by A. R. Knight
“Tell her where you found it,” Gray says.
Bronze looks away, off towards some distant forest point. As if by not meeting her eyes, he won’t have to face the horror of what he’s about to say.
“I took it,” Bronze hisses. “The owner didn’t need it anymore.”
“And tell her why,” Gray continues. “Tell her why the owner was so free to give up this holder of all knowledge.”
Bronze ignores him, “We need to keep moving. If we don’t find a tall group of trees to camp in before nightfall, it will be treacherous.”
This is a sloppy evasion, and one she catches easily. Yet, Bronze is larger than her, and, with Gray wounded, conflict doesn’t seem like the best course of action. Not here, not when the likely result is a fight and then being either dead, or down one or more of their small team.
“When I hatched, only one thing in my arch wore one of those. Watched me get up, scattered a bunch of those furry things, then she took me right to the edge. Told me to find my name.” Gray is saying the words, and she’s catching tone. He’s leading on to something. “And you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t slaughter her.”
“Neither did I,” Bronze stops as he speaks. “It was a struggle. He thought I wasn’t fit for it. He thought wrong. I did nothing more than claim what I earned.”
She moves between the two. Slaps her tail against the ground. It’s a wet thwack, the force of her muscles pressing plants, scattering dirt, crushing bugs. But it gets their attention.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know who either of you are, and I don’t trust you, but I need you. Whatever you both did before you got here doesn’t matter. What does is getting to the top of that Mountain.”
Gray hesitates a second, then lowers his claws. “Fine. Until we get to the top.”
“I’ll be ready,” Bronze replies. Then he turns and points, high up, where several trees are bunched. Their green, scaly branches all looping together in a sprawling tangled knot. “That’s where we’ll spend the night.”
Not that she plans on sleeping.
4 Night watch
With four claws and talons, the climb up to the tangled, woody mess takes little time, and it’s a big enough space that Bronze and Gray find their sides and stake their territory with glares and quiet, simmering eyes. She has no time for this, and anyway, it’s her first night in the forest. Not something she wants to waste with a pair of brooding fighters. Thankfully, it’s not hard to find where she can go: Up.
The trees continue above, stretching towards the canopy before exploding into the wide purple and pink flowers she saw from the arch. That she fell into. Now she climbs to them, and it’s a softness that her claws bite into when she gets there. Tearing through the bright color almost feels wrong, but the sky, now that she can see it clear, pulls her further until she’s above. That’s the only word that can describe what she’s looking at - a world spread out before her. One that she saw from the arch, yes, but that’s when everything was new.
Now she knows it. Understands what she’s seeing, the sounds she’s hearing, and the smooth smothering of floral scent that flows into her vents with every breath. In one direction, striking against the burnt orange sky as twilight takes its due on the day, are the black arches. Definitely three, and they’re much farther away than she would have expected. Bronze had kept them moving, and she supposes it’s a good thing, because the sooner they get to that mountain, the sooner she can get rid of them.
As she watches, the arches seem to glow. Only for a second, though, and then the lights refocus into tiny points along the arches. Like glittering blankets. She wonders what Blue is doing, whether he’s pushing another hatchling off the edge, or if, like her, he’s looking across the jungle treetops and wondering about the world beyond.
The thought turns her the other way, towards the mountain that occupied a sharp triangle on the horizon when she left the arch but that now dominates more than half of it. The mountain isn’t quite the perfect shape she thought it was from afar - it’s lopsided to the right, and the sides are jagged in parts and curved in others. Shaped by nature, and not by more purposed hands. She glances at her own claws, shadowy themselves in the last gasps of light. Razor sharp, but there are nicks. Chips here and there from rocks or deep cuts during the run. The imperfections are calming - maybe she’s natural too.
A trilling cry starts and stops quick above her, and when she looks up and catches - for an instant - the black line with wide wings that made it, she as quickly forgets it in favor of what dominates her view.
