Products of Society

Some unknown amount of time later, a voice entered the carriage.

“Your hair certainly looks quite well-maintained. Is now a good time to speak with you?”

I turned to Caramine, who was poking her head inside. Lotus had sent her over, I figured.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t particularly want to talk, but my mulling was not getting me anywhere. I was an adult in the desert, and I had to learn to cope like one. “Sure.”

Caramine crawled inside the carriage, keeping her body flush against the left wall. Once she was directly across from me, she broke the silence. “So, do you usually brush your hair a lot when you’re stressed? Lotus told me you’ve been…obsessively going over every segment.”

I knew I combed my hair to relieve stress, but was taking a stroke every now and then really that obsessive?

I knew brushing too much would aggravate breakage. But there’s no way that was happening to me. Nevertheless, I put down my brush. Only then did I notice just how much hair was tangled among the bristles. So I was indeed brushing too much.

“I guess it helps calm my nerves,” I admitted.

Caramine nodded. “Human hair always fascinated me. Unlike our scales, or a golden scarab’s exoskeleton, it only grows on the back of a human head, and profusely at that. You’d figure anything growing on the skin would be beneficial everywhere on the skin. The only explanation I could come up with is that it’s a vanity feature meant to help humans identify suitable mates.”

I said nothing.

Caramine laughed. “You aren’t interested in finding a partner?”

“Not particularly, no,” I muttered. Most people I knew around my age had liked someone, or five people, by now. I’m not sure if I liked anyone. I briefly dated a classmate who asked me out because I felt like rejecting him would make things even more awkward. Until I realized that that was, objectively, not how to make things less awkward. “You wanted to talk to me about something, right?”

Caramine took a deep breath. “This was your first real battle, right? Your first time killing a person? Well, a typhin.”

I stared into the floorboards. Over three days had passed, and the deaths were just as clear as they were when they happened. The unnatural angles of their bodies. The wet of flesh and blood, drying quickly in the indifferent desert air. The blood spatters that burned themselves into the retina of my eye, rewiring my nerves, branding their dreadfully artistic forms into my very existence.

Caramine sighed. I felt her silken gaze on my downturned face. Eventually, she broke the silence. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell a story.”

“Go ahead,” I said, relieved of the need to talk.

Caramine nodded. “I became the leader of this band when I was twenty-nine. If you convert that to human years, that would’ve made me barely a teenager. I was, what, a good thirty to forty centimeters shorter than I am now? But the desert paid no heed to that. Do you know how that happened?”

“No,” I said.

“Our band was struck with an unprecedented sandstorm in the center of the desert, not too far from where we are now. Most of our carriages and all the band members survived, but our steeds were not as lucky. Nearly half of them suffocated to death, drastically crippling our ability to keep pace.

“Desert steeds…are not nearly as prevalent now as the legends of old made them out to be. In order to survive, we needed either far more supplies, or to nearly double our steeds. Preferably both. So we changed course and made haste to the nearest mine. A mine that was owned by Antares.”

“Antares? The one with Azzerium’s relatives?” I asked.

“Yes,” Caramine confirmed. “In our situation, we were willing to return any charitable donations of food and steeds with interest. We were willing to cede property or a trading partner if it came to.”

Caramine shook her head. “Antares wanted none of that. I guess I could not have been surprised. The Moonlight of sixty years ago was not who we are today, and to them, we were not much more than a ragtag gang of lizards barely clinging to life, with nothing to offer. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the way they communicated their rejection.”

A pause. The quaver in Caramine’s voice lingered in the unmoving desert air. But she pressed on. “My father was the leader when this happened. He himself went to Antares to demonstrate our candor in pursuing this deal.

“But I believe Antares saw his actions as desperation. So they began to think. If they could eliminate my father right then and there, we would likely disband, and that would automatically open all our territories for the taking.”

“Wait,” I said, “you don’t mean…”

Caramine nodded.

