Chapter 177

Though Drolick and I had interacted several times in the past, I wouldn't have called him even an acquaintance. The mayor/guard captain/spiritual leader of the insular community lives his life in his heavily enchanted armor, so far as I know. Surely he steps out of the armor sometimes, but for any nonresidents of the city-state, the man and the armor are one. Within the armor, he cuts an intimidating figure, well over seven feet tall and broad shouldered, his grey beard stained with juices from the brownweed he seems to always be chewing on. The armor itself is constantly glowing from the force of his considerable magic being pumped through it, and lends credence to the Godless Hordes' postulation that magical power untied to divinity is an untainted and more robust form of the most basic ingredient to life.

Given that my visit is itself to ask more specifically about his people's experience with the Great Pilgrimage, it took me a surprisingly long time to reach Drolick himself. Instead, I was relegated to attempting questioning of the least disciplined of the members of the guard. There seemed to be some sort of a gag order out on any specifics being given about the Primogenitor Swarm's passage. All that I get before I can speak with Drolick himself is whispers of warnings ignored and guards murdered, nothing more.

-From the seventeenth entry of the epistolary travel journal of Kayuktuk the Landlocked

Rulac couldn't help himself and was very nearly killed immediately after my attempt to calm tensions within the swarm. Fortunately enough, Took refused to take him with her on her next hunt, and the next day's hunt, and the hunt after that. His blase approach to life simply couldn't coexist with Took's firmly regimented approach to life, and I wasn't about to force one of my oldest comrades to change her very essence to cater to a deliberately obtuse would-be suitor. Again, I felt fortunate that Took didn't feel any need to continue to argue or fight with Rulac after her first altercation, and though he still obviously nursed his wounded pride, Rulac remained a mere nuisance instead of a violent provocateur.

As the swarm continued to settle more and more into our nomadic lifestyle, a general schedule was created, and Sybil then streamlined it and sent commands to every Alpha of the swarm to ensure that they were instructing their subordinates to follow the swarm's plans. We would set off in the late morning, the morning rains keeping us cool well into the afternoon, though the seasons were changing and soon we would be overheating in much drier summer months. Since we could mostly self-regulate our own temperatures, though, I hoped we would be forced to seek shelter for the hours that the suns were directly overhead.

Once the suns began to set, we would settle into our impromptu camp and take our rest, while the most industrious of the swarm would set off on a hunt to ensure we wouldn't starve as a whole. That said, we couldn't subsist entirely off of the efforts of those most willing to hunt, so Sybil again created some rotation of packs that were forced to hunt on a given day at a certain time. We were helped by the fact that Foire and Silf would scout around the edges of the swarm as we traveled and then point out when there was a relatively nearby group of prey that could be quickly dispatched and distributed among the rest. I made sure that I myself participated in the hunts and led by example, though I let most of the others be more proactive in the killing than I was, as the weak, unimportant game caught exclusively for sustenance couldn't hold my attention.

Days passed, and though I wanted to move faster, farther, and longer, the swarm simply couldn't. There were too many of us, too many mouths to feed, and whenever we were forced to move through a narrower passage or thick bog, I could feel my teeth involuntarily grinding against each other. I thought I had made the right decision in proving our strength and leaving without slaughtering all the humans in the jungle, but had I, truly? Should I have taken charge of the swarm immediately, once I'd heard of the humans' presence, and led my new followers to hopeful safety? I knew now that I almost certainly would have defeated Redael were I to have done so, but if I had usurped control so early, would that Earthspeaker have found our den and then have remained determined enough to follow us? Then, she would have served as a beacon of our location to any other Speakers, so long as she had a good Windspeaker with her. Or, she could have cut into our flanks and slaughtered hundreds more of the swarm.

Dozens of questions filled my mind, and I cursed my indecision, and inability. While I was busy blaming myself, I indulged and railed against myself about having forgotten three times that I was currently training my eyesight to evolve my [Improved Vision Skill], and instead of being 12 days into the process of evolution, I was instead only 3 days past the initial starting point. The main culprit was when I woke in the night and habitually had shifted my perception to be able to actually see what was happening around me. 

Another, newer question began to plague me as we walked on, and the more time I spent as the Swarm Alpha, the more time I interacted with the "weak" and "inferior" keelish, the more this new question filled my mind and polluted my heart.

I had long known where my sense of superiority came from–by nature of my being a more highly evolved being than the rest. Yet, did I, Ashlani, actually agree with that idea? Agreement had come naturally, as I was stronger, a better suited ruler, but was that just my khatif part talking? Or was it actually me?

Though the weakest members of the swarm participated most to the frustrations regarding slowing the swarm as a whole down, though they obviously were the least valuable to me in a fight or war for survival… did I actually look down on them? Or could I simply embrace that there were different levels to my new people, that some were destined to be the weakest, but could still be on the same level as myself? The very thought turned my stomach at first, but as time passed, the more I wondered.

Joral and his brood were obviously inferior to my own. They were inherently weaker and less impressive in every way, but they had taken to raising Arwa's pups better than any other keelish, myself included. Eventually, we would find Nievtra and settle there or nearby, and at that point, we couldn't continue devouring every living creature within miles, or then we would starve. Would it not be necessary to establish a working class? Was there a caste already within the khatif and Keel that was built for that?

Those thoughts and more continued to congest my mind, keeping me from fully embracing any other of the dozens of minutia necessary for leading my swarm. I was forced to shake my mind into the full present, though, when Arwa raised her snout, sniffed, and whined before screeches of angry keelish filled the air.