#Shamura for best/worst mentor | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

the-tropes-are-hungry · 6 months ago

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4 - The Cat Laughs

I don’t have a clue how long this Cat – Worm – Lamb pattern will hold considering the story I want to tell but for now it’s a good frame to work from. Have a cat in a hat with a spider and a squid.

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Shamura was never kind to him. It took him years to understand their concept of kindness was something else entirely.

A crown did as much as its bearer allowed, but the spider forbade him from using his to curb hunger, or stay sleep, or anything else truly useful.

“You are not yet grown, therefore have no true grasp of your abilities.”

“Then let me use them.”

They looked at him with their too many eyes and his vision fizzed. The shadows of thoughts, the web of impenetrable life woven around Shamura like their black and gold armor, the unflinching stare. Narinder was a predator in his own right, but they were something else.

Shamura was seated at the low table in their tent, discarded maps and the remaining bones of their dinner resting next to candle stubs. Narinder stood in the doorway where he’d burst in, and the spider remained perfectly still as they regarded him.

“Why?” they asked.

He stared at them, clutching his young anger.

“What do you mean, why? Because we’re fighting a war— because we’re losing one!”

Shamura watched him, listened to him, and answered with: “Our standing in this conflict is my burden, as our supplies are Kallamar’s, and growing is yours. Why should I let you use your crown when I do not believe you are ready?”

Ears back, his words keened past his fangs. “Because it’s mine.”

“It is yours,” the spider agreed, holding one long hand over their tea and calling the tiny ceramic cup into their grasp. “But that is not a reason to use it.”

“I don’t need a better reason.”

“You do, if you want my permission.”

“I don’t need your permission!”

“You do,” they squeezed the cup and his ears popped at the pressure change, black ears pressed to his skull and half-sheathed claws now soft against his palm. Shamura blinked slowly, one eye at a time from left to right, then right to left. “You do, if you want to leave my web alive.”

The entire camp was their web. Narinder had felt it after waking up the first time, sensed it without really knowing what about the ground upset his fur, why his whiskers twitched at every tent door and post, why his vision doubled and the stars moved too much at night.

He’d experienced it the first time one of Shamura’s soldiers, a beetle of all carapace and no sense, threw their meal on the ground and declared they’d had enough of rancid flesh and deserved something better.

The beetle had spasmed as, from everywhere and nowhere, silk threads snapped tight and pulled their limbs back before they could curl into a protective ball. Their glossy chitin didn’t mean anything as Shamura’s slow steps made the beetle’s heart quicken, then race, then thunder in Narinder’s ears. The spider had walked as slowly as possible to give every onlooker time to find a place to witness their judgment. One blue finger had trailed up from trembling thorax to mandibles, and the slender demigod rose up on six legs to tower over their prey.

“Very well,” they’d said, and a silk wire lopped the beetle’s head off. Several more tightened around still-squirming limbs until they detached. All Shamura visibly did was wave a dismissive hand at the wrist, and their web deposited the open body on the fire, belly up, for the camp cook to decorate with salt and herb and oil and simmer with his own armor acting as pot and pan to serve him.

It had been, Narinder hated to admit, one of the best meals they’d had since his arrival.

Shamura’s threads were already in his fur. They touched his wrists, his ankles, trailed against his black robe and irritated his whiskers. There was no tension in them, just the ghostly presence holding his chest and winding around his tail.

The spider sipped their tea.

“You are not yet grown, Narinder. I do not mean this metaphorically: your kind do not come of age until they are ten and six years old, but the males do not reach their true strength until twenty and eight. If you will not tell me why you must rely on your crown before you are ready, will you heed my reasons why you shall not?”

Shamura had already made up their mind and even the best reason in the world would not sway them. Still, to stop the growing pain in his throat and the burning in his eyes and the pressure in his nose, he bared his teeth again.

“When my mother taught me the sword, she gave me a sword to practice with.” The mere mention of her hurt. Speaking of her was like licking glass, or breathing fire, or being forever in this world without her. “I’m not saying let me fight the Green-Eyed Queen myself, but you’ve got to let me learn!”

Shamura nodded, but he swore the wisps of web grew thicker.

“The words you are looking for are, ‘I am afraid, and believe a better weapon will keep me safer.’”

They stood up, four legs moving sinuously beneath their black robe, four arms folded politely in pairs as they drifted across the tent toward him. One set of hands parted and they rested one cold palm against his bristled cheek. They had too many eyes and he never knew which ones to look at.

