Inktober 2026 - 29 - Tusk

“Tusks”. That’s what their enemies called them. Or rather, that was the translation of what their enemies called them, but the meaning remained. This designation was easily explained by the beasts they rode into battle. The biggest and strongest of them were saddled onto woolly mammoths, whereas their more lightweight brothers and sisters in arms sat on warthogs. They had elite archers riding on overgrown vampire deer, and when the need arose, their marine troops had domesticated narwhals for their purposes. To summarise, every single animal they had ever befriended happened to have very special teeth hanging out of their mouth. If there was an explanation for it, it had been lost to the ages, but that did not matter to them, because they truly enjoyed how fearsome they looked, on top of their companions being genuinely loyal and caring.

That was probably the biggest cultural shock tourists experienced when visiting them: the vast difference between how their creatures behaved in a fight and outside of one. Sure, war animals were not a specificity of theirs; they were far from having invented the concept, and would have never pretended otherwise. Horses, dogs, even pigeons, were all known to have made a mark in times of war. They also had allies who rode dinosaurs, including flying ones. The same animal capable of trampling adversaries is however not always perceived as the best house pet, whereas in their land, everyone brings their mount home after a conflict without so much as a second thought.

They could understand how shocking it could be, to see a giant hairy elephant walking down main street with arrows in his hide, blood and gore on his fur and tusks, then stop in front of a tavern, and the person coming down from his back start gently cleaning the ivory with a soft cloth, more often than not humming a gentle tune to the animal as they did. During military parades, all dressed up in armour, the dissonance between how scary they all looked and how sweet they were with the children and the elderly was quite disorienting. And of course, there were the stories. Those of boars bleeding grown men in under a minute with a simple thrust of their head into their inner thigh, of big tuskers impaling up to four people on each side without so much as slowing down in their charge. Most were exaggerations. Some happened to be true. And after having heard that, how could one reconcile those mental images with the vision of a narwhal catching rings on its external tooth? Of toddlers using elephants as a jungle gym and hogs as pillows and living teddies?

All in all, they had rather be feared than underestimated, though. Calling on their animals for battle was part of their culture, but they were defenders, not conquerors. Interestingly and fittingly enough, they had once been told by visitors that, in their mother tongue, “tusk” and “defence” were actually the same word.