Shifters Alliance

by Shaun L Griffiths

  ‘Half a year ago, we were following the snow line as it melted, just as we always have. Out of the high passes came an animal of such size and ferocity, the like of which had never been seen or heard of before. It was like something that young children would invent to frighten each other on a dark night. It was a thing from a nightmare. But it was real. It stood taller than two men, with jaws that could crush a man’s head without effort.’ Sonny looked at his own hands, shaking at the memory of first seeing the animal.

  ‘Its claws are longer than my hands. It could see you from the other side of the mountain and never lose sight of you. Once someone was seen, there was no escape. It could run faster than any man. We could not stand up to this thing. Its fur was long and white. It would appear from nowhere, hidden under the snows to ambush anyone passing. We call it the Snow Bear. But it is not like any bear you have seen before.

  ‘This year, late snows came again in spring. We lost sight of them. The passes were blocked and nothing could get through, or so we thought. But when the snows finally retreated as summer approached, they came back. They injured half of the High Lands Pride in one battle. We believe they returned with their hordes to invade our land.

  ‘We retreated to the Low Plains, calling all the Prides together for strength in numbers, to save our people and our land from being overrun and lost forever to these invaders.’

  Sonny stopped to take a long swallow of the cool water, the memories of the struggle coming back to him. He looked off into the distance to where his mountains stood, unseen. Watching his father leave for the High Passes, with his shoulders proud and square, heading out to protect his people. Taking a deep breath, Sonny looked up and around at the faces of the Clan watching him.

  ‘A meeting was called of the elders. They understood that the Snow Bears were using a gateway to enter our land. They could never have brought so many over the Desert Plateau to the north. There’s no water or shelter from the sun in this place. The leaders made the decision that we must bring in help.’

  Sonny looked around at the people whose land his Pride had invaded. He saw Sam, whose own daughter had been taken.

  ‘We’ve known of your land by the river for many years. It has always been a land of peace and happiness. There were things we didn’t understand, but we were happy not to meddle.

  ‘Some people say that in the past, we may have been all one family. We look the same, except for your dark hair. We use the same words, and we speak of the same things around us. But we also know you are very different. When we need to, we can change, as you’ve seen. Everyone is trained from an early age. How to call on the inner strength in our hearts that can change us into something much stronger than the person you see. We can call upon our inner strength to change into Mountain Lions. We’re at home in the elements of the High Peaks. We live and survive where our normal selves would perish. We thought we were masters of the peaks. Until last spring when our belief was shaken by the arrival of the bears.

  ‘We had knowledge that you didn’t have, or that you’d forgotten. We knew of the gateways that allow us to cross our borders. We’d come and watch you sometimes, following your lives. We always remembered that you had gifts that we didn’t have, but we didn’t really need. Not until now. You have gifts that make you very special.’

  Sonny looked into the faces staring intently at him

  ‘You can also change.’

  It took a moment for Sonny’s words to be fully understood by those around him, but they were not sure yet whether to believe it. Except for Sam, who sat staring at him. Sam was seeing Sonny in a new light.

  He’s young and arrogant, but I never understood the pressures he’s under, thought Sam. He’s being asked to fight in a war, with his own family and his own land at stake.

  Now he found himself looking at Sonny very differently.

  It was left to Grandfather to ask, ‘You change to become Mountain Lions. What is it that we can change into?’

  ‘You may become hounds,’ he said.

  They tried to picture this, to understand how it was possible, and a lengthy silence hung over the clan.

  Sam spoke for them all to ask, ‘Is that why you have taken our children, because you need hounds?’

  ‘Yes,’ was all Sonny could say. Seeing anger in their faces, he now felt shame for the actions of his people.

  ‘The children have been taken to the High Plains and welcomed as long-lost members of our families. We know the children are afraid and needing their families around them, so we do everything we can to give them security. We do whatever it takes to make them happy.

  ‘We show them how to use the gift they have, how they can change at will to be the one that sleeps inside.’

  He looked around, hoping people would understand what he was trying to describe. But he saw Sam shaking his head and saw that his wife had tears in her eyes.

  ‘It is not right,’ he heard her say. ‘Why didn’t you come to us and ask for help? If we can change, why didn’t you show us how, that we may try to do what we can? Why come and steal our children in the night?’ she said, unable to hold back the tears that streamed down her face.

  Sonny stood in front of them, lost for words as to why the decisions were made. He only knew what had been said at the elders’ meeting, but he felt inside that the old ones had misunderstood the clan so badly that they would agree to do this.

  ‘My loyalty is to my people, and I’ll use any strength I have left to help protect them. To do this, I have to follow what the elders have told me, for the good of us all. I have to believe that the elders know so much more than I do. Without that belief, I am afraid we’d be lost.’

  Sonny looked up again, seeking out Sam, and holding his gaze, he spoke directly to him.

  ‘I’ve spent so little time amongst you, but what I’ve seen and heard in this short time tells me that what my people have done is wrong. Your gifts and your strengths far exceed those that we’re aware of.’