I was dumbfounded. “That’s…I’m sorry. I have no words.”

“That’s alright. It took me decades to find the right words. But I want to make one thing clear. Despite what transpired with my father, despite what happened with…Azzerium…, I don’t hate them. Part of me would love to think that, had I been in charge of a band like Antares, I would show mercy. But I am under no illusion that Antares achieved their position with mercy. And I should have known.

Caramine turned around to face the entrance of the carriage. “The desert is harsh and indifferent. It is a cruel twist of fate that aridity is essential for our health and survival as typhins; and yet the desert does not have enough resources on its own to sustain our population. Every day, bands wage war to own every last bit of fertile ground, to own the most valuable mines, all so we can exchange ore for food and money from towns beyond the desert.”

I leaned back against the wall. “So, are you telling me to not feel bad about what we did to Tundra?”

The words shot out, incisive as Moonlight’s pickaxes. I felt torn over whether I wanted them to be so caustic.

Caramine did not appear surprised. “No, I’m not saying that,” she replied, her voice steady. “The fact that you feel bad is important to me. It reminds me that I have failed as a leader, and must strive harder to build Moonlight’s resistance to sabotage and more thoroughly consider the consequences of every decision I make. I must strive until we no longer have to initiate combat for our livelihoods. Until we no longer lose a single life from my miscalculations.”

Silence in the carriage.

“Something’s on your mind,” Caramine observed. “Like most of our kind, I can only consistently detect killing intent from the Aether, but I’m not dumb. I can recognize quite a bit more as well.”

I sighed. I said I was going to learn how to cope, dammit.

“I’ve been thinking about the way I reacted to killing those typhins. At first I thought I couldn’t shoot anything at all. Then, in the heat of battle, my body started acting on instinct, killing a typhin and watching him die in front of me, yet I just kept going. And then, when it was all over, I celebrated with all of you. On top of all the dead bodies.”

I suddenly realized how this could be getting across, and quickly backpedaled. “I mean, I understand we were relieved, but personally, I always resented my parents for celebrating their victories.

“There was this one time that really bothered me as a kid. My dad killed the leader of a cult. Yeah, those people threatened to kill the head shaman and tried to burn his house down. They were fighting anyone who tried to stop them. But they were from a neighboring village. One of them even used to sell eggs to us. And my parents just killed one of them, celebrated, and disappeared for a few days like nothing freaking happened?”

I shook my head. “I made it a point for myself to not celebrate this kind of stuff. I guess I’m just shocked at how easily that all fell apart.”

Caramine kept staring out the carriage, at the beam of sunlight in the weathered fabric. “Whether or not combat is against a wild boar or a sentient being, whether it is a heated dinner table argument or a war, combat takes a toll on our bodies. Our minds. The way I see it, in order to psychologically withstand any sort of combat, we must shield themselves from the suffering we inflict on others. I do the same thing.”

I said nothing again.

“Unfortunately, due to the way you and your parents were raised, your body probably already had all its shield mechanisms in place,” Caramine explained. “And they activated in the midst of battle. It is in that way we are all products of our societies.”

“It’s the same for me, too,” Caramine continued. “I, too, am a product of my upbringing, of our people. I’ve seen my share of the dead, many of whom died as a direct result of my actions or my failure to act. On some days, the only way I can do anything is by activating my shield. I tell myself that the desert is brutal, the desert is cruel. It lessens my burden.”

A psychological shield. I guess years of training and monster raids had built that within me.

Maybe others thought that they could be better, too. But the forces around us were just too strong. I mean, what was Apple Valley, but a town too desperately in need of heroes who could save them?

I thought back to when my parents refused to see me for three days after they put down the cult. Were they thinking about the exact same thing?

“I’ll think about it, Caramine,” I sighed. Turning away, I said, “thank you for checking in. That was very valuable for me.”

Caramine hummed. “Glad I could be of help. Let me know if you want to chat again.”

She left the carriage, and I started to cry.