Chapter Text
There were people below her.
This wasn’t very strange. She had seen figures moving through the passes in the valley below with increased frequency for a while now. The great green valley stretched under her, bisected by a slow and winding river, its smaller tributaries spreading out as branches from a mighty oak. With such a fertile land, with the verdant forests drinking the sunlight and soil, it would be inevitable that humans would eventually find her great prison. How long since they had started appearing, she couldn’t say - she had lost her sense of time what felt like a millennium ago. But a few travelers moving along the passes that separated her peak from the surrounding mountains had almost become normal for her.
These ones, however, were moving quickly, erratically climbing the steeper slopes around the forested foothills on the edge of the great mountain. They zig-zagged around, backtracking and pausing sporadically, looking for all the world like the ants that scurried around the base of her rock. The pair dipped in and out of sight as they darted between the light tree cover amid the scrag, slowly making their way up the slope of her mountain.
She entertained herself a while watching them, drawing her thoughts away from the heat of the sun and the burning stone at her back. why were they running, she wondered. were they criminals running from the law, or maybe bandits getting into position to attack their next target. Perhaps they were new lovers, trying to find privacy from the rest of their kind. They were too far for her to see any details, merely two tiny black specks moving against the rich green earth. They paused again by a small river that cut across the forest, an open ribbon carrying life and beauty with it as it cut its winding path across the foothills and out of her vision. She stopped watching then, casting her eyes instead to the open heavens and the few, fluffy clouds floating within, sheep grazing amongst the blue pastures of the sky.
Should she call to them? Would they hear her? Perhaps they would hear, and help, and she could be free. No, impossible. They were closer to her than any others she remembered seeing, but still far too distant to hear. And what would she even do with freedom anyway? She wouldn’t be allowed to return to Xadia, and the rest of her family was dead. No, she decided at last. better to leave them be, and ignore her flickering of hope.
There! behind them, a third speck. Instantly the two took off again, cutting across the pale blue thread and further up her mountain, darting once more into the cover of the trees. A few birds rose up from the forest with the disturbance, their distant calls barely reaching her ears. The third stopped where the pair had been, and by the time it crossed the river, the other two had already disappeared.
The pair had passed from her sight now, disappeared into the forest under the slope of the mountain she was chained atop. She contented herself with watching the third figure, who skirted the edge of the forest. It busied around where the two had been, darting between the spot near the river and the treeline beyond. In time, she could smell the smoke, and see the flame, a glimmering pinprick of light near the pale blue stream, then moved back down the mountain at a lightning pace. Not a hunter, then. A friend perhaps, ditched by their peers, or perhaps a chaperone, returning home to report their charges missing and arrange a search. It would explain the marker fire, at least.
She watched the last of them make it way home, as the birds disturbed by the fires and the noise found their way back to their nests. A few landed on the grey stone plateau on which her rock rested, and calmed themselves by playing around idly in the dust and flat rock around her. They lacked any fear of her; she had been there long before their births, and she was just an unusual bird to them. She watched as one of them, a grey winged jay, landed next to her. It preened itself, scratching its wings against her horns and smoothing them down, a ritual to clear its feathers of smoke and shame. She smiled at the bold little thing, and it chirped back, its eyes bright and curious. As the birds calmed and took their leave, she followed them with her eyes, watching their small bodies escape into the open air.
The sun had well passed its zenith, and the small figure long gone, When she heard the voices disturbing the wildlife beneath her. They drifted up to her from just below the steep cliff beyond her feet.
"I think we’ve lost him. He would’ve caught us by now otherwise"
"Should we really have run from Corvus, Callum? he was only trying to help." A second voice, younger and more cheerful, spoke up.
A sigh.
"I know Ez, but he’s been guarding us all week. doesn’t it feel nice not to have him following us for once?" "I guess. It still feels mean." "Don’t worry, I’ll apologise later. Look at the view from here!"
"Look - that’s the castle over there! It looks so small from up here." The boy laughs, and she craned her head, trying to catch site of any such building. Try as she might, she couldn’t find anything. Perhaps it was too close, blocked by the cliff? More likely the stone she was chained to just blocked it from her sight, as it blocked half of the horizon, all behind her forever barred from her sight and reach.
Those beneath her fell silent for a while, and she held her breath, uncertain as to what to do, whether to call out, to beg their aid. How would they react, she wondered, to finding an alien o chained to a mountain? So lost in thought she was, she barely registered the presence on the cliff, the flash of yellow before her.
A large toad, spotted yellow and blue, hopped up from the grey cliff edge, into her line of view. It looked at her askance, turning a slight shade of purple, then hopped back to the rocky edge and ribbited down at something below.
"Bait? what are you doing?"
"How’d he get up there?"
"I think he’s nervous. Hang on Bait, we’re coming!"
"Ezran, wait for me! Dad’ll be mad if you get hurt."
She stayed silent, paralysed by shock as the soft grunts of exertion and calls for the frog, ’Bait’ came ever closer. She could barely remember the last time she was this close to a person, even if they were still beyond her sight. The toad, seeming to overcome it’s initial fear, had hopped closer to her, and she followed it with her eyes warily. Was it dangerous? aggressive?. It sniffed at her boot, and her eyes snapped to the odd being. She was so fixated on it that she only looked back up when she heard the gasps.
The heads of two boys looked back, poking over the cliff edge. Their mouths were agape in shock.
They stared at her, and she stared back, none of them capable of breaking the silence. The older of the two, a pale faced teen with a mass of brown hair and narrowed green eyes, slowly began edging towards his brother. She had to speak now, or lose the opportunity.
"Hi" She managed, voice cracked from disuse.
"Ezran." The older said, not looking away from her. "Grab bait, and run"
"Bait! Here boy!" the younger called, a younger boy, with dark skin and a soft, rounded face. His large blue eyes lit up as the toad begrudgingly turned from its discovery, and hopped away from her and onto his keeper’s head. It clung on as the boy, Ezran, disappeared back down the cliff.
It was only when the older also began disappearing that she found her voice.
"Wait! Don’t go, please! Come back!"
But they ignored her, and her words fell on empty air as she watched them disappear from sight, reemerging only as a pair of black specks scrambling down the mountain, away from her isolation and towards the pass from which they came.