  ‘Do you think our children are happy fighting your war?’ called Ned Woodman. The bitterness in his voice hit Sonny like a blow.

  He tried to find words that would bring a little comfort.

  ‘I believe your children are happy,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t mean to say they’re happy without you, because I think they miss you terribly. We show them our life, our people, our children, and we try to explain to them the dangers that we face. Then we ask them for help. If they ask to return, we will bring them back immediately, but they all agreed. Though they were young children when they were taken, they grow very quickly, and we form close bonds of love with them. I know they’ll return to you when they feel the time is right.’

  Sonny paused to catch his thoughts, ‘You wanted to know why we didn’t ask?’ he continued. ‘The elders agreed that if a stranger came to us and asked to take our children, to help save people we never even knew existed, the elders thought they’d be chased away.

  ‘Why didn’t we ask for your help? Because after a person has reached the age of eighteen years, if the child has never been shown how to change, if they’ve never been trained to bring out the hound inside, or their Mountain Lion, they’ll never be able to do so.

  ‘But we’ve found the children of your people, when we show them the way, they have such immense power, we find it difficult to believe. Their gifts of strength, speed, cunning, tactics, loyalty, far exceed anything we are capable of teaching them. They’re fearless when confronted by the Snow Bears. Though they’re children, they are now teaching us.

  ‘The elders believed that to show ourselves to you and ask you for the help of ten men, we’d leave empty handed. But by taking one child, we’d have the strength of fifty.’

  Salli spoke quietly to Sam, ‘It’s monstrous they could even think of doing such a thing.’

  Sam nodded, holding his wife tight and feeling her sobs start again.

  ‘You should leave now; you’ll gain nothing more from this,’ Sam told her.

  H
e could see Harri and Ned becoming angry, the questions becoming more aggressive in pushing Sonny to try to justify the deeds of his people.

  Sam watched Salli leave, then stood, and moved to the centre of the clan.

  ‘From what we’ve heard, I think there’s a lot we need to discuss amongst ourselves. Now we have an understanding of why this has happened, we can start on a plan. We can meet here later with the questions we need answered.

  ‘Tell us of the gateways,’ said Sam

  ‘They fall from the sky,’ Sonny replied. ‘We don’t know where they come from, but we know how they arrive. Long ago, people saw them cross the sky in a blaze of fire. They leave a streak of flame behind them, lighting up the sky. And when they hit the ground, it’s like a blow to your ears, the noise is so painful.’

  ‘I’ve seen one of these,’ called one of the clan.

  ‘These falling stones can open a gateway. We carry them to the border and when the stones are close they get hot. The closer you take them, the hotter they get, until you can no longer hold them. But only when a stone touches the border is the gateway created between our lands. The stones then start to crumble. When they turn to dust the gateway closes. We sometimes find these stones on river banks, where they’ve been washed down from the ice fields.’

  ‘And what of your land, what is beyond your borders?’ asked Grandfather.

  ‘We’ve found where our border lies with your land to the south. To the north, through the High Passes, lies the Desert Plateau that no one has been able to cross. Even my own father tried. It’s endless sand without water. But we believe somewhere at the end of the desert lies the land that the Snow Bears inhabit.

  ‘To the west is the endless water of the Great Sea. No one knows if this ever ends. To the east is the Forest. Some of our people have entered here and been lost for days. There’s no knowing east from west, north from south. The forest seems to move. Our people have stopped trying to find the border there; too many have been lost without ever being found.’

  ‘But people to your north have found their border,’ said Casey. ‘And now you’re threatened.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonny. ‘They’ve found their border and are invading our land through the High Passes. We don’t understand why they want our land. Some think it’s because their land is only desert, like our Desert Plateau, but no one is sure. They come to attack, not to talk.

  ‘So if we find a gateway stone, we could take this to our border, and a tunnel would open to your land?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Yes. Do you know where your border is to the north?’ asked Sonny.

  There were only blank stares when they realised no one had ever been aware that a border existed.

  It was Grandfather who broke the silence. ‘‘I remember a story that my grandfather once told me when I was a boy. It was of when he was in the North Hills with his uncle. They’d spent the summer there with the flock, letting them fatten up on the hill grasses. He told me that one summer’s day, they discovered some goats were missing. Uncle wanted to go and search for them and to do some fishing along the way. My grandfather passed the day looking after the rest of the flock.

  ‘After some hours, grandfather became concerned that uncle hadn’t returned, so he went north to find him. He searched for the rest of the day and he searched every day for a week after, but found no trace of uncle. The goats had scattered because they’d not been tended, so grandfather returned to the Meeting Place to ask for help. The clan was shocked to see him return with no uncle and no sheep. I was a young boy at the time, but I remember being taken to the North Hills to search for him. We never did find him.’

  Sonny then spoke, ‘There’s a story I was told of a stranger found wandering in the Low Valley. The story tells that he was an old man, he was lost, and no one knew how he’d come into the valley. He had hair that was once dark, but was then grey from old age. The family that found him tried taking him back to the town in the High Plains, but he never made it. He died on the trek through the hills. This could be the same lost man.’

