East Africa, 100,000 years ago
Ekan’e grimaced as she crunched a brittle strip of dried ostrich between her teeth. The meat’s flavor had all but faded, yet it had been all she and her blade-fanged companion Orru had had to eat for the past couple of days. It was the middle of the dry season, and both game and forage had been hard to come by on the savanna. Oh, how her stomach growled like a famished lion for the juicy tenderness of fresh meat or sweet berries! Ekan’e’s mouth turned to water even imagining such luxurious treats.
Slipping out the remainder of the dried meat from the small pouch she had hanging beside her short gazelle-hide sarong, she tossed it over her campfire to Orru. After it fell between his front paws, the cat lapped it up with his tongue and swallowed it whole. His whimpering moan afterward suggested that he too had grown tired of the stale leftovers and craved fresh, bloody meat.
Ekan’e gave him an empathetic smile and stroked the fur on his head with her fingers, receiving a satisfied purr in return. “We shall eat better before sunrise, my little Orru, I promise.”
She looked out to the ocean which sprawled eastward from below the cliff atop which she and her bladefang friend sat, the crests of its little waves glimmering pale yellow beneath a full moon and innumerable stars. Ekan’e and Orru had come to this coastline precisely to take advantage of its wealth in food, which they would harvest with her spear and his claws and fangs after going down to the nearest beach. It would be the first time Ekan’e had fished from the sea, but she had fished from streams before and figured it could not be that different.
Close to the bottom of the cliff, something sliced up through the water’s surface, shimmering wet. It was a thin and membranous ridge like the dorsal fin of a fish, and four more of them rose from behind it, forming a triangle that cut in a diagonal path toward the shoreline. Beneath her dark skin, Ekan’e blanched, the air around her turning cold. Those fins might not have been pointed like the fins of the ocean predators known as sharks, but they reminded her of even more terrifying denizens of the deep. Those were the ones that people had always spoken of in hushed tones in the campfire stories.
Continue reading “Raid of the Deep Ones”