#urshil

[needlesslycryptic]

A character sketch for The Pelts

[sunderlorn]

Pelts - Part One

“The Urshil have their ways and being that they are widespread throughout Olm, I believe through West and East alike, are best known for them. Even so these means they use to wear the shapes of beasts remain unknown and obscure to most. And to those who know the gristle of their customs those paths they walk are still closed off to all not of their blood. There are spellworkers too who set their sights on other shapes. Through study – anatomy, dissection, years of learning – they may learn enough of a new form to be as well-versed in it as their own. And so such magi may begin to weave a spell for themselves and learn to wear it as anyone else would a cloak: the form of a bird or fox or rat. But these are dangerous measures, and so ambition can lead to carelessness. Such carelessness makes it easy for them to misplace who they once were. Many lose their inborn shapes for good. But there are other stories still that end the way such cautionary tales of spellwork begin. And they tell of those who lose themselves. And so forget their own skins. And so through the strange laws of the wild world that existed before speech and before even Old Omor – before the world was ordered and was held together by raw sympathy: the pull of like to like – such poor creatures are claimed by wilderness.”

        — Extract from ‘Pelts: A Short History of Skinchange’,           an essay by Ersa Jeshamin, of Collegium Seheris, Tolomi.

[A story from Olm. Written for the very talented needlesslycryptic as my side of an art trade. Or at least, half of my side. Enjoy.]

The room was filled with breathing. It was something like a purring almost, but from a throat deep as a mine-shaft, dark as the sound of wet wood set upon a fire, waiting to catch. And it murmured throughout all the cabin. Its one room where she lived with her father, who had felled the trees to build its walls, to keep them safe from the brittle Winter that prowled outside.

But the Winter had got in. Her whole body felt hollowed by cold. She crouched in the corner, frozen still. If she moved she would shatter. If she blinked she would break. With eyes round and forced open, though they watered and stung each second, she watched the shapes and she heard the breath and she tried not to breathe herself. Her lungs were rigid. Time moved slow unseen, like the flowing water under the frozen water that filmed the surface of the nearby stream.

There were three of them though their numbers shifted with their heaving dark flanks and it was hard to tell in the shadows. They moved in circles, moving like people spoke, and on four legs like beasts. But they’d raised the latch and snuffed the lamp and gotten into the cabin alongside the cold. Their blunt paws scratched up the smooth-worn boards of the floor. She could hear their lolling tongues.

Like in a dream she might wake from, her throat strained at being silent. Her lips were dry and parched and cracked, and she couldn’t cry out. The three shapes crowded about her father’s pallet where she knew he was sleeping.

A groan shuddered out. She tried again to make a sound but it was not her father’s voice she heard. It was like an animal’s whining that stretched into a woman’s. Alongside the changing sound the biggest shadow-shape changed as well. It seemed to grow out of itself and up, sloughing off strips of stuff, until it stood on two legs: a poised woman’s shadow, upright, scrawny but bulked with furs, mantles, a collar of rattling things.

There were wet sounds. Tearing. A bruise-coloured pain in her chest as she tried not to understand. Despite herself she screamed, covering her eyes with one hand, fist suddenly stuffed tight against the blunt flats of her front teeth, trying to force the noise back in. A hungry whimpering. A ragged warm hurt layered over the cold and the coming blackness as she started to breathe again. And then stopped knowing for a time.

…

“Girl,” said a woman’s rough voice. Its accent was foreign but its tone was soothing. “Girl…Stillness is yes. Best. Girl. Sweet clever girl. No more move now. Just safeness. Safe and warm, sweet girl. You well sooner this way. And many way for us to go still. Moons, yes, months. Only once you can walk again. Sleep, girl. Sleep to walk. Then Yarastead.”

She was no longer so cold. The female voice crooned in her ear like purring — like the grumble of snow underfoot. She felt fur against her skin, wrapped all about her. And she felt the pain only dimly now, aching and frayed in the flesh of her shoulder. A fire burned nearby. She smelt it sharp on the air.

“Can’t carry her,” said another voice, lower and indistinct, but accented similarly. “Not all the ways. Is she pack? No, she’s no pack, nor no ‘Shil. It was wrong to take her.”

