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  Sephians are strict fluidivors that live primarily off varieties of floating fruit, but boredom and a developing inquisitive nature found them searching through juggernaut remains. Bits of the thick, rubbery skin cured into comfortable pillows, reservoir organs became carrying bags, and sinew served a variety of functions. In the exact center of a juggernaut's body was a fist size hard-shelled object that rattled when shook, but only contained a worthless yellow powder.

  Over time, Sephians and scoopers continued their alliance as much for social needs as survival. One day, two Sephian neuters were playing with a scooper while a female was feeding on a flock of fruit they had just finished capturing. The young scamps tied a strip of juggernaut meat to a rattle-rock, as they called the powder-filled organ and tossed it back and forth in a game of keep-away. A toss went wide and arced towards the feeding female, but the scooper grabbed it just before the collision.

  The toy cracked and sent yellow powder over the female’s face, which caused juice to spurt out of the fruit as she folded her teeth in surprise. As the liquid hit the powder, an intense jet of flame instantly cremated both the female and the scooper while the explosion created a four-foot diameter crater of sand. The heat transformed the pink sand into a translucent, emerald-green substance, extremely light, slightly pliable, and strong. The discovery re-birthed the Sephian Emerald Age.

  ~o0o~

  Under Chieftain Dea's leadership, craftsmen first began to create weapons for security, farming implements and then inevitably, the beginnings of civilization, but she was weary. When Dea was young and apprenticed to her mother, the chieftain before her, life was interesting but carefree.

  The village grew steadily, and each additional resident meant more lightly distributed farming duties. That left skilled sand-flamers more time to practice and enhance their craft. By the third generation since they rediscovered sand-flaming, Sephians invented new applications nearly every day.

  The latest innovation came from spears specifically developed for juggernaut hunting. The permanent village proved a constant draw for predators but they, in turn, proved to be a highly valued resource. Organized hunts for both safety and supplies became a daily chore.

  One could not simply slither up to an advancing juggernaut and stop all that momentum with a spear thrust. The sand-flamers developed a caltrop device by sharpening both ends of a spear and bending it into a 'U' shape after giving it a slight twist. When strewn in front of a moving juggernaut, one point always thrust deep inside the skin, and when a dozen had stuck, the beast flopped and slowed like a flat tire.

  Sefian leaders carefully placed the caltrops in a pre-planned pattern designed to restrict access to each gate of the village compound from predators both animal and Sephian. From the very start of village farming, independent wandering Sephians decided that stealing food was much easier than hunting.

  Periodically, a combination of over-hunting and periodic plant blights created local shortages of wild fruit. The bandit groups responded by redoubling their own efforts which forced villages to develop more intricate defenses. Bandits could slither their bodies between the spikes they could see, but closely laid hidden caltrops impaled their feet and abdomen. These periodic challengers sometimes persevered and destroyed the occasional village, but overall served to promote community and civilization.

  ~o0o~

  Chieftain Dea, in addition to overseeing the new defenses and having responsibility for fairly distributing work details, was tasked to oversee the Breederhood ceremony. A healthy Sephian community needed the proper mix of females and neuters because even though neuters were no longer necessary for hunting, loyalty and placidity made them invaluable for menial and everyday tasks. Females, although smarter and stronger, still retained enough territorial aggression instincts that the only sure way to maintain order was to pull their breeding teeth on acceptance to village membership.

  Dea’s village thrived so well that worker positions expanded faster than did immigrant neuters, so the community needed a number of neuters to undergo oestrus transformation. The brightest and strongest youth spent all week in faux-combat and vied for the honor of adding their progeny to society. Dea chose four out of the hundreds that would become breeders, but only one of those selected would win apprenticeship to the Chieftain.

  Chieftain Dea stood before the four, who were encircled by every female whose duties allowed them time off. She solemnly drew a sharp dagger across her abdomen to release a streamlet of blood. Sighs escaped every female, remembering their own blood initiation into breeder-hood.

  Dea approached each of the supplicants in turn and offered her slowly weeping wound. As hard as they had struggled to reach this point, each hesitated a moment from apprehension of their changing lives, but each also overcame their fear and drank.

  As the candidates fell into a post-coital stupor, Chieftain Dea attached sacks filled with fruit juice and a pack of hand tools to each. Groups of females placed the sleeping young women on travois and dragged them through the village gate, where they separated into opposing directions and carried them out of sight of any tracks or landmarks.

  There each would spend a lonely vigil, accompanied only by a pair of scoopers until they were totally convinced they were willing to sacrifice their breeding teeth upon return. That was the price of civic admission into the elite, at least for three of them.

  When they awoke, all but one found an empty string in their bag, which they hung about their neck to display their teeth as a badge of honor. For the moment, the empty string helped them meditate on the realities of the offer. They had total freedom to choose a life of their own, in exile, while keeping the gift of female-hood but forgoing all the benefits of civilization.

  One of the contestants slipped off her drowsiness and regained her bearings while she inventoried the contents of her bags. They contained the standard wilderness tools, including a dagger, caltrops, and rope netting. At the bottom of the last bag was a smaller bag with a tight drawstring. She opened it slowly, drew out the necklace, and gasped as she saw the medallion that depend from the bottom of the string. She, Gace, was the next Chieftain-in-training.

