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The thing about a fight is that many people simply have not been in one.
Sure, most people think they have. You get angry in a bar with one too many drinks and one too many idiots and have a scrap. You can hit meat with meat, bruise bones and scream till your throat hurts, but there’s an undercurrent of safety to it, usually. Security staff are on the way. Other patrons, or your friends will step in. You’re in public, and surely this other person isn’t going to kill you, are they? Will they?
Much of our media glorifies this. Well…not that exactly, but something similar.
Plays and great dramas are made about wars. Epics, and tales of final moments, triumphs. Dark and serious people methodically discussing methods of killing, and siege. There is instrumentation and sound design. Stage planning and script writing.
And the monsters, too. A Jagras transposed into an almost harmless mascot. A bear idealized as an oversized hound with a sweet tooth. Creatures and animals are humanized, and the sense of danger is obscured. Hidden. A Nargaguca likened to a cat, or a particularly large feline. We have infantilized the violence that pervades our culture, that is inherent to our way of life, the building blocks of our people.
But the truth is much, much simpler.
A Jagras is a pack-based ambush predator with a jaw that produces more newtons of force per square inch than any other mammal in its weight class. It’s maw; a thing full of jagged teeth that rend and snag in your skin. You do not get away once it has bitten you. A Nargacuga eats its prey alive, belly first. You will be ripped apart for whole minutes while it causes you more pain than you were ever meant to feel, with no personal motivation, hardly something as sentimental as malice. It is hungry, and you are meat, fat, and gristle. The equation for what will happen is almost insultingly rudimentary.
Nothing compares to the screaming, shitting panic of crawling, kicking dirt and scraping elbows to get the hell out from underneath an enraged, murderous Rathian. To the sharp shock and stopping pain that just halts you when someone kicks you in the back of the head. A falling rock smaller than a fist can kill someone, just like that. And people just do not know what they are talking about.
. . .
Home…isn’t.
Two months now, and it is unbearable. I can’t look shop keeps in the eye. I can’t speak to children. I barely go out. I eat, run, train, stretch, eat, and sleep. Every day. I don’t have friends. Food tastes like ash. Sleep does not come. I’m on edge, twitchy, and whenever someone looks at me in civilian clothes I can’t tell if I feel naked or overdressed. I long for chainmail, and leather. The comfort of worn in gloves and steel toed boots. My spine feels too light without my sword. I dress in simple, awful clothes and fail to feel like even a pretender.
I hide all my medals in a box under my bed. Stash my letters, seals of valor and accomplishment between cushions. Don’t like to look at them for not one second. There’s nothing tactile there. No feel. Nothing real.
I don’t...
I snap at a kid. He cries and I feel like doing so, too.
Dinner is routine is annoying is necessary is monotonous is nutritious is tasteless.
I’ve tried to eat out twice. Both, disasters of their own merit. I cook at home now.
Groceries and wandering the markets is an exercise in humility. I don’t like looking at people’s faces.
But there’s a little bumblebee. It’s on a tiny, pretty flower, wibbling and wobbling about. It is busy and does not know anything about me nor care for me. It does not comprehend me.
I buy flowerpots with savings I don’t know what to do with. I plant many pretty things, and care for them with a shoddy thumb and too much water. Some die, which hurts. Some don’t, which feels like more nothing than nothing.
It is, it isn’t. I am, I am not. Pick a day.
I lay flat on my back in grass taller than my knees, and watch little bugs go about their days. I hope I did not kill any laying down, but statistically I know that I had to have crushed a few. I try to smile when a little beetle trundles along my finger.
The sun feels perfectly lovely, and warm. My fingers are rough with dirt, and my hair is loose and carefree. It’s better, for a little while.
Cats jump at me, but that’s fine. They spook me, too.
Hounds- or dogs, I suppose, will sniff me, then whine. They trot over from their handlers and push their wet little noses into my hands, look up at me with so much…something that I just…
I shut down a little, pet their little heads, scratch behind their ears with well-worn hands that have no gloves, no loading mechanism and no steel, and try to understand why they look at me like that. The owners are often polite, kind and well-meaning and that is somehow worse.
Deployment comes as a relief.
The red seal on the letter watches me angrily. It arrived this morning. I didn’t want to look at it. Don’t want to look at it, but duty binds. I find a field of grass to lay down in, cold and damp from the night, and snap the seal with a finger.
…
A new unit with me as its literal and acting senior. It is surprising given my age but not given my experience, I guess.
Perhaps a better word would be experiences. I keep thinking I should talk to someone about them. I don’t. In a ruthlessly depressing statistic, I resolutely do not have anyone to tell.
Most senior unit leaders are pushing forty, at least. I am a little over a decade younger, and feel far too ready, and not at all enough at the same time. I feel like a contrast, and like a dead bug.
Alma is far too optimistic, terribly bubbly, and needs new frames for her glasses.
Gemma is way too loud, but thoughtful, and I like her immediately, which is rare. I don’t analyze it and tell her to cut her hair.
