped ears and wrinkled nose that Carevei had seen once or twice in passing on the faces of the city-natives. "If you with such a sign return, then you will have in the tribe status enough to be listened to."
"There's no more? I just walk out into the prairie, wait for an animal to pass by, pick up some of its sheddings, and come back, and you'll move?" The Tam-illee steadied herself with a hand on the ground. Why had the Hinichi ambassador not agreed to so simple a process?"
Ylriasna shifted; uncomfortably, the vixen thought. "No. The totem must to you speak. You must have the visions. That is why I must prepare you with the paint, and why the Sun Mother is for you crushing the bones of the elements."
"The bones of the elements," Carevei repeated uncertainly.
"Yes. The leavings of the eight elements. Wind, sky, fire, sun, stars, moon, water, and earth. When we administer the bones to you, to your success at having visions it will add much."
"Drug!" Carevei exclaimed. "You're talking about a drug!"
"I have heard your cousin-member call it so," Ylriasna said. She raised herself on her four, supple feline legs. "But we are time-wasting. The totem you are seeking must choose you, and then we can begin painting."
Carevei's tail flicked. "I have to choose one? That makes it harder."
Ylriasna shook her head, and Carevei could just detect something like amusement and curiosity in the other's mannerisms as the Ciracaana opened the wicker chest and reverently lifted from within it a large black satchel. "Starfallen! So strange you are! Mere people cannot a totem choose, as if the symbols of life were theirs to command. The totem will choose, not backwards. Now," she sat before Carevei and stretched open the little mouth of the satchel, "put into the bag of the void your hand, and let the totem guide you."
Carevei studied the Ciracaana's face for a few heartbeats, seeing in it a sobriety that leaped past the boundaries of an alien body language, and turned her attention to the satchel. No light penetrated its depths, no hints allowed to what she would find within. Silently, the Tam-illee vixen slipped her hand into the bag. Fingertips met cool metal, thin discs sliding over and over one another. She grasped one, trying to discern its shape by feeling its edges. When an unexpectedly sharp corner sliced open one of her fingers, she could not quite throttle her gasp.
"That one! Take it out!" Ylriasna sounded much older, as if channeling a wisdom deeper than her experience.
Reluctantly, Carevei withdrew her prize and held it up for the Ciracaana to see. The shape of a bird of prey, symmetrical wings outstretched on either side of a head in proud profile to the right, reflected all of the light of the lamp--save on the edge of its spread tail where the Tam-illee's blood stained it.
Ylriasna stared with green eyes as wide as stones. "The lifehawk, the tribe totem. And it has marked you already. This is a powerful sign." The Ciracaana looked at her, face still slack with astonishment. "I do not who you are know, Starfallen, but the elements can in a way touch you that I have not of another off-worlder heard. It is mete that the Sun-Mother wants you to succeed."
"She does?" Carevei asked, startled. That the tribe's elder had emotions seemed improbable.
Ylriasna wrinkled her nose in a definite grin as she replaced the satchel in the chest and lifted out a dizzying array of baked clay jars, each marked with a bright color on its lid and walls. "If she did not, she would not to the best ritual painter in the tribe have sent you. Undress, and begin we will."
Reassured and belatedly aware that her tension was a combination of anxiety and excitement, Carevei pulled off her blouse.

