Mango Chiefton's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Mango Chiefton knelt in the mud and stabbed his own arm again. The bone needle bit shallow. Ash-black ink welled up, then thinned to gray within an hour. He watched the mark fade like the last three had faded. He needed these lines to hold. His troop needed them to hold. A beast old as the swamp stalked their sleeping ground, and only a full-body binding ritual could chain it. But a binding ritual demanded deep lines that lasted a lifetime. His crude needles could not cut that deep. He had lost two cousins to the beast already. He pressed the needle to his skin a fourth time and drew blood, not ink. His hand shook. The tool was too soft, too dull. Every mark he made was a promise the beast would break. Mango stopped. He lifted the ornate bong at his side and packed the bowl with a torn violet leaf. He had traded a moon of foraging for that leaf. The elders swore its smoke opened the trance a true ritual required. He lit it, drew deep, and held the smoke until the swamp bent sideways in his eyes. In the trance, he stopped seeing his arm as skin. He saw it as a thing that could be carved by something hungrier than bone. He crawled to the neglected fence at the edge of camp, where wild weeds choked the rotting posts. Beyond it, the shallows churned. A swarm of marsh piranhas boiled in the murk, teeth flashing, bodies never still. Small. Fast. Their bites cut clean and deep. Mango understood then. He could not force the lines. He would let something else bite them. He smeared a stripe of ink-paste across his forearm in the shape of the first binding rune. Then he plunged the arm into the shallows and held it there. The piranhas struck. Pain ripped up to his shoulder. He roared and kept the arm down, dragging it slow so the teeth followed the paste line. They tore where the ink led them, hungry for the scent he'd mixed in. When he wrenched the arm free, blood sheeted off it. He fell back against the fence and scrubbed the wound clean. Under the mess, the rune sat carved into muscle, ragged but deep. He packed fresh ink into the raw grooves. This time it would not thin. This time it would scar and stay. Mango laughed, wild and ragged, blood dripping off his fingers. He had his tool. He had a way to cut lines the beast could not erase. But one rune had nearly emptied him. The full ritual covered his whole body, dozens of runes across chest and back and legs. No creature would let him drain that much blood and live. And the fish would strip flesh faster than the marks could set. He needed the lines to grow instead of bleed him dry.