“Wrong to take the other too but I see you did not stop it,” said the female voice, a little further off now and harsher, barking. “Wrong to take that meat, but you did not leave it. I do next best thing for pack. The wrong’s cut out. We carry what’s left to Yarastead to make the rest right.”

“It doesn’t make her pack.”

“I am pack! I am voice and I am claw and tooth and if you will not listen to voice, I will make you answer to tooth, and learn from claw. You hear?”

The girl opened her eyes with difficulty. It was the kind of twilight that comes with evening’s coming. She was bundled and half-numb in a clearing between thick and twisted trees. The open space was small and there were only cracks of orange and greying sky between the naked eaves above. The fire was a young one, still with unburnt branches and deadwood sitting by its side.

Squatting on their haunches around the fire’s beginnings were two figures. Their skin was smooth and grey like stones at the bottom of a river and their legs were long and clad in leather stockings. Fur mantles hung on their shoulders and necklaces of teeth around their necks. A woman with a long face, and a long mane of russet-brown matted hair, wild from the crown of her head down her back. Another, hairless all over, but with a wide sad-grinning mouth, long ears, and wide-set yellow-gold animal’s eyes.

“She has no pack but us now,” said the woman, hunkering down her head to aim her gaze at the forest floor. “For a few moons at least. Understand. Please.”

“She’s awake,” said the other.

…

She travelled with the Urshil after that. They told her she could walk alongside them — it wasn’t her walking that was hurt. She walked for a time. Soon enough she ran instead, as they did, in loose formation between the tall trees where she learnt to mark the time of day by the angle of the sun as it dappled the ground, and their moving limbs together. The frozen earth and its blanket of pine needles and burrs only stung her bare feet at first.

The two Urshil didn’t speak often. They spoke Metharim loosely, and often badly, but with a force that got their point across. But the girl never heard them speak another language, to each other or to her. Instead they were always moving: speaking without speaking, like animals do. But it was in ways that did not quite fit them, looking awkward on two legs, as if their skins were always itching to change.

Around the cabin the trees had been thick and pot-bellied, with black gnarling bark, tough skins. Her father called them Orehide trees and did not fell them but scraped off what he could to whittle tools, to promise furniture, to promise riches back in the town she only remembered as a handful of stories and blinding clear sky.

The Orehide trees were so tall she could never see their leaves but only knew they blotted at the sun and blanketed the stars. But lower to the ground there was Sweetheart Cedar with its flats of foliage, hung on spreading branches, like lines of cloud set in a horizon. Like shelves for birds to sit. Her father tapped them for their sap and set it in carved moulds to make shining things from its solid resin. The girl had left something behind: a little dog he’d cast for her, out of the deep-hued stuff, glossy and red.

But as they travelled the trees changed. The kind of light that day and night gave out changed too. Soon they were running through thin silverbarked trees with red low-hanging leaves that let the sun through. They grew close together and their slim trunks tangled and thatched, forming walls they had to find ways through, and paths they could follow. And the forest floor was dry, or banked thickly with ferns and brambles.

The Urshil taught her which fruit were good to eat. And they taught her which leaves you should not disturb, which growths of mushrooms you should leave to grow. They were often hungry – all three of them – but the girl was well-used to hunger. She’d never seen anyone run so fast as the golden eyed Urshil after a rabbit to cook on a spit and share between the three of them. It was the hairless one, with the golden eyes, who ate the head, and kept the paws, hanging them about their neck.

When next they hunted it was all the quicker. The woman-shaped Urshil waited downwind, amongst reddish bracken, hunkered into herself. The other worked to flush out their prey, running it toward the kill. That night they ate the doe, the female choosing as she would first. But it was the girl who ate the most, and the Urshil left the hide and the hooves for the morning to find.

After that the girl helped. She ran quickly now and did not tire. The woman-shaped Urshil did something with this next deer’s blood, cooing as she rubbed it into the girl’s shoulder. By the time they reached Yarastead, the ragged wound had become a ragged scar.

…

The sky around Yarastead was huge and bright: blue but striped by locks of cloud, and then blazing orange and purple, powerful as paint, come sunset over the sea of old stumps and new weeds that once was the Inland forests’s uncharted border. Beneath that it was a spindly criss-cross of timber, lashed and nailed together as a foothold in this frontier, set in amongst splashes of cornfield, and then tall brittle-stemmed meadows that moved with the high winds.

