“East of Kartonga, the so-called border with Varduun is a fiction, an absence of warning, law, or meaningful transition. The Kartongan wastes, for all their hazards; swaggering slavers, bravos with naked steel, the constant commerce of suffering, are still lands of barter and bravado, ruled by appetite but anchored in something resembling a code. Varduun is the antithesis. There is no frontier, no fort, no marker or ancient stone to signal entry into the Hyena Lands. One stumbles across, or is taken across, and the realization comes too late: all rules, even those of predation, become unreliable.
In the wastes, a lion may keep his sword sharp, his mind keener, and negotiate his way out of trouble or into power, but these old games die in Varduun. The hyenas eat everything—body, mind, and custom. Some bands are slavers, trading wretched lives to whatever kingdom or caravan will pay; others are feral packs, utterly mad, snapping up even their own kin. Some are simply monstrous: sick with parasites, flesh warped, drooling, cackling, and yet keen enough to sense the scent of an outsider, to know how to bait and break a traveler. There is no shortage of fresh horrors in Varduun. Hyenas rut and feast without conscience or law, their alliances shifting, their minds as fractured as their bodies. Nothing survives long that is not hyena, and even that is no certainty.
The catastrophe is not just ecological but spiritual. No one warns you. No post stands, no trader utters a caution, no scent changes in the wind. The hyenas know, and they wait. Kartonga knows, and does not care. For any lion, indeed, for any outsider, caught on hyena ground, there is only one wisdom: stay armed, keep poison handy, and pray you are never taken alive. To fall into their claws is to be remade as prey, as plaything, or simply as meat for the next sunrise. The only paradise east of the wastes is the one you do not enter, and the only warning is that there are no warnings at all.”
—Travel in the Kartonga
The fire was coaxed low, a red eye half-lidded with ash. Beyond it, the Zheru grasslands stretched in shadow—not yet the hyena city-states, but closer than lions liked to be. The jungle beyond listened. The jungle always listened.
Tull groaned, body tensing as he emptied himself into the warmth of a most willing lioness. She arched beneath him, coins clattering in her braids, mouth parted in a voiceless cry. For a long heartbeat, the fire’s breath seemed to rise with his, the whole clearing pulsing in rhythm, until he rolled off with a satisfied grunt. His seed trickled down her thigh, catching the glow. She laughed low in her throat—smug, satisfied, a queen paid in full.
Next to them, a second lioness sprawled on her side, bosom heavy, paw stroking lazily across her companion’s belly, as if to remind her: the bargain had been honored.
Tull lay between them, chest heaving, mane damp with sweat, the perfume of both females clinging to him like incense. He wore no coins. He wore the night and a grin, softened by fatigue.
The first lioness crawled slow between his thighs and lapped the trickling seed from his shaft, wrapping her lips around his girth and sucking, unwilling to waste a drop.
They were lionesses of the Southern courts—vast pale-gold manes braided with stones and coin, chiming as they moved. Their hides glistened with oil. Their breasts rose and fell in smug unison. They were idols, poured and polished—and tonight, they sprawled victorious beside the barbarian who had carried them here.
The wineskin drifted across his chest. One queen drank, lips wet, then tipped it to her sister, who swallowed and let the kohl at her lashes smudge into a wicked frame. They giggled softly, careless, too full of themselves to hear the silence pressing close beyond the fire.
“We bought well,” murmured the queen with the heavier braids. She smoothed her companion’s mane and kissed it into place. “Do you feel it? How the world grows smaller when a strong male sleeps in reach?”
Her companion, curvier, bit her lip and glanced toward the dark where grass met trees. “I heard hyenas. They follow laughter.”
“Hyenas always call,” the first said, still slurping greedily at his post-coital dripping. “They call for scraps. We are not scraps.”
Tull chuckled without opening his eyes. His broad hand slid across a waist and stayed there—heavy, warding. “No pack dares my camp,” he said, voice blurred with fatigue and pride. “Ask the vultures at the river raid.”
The fretful queen shivered but stayed close, tracing the scars across his ribs as if they might answer for her.
Coins were tangled in their manes, a few scattered across the pallet like bright seeds after the storm of their rutting. The queens purred, teasing one another with indulgent little touches. One stroked his balls absently, squeezing them with lazy ownership. The other leaned forward, mane spilling, and kissed his sack, while her sister suckled the head of his cock—tongue swirling with wet, playful greed that made him grunt even as he pretended to doze. They laughed and traded places, taking turns like it was a game.
“Tomorrow,” the fretful one murmured, lifting her head long enough to break the spell. “We’ll be on the road. If we’re quiet, the jungle will forget us.”
Tull cracked one eye, then closed it again, smirking. “When we wake, you’ll forget shrines and remember gratitude. The road waits for a proper farewell.”
They both laughed, coins chiming, and bent back to him. One kissed his chest, bosom pressed against him, lips hungry. The other straddled him boldly—thighs slick, braids whispering—as she began to ride him with slow, teasing patience. Their giggles turned to purrs, to sighs, to the unhurried rhythm of females who had already taken what they wanted once and meant to take more.
A twig clicked once somewhere beyond the fire.
