“How should I act in Dunbach? I’m sure we won’t be the only ones there.” I began to get nervous as I became able to see wooden yet sturdy walls surrounding the midway point of our journey through the Wilds. The city Dunbach didn’t seem to have cleared the forest that surrounded it, and as it had spread, they still hadn’t cleared the trees–I could see dense tree growth within the walls even from without them and with my weak “normal” vision.

“Simply follow me. You are fahvalo to me, and any who respect my position will respect my decision.” Ana’s response was simple and confident.

I nodded and fell in step behind her as the rest of the swarm flanked me with varying levels of worry, nervousness, and implicit trust between them. Sybil, Took, and the three kids were closest to me, Took sizing up everything that came close, the kids following my lead while also signing commands to their own pack of the youngest group of keelish (now almost entirely adults at this point), and Sybil muttering basic conversational phrases in the common tongue.

We were as ready as we were going to get.

…

Arrival at the gates of Dunbach saw us greeted by the now familiar screeching call of the Moonchildren from an unseen sentry manning the post. Ana responded in the common tongue, “Bloodpriestess Ana, come with Fahvalo Ashlani Indraymaf, Sahariliard.”

A moment’s silence, then, in the same common tongue, “You have declared this one fahvalo to you?” The voice was raspy, either a low female or high male’s voice, and dripped with skepticism and confusion.

“Yes.” Ana spoke clearly before immediately continuing forward to the closed gate. She made it to only a pace or two’s distance away from the gate before it began to open before her presence. Turning over her shoulder, Ana nodded, beckoning me to follow.

As we stepped through the gates and into the city proper… I realized that this was far from what I would have expected from a city. Instead of buildings and roads, infrastructure and shops, there were treehouses and hovels, tents and dirt paths. The apparently dense foresting within the city that I had seen from without was correct, and instead of having paths go straight forward and back, they wound aimlessly around the massive trunks that populated the area. Interspersed between the locations with thick trees were dug out homes, domes in the earth with doors so broad they were nearly as wide as they were tall.

The trees populating the area were different from any I’d seen anywhere else–they grew naturally up to about 7m before they spread and sprawled outward in a distinctly bushy fashion. The trunks were thicker than a tree of comparable height would have been, and were smooth, without notable bark or small branches before the crest, where the entirety of their branches grew. In these peaks of the trees were subtle treehouses, woven to intermingle with the natural branches and only subtly, ingeniously provide greater cover than the tree itself provided. I could see slight movement within the treehouses, but since I was limiting my sight, I couldn’t pick out any specifics.

As we continued onward, into what I presumed to be the center of the city, the Moonchildren around us began to leave as individuals or in pairs. I finally saw one scale one of these strange trees and enter into the house located on top, where more indistinct movement greeted them.

“It is an unexpected journey home.” Bloodpriestess Ana’s voice jerked me out of my musings. “Since I am here, it is an honorable visit, and their families will be happy to see them. Thus, they go to their family’s hazoma.”

“Then, those are your homes, there in the trees?”

“The hazoma are sacred, holy to Narsha’at. A Moonchild can only sleep soundly within the boughs of a hazoma.”

“I don’t recall ever seeing a hazoma anywhere else…”

“Nor will you.” Ana smirked.

“... How long has it been since your last sound sleep?”

Ana laughed. It was an off-putting sound, no matter how many times I’d heard it. It reminded me of the pleased noises a predator would make as they set into their prey at the end of a successful hunt. “Most of a year. We joke that the discomfort of sleeping away from a hazoma is what led our people to become night-dwellers–no reason to sleep anyways if there is no hazoma.”

I filed that away before changing the subject. “Do you have a husband, Ana?”

Ana’s laugh again belted out, full and joyous, even if still strange. “I am an old, stubborn female, Ashlani. What male would have me? I’m sure to be more cantankerous than he wants, too strong to be convinced of his ways, and too busy to warm a bed. Any male strong enough to be my partner instead of my bed-warmer is long since mated to another, and since I am a Bloodpriestess I must be monogamous, unlike the rest of my kind. Thus, my ambitious youth has left me ‘bereft of a fit partner’ in my old age.” Ana’s voice was only barely containing laughter throughout her speech, and she obviously didn’t care much to have a partner at this point.

“You call yourself old, but you certainly don’t seem to be to me…?”

“I have seen many moons, but in this tongue I would call myself… fifty years old, I believe? The common manner of counting age is strange to me, but, suffice to say, I am beyond the years of bearing children.”

“That is… surprising. You do not show evidence of aging.”

“To you perhaps. I am slower than I once was. You should have seen me–”

“Bloodpriestess Ana. This merits a thorough explanation.”

Ana was interrupted by a strange being I’d never seen before–a (probably) male figure, hairier than the Moonchildren by far, to the point of being called furry instead of hairy. He was not especially tall, just about 1.5m tall (not counting his horns), but his shoulders were at least 1m across. The fur covering his face and upper body was a gradient from a nearly charcoal gray to the gray of morning cloud cover, and his face was decidedly bovine in shape and form. His horns curled aggressively above his head, and he wore nothing more than a crude loincloth, leaving the rest of his furry, humanoid body exposed. At his hips hung two stone-headed hatchets, clean but unmistakably stained a rusty color with blood.

“Noonbright Teikhom. A pleasure to see you.” Ana stiffened next to me while gesturing for me to stand back.