Keith R. Potempa

photo by black butterfly

The following is a short excerpt from Keith R. Potempa’s high fantasy novel-in-progress Daughters of Oyr.

Immediately after the arrow had loosed, Whisper stood from her hiding, confidently reaching for the large knife on her belt. But she halted, catching sight of a curious animal print on the ground before her. It was some kind of massive cat, that much she could tell, and it was quite fresh. It must have slipped past her vision somehow, for it moved very lightly on its paws. Perhaps, she thought, glancing at the fallen deer, she could catch a quick glimpse of this cat before any scavengers arrived. She crept slowly after it.

After a good thirty or so paces a strange, tingling sensation on her cheek halted her. Turning toward it, she caught her breath, for but a hand-span away from her face was the terrifying visage of a massive, white panther. She could do or say nothing in that moment, for a surge of fear and panic unlike anything she had ever felt gripped her racing heart. She blinked, trying to disbelieve, but this frost-white creature still remained, standing somehow on its hind legs, though strangely hunched so their heights were equal. Whisper merely stared into this creature’s mismatched eyes; one a deep blue, the other a shimmering copper.

“Sun-haired,” spoke a strange, throaty voice. A high tenor. It was in Hrellian, the language of the local settlement in which Whisper was living. “Your child is near.”

She was too startled to even realize that words had been spoken. This is a kattedryin, she was thinking. Here she stood, before a legendary moonshadow. But they were black in all the tales, she thought helplessly, weren’t they? How had it found her? How had she, the settlement’s most deadly hunter, not noticed a pure white creature stalking around a verdant forest?

The few, but widespread tales of kattedryin were flooding back to her. They were savage beasts who splayed their prey open, disemboweling them with razor edged claws. Eating their victims alive. Those who escaped these creatures’ grasp and lived to tell these tales were cursed with a madness that no bone-singer could right. A madness somehow tied to the changing of the moon. As a child, Whisper had been fed tales of these moonshadows among others as threats to keep her from misbehaving. Though as an adult she was thought among the settlement to be fearless, the shadows of her childhood loomed over her mind in that moment, as this pallid kattedryin impatiently sniffed at her.

“Locks-of-the-Morning,” it whispered again, now in Tride, the trade language used between many cultures. Its whiskers tickled her face as it spoke, bringing that same tingling sensation that had initially halted her. “A child of yours exists.”

It certainly was this beast that had spoken, she could not deny it. And now it anticipated an answer, though in a language she could barely speak. She could usually understand Tride when it was spoken to her but constructing her own sentences was difficult and taxing. “A man-child?” she replied softly in Tride.

The creature snorted, its body rising threateningly over her. “I am man-child,” Whisper could sense its claws extracting at the very corners of her vision. Fully unsheathed, they were the length of her own delicate fingers; ebony razors etched with swirling designs of white and deep red. A strange power pulsed in waves from them. “I dance in night with father when the white bowl is full. We are children of men. This child is no man-child.”

Whisper swallowed deeply.

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All original fiction is ©2009 Keith R. Potempa and is not to be reproduced in any form without prior written consent of the of the author.