Bad Omens, Good Stripes, I

The next days were bright, both in heart and of course, in daylight. The sun was at its most relentless now, no rain having fallen since that fateful day that had brought Shuule and Set together.

Their relationship had become more relaxed, more flirtatious, but not much more intimate, other than that she had begun to sleep with him at night instead of in the nest. It was almost necessary now, as his cold blooded body was refreshing to curl up into. What Shuule didn't know was that Set barely slept during the night, taking in the hours as this female clung to him in sleep, wondering if she would wake up the next day and decide she could do better. It never happened though, and if he had known what to look for, she even often would sleep fully human, ears and all, because she was so secure she didn't feel the need to use her better animal hearing.

Every day, Shuule wrestled with the wish to just lay around in the darkness of the cave, while also knowing that without the help of a village, there was a need to prepare for the coming seasons, and there were just the two of them - and just one of them for the coldest season.

Set had a quick, unhappy conversation one evening about hibernation - that there was nothing he could physically do, he would drift to sleep for nearly three months in the winter, and Shuule would be on her own. This, he stated, was why they would need to make their way to the Great City, and she would eventually need another mate - someone to protect her when he couldn't. They argued lightly about it, but he insisted, the Legacy told him this, this was something his father had gotten right, even if he had hated it. The concept of leaving her soft glowing cave put a growl in Shuule's throat, and she vowed to show Set that she could prepare and fend for herself.

She knew his Legacies showed him many things, but she also knew that the poorness of her own tribe may have actually shown her some alternatives. One of which was drying and storing food for the winter - without the use of salt. Salt in the Beastworld was the most precious commodity, next to child bearing women. Besides the fact that it was the only flavoring most of them used, the women couldn't live without it, especially in the winter. Fruits and nuts had a small, natural, amount of salt within them, but once they were relying on winter stashes of food, additional jarred salt was needed to get through the cold snap.

For Shuule's entire life, the Second Great City had a monopoly on the salt market, as they had figured out how to make it rather than being at the mercy of the Merman tribe, which was more or less extinct now. Traditionally, the city would visit other villages, and trade salt for females - and their mates, which is how the city had expanded so fast.

This, clearly however, was an issue for her village, which had no women to trade. They couldn't even afford to send off their older women, who didn't want to go anyway - it was younger girls who always wanted the adventure of getting out of the jungle and entering a place with real buildings and markets.

Her village was lucky enough to at least have one secret asset, which, it turned out, was actually ... her. And her mother. Her mother had learned about a Human World weapon, the bow and arrow, and Shuule had mastered it. The coveted Blue Fox fur clothing she had was actually hunted by her, and she had become skilled at targeting the prized animal. Since she could stalk them from a distance and kill them with an arrow, she was well out of the way if they let off their skunk-like defense, and the blue hide was wanted enough by the large city's women and markets that they relented to sell a few jars of salt annually for a stack of blue hides.

That still wasn't enough salt to salt dry all their meat for the winter, though, which is how a wealthier village would have done it. Unfortunately, the scorching sun now was the best time for her to start to use her villages' own drying method. Set had started to bring home larger and larger prey, which raised an eyebrow for Shuule as she didn't ask for it, but it allowed her to start preparing.

The top rock was perfect for this, and she built a small fire. With Set's help, they constructed poles to hang the meat. When he would bring the prey in, they would use Set's razor sharp scales and cut very, very thin slices, and drape them to dry. Between cold smoking and the scorching sun, it would only take a day for the meat to dry entirely, and she could cut it into jerky strips to store.

It was high noon as she was sitting on the top of the cliff, chipping away at a tiger carcass that Set had already brought in, when she started to wonder why it was predators that he was dragging back. It was becoming more frequent, she felt, and when he would return, he looked haggard.

This one in particular was fairly large as well, and she furrowed her nose as the thought crossed her mind - was this a beastman? All shifters died in their beast form, and it was hard to tell the difference at that point. She stopped cutting as the hair on the back of her neck stood up. He was a snake. It probably did not bother him. But... no. He had been so kind to her. Still, she pinned her fox ears back as she started to skin again.

Only a moment later did she sense Set slithering back, and she put down her tools to look over the cliff's edge. There was the black snake, crawling slowly through the low, half dried stream, surely making a mud trail in his wake. Behind him, he dragged a dead animal, this time a large bear, but he seemed....wrong.

Shuule forgot her tasks entirely, only looking back to make sure her smoldering low fire was at a safe size, and met her mate down at the water. The stream had dried up to the point that the deepest portion was now only up to her waste, but it was still a blessing it survived as long as it did through the heat.

"Set!" she sputtered, hugging this snakes head as he closed his eyes and pressed into her. "What's wrong?" She quickly tried to move her hair out of her eyes, sweaty and plastered to her forehead because of the work she had been doing.

The dark serpent shuddered for a moment, before changing to his half human form, and she gasped. Set was a mess. His hair was, as always, inexplicably smooth and tangle free, but the rest of him showed obvious signs of battle. There were 5 deep claw lines down his muscular back - clearly from a bear's paw, and another puncture on his rib cage, giving away that he had been jumped from behind - though it was clear who had won in the end, the bears mangled carcass now laying halfway up the bank.

"What HAPPENED - Oh! Set!" She reached out, and he winced thinking she would press on a wound, though instead she reached out to his left cheek, "Your face! You're three striped!"

Set wrinkled his nose in skepticism, the way Shuule normally did instead of himself, but he looked in the now murky, mud laden water, and sure enough, he could make out two green stripes on his left cheek, and the usual single on his right. He somehow managed to scowl while also giving a small smile, grunting.