HOOTERS

THE FAILED REVOLUTION

It became painfully clear to the hooters and their half-blood kin that King Aurel wasn't just cruel. He was on a mission: extermination, erasure, ethnic cleansing, but with better robes.

This wasn’t about vengeance anymore; it was about existence. So, they turned to the only being mad enough, brilliant enough, and terrifying enough to make even silence flinch: Al-Kane, The OG hooter.

The golden-eyed bastard child of the queen and a curse.

The “half-brother” Aurel never acknowledged.

He lived alone by the beach, far from the village where he’d been raised by Moufaka and the knowledge that his mother was dead. Moufaka was a former eunuch with biceps big enough to cast shadows at midnight and had spent his days thinking, building, and brooding.

Al-Kane and his guardian were nearly identical in physique. The only difference was his troubling gaze and that silent presence that seemed to announce itself before he ever spoke. He was like a freshly forged sword; elegant, deadly, and always ready to kill.

When the hooters told him what Aurel had done to Pearl, to Arche, and the hybrid children, he didn’t argue. He didn’t curse.

He simply rose, took a torch in and walked towards the royal fields. No chants. No warnings. Just fire.

The first flame bloomed at his feet, catching the grass like it had been waiting centuries to burn. Within minutes, the fields were an inferno. Every crop turned to ash. Every cow to steak. The smoke rose high into the night, and everything was charred to black before the king and his servants could get there. He chose not to speak and went back into his chambers to plot his next moves. The sky glowed red as if hell was about to rain down throughout the night.

The King’s breakfast arrived late the next morning. Not because the servants were slow, but because there was no food. Nothing left. The royal stables were still smoking. The wine cellar exploded. Only a single message, carved into the burnt palace gates, remained:

“RUN.”

The hooters didn’t celebrate. They waited. Two days passed. No retaliation. No word. Just silence: the most dangerous kind. But on the morning of the third day, just as villagers began their morning routines; tending fires, sharpening spears, pretending to hope, two horses galloped into the village at full speed.

Each horse dragged one leg of the same hooter woman, the Queen.

Her body had been split, torn down the middle by force and distance. Her torso had long given up. What arrived was blood-soaked pulp, limbs detached and twisted, one half to each horse. The rocky path seemed to have done its job: blood, bone and torn flesh on the trail.

The horses collapsed at the village square, foaming and panting, revealing the broken body of the hooter or rather, what was left of it.

Both horses had a note hanging across their chest: “BEHOLD YOUR QUEEN.”

Silence swept the village, the kind that burns deeper than screams.

Humans and hooters alike stared, frozen not by grief, but by the cold realization: Noone was safe if the king killed his own ‘mother’.

Some fell to their knees. Others vomited. A few screamed. But no one touched the corpses at first.

[FLASHBACK: THE FALLEN QUEEN]

Years ago, after the Queen of Eldrathia turned hooter, King Alfred had her recaptured in secret and thrown into the deep vaults of the palace. He believed she could be “reversed,” purified, restored to human form. He failed. The magic resisted. Her hooter nature only deepened. Ashamed and enraged, he kept her hidden in a dungeon far from public eyes, hoping no one would find out.

When Alfred died, the secret passed to his heir, Aurel who unlike his father, didn’t hide her out of guilt.

He kept her as a symbol of what happens to those who disobey royal blood.

And now, he had sent her corpse back to her people, not just as a warning, but as a declaration that no one was safe.

The hooters eventually picked up the queen’s body and gave her a quiet burial.

But they did not tell Al-Kane.

They knew what he would do.

And they feared what would follow.

Not because they doubted him; but because they didn’t want to watch the world burn.

Yet even as the earth sealed her grave, a storm was already stirring at the edge of the sea.

And somewhere on the coast, a pair of golden eyes opened… and didn’t blink.

Now that’s a connection between a mother and a child