  Sam rose, and walking to the centre of the clan, he called out, ‘We need two things. We need to find a gateway stone and we need to find the border.’

  Turning to Sonny he asked, ‘Will you help?’

  Sonny look at the faces around him. He felt shame for bringing such hurt to these people. He slowly nodded his head.

  ‘So tell us, what do the stones that open a gateway look like?’

  ‘They’re black, very black, almost like they swallow light. Sometimes they’re rounded, like they’ve been melted, and sometimes very sharp like they have been smashed open. And they are very heavy. But the first thing you will notice is their blackness.’

  ‘And our border?’ asked Casey. ‘How will we know when our land has ended?’

  ‘Will it be in the same place that your people entered our land?’ asked Ben.

  ‘No, it’s not so simple,’ said Sonny. ‘The border is fluid. We may never come out in the same place twice, but its place on our side always stays the same. We know our border because it’s where all land looks the same. You may see ground in the distance that looks the same as that which you’ve just crossed. You seem to be walking forever and never make any progress forward.’

  ‘Like entering the forest and you cannot seem to move forward?’ said Grandfather.

  There was silence as the clan realised what Grandfather had said.

  Sonny nodded, now understanding that he’d missed the obvious reason for getting lost when he had tried to escape from the Clan.

  ‘That may well be a place to look, but I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Sonny. ‘The forest is to our east, as it is to yours. Entering there may take you to places you don’t want to be. The forest… it has a power… a power of its own.’

  Sam stood alone at the river’s edge. Sonny approached him and stood silently watching the sunset over the river.

  ‘I’m sorry it was your daughter taken,’ said Sonny.

  ‘If it wasn’t my daughter, it would have been someone else’s child, still a loss for us all. It still would have hurt. Not as much as having Lulu taken, but this is a pain I wouldn’t wish anyone else to carry. It should never have been done.’

  ‘I know that now,’ said Sonny.

  Sam looked at him and saw genuine remorse.

  ‘She will return,’ he said, watching the sun light a golden path across the water straight to the river’s edge where they now stood.

  Sam gazed off into the distance, lost in his own thoughts for a moment.

  ‘Sometimes I want to get in a boat and follow that path, to see what’s over the horizon.’ said Sam.

  ‘I have the same feeling when I look at the highest peaks in my land. I wonder how the other side of the Desert Plateau looks. I’ve heard stories that the silence of the desert is like a thunder in your ears, the silence seems to be deafening! And at night the stars are so big that you can almost touch them.’

  ‘Is it in the nature of all men to always wonder what’s on the other side?’ said Sam as the last glint of sunlight disappeared for another day, filling the sky with a rainbow of orange, red and magenta.

  Chapter 5

  The clan met at the river’s edge the following morning. ‘Anything that looks strange we should collect and bring back here, we can inspect everything later,’ said Sam

  They split into two groups, moving north and south in search of a stone that may have been washed down with the floods. Sonny walked at the back of his group, to pick up anything missed by those in front. Walking with his head down, he became aware of someone keeping step with him. He looked up to see Kerri bending to pick up a black basalt rock.

  ‘We’re looking for something much darker. It’s a darkness that seems to leave a hole in the sunlight,’ said Sonny.

  ‘I can’t imagine what you’re trying to describe,’ said Kerri.

  Sonny took the basalt from her and washed it in the river.

  He held it up and said, ‘Yo
u see how it reflects light, how it seems to shine at these points,’ he said, moving the stone in the sunlight to catch the sun’s ray. ‘The stone we’re looking for reflects nothing. Even when it’s wet, there’s no light coming off it.’

  They moved on together, then Kerri stopped and looked up. She asked, ‘Were you one of those who took Holly?’

  Sonny stopped and turned to her. He could see her sadness and her loss.

  ‘No, this is the first time I’ve entered your land, and if it wasn’t for Sam, I’d never have come here.’

  ‘Sam told us of your ‘struggle’ together,’ Kerri said politely. She turned serious again, ‘Why did your people pick Lulu?’

  Sonny was shaken by the question. He had worried that someone would ask him this. He was expecting Sam to be the one. It would have been easier if it had been Sam. He felt he could have hidden the truth from him. But now that Kerri had asked, he was not sure that he could lie. He hesitated, desperately trying to make a decision. He felt Kerri was reading his mind and to hide the truth now would be to make an enemy of her.

  ‘Lulu is special,’ he said, trying to hold her gaze. ‘What you’re asking can only be explained when you understand our lives. When we change, when we release the Lion from inside, we also release ‘gifts’ that we wouldn’t otherwise have.

  ‘These ‘gifts’ are something all Felines have, though some have forgotten they have it or have forgotten how to use it. All cats can see, they can see through our world and see another dimension, other worlds if you like.

  ‘When we change, we can see people in these other worlds. And Lulu was seen. That’s why it was so important that she came to our land. I can’t tell you any more except that we believe that Lulu is … needed.’