Book One – Chapter 15

His words were reasonable. His tone, calm. His posture, respectable. His mannerisms, restrained. And yet, while his body moved through all the expected motions, his eyes did something else entirely. They never stopped moving. Never settled. Never focused where they should. They flickered, darted, and snapped from point to point, like they were disconnected from him entirely, driven by something else. It was as if Tirran was a normal person – a guard saying guard things and doing guard things with his more or less normal guard body – while some other presence, some senseless beast, had latched onto him from the inside. And this beast had taken control over his eyes. And it had been wreaking havoc with them ever since.

Tria had never mentioned the eyes when she had educated Yu on omira. Or had she? No, he would have definitely remembered that. Would he not? Well, then again, how would anyone describe this? You could say unsettling eyes, you could say pupils flaring, but there was just no way to truly capture the degree of disturbing Tellin’s eyes caused, to convey the sheer amount of raw horror they evoked, not with words.

Well. The one thing Tria had definitely spoken about, at length, was their hunting practices.

Unlike the bormen, whose strength came from sheer bulk and brute force, omira relied on speed and cunning. They were hunters through and through. Born with scent markers undetectable to most other races, they could recognise and coordinate with one another even in absolute darkness and across vast stretches of open land. Their exceptional sense of smell was one of many advantages that made them fearsome hunters and unyielding trackers. If you knew one thing about them, then you knew that an omira did not lose a trail.

Above all, hunting was more than survival for them. Hunting was an integral part of their culture. When a ruunar, which was the general term for a child omira, came of age, they were cast into the wild alone. This was the Trial of the Hunt. They had to endure, to track, and to return bearing a kill worthy of their pack’s respect. Only then were they truly accepted as a member of the pack. Only then would they belong.