The daylight is gone, and in its absence, the stars have come out to play.
She doesn’t know what they are, these bright sparkles flaring. There are countless numbers of them, some in clusters and others spread alone, as if choosing to walk their own paths. Patches of the dark shift in color, with bluish-white slashes cutting behind as if a shallow scar has been cut through the universe. In an instant she is made small, a tiny nothing against the vastness of the cosmos, and for a moment the wonder she’s feeling threatens to slide into panic.
Instinct helps her here. She’s a hunter, a survivor, built for murderous, efficient purpose, and she knows that what she doesn’t know is the greatest threat to her existence. She has to fill the gaps, understand what she’s seeing. Know what to avoid, to find, to use and, if necessary, to kill.
That thought slips her towards Bronze, and what he’s wearing on his wrist. Bronze said knowledge lived inside it. A vast amount. Enough, maybe, to tell her what’s going on up there.
She descends face first, looking for any sign her two companions might have murdered each other while she was stargazing. No blood greets her return to the tangle, only a pair of sleeping... and that’s when she realizes she doesn’t even know what they are. What she is. Words and names have come flitting through from... somewhere, telling her to call these things trees, to call those lights in the sky stars. But there’s holes.
There’s nobody to answer the why. But there’s something that might.
She takes a cautious step towards Bronze, her talons resting on their points, keeping things quiet. Even so, she figures the noise of the night - the hoots and howls of things on the prowl and the panicked cries of their prey - would cover anything she does. Another step, keeping her tail off the ground, her midclaws spread, ready to reach down and slip that emerald bracelet off of Bronze’s wrist.
“You can’t have it,” Brown says as she starts to reach towards him, without opening his eyes. “This belongs to me now. It’s mine, forever.”
“You took it from its owner,” She replies, covering the shock and frustration with a question. “I only want to look. To ask questions.”
“If you’re lucky, someday you might find your own. Now sleep. Got a long way to go tomorrow.”
And just like that her questions remain unanswered. She gets another first - failure. The feeling saps her enthusiasm, lets the day’s efforts in, and she slumps back to her own side of the platform. Curls up, resting her head on her tail. Sleep comes cloaked in mysteries and whisks her away.
5 A Hunt
When Grey announces he’s hunting for breakfast, she’s says she’s going with him. Gray doesn’t answer, just leaps from the branches towards the forest floor, though when she follows, Gray greets her landing with a steely stare.
“I’m not doing this for fun,” Gray says. “I’m doing this for food. I don’t want to take care of you.”
“We’re supposed to work together to survive, right?” She replies. “If I’m no good at this, how can I help you?”
She’s hoping the logic might drive a wedge in Gray’s attitude, but he just shakes his head. “If I need your help, I’m already lost.”
But Gray doesn’t object when she follows him. When he bursts into a fast run, she does too. Her talons catch deep into the dirt and propel her along, diving after Gray between the trunks and dodging vines as they move. Until, suddenly, Gray s
tops.
“We’ll never catch anything with you making all that noise,” he hisses. “Don’t move. Watch.”
She looks as Gray starts to bound. She notices something; His claws, rather than dig into the ground, ripping and tearing, land lightly. As if the tips of the claws themselves are the only things that hit the earth before Gray springs up again. When he passes by tree trunks, as he goes in a large circle around her, his foreclaws reach out and gently guide him from one tree to the next. His tail, rather than dragging on the ground like her own, stays rigid behind them. It swings through the air without a sound, providing balance.
“You’re quiet,” she says when Gray stops back in front of her.
“It’s called hunting,” Gray replies.
“Let me try,” she says, and doesn’t wait for an answer.
It’s hard. She has to measure her weight, has to battle her own balance and lean forward into her momentum. She keeps her claws, and tries to only extend them when she’s making a sharp turn, or needs to steer herself through close bunch of trees. These things come quick, but the tail is the hardest part. It wants to sink down; it’s heavy and not used to being taut. This will, she realizes, take time.