  She reached in and stroked her budding breeder teeth then shivered with relief that this was one sacrifice she need not make. In her time, she would be the primary breeder of the village, and her children would enjoy status and importance forever. Those dreams would have to wait for her teeth to finish growing in, and then she could revel in her triumphant return.

  ~o0o~

  The bandits arrived without warning, sending hundreds of gliding neuters over the walls and into the village. The attack appeared senseless because the village’s females by themselves easily overpowered neuters and both females and neuters were armed. The outcome was in no doubt, but the sheer number of enemy neuters would require time to slaughter, time that the bandits counted on. From the rear stockade wall, opposite the gate, an explosion and huge flame shocked everyone to momentary stillness. The bandits did not yet have the skills of tool making, but they had figured out the use of juggernaut powder mixed with liquid.

  As soon as the flame died down, a dozen enemy neuters emerged from an armory and dragged a netting-entangled neuter sand-flamer. The closest females immediately tried to follow, but were delayed as hordes of neuter bandits sacrificed themselves on the defender's spears and blocked the exit. By the time a posse went through the front gate, cleared a path through the caltrops, and ran to the rear of the village, the captured sand-flamer disappeared into the desert.

  ~o0o~

  The day came for Gace to return. She had greatly increased in size, her breeder teeth had grown in, and she could feel her teats swell beneath their scale flaps. She had been expecting an honor guard to show up and show her the way back for several days, but hour by hour passed and her worry increased until she had convinced herself something was wrong.

  She had always had an affinity for scoopers and had excelled when apprenticed to the handler
s and trainers. She made up her mind and whistled the command for 'home'. The scoopers excitedly raced in circles a couple of times then headed in a direction Gace had confidence the village lay.

  She could not comprehend exactly what see saw at first. She found the stockade walls either melted or blown to green crystalline rubble. Thousands upon thousands of scavengers rolled upon hundreds of covered lumps, which as she got closer proved to be dead Sephians, or in many cases, just body parts. The head of Chieftain Dea rested on an impromptu spike stuck to the gate.

  In a daze, Gace slithered into the village proper but heard no sound except the stabbing and slurping of scavengers. The barbarians uprooted and destroyed every fruit in the fields they could not carry away, and every building was shattered or broken. Her two scooper companions rolled among the fallen and shivered in fear and apprehension. The juice storehouse was the one building complex still standing, where fresh-squeezed ripe fruit was stored in fused-sand jars covered with juggernaut membrane.

  Gace cautiously peered into the opening and saw more than fifty bandits, satiated and dozing among their spoils. The bandits had no real industry or skills, other than kidnapping sand-flamers and forcing them to make weapons. The bits of decorative clothing and ornamentation they had stolen from the vanquished villagers looked grotesque on them, at least to Gace's sensibilities.

  She, however, was adorned with artistically woven carry bags and wore her brilliantly carved medallion of office that made her look impressively regal. A bandit patrol returned from their nearby encampment and saw her standing outlined in the sunshine, and inarticulately whistled a loud warning as much from fear as recognition of a villager. Gace turned and slithered quickly away to gain a significant lead before a dozen bandits gathered their wits for pursuit.

  And pursue they did. Gace was born in the village but participated in many juggernaut hunts during her neuter-hood so knew the surrounding area intimately within a two full-day journey in any direction. She instinctually headed towards an area of rolling dunes, hoping to escape any line-of-sight pursuit. Her hunters, however, had brought several of their neuters, and even though they could not move as fast, they could jump up and glide in search patterns to track her.

  Gace could have maintained a steady pace without stopping, but her two loyal scoopers needed periodic stops, and she loathed to depart from them. She let them rest until she spotted a gliding seeker crest the horizon and whistled them back to rolling. Gace fully rested and well fed from the plentiful supplies from her vigil, was capable of going for several days. The bandits were equally well-rested and fed and were determined to bring her down.

  By the third day she had traveled beyond her known limits, and looked up at rock outcroppings thrust up from the sand. Unknown to Gace, her village was the Eastern-most habitable area of Sephia. The native plants and animal life of the desert could not survive beyond the sand plains, and beyond them sprung rocky foothills that became true mountains.

  As she continued half a day up-slope into the foothills, the bandits decided that the reward was not worth the cost of leaving their familiar environment. Gace finally realized they no longer followed, but could not return for fear they may have left a lookout. She continued on.

  She saw the scoopers had trouble negotiating the steeper slopes, and could not climb rocks or boulders at all. She also felt her gravidity about to reach its peak and knew she must soon lay her eggs. She was morbidly exhausted and had not eaten in way too long.

  Gace found a small cave and decided to shelter for a time and try to think of options. The fact that a local reptilian also chose that particular cave for the very same purpose was a minor coincidence that changed the course of Sephian history.

  The creature was not native to Sephia, but she, or rather her ancestors, had migrated off the central mountain of Dhos, soon after the Catastrophe. A major avalanche had struck the separating barrier between the two lands with such force that it split the bedrock beneath and created a canyon that undermined even the deep-set invisible wall. Over the centuries, a mix of alien wildlife migrated between the not too dissimilar environments and fit into local niches.