#

Seven hours later, Carevei stood naked before the Ciracaana of the tribe of the Lifehawk, naked despite the short white shift clasped at her ribcage with a band of incised gold, despite the dagger on her leg ritually tied in the ceremonial knot of willingly relinquished power, despite the heavy armbands and masses of jewelry, bells, bracelets, earrings. Spending the hours in silence with only the soft susurrus of Ylriasna's breathing and the occasional plangent sound of droplets of falling paint had eased her into a fugue as flowers and leaves and abstract animals and designs grew out from her spine. The movement of the brush had stripped her of the years she'd taken her body for just a part of her, forcing her awareness of each limb, each hair, the groove of her hips, the rise of her buttocks, the slope of a shoulder blade, the swell of her biceps. Standing in the flickering shadows of the torches ringing the meeting circle, Carevei felt herself a newborn, her senses tingling in every square inch of her pelt, her skin as she stood in the vespertine dark.
The Sun Mother stepped forward, a young female beside her cupping a clay bowl so brilliant a white shadows proved incapable of clinging to its surface.
"Carevei of the tribe of the Starfallen off-worlders. Have you been by a totem chosen?"
The Tam-illee lifted her chin, hearing the soft plaint of the bells woven into her night-dark hair. "I have, Elder."
"Let now these others hear your claim."
Carevei took a deep breath, then lifted her hand to touch the stained medallion centered over her forehead. She recited the formula Ylriasna had taught her. "Lifehawk chose me, Lifehawk claimed me, Lifehawk has by blood already marked me."
Soft murmurs ran around the edge of the circle. Carevei could just detect the slight widening of one of the Sun Mother's eyes.
"Carevei EarthHunger Starfallen. We have your claim heard. Upon your return with the physical mark of the lifehawk, we will know for truth your words. But the elements to court is a task difficult for those of us who for the joy of earth forsook their symbolic life. Help we will offer you. Are you for the bones of the elements prepared?"
"I am," Carevei answered.
"Then receive this gift, and be to the elements abstracted." The Sun Mother gestured for her handmaiden to come forward and lifted from the bowl a slender reed. She leaned forward, grasped Carevei's chin firmly, and tipped her head back.
"For wind."
The Tam-illee closed her eyes, felt the mild summer breeze against her exposed upper back and legs, controlled her jolt of surprise as the Ciracaana Elder blew a short, sharp puff of dust up her right nostril. A chill ran like water down her back. She could hear the breathing of all the thirty-odd Ciracaana watching her, felt their gazes on her.
"For sky. For fire. For sun." The reed slid out of her right nostril and into her left. "For stars. For moon. For water. For earth."
The warmth of the Sun Mother's hand against her chin dissipated. Carevei let her head down gently, her hyperawareness extending past her body into the air where the night seemed to saturate its molecules, painting them black. The Tam-illee focused with difficulty on the Ciracaana Elder.
"Now we bind your eyes and to the sacred place take you, there to succeed or fail as truth will judge."
Carevei felt the dark fabric shutting out her eyesight, almost moaned in protest as the sense that had grounded the abnormal amount of information seeping in through her ears, her skin, her nose vanished, leaving her nauseated and disoriented. Her arms lifted; she thought it was of their own volition, but the tingle at the tips of her fingers whispered songs to her of someone else's hands, grasping hers firmly, drawing her forward. The Tam-illee clove through the night, as if each needle of hair on her body had become a knife to pierce the thickness of the air.
The walk drew out interminably, a thread of minutes faintly connected through the haze of her perception. The vertigo she experienced came, not as a result of sudden motion, but of its sudden halt.
"May you by the elements be guided," the Sun Mother said, the sash unwinding from around Carevei's head. She blinked open her eyes and saw no one, the Ciracaana all melted away into the shadow-spikes of the grasses in the moonlight.
Carevei EarthHunger stood alone on the prairie, her face lifted to the breeze falling like a benison from the sky. No city lights drew attention away from the stars; no sounds interrupted the melodies of wind on grass. The pressure of the lifehawk medallion against her forehead soothed her fear and doubt, and she lifted her arms to the swollen moon, her breathing deepening, the bells in her hair and tail tinkling.
"Lifehawk...," the words leaped from her mouth, her palms outstretched, fingers curved to cup the pale light, "Lifehawk, if it is your will to save these people, grant me your visions!"
Her ankle snapped as the earth lurched beneath her and slammed her down. Carevei gasped past watering eyes, digging her nails into the soil as the ground bucked, the bells in her hair jangling. Earthquakes? It was too soon! The results of the tests hadn't predicted any activity until the plates had moved for another month! The Tam-illee's eyes widened. The tribe! She had to get to the tribe, to warn them, to tell them to leave, it was too soon, something was wrong, wrong, wrong...
Wrong...
The thunder of the earth ripping apart, so familiar, forgotten. The wooden walls around her begin to collapse as she clutched her stuffed gryphon to her chest, too petrified to move toward--
Toward the beams beginning to crumple.
Toward the screams of shattering crystal.
Toward the figure holding out a hand, the bemused astonishment frozen on her face as the ceiling buried her, her, her...
Mother!
Carevei screamed against the ground as it snarled and shuddered. "Mother! Dam-ley, Mother! No...." She sobbed, turning her face into the soil. "It ate my mother. The earth took my mother from me. Oh, Iley, Iley, Iley..." The words rushed out of her as inexorably as the memory, crashing through a wall as old as her childhood. She tilted her head back as the anguish seized her, and in her defiance cried, "NO!"
A screech higher than hers made her throw her arms in the air, ducking away from the bloated face of the moon. Feather-edged patterns blocked out the light, and her nose filled with a spicy-sweet scent reminiscent of the bones of the elements. She felt something ripping at her, and instead of flailing, she became utterly still, stretched like an archer's bow with her arms an arc to the sky.
Her arm trembled beneath the weight of a hawk, mantling its wings as its talons sank into the top of her right hand. Carevei's tears dried as it folded its wings, staring at her with pale gold eyes that matched her own. Her grief drifted slowly into a pool at the center of her body.
"Lifehawk," Carevei whispered.
Shifting on her hand, the hawk stared away from her. Blood dripped into the nest of torn grasses threshed by her convulsions. Carevei quivered under his weight, physical and not. It returned its gaze to her, eyes far more alien than any Ciracaana's; she saw herself reflected against those gold surfaces, broken from a battle she hadn't even known she'd been fighting all of her life. She saw the peace beginning to settle in her face, and the surprise that she'd hadn't felt it in so long.
Talons gripped her hand, tearing across tendon and bone. The hawk lifted its wings, feathers spreading, and vaulted from its living perch, circling up into the sky. Carevei watched it, trembling, teeth chattering with the shock, until against the disc of the moon she saw no smudge.
The hyperawareness rushed back to her. The blood curling around the edge of her hand to fall to the ground set her nerve endings afire. The sensuous friction of the broken bones of her ankle lifted the hair all along her back. Sweat darkened her pelt and soaked through her hair, slicking against the medallions and jewels there, but the familiar pressure of the lifehawk medallion against her forehead gave her strength. Carevei rolled onto her hands and knees and, gingerly and with determination, crawled in a direction she sensed would lead her back. Compared to the journey she'd just finished, a few hours through the grass of Ciracaa, even mangled as she was, seemed simple.

