8 |✓

One | Before they lost each other

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It was solstice when he was born to the tribe of Yagahl. The blood of royalty ran through his veins. A few days later, she was born to the tribe of Argahd, a tribe of fearless huntsmen.

He was growing up fine and strong; he was training to become the tribal chief, just like the respectable and wise man his father was. Trailing day and night behind him, he chased after woolly mammals with the hunter-gatherers and learnt to run, fight and lead.

She was not a beauty, but it did not bother her. She found joy in sparring, climbing, and spending her days growing up with men, believing herself to be one of them.

It was in the forest, the one that stood on the boundaries between the two territories, that he and she first met.

He was all alone, chasing after a beast. Instead, he fell into a deep hole, a trap sprung on him by the spear-toothed animal. He tried to escape to no avail. He mustered all the strength in him to leap up, grab a study rock or something. But he fell back into the sunken earth again and again. He thought that was the end of him, that he would die in the beasts' den. He began to say his last prayers.

A long vine dropped before his face.

He was stunned. Had his prayers worked? He pounced on and climbed, only realising belatedly that the vine was being hoisted upward - someone was saving him. When he reached the top, a small callused hand reached for his and dragged him out of the pit.

A howl from behind terminated any form of celebration, and they were forced to flee immediately. They ran as far as they could from the animals.

Finally, when they were a safe distance away, he looked at his saviour for the first time.

He was enamoured by the young girl before him, her curly black locks, wild and tangled, her fierce and bright eyes. Her skin was a dark bronze, covered in the furs of mammals. Dark and dirtied, she smelt like the best things of nature.

She was captured by the young boy before her, for he was different from all those she had been familiar with. He had blue eyes the colour of her tribe's most treasured gems, light hair and exotic features. Her people had always warned her to stay away from strangers - for anyone who was not like them was a savage beast, but she had just done the opposite, she had just saved one.

When he, squatting and crouching low to the ground, moved towards her, she flinched and stumbled back instinctively, one hand clutching the dagger behind her. Shaking, she could not bring herself to kill the stranger. His eyes were too gentle, and the care he took in his movements assured her he could not possibly mean harm.

Slowly, he leant towards her and kissed her nose, and she understood then that he was thanking her.

They could not communicate, for they did not speak each other's tongue. But there was a divine connection, a sense that they belonged together.

She healed his wounds, he healed her fears.

For days and months and years they met in seclusion by the river in the forest. Neither knew what it was, that feeling they had for the other, but they knew they had to protect it, from the beasts, from their people, from danger. They vowed to be together for the rest of their lifetime, for the next, the next, and the next.

Then one day, he told his father about the girl from nature. She told her father about the boy from the woods.

His father gave him consent to marry the girl; her father was infuriated.

His father sent him with gifts to ask for her hand; her father had her beaten to death.

With a bag of dowry, he ran into the forest to meet her, with feelings of ecstasy like he never had before.

But even as night fell, she never came.

For days and months and years he waited by the river alone, for the girl he never saw again.

Little did he know that the beasts were not beasts, that there were far more malicious creatures in the world than the one that he wore over his skin.