Nala's Venture: The Heavens Open Up
#3 of Nala's Venture
Nala finds herself trapped by the Ancestor's Wrath, How can she go on with her body racked by starvation?
Nala walked across the desert with her head bowed. Her shoulders ached from walking and her throat was painfully raw; it had been almost a day since she had last had a sip of water. Her eyes were half lidded, it was hard to think of anything else but her thirst and her belly had stopped grumbling for want of food yesterday. She kept her paws moving, however. Times were tough for everyone and in the last two years, Nala had been forced to make do for longer periods without a fresh kill or to break old bones and lick what desiccated marrow she could out of them.
...But she had had a little more weight on her back then, and more muscle. Each trial punctuated in between by the times someone somehow had managed to come up with a meal for the Pride had left Nala a little leaner, a little weaker. The proud huntress wasn't sure how much longer she could go on. Nala's left fore-paw caught on a half buried stone and the dazed lioness could not prevent herself from stumbling. She lay in the dust for a long time, how long, she wasn't sure. Her mind in a fog, it seemed, as time passed, increasingly alarming that she hadn't gotten up yet and started moving again. It seemed simple: just get up. But nothing happened she just lay there. And then the sky turned black.
Wind tousled the tuft of brown fur at her tail tip which was odd since the air was dead still and hot in the Pridelands nowadays. It was a struggle to open her eyes, but Nala did and turned them skyward. At first she thought it was night and she was fearful; if the hyenas caught her like this, lying prone and exposed in the desert, they were not above "trimming the pride" of a useless huntress. Several of her friends had not returned from their hunts already and their unspoken fates never ceased to haunt Nala's dreams. But no, it was not, in fact, night. The sky was dark with clouds.... clouds, it had been so long since she had seen clouds like that. Hope stirred in the lioness's chest so that she was able to raise herself from the dirt.
Grinning madly she raised her throat to the sky and roared with maniacal glee just as the first drops began to strike her face. The sky answered back her call a thousand times over. It was then that the Ancestors decided to let down that which they had withheld from the land for so long. In no time the earth was turned into a cesspool of ankle deep mud. Nala was so happy that she danced around, lapping the drops right out of the air. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the sheer luxury of being wet all over. The roaring of the ancestors overhead nearly deafened Nala to what was coming, however. She felt it in her paws rather than heard it.
In the flat pan of desert she had been traveling in, it was hard to tell where the water came from. First there was a stirring in the earth, a curious sensation that struck a memory deep inside. A chided warning half heeded when she was a cub and never cemented in place by experience. Nala soon learned that water could mean death as much as it meant life. The water swelled up to her elbows in minutes and then prancing about didn't seem like so much fun any more. Looking around, all Nala could see was brown water, and not far away, she saw whole trees floating by, torn from their dead roots by the force of water. She had time to feel her stomach sink before the water surged up, carrying her off her paws completely.
It was impossible to tell how deep it was. For all she knew the bottom could have been a paw's width under her wavering, inexperienced paws or several body lengths. There was nothing to see of the world but churning, splashing water, all brown with the lifeless dust which was unable to withstand the Ancestor's might. She was traveling quickly with the force of the water racing over the land, but it was all a fully grown lioness could do to keep her head above the water. Her current met with a contrary one and Nala was sucked under the surface. Flailing helplessly in a dark world, she was sure that her strength would fail, she had so little left.
But Nala did not let go of life so easily. She kicked and paddled and was rewarded with a breath of air and a second of vision above the surface. There! she thought as she saw a tree floating by near her floundering form. Paddling underwater more than above it, she was able to sink her claws into the wood of the old tree trunk, most of it limbs already broken off from being tumbled in the water. Nala pulled herself up on it and let her body go slack. She had nothing left.
She could not do anything but watch the water race by landmarks barely visible except between stabs of lightning, the lashing of the Ancestor's tails. The water moved swiftly over the flat land, eventually flowing into an old river bed, but Nala simply couldn't muster the strength to make for the bank. Eventually the water calmed and she no longer had to sink her claws into the wood and hold fast to stay on her make-shift raft, but by then the banks had withdrawn to the edges of her sight. Foreign mountains met her eyes when the Tails lashed. The Ancestors at last rested and so too did Nala shut her eyes and let the cradle of the water rock her weary bones to slumber.