But it’s a start.
When she circles back around, Gray doesn’t wait for her to settle, but breaks off. She recognizes the chase for what it is and keeps after him, though now she’s hearing the rushing air as they move, the startled cries of creatures caught underfoot, and the gurgle of flowing liquid, which grows into a roar. Until, stopping himself hard against a knot of trees, Gray stays still. She’s going fast too, and the sudden halt isn’t something she’s ready for, so she digs her talons in deep, her head jerks forward and she’s about to pitch past Gray into the ground when his tail whips out in front of her like a bar and keeps her steady.
“Water source,” Gray hisses, and she has to strain to hear him over the churning rush just beyond. “Stay quiet.”
As if he has to tell her that. Gray nods one way, then points at her and the opposite. The meaning’s not hard to parse, and so, one talon at a time, her fore- and midclaws out and ready, she circles left. The brush here is thicker - the constant water giving them plenty to grow on - and it’s hard to move without pushing aside wide leaves and thick stalks. In between the green and purple vegetation, though, she catches glimpses of the swirling rapids beyond and the pool into which they pour.
As bodies of water go, her limited experience makes this the largest one she’s ever seen. The pool is larger than the branch nest they slept in the night before, wider than the groves they’ve come across, and its deep sapphire color stands in contrast to the brighter pinks and greens of the flowers above and ferns nearby. She briefly considers the pool as a source of peace, rest, even, but instinct smothers that feeling quick as she catches sight of the pool’s already-present members; there’s a pair, and she realizes why it took a moment to pick them out of the foliage; because they are like what surrounds her.
Like large rocks, only coated in hundreds of slippery emerald vines that sink down and pool on the ground around them, though with a decided majority angling towards and dipping into the pool, the creatures seem to be resting. The only sign that they’re not the very plants they imitate comes from small clouds of yellowish dust that puffs from the tops of their sloping bodies every few seconds. The dust falls back down on the creatures, and when it coats the vines, they glisten.
“Do you know what they are?” she hisses, softly, at Gray.
“No,” Gray replies. “But they taste good.”
Her confused face asks the question.
“Bronze taught me what I taught you three nights ago,” Gray admits, and by the huffing of his vents, its clear he’s not thrilled about it. “I think he’s been running around here longer than he admits. Told me that I’d need to know how to catch my own food, but after our first day moving, I didn’t have the energy. So he had me watch.”
“Watch what?”
“This.” Gray slithers by her, moving quick and soft along the wet bank towards the two creatures.
They don’t move. Don’t even react to Gray’s presence as he closes in on them. She focuses. Waits for the creatures to run, or maybe attack. But they don’t. Gray gets real close. Stands over the nearest one, then turns back to her. Even from here she can see the sad glint in his eyes, the lost chance at a thrill. Then he turns back, opens his mouth, and the claws begin to tear.
6 Raging Storm
No natural predators. That’s what Bronze says when they get back to the nest. The creatures, which Bronze claim are Mossox, are delicious. Juicy and tangy, and she eats more than she thinks she can. Apparently running through the jungle gives her an appetite.
Bronze partakes too, and though he did none of the work, he eats the largest portion. Even ushers the two of them to eat faster. She waits for Gray to protest, but the hunter says nothing. Barely speaks during the meal.
“Is it hunting if the prey doesn’t run?” she asks Bronze, mostly because Gray had seemed so excited and now no trace of that murderous gleam could be found.
Bronze holds up his left foreclaw, the one with the bracelet, “You find it, kill it, eat it. That’s a hunt, according to this.”
“Then that makes you a hunter,” she says to Gray, who pauses for a second and glares at her.
“She’s right, little one.” Bronze is grinning too wide while he says this. It twists the nickname into an insult, and, when Gray bares his own teeth back, she tenses. “There’s not much I’ve found that’ll give us a chance to really test our skills. Best be happy with this. At least till we get to the mountain.”
