Nyra's Perspective
Before he appeared, my life was not measured in the passing of days.
It was measured in distances.
In the exact number of centimeters separating one hiding place from another. In the skill required to move without a single blade of grass betraying my presence. In the maximum amount of time I could remain perfectly still, holding my breath, while something grotesque or hungry patrolled only a few steps away.
In Zarhama, the future was not an option. Being born human meant being born marked by weakness. Demi-humans grew quickly, developed longer strides, keen senses of smell, and enviable night vision. We, on the other hand, only learned how to hide. That was our only art.
Finding sustenance was a daily ordeal. To avoid starving to death, you had to venture outside, and crossing the threshold of the shelter meant exposing yourself to the hunt. You might stumble upon a carnivore that judged you to be an easy meal, or a colossal herbivore that crushed you beneath its hooves without even noticing your presence. To them, our existence was irrelevant; we were simply too small to matter.
You learned to move crouched low, to erase your tracks from the earth, to swallow whatever rotten root you could find. The only thing that mattered was scraping together one more day of life.
And even then, most of the time, it wasn't enough.
When the Leontaaris cornered me in the red-grass prairie, my mind no longer considered escape. Not because I lacked the will to live, but because I knew how it would end. I had witnessed it too many times: friends, family members, members of my own tribe... They all shared the same final fate. Surrounded, stripped of every avenue of escape, turned into food.
Sometimes death was swift; sometimes it wasn't. More often than not, they played with their prey, devouring them little by little while their screams seasoned the hunt. I can still hear those cries. Not as a distant echo, but as a stab of pain that erupts without warning in the stillness of night.
The Leontaaris advanced without haste. They knew I had nowhere left to run. The stench of their breath reached me before their claws did: a mixture of rancid blood, corrupted mana, and death. Desperation never came; my body simply shut down its fighting instincts. I remained motionless, accepting that my story would end in that corner of the savanna.
And then he appeared.
A man dressed in strange clothes, with striking yellow eyes. I had never seen a gaze like his: it held absolutely no fear. He did not shout, quicken his pace, or hesitate for even a second. He stepped into the hunting ground as though the presence of those beasts were incapable of taking his life.
And reality bent to his will.
The Leontaaris yielded ground. One step back. Then another. With every step the stranger took toward them, the predators retreated. It was then that I realized something inconceivable:
They could feel fear too.
That revelation was more devastating than everything that happened afterward. Because if the beasts could feel fear, then they were not invincible. The immutable laws of Zarhama could be broken, and someone had just shattered the first of them.
What followed bordered on the impossible: a human slaughtering demi-humans. The Leontaaris fell with almost no resistance. I could not look away, not out of morbid fascination, but because I was witnessing my old world crumble piece by piece.
As I climbed the mountain, I expected terror to continue following me. But something inside me had shifted. The first few days felt unreal. I woke with a start at the slightest crack, turning my head at every hint of approaching footsteps, sleeping with my muscles tense as I waited for fangs to sink into me from the darkness.
Yet no one came to hunt me.
One night passed. Then another. Then an entire week.
Until one morning I realized that I had slept through the night without waking, without flinching, without waiting for death.
The air felt different here. It did not smell of danger or suffocate my lungs. Selvryn insisted that the feeling was called hope. I still distrusted the exact meaning of that word, but I knew that, for the first time, I could exhale without calculating how many minutes of existence I had left.
Adapting to an abundance of food was a more complicated process. The first time I had a portion large enough to actually satisfy me, I hesitated. It was real food, dense and filled with the mana we had only glimpsed from afar down below. It took effort to bring it to my mouth. In the savanna, putting flesh on your bones only made you a more tempting target for hunters.
Not here.
No one was waiting for me to grow fat so they could devour me.
Lusian never bothered to theorize about it. On the day we arrived, he simply handed me a stone and pointed toward a section of wall under construction.
"The mountain will be our home," he said, pointing toward the first huts. "We are going to build our own place. Our own domain."
Home.
That word brought tears dangerously close to my eyes. Not because of its poetic weight, but because I had never had one.
"Home..." I murmured, weighing the stone in my hands. "We have the right to a place of our own."
He offered no verbal response.
None was necessary.
From that day onward, I have worked without rest. I raise walls, carry heavy loads, learn new skills. My body has changed almost imperceptibly. One day, while looking at my reflection in a polished sheet of metal, I stopped dead.
The sharp outlines of my bones were no longer visible. My face had color again, and my arms had gained strength.
When I recognized myself in that uneven mirror, I felt fear.
Not fear of what I saw, but fear of losing it.
For the first time in my life, I possessed something valuable that could be taken away from me. My existence had changed so much that I doubted whether I could survive a return to the past.
And I absolutely refused to go back.
Sometimes I stop to watch Kara train. What fascinates me is not merely her physical skill, but the ease with which she moves, stripped of fear. Sometimes I watch Selvryn beside the Mother Tree, caressing its roots with a devotion bordering on communion. Once, I would have thought such a thing insane.
Now, very few things seem impossible to me.
Not even my own transformation.
I am no longer the starving girl who crouched in the grass waiting for the end.
When Lusian walks nearby, I straighten my posture instinctively. I am not seeking his approval, nor am I trying to impress anyone; I simply refuse to project the image of someone expendable.
There is something down here that needs my protection.
Something that did not exist before.
At night, I watch the horizon of the savanna. I know the predators are still lurking and that the weak are still running. I also know that the balance is beginning to fracture: the Lithaar are mobilizing from the depths, the carnivores are gathering along the borders, and the mountain is becoming the center of the world.
I do not know how the next conflict will unfold. I do not know who will strike the first blow, or whether our forces will be enough to withstand it.
But I hold on to one unshakable certainty:
I used to run.
Now, I stay.
This is not merely a refuge where death can be postponed. This is the place where I have learned to live.
To eat without paranoia.
To sleep without nightmares.
To walk upright.
This is my home.
And if someone intends to take it from us, they will not encounter the frightened prey that once hid in the red grass.
They will face someone who knows all too well the weight of losing everything...
and who has decided never to give it up again.