The fretful queen’s ear flicked, but her body betrayed her with a moan as Tull’s hands gripped her hips and pulled her down harder. The sound poured away like water into soil. She let herself be kissed back into silence.
Coins chimed in quieter voices, gossiping over the contest of queens competing for the same spoils. They kissed each other for the taste of what they had taken, pressed their breasts against his chest, laughed into his mouth, then bent lower again, sharing him without shame. They licked wine from each other’s lips, licked him as well, and let the night spin around their careless indulgence.
The deerskin creaked. Bangles rattled. The fire breathed in. The fire breathed out.
Tull rolled back atop the second queen and began to thrust again.
Wine circled again. Lips drank. Then lips drank from lips. They moved in long repeated shapes: breath, touch, hush; breath, touch, hush.
At last the fretful one softened, her vigilance melting into something gentler. She studied Tull’s face—the tiredness at the corners of his eyes, the stubborn humor tugging at his mouth, the shadow of wounds twitching across his brow. She smoothed his mane with the reverence of a priest anointing a victor.
“Bought well,” she whispered, not to be heard.
Somewhere beyond, something padded with the care that makes no sound at all. A bough sighed. The listening changed tone, the way a hall does when a hidden door swings open.
Court-taught queens obeyed their lessons: ignore what does not announce itself. They let their eyes close—smug and sated.
Tull’s hand sagged across a waist, twitching once near the blade within reach. He was warm. He was tired. He had been fed with wine, flattered with laughter, stroked by two perfumed females who had paid for his strength and taken their due twice over.
Even a wary male drinks stillness when it is offered.
He drank.
Coins settled. Wine breathed. The embers turned. The vines hung like banners without wind. The trunks stood like pillars without temple.
The jungle kept listening.
It is very good at that.
The fire was a carcass of embers when the queens stirred. Their braided manes clinked with the tired music of coins as they shifted, stretching against the furs, breasts heavy with the drowse of sleep. Pale light crept into the clearing in thin blades, painting the hides of the two lionesses as if carved from dusk-gold.
Between them lay Tull, bulk sprawled lazily, mane mussed, chest rising and falling with slow, ponderous rhythm. His warmth still anchored them to the belief that no harm could come while his shadow was theirs.
The first queen yawned, a regal cat, lashes heavy, and pressed her bosom against his chest. Her paw wandered down without thought, brushing the old familiar prize she expected to find. It was there. Her lips curved in smug satisfaction. She nudged her companion awake with a sly look: See? Even dawn bends to us.
The second groaned softly but obeyed, sliding closer, licking lazily at Tull’s chest before her hand joined the first’s. The air thickened with the sweet musk of their indulgence. They giggled, they kissed, whispering like conspirators about how gratitude must be shown once more before the day’s march.
Tull did not speak.
He was a brute of action, not chatter. His silence was power—the silence of a lion who knew the world quaked at his presence.
They caressed him regardless, murmuring court-teases, half-mocking, half-reverent. Their tongues trailed across his skin. Their ornaments rattled. Their hips shifted with the instinctive restlessness of females who knew that the body was both gift and weapon.
The first queen bent, her mane falling forward, lips brushing lower, trailing kisses like a worship path. She lingered—lips parting, braids swaying. Her black mouth gleamed against his pale heat. She hummed, pleased with her own craft.
The second watched, thighs pressing together, hunger stirring. The fire caught the moisture of her lips and made them shine. She shoved forward, eager, jealous, pressing her companion aside to taste what was hers by right of the bargain.
The first swatted at her shoulder in protest. Their laughter rose again, soft and shameless.
Then the second queen’s eyes flicked up. Just for a moment.
But something in his face made her breath hitch. The laughter froze raw in her throat.
She blinked, as if vision lied.
Dawn was cruel.
Her hand lingered on his chest, unsure.
The first queen looked up too—annoyed at first, then curious.
They saw it together.
The grin that had so charmed them was stiff now—a rictus stretched by rigor, lips parted in a soundless snarl. His mane was stiff with clotted dark. And jutting between his eyes—obscene as a crown—was the thick black shaft of a crossbow bolt, sunk so deep the fletching brushed his brow.
Their warmth curdled into ice.
The twitch they’d mistaken for virility was just death jerking the last nerves of a carcass.
The first queen gagged, falling back, braids jangling like funeral bells. The second screamed, hands clawing at her thighs as though she could scrape away what she had just touched—what she had just tasted.
The corpse lay between them, obscene in its false life, chest still rising on trapped air, cock still iron with the blind stubbornness of death’s last grip.
The jungle, which had listened all night, laughed back.
Figures stood at the edge of the firelight—hyenas, lean and painted with war ash. Their yellow eyes gleamed with hunger, with sport. Their teeth shone as they grinned. Their chuckles echoed across the clearing—mocking, triumphant.
The queens shrieked, manes whipping as they scrambled from the pallet—naked, dripping.
Their coins and ornaments were no armor now, only bright markers for the hunt.
They fled into the wastes, bosoms and rumps jiggling with panic.
Behind them, the hyenas followed laughing, knowing full well:
What they chased could not be sought.
And would never escape.
