Iris

For the most part, Iris is a fairly average cross fox - the melanistic morph of red foxes. Her build is small and slight, hiding a surprising amount of muscle acquired from a lifetime spent in the water. Dark gray tones make up the majority of her pelt, with fiery copper accents on her face, flank, and tail; additionally, her paws, tail tip, and a stripe along her nose are a bright ivory. Having come from a very hot region, Iris’s fur is generally short and thin, except her tail, which is impressively thick and fluffy.

None of these are what strangers immediately notice, though. Iris’s most striking feature is her feathers. Long, showy, and iridescent, they adorn her mane and the base of her tail in clusters of emerald green and sapphire blue. White and gold eyespots not unlike a peacock’s decorate their tips. Smaller round feathers run like dragon scales along her spine. Extensive training as a dancer has granted Iris an elegant and measured gait that makes her feathers sway with each step, making them the center of attention.

Araza appeared at the end of Iris’s first year. She doesn’t manifest often; she’s used to hiding her presence from Cayat and his clan members, and their absence is hard to adjust to. However, even when she’s not physically there, her presence in Iris’s mind is still constant. Recently, Araza is taken to hiding herself between Iris’s feathers, obscuring her vivid green glow among their vibrant colors.

While Araza is just as clever as Iris, she’s also a good deal more calculating. She’s quick to identify others’ weaknesses and often helps Iris think her way out of sticky situations. She also acts as a comforting presence, being the only thing in Iris’s life that has stayed with her for nearly its entirety. Her sharp intelligence and confidence provide Iris with an example of someone who’s like her - who will achieve true freedom, no matter what it takes.

Many kilometers from Myrkur and several days’ distance from Sköpun, a pitch-black archipelago rises from the ocean waves like a cluster of broken arrowheads. Mottled with dense jungles and punctuated by several massive volcanoes, the Blackspear Islands are as forbidding as they are beautiful. The ten Clans that call them home are much the same.

Iris was born into the Caavaikanaya clan in the beginning of the two warm seasons. Her parents, Moaka and Kito, tried to give her the best childhood she could, but it was clear that a feeling of deep dread had poisoned the entire clan’s happiness. Iris was three months old when Moaka finally explained why to her.

The Blackspear Islands were paradisiacal during the warm months. The migration patterns of numerous fish species brought them close to its shores, the jungle was filled with bounties of fruit, and the weather was clear and beautiful. But as the weather began to shift, the prosperity began to fade away. The islands were prone to vicious storms that could turn the iconic black stone mountains into slippery death traps. Worst was the inevitable food shortages. It was inevitable that each winter, some clans would thrive while others starved. The Clans of Blackspear Island built their society on the basis that only the strongest should persist. It was against both the laws of nature and of the gods that the weakest Clans should flourish while the strongest languished on the whims of sheer luck. Their solution was the Kalin.

The Kalin was a competition that spanned two weeks at the beginning of the colder seasons. In it, all ten clans participated in a series of games to demonstrate their physical, mental, and spiritual prowess. These games ranged from simple athletic feats like races to – should the right to duels be invoked – battles to the death. Not only did the Kalin allow each clan to prove why they deserved to survive the coldest months, the islanders believed that it allowed the gods to choose their favorites among the contestants. The end result was two weeks of brutal competition where the winners secured their clan’s prosperity during the hard months and the losers faced two seasons of hardship. The Kalin’s champions got first pick to the islands’ prime hunting, fishing, and medicinal herb grounds. They also got the right to steal some of the losing clans’ women.

Not only were the Blackspear clans in a vicious and ever-changing hierarchy, they were also incredibly sexist. Women and girls could only participate in a handful of the Kalin’s games. They spent their lives viewed as objects that could be traded and exchanged, as trophies instead of people.

The Caavaikanaya clan had not celebrated Iris’s birth – they had mourned it. They had mourned what it did to her. Because the Kalin was coming fast, and they were not going to win.

Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the Blackspear Islands, far away in the chasms of Sköpun, months prior, a poison had bloomed. Rivers and streams carried it into the ocean and into the bellies of fish and other marine animals. Currents and bad fortune had sent that toxin to the Blackspear Islands and to the Caavaikanayas’ territory. In the months before Iris was born, numerous clan members had died from a toxin they could only describe as retribution by the gods for some unknown crime. It had killed some of their strongest warriors and sharpest minds. And now, they were sure, the Kalin would kick them even further into the ground. Iris was young, beautiful, and most worrying of all, a girl. She would be the champions’ first pick for a trophy wife.

On the day the Kalin came, Iris looked at the sea and debated finding a raft and running away before anyone could catch her. They all knew the fate that was awaiting her. Moaka had taken the last week to teach her daughter everything she could - not words of kindness, but ways to manipulate the man who decided to steal her away. Each of them scared Iris more than the last. She felt nauseous every time she wondered if she would be pregnant by the end of the year.

In the end, she didn’t leave the islands. A storm rolled in and she was more afraid of getting shipwrecked and drowning than the fate her mother had prepared for her. She had to have faith – the Caavaikanaya clan might do better in the Kalin than they expected. Maybe other clans had suffered from the toxin too.

The Caavaikanaya clan was decimated in the Kalin.

The difference was so brutal that Iris watched as some of the other clans battled with whether to show pity. They were outnumbered, outranked, and outperformed in every game. Still they kept on fighting. Ankir, Iris’s older brother, was one of the contestants. He refused to let his little sister down.