“If I clothed you in the strongest armor and then struck you one hundred times a day for one hundred days, it is true that you will stop fearing my blows and focus on hitting back. But if there is one day, not of your choosing, where I would make those hundred strikes on you without your armor, what would happen?”

His vision was blurring again, this time with frustration. His throat was growing tighter and it wasn’t Shamura’s silk. His chest and arms were trembling and the spider hadn’t struck him once.

“I would die.”

Shamura nodded, and released his face.

“That is why I will not let you use your crown to hold back sleep, because already you do not sleep enough. And I will not let your crown suppress your hunger, because you do not eat enough. And I will not let the crown make you stronger, or faster, or anything else you desire, because this weakness is born of things no crown can fix. You must train your mind. You must grieve your loss. You must let your body grow, child. Return to your duties.”

Duties. All Shamura had him do was practice symbols in wax and ink, and read the same marks off paper and metal. He was to learn the stars by different names, and the plants in their times and properties, and the many lands by their rulers and laws. Narinder’s duties were to grow his mind and eat hearty off the army’s stew pot, as if he were some kind of pet in the spider’s keeping.

He left with rage pulsing under his skin, humiliation turning his fur up as the silk whispers of the camp kept sticking to him, thickening around his ankles until he could almost see the strands. He sped up, all but ready to begin dashing past soldiers, and barracks, and cook fires and—

“There you are.”

His body stopped. A shimmering blue light encircled him and his muscles couldn’t move, his momentum halted. A webbed hand pressed warm to his shoulder before Kallamar’s spell vanished, and the third crown-bearer in this camp steered Narinder off his path between another set of random tents and tables, the squid’s long face pulled in an affable smile.

“Bold of you, to challenge Shamura directly,” he chittered. Narinder was only half-grown, but Kallamar was only just taller than him, too long, too nothing beneath his robes. “I can see how that went by the look on your face. No—don’t stop, be mad. Get it out. You can’t close a wound with the knife still inside.”

“What do you want?” Narinder asked, teeth clenched, whiskers flared as he kept walking and Kallamar kept pushing.

“To stop you from ending up on a spit,” he said. “Shamura is unkind, but rarely unreasonable. Come, running off will get you in trouble, but I’ve prepared something for you.”

Shamura and Kallamar had journeyed together for two years now, amassing followers and striking out at the Green-Eyed Queen’s champions: the Seven Toed Oak, the Marble Tongue of Dawn, and Ashblight. Shamura’s real target was the Wrath-Bringer, for their own reasons. Kallamar had come from the white waters of the Serpent, and beyond Shamura’s trust in him that was all Narinder knew.

Most of the followers in this camp were the spider’s. Kallamar’s followers were weepy-eyed creatures that hissed at the sun and plied their master with even more miserable gurgles than what Kallamar paid the spider.

There was something the Green-Eyed Queen possessed that Shamura wanted before taking their campaign elsewhere.

The mobility of Shamura’s forces was crucial, as staying overlong in any one place cleared the trees, dirtied the water, and ate the land barren. Never-mind counter attacks from the Queen’s champions.

Narinder had been with them a month. During the four battles this army of two hundred followers had fought he’d sat at Shamura’s heels with clean claws and sheathed blades and a leash short enough to call a belt-loop. Every time he saw Kallamar, the Serpent’s exiled son was either flustered with the logistics of keeping this army fed, or impatiently keening at Shamura to send Narinder out of earshot so they could speak.

The cat and the squid had never been alone together before now.

“Hurry up! Hurry up! I think you’ll hate this until you learn to love it.”

Narinder’s tail kept lashing. “You have the worst way of saying things.”

“Do you know what’s more fun than having a shard of the Serpent’s power sitting on my head?” Kallamar asked, the membrane of their face bubbling with their words as they tapped their crown.

“Leaving me alone?”

“Having my own power to wield as I like.”

Kallamar brought him to a freshly cleared bit of forest at the edge of the encampment. Fresh stumps littered the ground like boils, sweet sap still bleeding from the saw-marks. The squid kept giggling to himself, but trying to hide it with his mouth closed. The hrm! Hrm-hrmhrm!! Was enough to make Narinder’s claws itch. He’d never eaten squid before.

