Title: The Return
Fandom: Earth's Children
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 2183
Author's note: I think I managed to squeeze three kinds of reunion in here.
Summary: She has not found any trace of Others in all her years of northward travel since her curse was laid upon her. She has the shelter of her valley, but the north beyond the waterfall holds only emptiness and the great walls of ice. Ayla turns her step south.


It was early in the morning still, the last traces of the night yet present in the shadows and stillness, as Ayla stood at the edge of her cave's shelter, looking at the morning sunlight creep down the length of her valley. A brisk wind channeled from the ice mountains in the north lifted the tips of her hair. She could sense winter's last grasp had loosened after the flood that freed the valleys waterfall, making her as frisky as Whinney at the sight of fresh green grasses pushing their way up through the sleeping earth. Slowly brightening as she watched, the sky looked vast and clear after days of damp fog. Baby was sleeping, nothing more than a softly breathing shadow in his alcove, but Whinny was restless, crowding up against the human.

Ayla feels a pull too, a restlessness, part of her picking up on horse's anticipation and yet undirected, creating a longing for movement, out of her cave, past the shelter of the valley. She had spent too long cooped up in her cave by cold and inclement weather. A productive time - the bowls and baskets and mats piled high against the walls behind her stood testament to that - but she is made to move.

It will be a good day for journey out on the steppes, she decides, talking in the air and lack of cloud in the sky. To the east was the herd, too close for her comfort when she had just got Whinney back, and to west the shape of the land had forced all journeys in that direction to require a long detour before she could make the assent to the steppes. She would have to make more than a days journey of it for a trip in that direction to have any worth. She finds herself considering the prospect with far more interest than she usually does.

There is no pressing need for her small clan of three to hunt. Even though it is early in the season, with ice still forming along the edge of pool in the mornings, her stores are good. Her cairns and racks and baskets are full enough to sustain her through the summer and another lean winter, if she rations herself and allow Baby to eat his hunts.

Even so, Baby would need meat and she cannot bare to go longer much without fresh greens added to her diet. And, even if she could, harsh necessity has taught her that she could not put aside further redundancy. Sparks fire, puts tea on to seep and prepares equipment for an expedition, gathering strips of dried meat and her new tent hide to set beside baskets. Gives Whinny a scratch as she investigates the pile.

Some of the medicines she is running low on are best harvested early in the season. Whinney can carry baskets. She will gather them along the way.

And there will be herds starting to congregate, but not yet in large numbers - and the food stores of prey animals need time to grow still or their meat will be lean and good for little but travel rations. She can live off her surroundings. And she will not pass the opportunity to hunt - especially not with Baby along to help - but this trip has another goal.

For all her wide hunting, all the distance that Whinney carries her, she has had no luck with her search for Others to the north. In that direction lies only emptiness and the great walls of ice that Durc of legend fled before, arid and unlivable without the shelter of her valley. She will find no people there.

For all she had subsisted the whole winter long on only the gathering she could, years of experience and lack mean stocks have Her supplies are well stocked, both cave and carn, and Baby is becoming restless. Soon he will go out and wander the steppes, with or without her company. There is nothing to the north, she is sure, but the world beyond the clan's peninsula is vast. Perhaps she missed them on her journey.

She had been half dead, ill-equiped, and not been truly looking for Others at the time.

Yes, she decides, turning to make ready her baskets and wraps, she will go south.

---

Uba stretches and straightens and tucks a handful of thin leaves into the fold of her wrap. They are good for nutrition when seeped in a tea, and keep sickness at bay in early spring when other plant have not yet begun to emerge. The properties, she knows, will be needed. The hunting has not been good, and many of the men have picked up minor injuries that further reduce their ability to secure nutrition the clan needs to make it through the next winter. They have already lost elders to the coughing that comes with the cold. They are remnants of what was Brun's clan. Before the earthquake. Before her sister had been cursed with death.

Durc, beside her, stabs at the ground with a digging stick. He is sullen, acting more like boy than man he is on the cusp of becoming. Uba is sympathetic, as much as she can be when she is vividly aware that Durc is approaching the age when he will be a man and no longer safely a boy at her mate's hearth. Broud had snubbed his training, and Durc was even now gathering green with the women while Brac, his milk brother, trailed the hunters on the steppes, learning the hunt.

She is a good woman, and she doesn't let herself notice herself think it, but Broud is not a good leader. He is harsh and ill tempered as the woolly rhino, and he has not half the skill Brun displayed from the day she was born. Their stores are dangerously close to empty, their cave is small and distant from water, and their totem spirits ... she dreads to think, as any member of the Clan would, that they might have abandoned them for good.

Uba looks up as the sound of other women working vanishes, fingers collecting another handful by feel as she does so. Follows the attention, as potent as any tincture, to the bend of the river and freezes too. Cave lion - the biggest she's ever seen - approaches, and walking beside it, the spirit of her sister. They haven't been seen. Debate with quick glances, caught between trying to drive off the predator with shouting - not that has much chance of success, with one of the greatest hunters - ignoring the spirit as is proper and escaping with their lives. There are no men with them. Group is large enough to scare off small predators. Nearest is Goov, and he will not be enough to fight off the lion. Mog-Ur is in the cave, close enough to hear them call but busy with preparations for the night's ceremony. All others are hunting.

