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Save Point: Blood and Bone

"I'd still like to know how you got the rest of my stuff back," says Cleo, with a sparkle in her eyes now that she's started to regain some weight and look like a lioness again, instead of a skinny cat standing upright on dangerously slender legs. "Especially the bone armour."

"Let me tell you one of my stories," suggests Terrowne.

~*~

The cave is a low dark opening, at the base of a cliff. Men who go into the cave do not come out.

It is nearing sunset as he approaches the clearing in the jungle, a low and gloriously luminant light that casts the sky in shades of deep yellow and orange. The shadows are long but the sunset still shines toward the entrance, without which the glade would not be visible at all. It is the final golden hour.

The space in the trees is not natural at all, but neither was it created by the actions of the village dwellers distant to this place. There are no marks of blade or ash. Instead the path upward through the trees has been made by the actions of a heavy body passing this way, time and time again, marking and scenting the bushes and trees until they grow sparse upon the entrance.

As he approaches he does not trip over such much as steps around the bones. There are, as one might expect, a representative assortment of separated bits and pieces of the local wildlife, but nearer to the entrance, there are just as many bits and pieces of human, skulls ostentatiously discarded, rib-cages torn open with the signs of gnawing. Bits of spines all over the place.

Between the scattered remains and the heavier trees at the edge that have survived to grow there are altars, clumsy upright scaling pillars of stone that might be placed hastily by a small group of three or four strong and terrified men hastily emerging from the treeline, with a certain degree of confidence that they won't just be knocked over. Atop each altar there is a wide-rimmed but shallow bowl, coated with layer upon layer of turned and congealed milk, stinking in the hot sun until it has taken on the palely yellowed and translucent consistency of rancid butter.

Dribbles where the milk has overflowed trail down the sides of the altars like spilled semen.

The people who live here, and stay well away, are familiar with tigers but do not worship them. In fact, they like to catch them in pits and stab them to death with spears whenever possible. The thing they worship, not so much openly as in a matter of habitual reverence that has built up to cover what they fear, is not a tiger. It's far too large to be a tiger, almost as tall as a man when it's standing on all fours, and is black as the darkest night. It lives on and never dies.

Clearly, it is a god. Men who go into the cave do not come out.

Worship of this deity is more elaborate the further you go from the epicentre. Jewels, beads and dangly gold things decorate the ornamented lesser shrines to this creature that are added, just as an afterthought, to greater temples elsewhere as it would not do to neglect a beast-god that might perhaps possibly actually live somewhere off that way. Although of course they've never actually seen it.

Here the worship is at its purest, and the stark altars and the old bones long-bleached of blood after years in the sun are the purest statement of all.

He does not draw weapons. He does not pause to brace himself. He walks straight into the cave, even as something huge growls low, deep in its throat.

The beast is on him in a second and it gallumphs toward him, throwing itself on top of him with the enormous paws on his shoulders flexing dirty arcs of stained keratin claw. It makes desperate and excited sounds he would not have believed it capable of, had he not heard them himself, as it slathers his entire face with a spray of drool and hot reeking breath.

Any normal human would be knocked flat, but Terrowne flexes as the riding cat hurls itself at him in a sort of clumsy full-body embrace, and sinews briefly tainted with a trace of Dragon-stuff hold up under the enormous weight. It grunts at him excitedly in its characteristic way and he hugs it back as they stagger about and eventually fall over anyway when it slides of him.

"Stop it. You're acting like my girlfriend," he jokes as he rubs his face into the shining fur of its flanks, scents its heavy animal smell and tickles the rows of small hard vestigial nipples that are concealed underneath to either side of its maleness. It keeps licking him in big sideways swipes and rubbing its huge bared smilodont sabre-fangs against him.

Once they've gotten re-acquainted and are piled in a warm happy heap, Terrowne finishes giving the beast belly-rubs and explores the cave. The low lighting is no obstacle to a Dragon, and what still slips in sideways through several fractures in the cliff face is quite sufficient to let him see all the details without even needing to let his vision adjust.

The riding cat looks older, somehow, even though it is immortal just like them and will not expire anytime soon. Just wear and tear, he supposes. Still, it has been meticulous in keeping the cave itself clean, with all the scraps and bones picked up in its teeth and chucked out the front to scare away the competition. The floor inside is mostly dry and clear save for the occasional stains left where dinner has been devoured.

At the back of the cave he comes across, to his surprise, the remains of the custom saddle for the fearsome feline which lets you ride something which absolutely will not tolerate reins, complete with all its grips and intentionally bronzed fittings. It's in amazing shape for something that has been sitting at the back of a dry cave for a century or more, sort of crumpled and a bit folded, with a hint of dry mold but no dampness, and with the right sort of treatment it can probably be restored to its former function. Leather would have long since gone stiff, or hopelessly cracked and shattered, but the materials of the saddle are fully synthetic, as are the saddlebags that are cast off to one side, and look as though they have been nosed through occasionally by a giant cat for sentimental reasons.