The Urshil left her on its outskirts. It was like they presumed she would find her way now though still only willowy child with a scar and leathery feet — she would find her way if returned to her kind, like letting a fish back into water. But for the first time in months, the girl was scared and the feeling was like a stone in her belly. Something stitched and half-healed was about to be torn away.

“Girl,” said the russet-maned Urshil, drawing close to her on the edge of the cornfield. “Your fear will feed you, not eat you up. Strong, girl. I’ve seen you strong. ‘Shil children, we let them go, out into the wild still smooth and strange. That is how they grow, girl. And this is our wild.” She gestured beyond the field and into the town, where smoke rose in lines to the sky.

The golden eyed Urshil did not say a word but looked at the girl, never glancing away. A constant whimper sang in and out of its throat with every breath. The sound was low and long, unstopping, as if always about to break into something to be said — but it stayed trapped behind the younger Urshil’s gritted teeth.

“Strong,” the girl said to herself, walking into the cornfield. No shoes on her feet, and pelts on her back, a ragged nighttime shift all the clothes she owned. “This is how we grow.”

[sionid]

I'm considering this the first of the Halloweenishness, because this lady had to hunt and eat housecats to learn to change into one and that is pretty spooky, no?

[sunderlorn]

The Olmanac - Part V

            The Living Races - Part III         The Urshil Shortly after the fall of the Omorin Empire, it is believed the Urshil first emerged. They came from the Kadari Forests, and from the Inland, and they would not return. No amount of wars, or distrust, or oppression could make them go back. They walked Olm from then on, as they do now, migrating over the years in haphazard patterns, tuned to the beasts they resemble. Every Urshil is a chimera in their own right, but only when grown. Urshil are born sexless, lacking all features but large round black eyes, lipless toothless mouth, humanoid bodies, and smooth, loose, grey skin: dark for the most part but paling towards elbows, palms, soles. But the Urshil are a race of shapeshifters, and it is by shifting, and emulating other creatures, that they become distinctive, taking on new features, personality, sexual characteristics and gender. The Urshil are also a race of hunters. It is by studying another creature, emulating it, killing that creature, eating its meat and wearing its hide, its teeth, its claws or its feathers, that they grow closer to it. Once an affinity is established, the Urshil may take that creature’s form. Through learning the ways of animals, and taking their shapes, an Urshil can find its own path, and its own identity. An Urshil that shifts to a she-wolf will begin to resemble a wolf, and may begin a shift towards femininity. Where their gender wanders, their biological sex will begin to follow. As such, among Urshil, puberty, and coming of age, comes not with sexual maturity but with shifting. Traditionally moving in large tribal family groups, and migrating with the seasons, in patterns that only become clear over the course of years, Urshil children are not considered the responsibility of a pair of parents, but of the tribe as a whole. Social groups tend to form between Urshil who share affinities for particular sorts of animals. Children move between them, learning their ways until they are judged old enough to choose what form they wish their first shift to take. Over the course of a season, they will learn from that group how to track and how to hunt their chosen creature, before setting off alone to do so, on lone travels that may last years. This is how an Urshil comes of age. When they come back to their people, wearing skins and charms of bone, and with new features growing from beneath their old skin, they are judged an adult, and worthy of respect. Often, this first form will be some form of prey mammal. These are the easiest to hunt, and easiest to learn, though some truly ambitious young Urshil will choose to hunt predators. Technically, an Urshil can take the form of any animal they can kill. However, easiest are land mammals, followed by birds, reptiles, then fish, and lastly insects, molluscs, arachnids, and all else. As such, one can judge an Urshil’s shifting talent – and often their standing in Urshil culture – by the mix of their features. The more forms an Urshil has mastered, the more ragtag and strange they will seem. The irony of the Urshil’s shifting, however, is that though they learn to perfectly mimic the creatures with whom they hold an affinity, they will never pass among that species. They will be forever marked with blood: instinct among that species marks them as a killer — something to be feared. For this reason, the people of Olm know that if ever they meet an Urshil with unsettlingly ordinary features – one who looks Uttaran, say; or Shim – who is clad in strange smooth leather, and followed by a creeping sense of unease, it is best to be wary. Or else to be ready to run. For not all Urshil restrict themselves to hunting beasts. Some are monsters in their own right.