  Closer to insects than reptilian, the creature in the cave was composed of twenty body segments, each a one-foot wide oval with its own pair of legs. The head closely resembled an alligator, and a pair of foot-long pincers brought up the rear. The mopis, as Gace named it, had been hunting and stockpiling prey for her own soon to hatch brood. The various prey were still alive, though paralyzed by venom to keep them fresh.

  The scoopers were in deep slumber, as was Gace after laying her eggs when the mopis scuttled into the cave. Neither Gace nor the scoopers had ever heard that particular sound on the sand, so they did not immediately react to the danger, but they did wake specifically because they could not place the sound. The scoopers immediately attacked, which saved Gace’s life.

  The cave floor was fifty feet wide and fairly level so the scoopers could roll to speed quickly. Gace pulled her dagger and started for the cave opening, but the mopis had one end blocked by her toothy jaw and the other by her pincers, so instead Gace backed into a small alcove.

  In a sudden flurry of movement, the mopis arched her body and grabbed a scooper in her pincers and injected a stinger. The scooper dropped and never moved again. The other scooper, now aware of the danger, rolled into a sprint and gouged through the second segment from the rear and separated the pincers from the body. The mopis screamed in pain and anger and twisted her snapping jaws towards the scooper. The scooper dashed to the front of the creature and separated the body at the third segment behind the head.

  The scooper was at least as intelligent as earth an earth canine, but had never encountered this creature and decided to focus on the fourteen-foot middle segment that thrashed on the cave floor. It never saw the mopis' jaws approach, fully mobile with six legs still attached to the two segments still attached behind the head. In one snap, the last scooper lay crushed. The partial mopis turned to confront Gace, who now outweighed the creature, was just as quick, and an equal match in length.

  Gace snapped her head forward to slam her dagger into the mopis' neck, but the thick, scaled skin simply shattered the sand-flamed blade. The mopis' snapped in response and forced Gace to dive underneath its belly. The mopis reached down with its snout and latched on to Gace's left leg. The pain was so incredibly intense she began to pass out, but breeder fight hormones surged through her. She twinned her body around the top and back of the mopis and sank her breeder teeth deep into the joint between the head and the remainder of the body.

  The mopis rolled and bucked, but its head joint only swiveled around or down, not up. Driven by the fighting surge and her extreme hunger, Gace drank her fill of mopis blood and then fell into a near coma next to the vanquished monster.

  ~o0o~

  Gace awoke and felt refreshed and well overall. Her first concern was to remove the carcasses from the cave so as not to attract whatever local scavengers inhabited this environment. She tenderly carried the scoopers out and into a ravine; the mopis pieces not so tenderly. While she scouted the area around the cave, she realized there at least was no need to worry about juggernauts. In no way, they could move their bulk up the rocks and hillsides.

  As she returned to the cave and her eggs she felt disjointed and floating, not worried so much as numb. Her lethargy increased, which kept the growing depression at bay. She had lost her scoopers, her village, her Chieftain, and she had no prospects for food. Her last meal was two small fruits several days earlier, but then, why did not she feel hungry? Gace's world seemed to tilt as a nonsensical memory pushed into her awareness.

  Her memory of the battle itself was somewhat fuzzy, but she had the distinct impression that she had actually fed off the mopis! She felt all right, in fact, she never felt better. Ingesting the fluids of any native desert animal, other than female Sephians, meant cramps and chills if not death. If she could feed off other mountain denizens, then she mi
ght survive in this strange place.

  Gace looked over at her eggs while she stroked her Chieftain-in-training medallion. It occurred to her that she was now Chieftain. And as Chieftain, she could start a new village. Let the bandits have the desert; she would conquer the mountains, and in time, she would make the scum of the desert pay for her losses!

  ~o0o~

  Gace found hunting was easy and game plentiful. The mopis was at the very top of the local food chain, yet mostly preferred to avoid confrontation. The one in the cave was exceptionally aggressive because she was protecting her eggs, which she buried down a low tunnel in the rear. Gace was too large for that part of the cave and had no reason to explore it and was unaware of the approaching hatching date.

  Her own clutch could emerge at any moment. She had brought in a harmless, juicy prey animal, wrapped alive in netting she had adapted from various animal sinew. She paced nervously, betting her entire future dreams on an experiment involving Sephian reproduction and these new food sources. She only had six teats but could nurture twice that many neuters. She wanted to keep all twenty-four of her brood rather than cull the weak as normal.

  Gace watched the supple eggs as they rocked and pulsed, making special note of those with vigorous movements. Aggressiveness was one of the most easily noted traits she would look for in the six she had decided to suckle, with alertness and responsiveness to their environment to be judged once they kicked through the leathery shells.

  She heard a couple of irritated whistles, which were the first neuters that sliced through their eggs with their tiny rear claws. Two emerged simultaneously, stretched their foot-long bodies to full height and looked around at their world. They noticed each other, but seeing no other danger, raced towards Gace and begged/demanded to suckle.