Pain reached Nussudle before sight did.
It came in layers. First, the deep ache in his ribs and shoulder. Then the sharper pull at the side of his head whenever he tried to move. Then the dull, constant throb seemed to sit behind his eyes, making thinking quite difficult.
He breathed in too quickly and regretted it at once. The air was hot, dry, and carried smoke, ash, and something sour beneath it. Not rot. Not sea salt. Something older. Human places had smelled wrong. This place smelled worse.
He opened his eyes slowly.
For several seconds, all he saw were bars.
Not metal. Wood. Thick lengths of dark, hardened timber, lashed together with cord and resin-black bindings. He was lying on the floor of a cage suspended slightly above the ground, its frame reinforced at the corners with carved bone wedges. The door faced outward, shut tight by a slab of stone shaped to fit into a locking groove. No gap wide enough for fingers. No weakness he could see immediately.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow.
Pain flared across his left side. He hissed and stopped moving until it passed.
The camp around him came into focus piece by piece.
Ash lay over nearly everything. Not drifting lightly like dust, but settled thick across the ground and caught in the edges of structures and bone-work. Totems rose from the camp in crooked lines, built from skulls, rib cages, wing bones, and carved poles blackened by soot. Some were shaped into spirals. Others into hanging curtains of vertebrae that clicked softly when the wind moved. Fire pits burned low and constant, filling the air with a restless orange light even though it was not yet dark.
He looked farther.
The Na'vi who moved through the camp were not like any clan he had seen before. Their bodies were lean to the point of sharpness, their clothing layered in hide, ash-stained fibre, and blackened ornaments. Their paint was not ceremonial in the way he understood it. It looked lived in. Burned into them. Some wore their hair bound back with bone pins. Others let it hang loose and wild, dusted grey at the ends.
And everywhere he looked, there was fire.
It sat in braziers. It ran along trenches. It burned in bowls and circles and rings as though the camp itself needed to remain surrounded by it.
Nussudle swallowed hard.
Then he saw the performance, or ritual, or whatever it was meant to be.
A healthy-looking Na'vi male moved around a central fire with intense, almost manic focus. He leapt through rings of flame hung from bent branches and bone frames, landing lightly and immediately throwing himself through the next. Ash rose around his feet. Heat shimmered in the air. Several others watched with approval, their faces unreadable in the firelight.
Nussudle's head hurt.
He tried to follow the motion, to understand whether this was a celebration or punishment or simple display, but before he could settle on an answer, a younger Na'vi woman stepped into the ring of watchers.
She was marked heavily, tattoos and blackened patterns running along her arms, throat, and face in lines that made her look more carved than painted. Her expression held something close to delight, but there was no warmth in it. She waited until the man landed near the central flame, then shoved him hard between the shoulders.
He fell forward with a shout, straight into the fire.
Several people laughed.
The young woman laughed loudest.
It was a sharp, wicked sound, not joyful, not playful. It carried the same wrongness as the camp itself. The man rolled out of the flames a second later, skin smoking in places, and dragged himself back to his feet while those around him watched as if nothing unusual had happened.
Nussudle turned his head away.
That was when he noticed the guard.
The Na'vi stood just above the cage on a raised platform of scorched timber, spear in hand, expression fixed in clear dislike. He had been there the entire time. Nussudle simply hadn't seen him through the haze in his thoughts. The guard looked down with the sort of anger that did not need words to become dangerous.
Nussudle forced himself upright, slower this time.
His body protested, but he managed it.
He said nothing.
There was no point.
The guard's grip tightened on the spear shaft, and for a brief second, Nussudle thought he might strike him through the bars just for moving. Instead, the man only spat into the ash beside the cage.
Then a voice came from behind him.
"You're lucky."
The words were slurred, rough, and close enough to make Nussudle tense immediately. He turned as quickly as his injuries allowed.
Another cage stood in the shadow behind his own, smaller and lower to the ground, almost hidden by stacked bones and hanging strips of hide. Inside it crouched a Na'vi so thin he looked half-starved even by the standards of the camp. His limbs were little more than rope and angles. Most of his teeth were gone, the few remaining broken and dark. His face had collapsed inward around old damage. Worst of all were the eyes.
There were none.
Only sunken, scarred hollows where they had once been.
The man tilted his head slightly, listening rather than seeing.
Nussudle stared for a moment too long. "Lucky?"
The blind Na'vi let out a dry, unpleasant laugh. "If they wanted you dead, you would be dead."
The grammar was broken, but the meaning was clear enough.
Nussudle shifted, ignoring the pain. "Where am I?"
The man smiled, or something close to it. "You in place of ash. Place of hunger. Place of rage." He licked cracked lips. "You are in their camp now."
Nussudle looked back through the bars toward the wider settlement.
He already knew that.
What he needed were answers.
"What do they want with me?"
The blind man's head turned a fraction, listening again to the fire, the guards, the movement around them. "Depends who asks first," he said. "Warriors want blood. Younger ones want you as a toy to practice on. The elder wants to sacrifice you to affront Eywa." He gave another small laugh. "Their leader wants something else."
Leader.
Nussudle filed the word away.
He leaned closer to the bars separating them. "Who are you?"
The man went still for a moment. When he answered, his voice lost some of its mockery.
"Used to be many things." He tapped his own chest with two thin fingers. "Now I'm what's left."
"That doesn't answer me."
"No," the man agreed. "But it's truth."
A shout rose from somewhere near the centre of the camp. Several voices answered. The guard above shifted his weight, suddenly more alert.
Nussudle followed the sound.
The tattooed girl was standing again, one foot planted on the chest of the man she had thrown into the fire. He was still alive, though barely. The watchers were parting now, turning toward a path that led deeper into the camp between two rows of bone poles.
Someone important was coming.
The blind prisoner lowered his head. "Don't talk too much," he murmured. "They like fear. They like to fight. They like it when forest people do both."
Nussudle's jaw tightened.
"Forest people?"
The blind man smiled with those ruined teeth. "You smell of leaves. Of rain. Of places not burned." He tipped his head again, as if scent alone were enough to place him. "They hate that."
Nussudle looked down at himself.
His clothes were torn and ash-covered. There was dried blood on his sleeve and chest. His hands shook slightly when he flexed them. The memory of Nova's scream returned so sharply that for a second, he nearly lost his breath.
Nova.
He turned back to the blind man at once. "My ikran. Did you see—"
The man laughed again, louder this time, and the guard above barked a warning in a language or dialect Nussudle didn't know.
"No see," the prisoner said once the sound passed. He tapped the scarred hollows where his eyes should have been. "Hear. Smell. Feel." His smile faded. "Your beast was alive when they dragged you in. Angry. Loud. Then not closed anymore."
Alive.
The word settled through Nussudle with painful relief.
Not safe. Not free. But alive.
He closed his eyes briefly and let that be enough for the moment.
When he opened them again, movement at the far edge of the camp drew every head, every weapon, every whisper toward it. The firelight shifted as bodies stepped aside.
Whoever ruled this place was finally arriving.