“First! An exercise I’m sure you’ve done before!” Kallamar wiggled his way forward and called back to him. He shook out his robe sleeves, getting shorter and squatter as his upsettingly fluid physiology squirmed around under his bipedal guise. With a delighted gurgle, he rose up and spread three tentacles from each sleeve, raising his new arms up with a flash of white.

Ten liquid bubbles gathered from the sap and soil, hovering over the stumps. “Ten seconds to destroy them all! Have at ye, young demigod!”

Narinder stared. “What?”

“Ten! Nine!”

Oh, he meant it.

Narinder’s reflexes were sharp, his legs always half-wound springs that sent him flying at the first bubble with claws out. Its skin was tougher than expected and his lead claw curled past it, but the dew claw on his smallest finger snagged it right and tore the bubble open.

A grotesque sploosh of half-warm-too-cold gelatine that sluiced down his leg and stayed there.

“What is this!?” Narinder shrieked, his voice splitting like hairs as his tail bristled.

“Six!! Five!”

He spun with three darts in hand that burst three bubbles, and vaulted another log with a hand at his sword to tear another. That made five, with only—

“Three! Two!!”

“Kallamar!” he roared back, his sword coated in the same blue ick as his robe and hand.

“Ding-ding-ding!! You lose!” The squid trumpeted, throwing his head back with laughter.

Lost? He’d lost? Narinder never lost anything. He never failed anything. He couldn’t lose a game like this—one of speed and reflexes and sharpness, no!

“Again!” he shouted.

The laughing stopped. “Again?”

“Start it again!” He stomped his foot, sword dripping, his leg and hand so cold they felt numb.

“Hmm!” the squid put four hands to his wide chin, pouting. “Maybe! But I want my prize for winning first.”

Narinder stiffened, ears swivelling, weight on his toes. “What prize?”

Kallamar’s face split with far too many teeth at far too many angles. Narinder was a predator in his own right, a killer and a hunter, but his fur went rigid at the sight.

“Here, kitty-kitty, dodge this!”

The first unpopped bubble sailed straight at him. Narinder twisted with a yelp, but another crashed the back of his head and erupted with cold slime down his shoulders. He screamed. It didn’t hurt—it was cold and slick and horrible but it didn’t burn or bind or harm him, and the lack of danger made his screaming worse when he took two steps and was slammed at the knees by another bubble that took out his legs.

The last two pelted his back, one and then the other, and left him in an inch-deep puddle of viscous blue slime.

He pushed his face up, spitting, the fur on his cheeks dragging down long, his whiskers coated so thick he could barely breathe, his ears dulled with gelatine.

He was so fucking cold.

Kallamar was laughing to the cloudy sky overhead, the drip-drip of his tentacles slithering over the trampled grass.

“Oh! What fun, your poor face!” he cackled, wiping one webbed hand under his eyes to stop the tears.

Narinder bared his fangs, felt the cold slick trickle into his nose, and sneezed so violently his back arched.

Kallamar doubled over, wheezing, his eyes bulging in delight.

Narinder was cold, he was embarrassed, he was sopping wet. He was a month without his mother and denied his own power. He was stuck in a puddle of slime on a bright spring day with the sun parting the overcast sky and birds were singing and Kallamar was laughing and they were too far away from the edge of camp for anyone to see or hear them.

Narinder grabbed the tentacle that counted as Kallamar’s ‘foot’and yanked it. The squid yelped and tumbled down in a glorp. Before he could think twice or Kallamar could get away, Narinder slapped a handful of muddy slime in the other demigod’s mouth.

The sound Kallamar made was worth the laughter that burst out of Narinder. His goopy tail coiled around his bent legs as the alien sound scared his ears back and he reigned it in quickly, afraid of—just afraid.

Of Shamura? Of dying? Of the Green-Eyed Queen? Yes.

As quickly as he’d laughed, tears cut through the frigid slime, like embers down his cheeks.

His mouth trembled, spit and slime on his lips. He couldn’t breathe.

He would never see Mother again. She would not groom this ick off his fur, or run her claws over his ears, or warm him with her purr. Her tail would never twine with his, and she would not pick up his blade and hand it back, and she would not be with him, and she would not come back.

And Narinder was her Lord of Lords but he was twelve years old and frightened and alone and he had never been frightened and he had never been alone and he had never had to decide what to do and he had never been told what he could not do and—

“Me too.”

