Profound-Speaks-Always

All Zipsum wise-women have two stomachs. That's what Profound-Speaks-Always believed. One stomach is just the normal shit-making one. The other stomach is their intuition stomach. The intuition stomach gurgles in highly complex manners. Good wise-women can read these gurgles and make smart decisions from them. Her intuition stomach had been gurgling a lot lately.

It gurgled, for example, the entire time the Vorax-who-did-not-want-honor and her non-defiling-defilers were staying in the enclave. It gurgled before that when the Kyo-Tee-Shee crashed into the forest floor and made a glass-cave. It gurgled after they left, when a few days later demon-defilers appeared out of thin air in the enclave. Yes it gurgled angry gurgles then.

The Riverswift Tribe attacked at once and annihilated one defiler so completely she disappeared. The other died and sunk to the bottom of the lagoon. They retrieved his corpse and cast it into the jungle, but for three days Profound-Speaks-Always declared the lagoon poisoned and no one drank from it.

The whole tribe heard her gurgling intuition stomach during those days and no one needed her to interpret it for them. Cheldrun Defilers had found the enclave, and only a few days after they released non-defiling-defiler prisoners back into the jungle. Profound-Speaks-Always wondered if she had lost her gift for interpreting the gurgles. Had the gurgles told her to execute them and she didn't listen? Had she wanted to believe the Vorax and the Fox-Son and a fellow Zipsum that these particular Cheldrun were not demons? Perhaps she was getting tired of fighting this war and in her secret longing for peace she had overlooked the danger...

And now here people were doomed as a result. If one group of Cheldrun had found them, others would come soon. The Riverswift Tribe could not win in a pitched battle. They would be forced out of their enclave. Forced to find solace somewhere deeper in the jungle. Winter was near and they would have to abandon their cache of nuts and pray to every mighty Kyo-Tee-Shee that Karia would be merciful.

Gurgle. And something else was wrong. Something more immediate, more sinister and completely beyond the wisdom of her intuition stomach. Ever since they'd fished the Cheldrun corpse from the lagoon and the three days had passed and the tribe had begun drinking the water again... People were getting sick. Acting strange. She had never felt this kind of existential dread before. Whatever it was the Cheldrun had unleashed, it completely unmanned her. She evacuated her bowels, failed to sleep, and wept and wept.

"Leaps-Over-Lakes, follow their trail. Take 5 warriors and go after them..." she'd said it earlier this morning in a desolate voice. "Find them and come back to me alive if you can. If we can, the Riverswift Tribe will repay them for betraying us, all together."

She'd been weeping every moment since she made that decision. She wept for her tribe. She wept for the jungle which would lose another guardian and be even more vulnerable to the loggers. She wept for Karia and this rising horror that she somehow knew would consume it all. Most of all, she wept for herself and her incoherently gurgling intuition stomach. It no longer spoke to her in a language she could understand. She wept and when she looked at her reflection in the lagoon she realized that her tears had turned to blood.