#

"Are you sure you felt nothing two nights ago?" Carevei asked again.
The black-striped Ciracaana shook her head. "It was of your visions a part, Kar-e-vey."
"I was so certain...," the Tam-illee shook her head, shifting where she rested on a packed sled to rearrange her reset ankle. The silence that deepened between them had nothing of discomfort, and so Carevei let it sit until her companion broke it.
"What will you do now?" Ylriasna asked.
Carevei carefully refolded her arms, favoring the bandaged hand that had given the Ciracaana the physical sign they'd needed to believe her warnings. The bustle of the packing tribe soothed her, and she watched as another tent, deprived of its center pole, deflated like a popped balloon. "I don't know. I suppose I'll go back to my work."
"You do not enthused sound," said the Ciracaana.
"I guess I'm not," Carevei admitted after a few minutes. She tipped her head towards the sky, eyes closed against the brilliance of the nooning sun.
"Now that you have identified the spirit that drove you, and discovered your own it wasn't, you have no energy for the study of the earth's hunger," Ylriasna said.
The Tam-illee froze, eyes half-opening. "Yes. That's...that's it." She shook her head. "But it's what I've done all my life. What is there to do now?"
"Stay with us," Ylriasna said. "We will new ways teach you." Carevei saw her shock reflected in Ylriasna's eyes as the Ciracaana paused, then said, "Are there not in the Starfallen tribe those who make of their lives the study of others? You could 'study' us. We would welcome you...the tribe totem gave you a vision such as has not been seen since the time of the heroine Menagliia. If it has freedom given you, should you not leave the cage?"
Carevei stared around her with different eyes. A child capered past, graceful despite the lower body he had not yet grown into, playing chase with one of the older children charged with care-taking. Two Ciracaana pulled down one of the larger octagonal tents, its painted sides glistening cobalt blue. The sun limned the edges of their bright jewelry, just as it filtered through the tall grasses and gilded them.
Her fingers traced for her eyes the bird of prey incised into the gold band around her upper arm, but they felt the satin of the wooden bottom of the light-cage. She thought of the dozens of medallions in the bag of the void, each made by some craftsman by a method she could not conceive of, wondered who had discovered the bones of the elements and how the rite of the Vessel had been constructed around it, thought suddenly of all the things there were to learn above the hidden earth.
"If...Lifehawk will have me," Carevei said, not quite believing the words even as they left her mouth.
"Lifehawk already does," Ylriasna said, her entire muzzle disappearing the one vast wrinkle, a grin the size of her face.
"Then...I'll stay," Carevei, realizing as she said it that it was her desire above ought else.
"Hei-la! I will the Sun Mother tell right now, that Lifehawk's chosen will with us remain, that Carevei EarthHunger is of the tribe now!"
"No," Carevei said suddenly.
Ylriasna stopped, mid-leap. "No?"
"No," the Tam-illee said, feeling the taste of her liberation even as she answered. "Not Carevei EarthHunger anymore. Carevei HawkFreed."
Ylriasna's face wrinkled into a grin. "It is mete." The Ciracaana turned and darted through the commotion toward the center of the camp, toward the tribe Elder. Carevei watched her go, then lifted her face to the sun.

***

About the author:

M.C.A. Hogarth has been many things--a web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist--but is currently a parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens.

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