“And when will that be?” Gray hisses.
Bronze looks towards the mountain, though it’s almost impossible to see through the thick brush. Turns back to Gray and turns all four of his open claws up. Gray huffs at the gesture, then goes back to the meat.
As if answering instead of Bronze, a snap-crack wind gusts through the grove they’ve claimed, and she looks up to see pure-white bolts splitting a darkening sky.
Just because everything she can see is a swirling mix of rain and falling foliage doesn’t mean they don’t run. If anything, she thinks Bronze is moving faster today than before. Their leader is leaping high over muddy pits, and using his claws to tear apart brush in front of him rather than avoid it.
At first Bronze’s change in tactics are a curiosity, soon she gets worried.
“What are you doing?” she asks during one of the rare moments they pause to catch their breath.
The forest, though it must be the middle of the day, is almost pitch dark around them. The trunks press in close, and even though she thinks she’s the deadliest thing in this forest, a fear she might be proved wrong shivers with the cool storm wind.
Bronze, though, doesn’t answer her question. He gives her a wide-eyed look, then bounds on, his talons tearing up chunks of mud that splatter the trees.
“He’s afraid,” she says to Gray, who’s staying back with her.
“Of what?” Gray’s as confused as she is, which makes her feel better.
Though maybe it shouldn’t - as Bronze is getting ahead now. She bursts after him and hears Gray hissing curses behind her. How does she know they’re curses? Only because the words trigger some deep twitch in her, a recognition that such things should be said in the most desperate of times.
She risks a glance back to confirm that Gray is not, in fact, in such dire straits, but instead of his flashing form, she only sees black jungle. No sign of him. No sound either.
She’s kept her legs pumping through the trail of Bronzes’ wreckage out of instinct, but now she falters. Bronze isn’t getting closer anyway, and it’s either wait for Gray or continue on alone.
Wait for Gray. That assumes he’s coming.
She looks around her and notices that the trees are thinned. The forest gradually breaking up into grassier land, lit up in blinks from overhead. She opens her mouth, catches some of the r
ainwater and embraces the ice cold rivulets running down her throat. Her vents lacing her chest inhale the fresh scent of nourishing growth... and the rank stink of fear.
It’s coming from her right, back towards the thicker forest. She can’t see past the ferns bleeding into the grasses, but there’s something back there. It might be Gray, or it might be prey. Either way, Bronze is gone and there’s nowhere else to go.
So she raises her tail, treads lightly and lopes towards the smell. Goes around the first batch of trees, blinks away the raindrops, and hears something beyond the sounds of the storm; growls, ones she know, and they’re being answered by whistling hums and wet thwacks.
She slides her head around a trunk, and in the next flash of lightning, sees Gray flying through the air, but he’s facing the wrong direction. By the time she forms the word how, Gray collides with a tree and falls to the ground. She looks back the way he flew and there, crashing through the brush, is a whirling wall of vines writhing and stretching towards Gray’s limp form.
There’s a click of recognition - the thing’s a Mossox, only one far larger than the pair they’d eaten at the start of the day. And unlike the two docile ones, this Mossox is moving with a vicious speed, and its vines slice through the air towards Gray.
Indecision strikes for a second. She’s safe behind the tree, and the Mossox doesn’t look like it’s noticed her. She could run, pick up Bronze’s trail, and probably catch up to him sometime later. At the very least, this thing wouldn’t eat her.
In that hesitation, the Mossox’s emerald tendrils reach Gray, wrapping around his claws and legs. Lifting him from the ground. Lightning-lit, the Mossox lumbers closer, and she sees the horde of vines encircling its front peel away, like water from the head of a fountain, and beneath their cover spins a rocky maw. The Mossox’s teeth, unlike her own, are black and crumbled, stumps jutting forth from a dirt-ridden wreck of something that may have, in some distant past, been flesh.