The only parts missing are the under-belly girth-straps and their bronze buckles. The riding cat must have gnawed them off to divest itself of the saddle after it found the cave and chased off whatever was living here previously.

The music player in all its ruggedized glory is off to one side, wedged edge-on into a crack at the base of the wall. It doesn't light up when he presses the on button, but then it's been in the dark for a long time. A few days in the sun may well get it going again.

Most amazing of all, he finds Cleo's armor of bone, or at least most of it. The riding cat seems to have kept it around like a most-prized cat-toy, and has sniffed it, licked it, chewed it to the point of effacing the surface patterns and designs, wearing down the edges with a thousand tooth-marks as it sought the smell of its mistress on the material. The thin nano-sheathe gambeson dress that acts as the underlayer to provide frictionless give for the outer leucrotta-bone plates is still inside the battered heap and has mostly retained its shape. Although, he notes, a patch at the crotch and a wider band inside the cuirass are starting to turn subtly cloudy instead of fully transparent, where an extra coating of sweat and skin oils have been rubbed onto it by Cleo's body.

He sniffs at this himself, only to find that the riding cat's tongue has taken away most of it over the years and contributed to the damage. It seems unlikely the nano-sheathe will last more than another couple of centuries, if removed from the cave and exposed to the elements again, given that it's just a simple solid-state material. Unlike the bone it can't heal itself over time, and so will inevitably degrade.

He lives in the cave with the riding cat for a few weeks, while he fixes things up. When the women come to pour the tribute milk into the bowls, they are astonished, and then class him as a visiting god of some sort and thus exempt from being eaten. He watches the hilarious sight of the riding cat standing up on its hind legs and licking milk out of the bowls, gripping them possessively, and then slinking off hastily later into the forest because the delicious milk, while digestible to it like just about everything else, is rather different to its usual diet and upsets its stomach slightly.

Some basic work is required to get the music player up and running again. It makes various error noises and system sounds at him until he manages to deduce the utterly random combination of keys that resets it, or at least the music-playing bit. The riding cat is fascinated and circles around him trailing its tail, startling at each new sound.

Once he gets it working he places it out in the sun on the nearest altar and leaves it set to random on, enjoying the vast playlist that Cleo has accumulated. It's an indirect way to get to know her by her tastes in music, which aren't precisely what he would pick but are always interesting or good to dance to. He dances and the riding cat soon joins in, leaping about and pouncing evasively as he waves his arms all over the place and spins.

The mess of bones lying about the place outside the entrance makes a good repair media for the armour, as he cracks open the weathered ossuary a little at a time and concocts in another altar bowl a thick slurry of ancient marrow, bone bits and blood, sticky like glue, and slathers it thickly over the gnawed plates. He can't say he ever read the full manual for it and this is more of a field expedient repair, but as long as he keeps the armour moistened and out in the sunlight, it seems to work. The occasional rain shower helps, although the climate really seems quite stable again, given that it's only a couple of centuries after everything that happened.

For the saddle, he makes thread out of the tattered endings of the straps and uses this to sew the ends off cleanly at the same length. It may be possible to trade for proper replacement buckles at some point later on, but for now simple ties made of hide should suffice. He trades the riding cat his skills at conveniently disassembling a carcass for the torn-off skin after it slinks in proudly one day and drops a fully-grown dead antelope at his feet, the way most cats would present a bird or a mouse.

When they are finally ready he cleans off and repacks the armour in its special carrying bag, crisp lines and sharp edges restored. The music player slots handily into the empty arrow-sheath at the front of the saddle, for entertainment while they travel.

He makes a point of taking the riding cat through the nearest row of convenient villages on the way out, music still playing. Villagers watch in conflicted awe as the two probably maybe sort-of divine beings ride out, heading for parts unknown and distant lands. Discussions he overhears include setting up a temple in or around the cave, arguments over who will get to hunt in the area of forest no longer being predated, and probable reductions in the price of milk.

It all so makes him wish he could whistle as he rode.

~*~

"...so what I think had happened, you see, is that when it all went down someone with a little more common sense than the rest of them dashed out to the holding pen, threw on the saddle and whatever was in the riding bags in case it might be useful, then tried to ride our delightful little grunty kitten friend out of there. Who knows how far he got, of course. The riding cat is immortal just like us, but I doubt his rider was. Maybe he or she made it to safety, maybe not, but they never got a chance to take the saddle off. So Grunter kept going, found himself a nice cave lair, cleared it out, gnawed through the straps and has been guarding the contents for us ever since. Anyone who came in and tried to steal it never got out again, and our Grunter got a free dinner."

"Maybe the first guy survived and founded the Sacred Cult of Grunter."

"We may never know."