The lion huffs, and Ayla - no, her spirit, Uba's sister is dead - complicates the situation by calling out to them, teeth bared. The sight of it is a shock. Like turning to walk to Vorn's hearth and arriving at Creb's. There is only one acceptable response, and that is no response at all. A lingering spirit must not, can not be encouraged to stay.

Durc runs to her, his long un-clanlike legs getting him beyond Uba's grasp before she can react. "Durc! Don't!" Uba cries, hoping to distract, no matter that she can do nothing against the great beast, or that even every spear of every hunter in the clan -

- and Ayla lifts her hands from the lion - her totem's - mane to reply an impossibly flippant "no danger" before he tackles her, and she falls backwards under his weight, laughing. He is laughing too, careless of witnesses and decorum.

Baby is confused. Strange humans are close, and they are making fear noises and Mother is hit and on the ground. He tenses, but laughter and her hands are petting the small human. He sniffs. The small two leg shares Mothers scent. Cub. Problem solved, he butts his head in for a share of the attention.

Durc's body - Durc, her son, her baby, Durc - grows stiff against her as the blunt head presses against his side. Ayla stretches to reach, and signs a quick reassurance with her free hand, "No danger. Is just Baby." He shakes his head. "Is a lion."

Uba intervenes, eyes low in an effort to avoid attention of the spirit. "Durc, don't talk to the ghost." Ayla sits up, pushing the lion's head from her lap like an empty basket. Her eyes are watering, but her signs are firm. "I am not dead, Uba." Looking at her, and Uba is looking back. Emotions well in her, almost beyond the strength of her self control to contain. Deflects by pulling Durc away from the mane.

Ayla grabs her digging stick and starts collecting roots of the kind Durc was working on earlier. He stays at Uba's side, content to watch and soak in the sight of - of the spirit who has taken the form of his mother. The spirit who bares her teeth and laughs and breaths and has not tried to lure him away into the spirit world. Yet.

Uba sends a plea to her totem for protection. She knows it is only a small, weak spirit when compared to the spirit of cave lion and the spirit who was her sister, but even a small herbivore has more power in the spirit world than she.

"How has the clan fared?"

Mogur appears before she can formulae an answer to the question. She would hardly know how to answer if it had been addressed to her by a man, a being of this world, with only the troubles that came with. She has already acknowledged presence - but has not spoken to it. Spirits willing, that will not be enough to draw misfortune.

Uba shrinks back in relief from Creb's successor, but his attention is on Ayla, content to ignore the impropriety she allows Durc to display. Eyes on her digging, but attention fixed in a display of almost masculine directness, she greets him with Creb's one handed signs. "Mogur. This woman greets you."

"Ayla. You have returned." Goov's eyes stray to the cave lion sunning behind her with as little expression as he can. The Medicine Woman had, when she was younger, brought creatures into the cave, but never meateaters. Never a cave lion, or anything larger than a rabbit. And always injured, weakened. The lion lying beside her is neither of those things.

"The spirits told you your curse was broken?" He phrases it as a statement. The mysteries of the spirits are not for women, but this is the Women who Hunts, whose totem the great cave lioness had lead her through a death curse and who the Great Mog-ur himself had called on spirits more ancient than the bulk of their memories for. The woman who returned from not one but two death curses.

Still in shock, the gathering party's eyes flicker from lion to woman, defering to decorum, even as allow themselves to once more see. The strangest member of their clan.

Further shock as she grunts acknowledgement - like a man! - and uses one handed signs without moving from the ground. The signs only used by Creb, greatest of Mogur. Truly, of the spirit world, and yet their Mog-ur says her curse has been broken again. They allow their eyes to acknowledge her, taking in height - even taller now, if that is possible - and health.

"Spirit of lion and horse," her signs are almost hesitant as she replies, like she has to remind herself that members of the clan she is talking to are not part of spirit world, "led me here."

It is not a direct answer, but Ayla was shocked to hear curse was lifted. She had thought, even as she turned to retrace her journey to clan territory, to ignore the existence of the curse, to find and join with Others who did not know to shun her. And yet, there is a worry that has followed her since early days of her exile, almost as deep as longing for her son. Pushes Baby away and rises, carefully considering what she must say.

The women return to their gathering, watching out the corners of their eyes. This is Mogur business. Goov reels at such direct interaction, but clings to control.

"I am medicine women." Goov grunts his acknowledgement of the statement. She is of Iza's line, as highly ranked as Uba. Higher, perhaps, for being acknowledge so at the Clan Gathering. The status carries, even after her death. She continues after a little pause. "I carry part of spirits of all the clan. Spirits I took into death, to the spirit world with me. This women brings them back."