The first thingI think when I wake up is that I amalive.
I groan, trying to rise, but a dull pain floods me from every side. Coiling and tensing my muscles against it, the agony spreads through me until there is nothing else. A throbbing pressure consumes me and I nearly black out, releasing a rough hiss.
“Eat,” someone, orsomething,says softly with a hiss of their own, pressing bloody meat against my mouth.
My eyes tear open and as I go to push the meat away, my vision fills with the face of a strange naga. A face that is sunken, strained, and appears oddly… feminine. Their features are small and softly formed, with eyes slitted to frame pale irises.
The naga pushes the meat against my mouth harder. “Eat.” Their voice is low and hoarse, like they are not used to using it.
My gaze flicks to the naga’s body then shifts to my own right after, taking in their smaller feminine shape and my wounds in the same sweep. Noticing movement around me, I look up tofind more of the petite, similarly-shaped nagas watching from the trees and bushes.
As I slowly sit up, the naga holding meat to my mouth shuffles back, only to change their mind and push forward again and press the meat against my mouth. “Eat. Heal,” they say.
Something flies by my head—an orb, which scans me, then flies toward one of the nagas in the trees and says something I cannot make out through all the hissing. Another orb appears, and then another, to scan me as well before they return to their owners, lingering around their heads and telling them their findings.
I have no idea what is going on. And the pain is making it very hard to concentrate on finding out. But something occurs to me as I observe the nagas I can see best amongst the forest overgrowth: I have seen bodies like these before, despite the emaciated appearance of them.
“You are femalessss,” I hiss. All of them are the same beige-gray coloring and mostly patternless, but their similarities end there. I count two with cowls like Zaku’s.Those are female King Cobras…Except their coloring is wrong…
Some of them hiss in reply while others have their orbs try to explain what a ‘female’ is.
“Yessss,” one of them answers under her breath.
More nagas begin to appear out from the brush, some of them with larger bodies now. “Malessss too,” I add slowly, wincing but rising on my tail to meet them head on.
The female next to me, the one that has been trying to get me to eat, pushes the dead animal at me again. “Eat. Heal. Will give sssstrength.” Eyeing the fur on the bloody carcass, I see the unmistakable ears of a rabbit appear when her wrist twists.
As they watch me, I accept the rabbit from the female and, clawing and ripping the hide off of its small form, I take a tentative bite out of it. My eyes track everyone and everything,alert to the fact that they could attack me at any moment. Yet no one does. The female closest stares at me with wide eyes and as I look at her and the rest of them, I slowly consume the entirety of the rabbit, bones and all. In the minutes it takes me to chew, I already begin to feel some of the pain from my bite wounds fade as my body makes use of the food.
“You came from underground,” I say when I am done. Though they could be a clan now, the more I see of their bodies, the more obvious it becomes that they are many different species of naga.
And Zaku, as far as I know, does not have sisters. Given how many weakly-looking females are in front of me, and how clustered, I can surmise they all came from somewhere together.
These have to be the nagas Julia found. She thought she destroyed them, the technology around them… Instead, she awoke them.Freedthem. It is the only way there could be female nagas before me. I know this forest, this land better than anyone, it is impossible that so many females could have existed without me learning about them until now.
They’re also much smaller than they should be, and sickly too. They are… newborns.
“From the dark,” the female next to me says. “We came out.”
“Why are you helping me?” I ask, turning my attention to the torn apart naga corpses on the ground to my right. I glance back at the female closest to me, who continues to stare at me intently. “When they attacked” —I run my hand over the bite wounds along my arm, grimacing through the pain— “they tried to kill me.”
“We have orbs. They did not,” one of the nagas answers from the undergrowth to my left. I turn towards the voice because it sounds stronger than the others; a male, one with a deeper beige coloring, comes forward. As I face him, he slowly lifts his chin.
“You… had orbs when you awoke,” I state more than ask. I know a little something about my origins. Though I did not awaken to life like the nagas here had to have done, like my father had.
It was a dark time he could not clearly remember, and what he did remember had been hazy at best. It was the same for the naga I called uncle—not by blood but an elder of the Copperhead clan. But one thing they both remembered were their orbs. The machines seemed assigned to them and helped them adjust, speaking to them in a language they already inherently knew. They remembered understanding how to survive but only on a surface level. Until, with the help of the orbs, they could understand more.
“Yessss,” the male naga responds. “Though not all.”
I tilt my head as I squint at him. “Why?”
He stares at me, unanswering.
But his nonanswer does answer one thing: those nagas, the ones that attacked me—one of them had been close to the encampment. And one, if not more, had attacked the humans that were on patrol.
Glancing at the dead nagas, then at the bite marks along my arm, I shake my head and clench my hands.They can not be left unchecked. They are a danger to Julia.
My lips flattening, I search for more corpses. More had attacked me than just the few here on the ground. I peer around at those on either side of me.These nagas saved me from them but did not kill many.“Some got away,” I say offhandedly. “There are many of you too… How?”