On the last day of the Kalin, the Caavaikanaya clan made a desperate bid for victory. They invoked the right to duel the next lowest ranking clan, and the Caavaikanaya warrior that would be fighting his opponent to the death was Ankir.

It was a well-matched fight. That offered no comfort to Iris as she watched her brother’s neck snap in front of her.

Her parents had warned her what was coming next. She wanted to scream.

The winners - the contestants of the Opozyimari clan - lined up all the Caavaikanaya women below middle age as if they were items to be bid on. Iris flattened herself to the ground, trying to look pathetic and invisible, but her unconventional beauty proved a curse that would not spare her. She was the third selected. She would never forget how Cayat, the warrior who took her as his wife, looked at her – like she was a tantalizing hunk of meat, a lamb ready for the slaughter.

At only six months, Iris was ripped away from her family and into the clutches of a husband nine times her age.

There was some small measure of good fortune in this fate. The Opozyimari clan was much more prosperous than the Caavaikanayas. Iris didn’t have to worry about starvation or death by preventable disease.

Furthermore, Cayat was a seasoned contestant in the Kalin with a history of taking wives as trophies. He already had both a harem and an heir. If she was lucky, Iris would not have to bear his children.

Instead, she learned how to dance.

Cayat was fascinated with her ornate feathers – he had never seen anything like them. They were all he remembered her by. Cayat’s other wives taught her how to dance in a way he would like. Night after night, Iris spun and twirled and somersaulted for him. She learned how to sway so that the iridescence of her feathers caught firelight, she learned how to treat her fluffy tail like a banner, and most of all she learned how to hold back tears by pretending she was somewhere else.

In time the sadness subsided. In its place was hot rage.

Iris watched as Cayat got everything he wanted. He played with his wives as if they were amusing toys, he gorged himself on food and left what he didn’t want to rot, and the others of his clan nearly kissed the ground he walked on. Every opportunity in life had been granted to Cayat not because he was especially skilled, or smart, or anything but strong. They had been given to him because he was a man. He took power for granted, lived in it like it was a second skin. Iris grew sick with anger. She would spend the rest of her life as his plaything, when all she wanted was to crush him beneath her feet. Gradually, she grew obsessed with power. What would her life be like if she had been born into the Opozyimari clan as one of their warriors? How much easier would freedom have been then?

Two and a half years into her marriage, she finally got the opportunity she had dreamed of.

Iris put extra effort into her dance routine that night, something she had never been brave enough to do before. Cayat took her to be alone with him. She knew what was coming next with sickening disgust as she saw the room he led her into – dim, secluded, and lined with pillows and silk. She watched him lean towards her with a lurching clarity.

And then – with the speed and fury of a viper – she lunged.

Cayat was a powerful warrior, but the battlefields he knew were made of trodden sand and against opponents who clearly stated their challenge against him. He had not been expecting an attack as sudden and as brutal as Iris’s. She threw her weight against him, then ravaged his throat and tore frantic claws into his eyes. He gasped, then screamed, then gurgled, then a scarlet stain spread across the pillows, and he was silent.

Iris was not stupid. She knew that if she stayed, she was done for.

She left the room as quickly as she could, then made her way to the docks, ducking her head so that no one would see the blood spattered across her face. The Opozyimari clan were renowned fishers. They would certainly notice if a boat went missing, but by then she would already be gone – or dead. She didn’t care which. She just cared that Cayat was dead too.

It was early in the morning. Many of the boats were already gone, but a raft with a simple sail had been left behind. Iris couldn’t wait for a faster vessel. And besides, this one was lucky - its owner had left some supplies on it behind. Iris unfurled the sail as best she could, untied the raft, and then used a long pole to navigate to open waters.

On the second day of her journey she began to run out of food. She rationed what was left, then fashioned a makeshift fishing rod and began to catch paltry meals.

On the seventh day of her journey the wind began to pick up. Iris flattened herself to the raft and dug in her claws. It would pass, she thought.

The storm continued.

On the eleventh day of her journey a gale ripped through her sail and knocked the mast into the water. Iris barely managed to get out of the way as it plummeted, nearly upending the entire raft.

She had never trusted the gods, but now she began to pray – not to the seasonal and primordial gods, who had not helped her for her entire miserable life, but to something more tangible – the ocean beneath her. She begged and pleaded: I don’t know if you’re listening, please, I’ll do anything…

On the fifteenth day a wave crashed into the raft and shattered it to smithereens. Iris screamed as she fought to keep her head above water, and then she was sinking down, down, further than she had ever gone before.

The current pulled her down fast. Iris would never truly know if what she saw next was hallucinations or reality. She went down, down, down, into darkness so immense she couldn’t see herself. Pressure crushed her between its jaws. She knew that she had tasted a glimpse of power on the day she murdered Cayat, and now it had all been ripped away from her. The Clans of the Blackspear Islands, her life, all of that was irrelevant. She was a tiny fragment of life in an ocean of desolation. She saw skeletons and sand, dead coral reefs, leviathans with eyes bigger than her entire body, ghosts that rose from the blackness and reached for her. She saw the lightning of the storm that had crashed her raft and swore it split the whole world in two. And then she saw nothing.

Iris awoke on the shore of Myrkur an unknown amount of time later. Finally, luck had given her a second chance. She was free.