Narinder was sitting in this puddle sobbing like a kitten, and he couldn’t close his mouth or stop the sounds or the tears from hiccupping out of him. When Narinder looked at Kallamar, he expected everything except the broken hinge of the squid’s mouth, or the thick-rolling green slime that counted as his tears.

“I miss everything too,” he said. “Everything from before… this.”

“W-what happened?” one lost little boy asked the other.

“The Serpent was afraid of something,” Kallamar explained, his own tears rolling into his mouth. “They called everyone in to their temple, but I got caught in the tide pool that morning and couldn’t answer the gong. I watched the waves turn red, and the sea boiled, and then everything went dark. By the time I got out there was nothing left at the seabed, just this—this hole. Like a storm beneath the sea. Everything was gone. The coral, the vents, the sand, the kelp. Just dark water too scary to swim through, so I didn’t. They’re still down there, I think. They keep pulling everything inside, and Shamura thinks one day they’ll swallow the whole world.”

And that, two small children in two large crowns decided, was too much for them to think about.

They cried until they couldn’t cry anymore. This left Narinder only wet and too cold, and Kallamar dry and too hot, so when the cat scraped one hand down his slimy sleeve he smeared it on the squid’s ugly face.

This made Kallamar laugh.

“Here,” he said, taking Narinder’s hand in two of his. “Let me show you what I brought you out here for.”

It was a spell. A little mote of magical light between his tentacles that drew the wet ick from the fur and fabric down his arm. He wasn’t quite clean, but he wasn’t wet either.

“Now you try. But not with this,” he pointed at the crown. “Just this.”

He tapped Narinder’s forehead, where the fizziness and shadows and double-vision kept coming from.

“This is where your magic will manifest. It means you aren’t like other cats, so even without your crown you’re still something different, something else.”

“What else?”

Kallamar shrugged. “Whatever Shamura and I are. Demigods, they say.”

They practiced the spell together. It was finicky, but only difficult until Kallamar talked him through the noise in his own mind. They pulled the slime off his fur and ears and tail and clothes, and with the last of it the squid gurgled shyly in his throat.

“There was one other thing,”

“You have more one other things than you do arms.”

“No, this is actually it,” he bubbled. “You’re something else. You’re something between Shamura and I. You see, their body is hard and spiny on the outside, protected even without the armor they wear. Then there’s you, who grows your bones inside your body with the soft parts outside—which is bad design, really. You’re very poorly made.”

Narinder showed his teeth. He flexed his claws too. “As poorly made as a bag of water?”

Kallamar held up another bubble of slime. “I’m not afraid to use this.”

The cat relented.

“My point is,” Kallamar continued, holding the bubble in their lap and slowly running their tendrils over and around it, peeling off slime to slick themselves after sitting so long on the prickly grass beneath the blazing sun. “Neither of us can fight like Shamura. But you don’t have your own magic, and I don’t… Well, I know lots of magic. I know spells, and enchantments, and incantations, and charms, and curses. And you…”

Narinder followed the squid’s eyes this time, and snatched up Mother’s sword from beside him.

“No,” he said.

Kallamar quickly folded himself on his ‘knees’, leaning forward. “I don’t mean give me your sword, just practice! Or your knives? I saw you practicing with a rope dart the other day and it was so fast! Imagine if you could sling spells the same way, and I could carry a sword—or a staff. Can you use a spear?”

This felt… not allowed. It felt like breaking one of Shamura’s rules. Kallamar had real duties to the war, counting food and provisioning armor and setting up where tents could go and tables set up.

But Mother had always protected him, and Narinder had never had someone boldly ask him about what she’d taught him. “I… can?”

“What about a javelin?” Kallamar asked, eyes now alight. “A glaive? Shamura has a glaive, you’ve seen it, with the gold blade and obsidian handle?”

“I have.” He had. And he’d also seen… “…their sickle chain is faster than my rope dart.”

“It is!”

On that day, two boys made a pact with each other. The older would teach the younger magic, and the younger would teach the older weapons. Through their web the spider heard all of this, even the part where they struck a bet to see who would get to hold their glaive first. It made them smile.

To Shamura’s surprise, it was Kallamar who won the bet.

Surprise became wonder, as Narinder’s Third Eye opened right as his oath-brother raised the gold blade.

Somehow, both these achievements mattered more to the Demigod of Victory than the fact that they had just been split open, mandible to abdomen, by Champion Ashblight.

“Shamura?!”

“Shamura!!”

It was a good day to die.