Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 9 — Expanding and Converting.

Kids, you have a choice.
Not much of a choice some of you say, but you have it.
Forget the pressure from our society.
You know that your mothers will keep contact one way or the other.
Go to your rooms today.
Think.
Do I want to be a man, a woman or one of the tribe?
You had all your life up to this moment to decide, but think a little more.
You have one week.
Use it.

Linda Basteter
Discourse to the children of the Tribe at their thirteenth birthday.

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From the tribe`s history books:
 
 
In the beginning, Bastet and Erica were the ones tasked with expanding our domains.
Their first enemy was a spirit perverted by the land where it grew. The spirit of the forests that separated the mountains from the grasslands.
Some scholars say that the confrontation could be avoided, there were many ways to get to the cities. They could take the swamps west of the forest, they could take the underground and excavate tunnels bellow the forest, they could find where the cursed forest ended to the east.
But you do not leave an enemy alive at your doorstep.

Bastet Talking:
My sisters keep asking me to tell this tale. A tale of magic and wonders they say, a tale of how to subvert and not confront. A lesson to future generations and blah, blah, blah

Damn, I prefer to be out there, fishing, hunting, making sex and doing whatever I feel like. Not in this damned damp cave writing in a history book so that a poor sob will be forced to read it in the future.
But the big black goo that we call a goddess agrees with them. Something about future generations and all those big plans of HERS.
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OK!!!OK!!! Stop pestering me. Correction, people. SHE is an ocean of dark mean, smart goo. Happy now, OH goddess of us, the perverted whores?
Because oh reader, this is how they call us in the cities. The dark ones, the perverted ones, the ones that steal girls from their fathers, the sucubi, the ones that drain male hood.

And I am proud to say that I started this.

It was simple, actually.
I love fishing. But there was no fish in the caves. The goddess ate it all “in the time of famine when the big rock fell from the sky.”

Or some other bullshit like this.

There was plenty of fish in the mountain rivers tough, including one that was neither male nor female. Or better, they were all big females until a certain time of the year, than one female in a hundred would turn male, losing some skin in the process.

It happened in Erica`s first period ever. We were hunting naked, of course, so the blood didn`t faze me much. I simply went to where our backpacks were to get some herbs and clothes to keep the herbs in place, but poor Erica got all: “Oh, this is so gross” and run to the first stream that she found.

I found her there, in the water. She had our memories, we had prepared her for it, but feeling it running down your legs was still absolutely terrifying.

She calmed down fast though. I sent my memories of the past menses and she understood. Only them we noticed the fish nibbling at her blood.

And there must be something of the goddess into the blood, because the fish were being taken.
This is when I realized it.

We could alter these fish, they were already quite big, but we could make them bigger.

The animals of the woods were used to eating the skin of these fish in their mating season, every hunter knew it.

The spirit of the woods was a manifestation of the animals and plants. If we could take the animals and trough them get some of the plants, we would get the spirit.

We could turn the spirit itself into a servant of the goddess.

There was a problem tough, as Erynia reminded me when I sent the thought. The spirit was also fed by the magic coming from the big rock buried deep bellow the grasslands.

This is what had corrupted the spirit. That thing that, as my sisters loved to say: fell from the sky breaking the mountains and damaging the GODDESS, making her more bestial until we came, …
Blah, blah, blah.

I really don`t care. We lived our whole lives in the grasslands, my mother used to tell tales from the weird mutated children of old and how most had to be killed right after being born. In the past. But not in the last, I don`t know, ten, eleven generations?
Our people were immune. Even a half blood like me was immune.

Erynia was not of the people, but even she had not turned into a monster.

I told the Goddess to look into us, see why we were immune and use it. Make the whole damned forest immune if needed.

The girls and the Goddess got all excited after looking; they started to talk about some new thing that they called “hormones”, magic making mutations and some such.

I didn`t care. I just got me some fish and started to work on them.

A wonderful thing happened. These fish could still be eaten.

Usually when the goddess takes an animal eating it is like eating a part of yourself. May be nutritive, but is very painful.

But these fish, better yet, the skin that they could liberate under the goddess will, this could be eaten. The fish would become male, and have to eat a lot to become female again, but this was the fish`s problem, not mine.

It was like raising sheep or llamas. But instead of wool, you got meat!

And they loved our menstrual blood. Soon they were changed by that hormone stuff or whatever or by mutation magic from the goddess. Shit, guys, if you are studying this to learn about this stuff go read a book written by Erynia. See if you can get to the end before falling asleep you have my deepest admiration. I can`t look into her damned memories in the spiritual world without feeling bored.

What really matters is that after a few menses and lots of work shepherding fish we got a very, very special breed.

You know, what was holding the goddess is that since the “big bad rock” she could not slither, roll, walk or whatever in the sun. Creatures taken by her can, but after lifetimes of war the spirit was ready for the big creatures. The small creatures could not contain much of the goddess, or so SHE thought at the time.
The goddess would advance at night, perhaps take a few creatures and the spirit would take them back during the day when the goddess was not there to strengthen the bond.

Heh, but It never saw our blow. We didn`t take a few creatures. We took the whole damned forest for us.
Erica is a hunter, she taught us to be cautious and sneaky. We sent our fish and waited for the skin to be eaten, but we did not take the animals right away. We let them loose, roaming the forest, mating, feeding and being fed upon. Spreading HER seeds slowly through the forest, growing unnoticed.

When we acted it was all at once. It was day, but SHE placed us at the borders and also some of her biggest animals.

Through us she could reinforce the bond during the day. There was too much of her out there anyway, the forest was already hers.

The spirit didn`t feel a thing. One moment it was an angry raging thing, the next she was a part of a vast creature, she was part of our goddess.

Now we had free access to the grasslands.

OK Anora, Can I go now? The sun is calling and there is much fun to be had today.

Anora speaking:

With the grasslands open we had a lot of opportunities, but first we had to be prepared.

We all know that the second most important thing in warfare is information, almost tied up with the first, logistics.

This is one of the first things I learned from my father.

We make love, not war, but information was still essential to avoid a war.

We had to look into the memories that had belonged to the spirit of the woods, the memories of the animals and the forest itself. Since the spirit was not very rational, its memories were a tangled mess filed with confusion and negative feelings, but some of the beasts that were part of the forest had reasonable memories.
Some monkeys that now were our creatures remembered what happened with the remains of our tribe.

They had been betrayed.