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Metsu was born into a world choking on its last breath. Her first memories were of hunger—her mother’s sharp ribs pushing against a frail, khaki pelt as they huddled under the skeletal shade of an acacia tree. The pride spoke of better days—when rivers flowed freely, when prey was plump and plentiful—but Metsu had no use for myths. Her cubhood was marked by rot. A world decaying under the cruel glare of a sun that showed no mercy.
But drought wasn’t what destroyed her. It was the night.
The rogues came without sound. Shadows slipping through grass dry enough to crackle. Eyes glinting with the madness of lions who had nothing left to lose. The attack was over before it began. Flesh tore; bones splintered, and the air filled with the metallic taste of blood. Her mother fought like the lioness she was—roaring her fury even as her body broke. Metsu didn’t cry. She couldn’t. She only crouched in silence beneath a thorny thicket, wide eyes watching her world collapse.
When dawn broke, it was worse. Silence. The pride was gone, scattered like dead leaves, twisted and still. Metsu crept out and found her mother’s body—a mauled carcass, her cloudy wide eyes staring at nothing. Metsu, shivering in the breeze, pressed her small body against her mother’s cold side, waiting for warmth that wouldn’t come.
Time passed; days blurred into nights, though it felt meaningless. Hunger gnawed, thirst burned, but Metsu lived. Somehow. The land, indifferent to her suffering, offered no solace. For the land didn’t care about her grief. The land never did.
A wandering healer found her—a lioness as ancient as the stones, with a gaze as sharp as a poacher's knife. She took Metsu in. Fed her. Taught her. The earth became Metsu’s teacher, every root and herb a weapon against death. She learned to bind wounds, to draw poison, to chant words that soothed the dying. But every lesson came with a bitter truth: healing wasn’t salvation. It was war. And war was never won.
“For every life you save, death claims two more,” the healer would murmur, her tail curling around the front of her paws. “But to save even one... that is the greatest act of defiance against inevitability.”
Metsu became that defiance. Seasons passed, and she grew into a lioness that legends clung to like shadows. “Metsu the Healer,” they called her. Feared. Respected. Her brown eyes, once unremarkable, now carried a weight that made even the strongest lions falter. The kind of gaze that came from staring death in the face and not looking away.
But Metsu carried deep wounds that didn’t show, the ones you couldn't rub an herb on or wrap up with cloth. Every life she saved reminded her of the family she couldn’t. Every lesion she stitched whispered of her mother’s blood in the dirt. At night, under the stars, Metsu would whisper to the ghosts she couldn’t shake. “I could’ve saved you,” she murmured to the dark. “If I’d known then what I know now...”
Grief didn’t break Metsu. It honed her. Carved her into something sharp, unyielding. She didn’t live for herself. She lived for the lost. For the sick. For the ones who couldn’t fight back.
In the end, Metsu’s life was one of service—a constant war against the inevitability of death. But as her own time was to draw near, she found herself unafraid. She had stared into the face of death a thousand times, and she had no fear of meeting it once more. Her only hope was that, in the lands beyond, she might see her family again. Until then, she would remain a flame against the dark, burning brightly until the last breath would leave her body and the savannah snuff said spark, however long that may take.
“Grief does not kill,” she once remarked. “It carves us into something unrecognizable, something sharp and unyielding. I am not whole. I am a weapon, forged by loss and wielded by duty. And so I will fight, even as I bleed.”
Credits: 9Natalee9 (#494754)
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