Both of them are new, on their first unsupervised deployment and have been paired with me as their hunter. They seem to already know each other, seem close, seem friends. I wince at them sharing hugs, and kisses on cheeks, and try not to examine how I feel. Alma laughs at a book Gemma tells her about, and I sit at the same table, sharpening my knife, counting herbs, organizing pellets. Gemma smiles slowly and softly when Alma works and worries herself into a tiff over what’s coming, places a hand easily on her back and rubs circles with rough fingers and blunt nails, the gesture as familiar as it is easy, and I am like a voyeur not knowing how to engage, when to engage, or what to even say. I sit not one meter apart from them and feel like a stranger, and like a crushed beetle.
Alma tries, which is sweet, if misplaced. She asks about my hobbies, and I do not have any. She inquiries about family and I shake my head. Gemma looks over with a furrowed brow and worried eyes, asks about relationships or a boyfriend, even. My neck hurts from rotating so much. I click my wrist slinger into place, fasten straps and test the loading mechanism. Frowning, I begin to disassemble it, something not accelerating correctly. The boat bumps over what has to be a truly massive crest, and I scramble to keep all the parts on the bench. Alma catches a washer, and I take it from her hands feeling like an alien.
It is a comfort to return to my quarters to change. The civilian clothes come off like ill-fitting skin. A sleeveless leather vest replaces it, and it is like flesh. I pull over the matching sleeveless sheets of chainmail, and it is like sinus. Thick linen and leather padded pants replace what was, all earthy brown and a faded green. I slide my boots on, wiggle the folds just below my knee, and the weight of the steel toecap is uncomplicated. Satisfying. I no longer feel like I walk on air, and it is good. A leather and glass visor is looped over my head, and I spend a moment double checking the straps before I loosen it and let it hang around my neck. I tie what I can of my hair pack into a little bun, and the remaining bangs almost hang in my face. I frown, consider cutting the whole thing, and then the wood of the ship rattles and I decide I can do it later. Long, reinforced leather gloves are found and thrown around my belt. I loop my few sacks and bags of equipment around my waist. Strap my knife to my lower back. Lastly, I secure the rope cord for my sword around my chest, stuff some oil and cloths into my pocket, and return to Gemma and Alma.
It is remarkable how much more of a person I feel with amor and weapons, or some shoddy approximation of one at any rate. It is better. I still do not know how to talk, could hardly strike an easy conversation about anything other than logistics and strategy if my life depended on it, but…it is nice. Sitting with them is uncomplicated. Satisfying in a weird way.
Gemma guffaws when I lay my sword on the table. The whole thing creaks under the weight, and my shoulders strain, exposed under the light.
Both Gemma and Alma had asked earlier what I liked doing and I hadn’t been able to answer. I like bugs well enough, I suppose. In the same way that a person might appreciate a sun that shines, or a wall that does not have holes in it.
Failing to answer, they had taken pity and asked me what I do instead, which I thought was a rather silly question.
I take a moment, mostly to finish oiling the long steel edge of the great sword. Stare at the reflection of my own eyes, slate gray.
“I am a hunter.” I say, and I am exhausted, but not tired. I’ve felt that way for a long while now. Years now. “And I kill monsters.”
. . .
The Chatacabra species are amphibious carnivores. Their physiology an awkward approximation of lizards, toads, and frogs – though, the distribution of muscle mass likens them more to large primates, such as chimpanzees, or gorillas.
Robust as they are, as far as we’ve been able to observe, they are, generally, not a dangerous species. In the same sense that a moose is not dangerous so long as you stay far out of its way. Gemma likened them to bears, which I think is not an inaccurate comparison. By and large, if you do not bother the Chatacabra, it will not bother you. But shifting seasons, poor hunting periods, and so on and so forth can mean a real hunger and desperation – and much like a bear, a predatory attack from a Chatacabra is a motivated wall of swelling muscle, claws and teeth larger than five men, and far stronger.
They’re also cold-blooded, and similar to snakes they bask in the sun during the long, blistering days of the Windward Plains and need to find dens or burrows out of the wind to sleep through the night.
I cough. Once. Groan and push myself to my knees. Looking at the sky hurts, so I don’t. I hear Alma’s voice, but it comes a bit warbled. Distant, but still ringing in my ears. Staying upright is very difficult, and I have three limbs touching the ground right now. I shake my head, which was a bad idea.
Cool fingers grace my neck, and I lean into that touch. My handler’s worried face swims in my vision and I realize rather belatedly that I am concussed. I want, vaguely, for that citrusy water I use to always make when I felt sick. I follow Alma’s finger absently as she walks and talks me through concussive assessment tests, following basic procedure, but I don’t much see the point – it has to be pretty obvious, I would think. I pull away slightly when Alma uses a bit of glass to reflect sunlight straight into my retina and fall back onto my other hand.
…it takes a moment for the pain to subside. I fumble for a flask at my belt, and Alma pries it from my shaking fingers, articulates my jaw and tilts it back into my mouth.
My sword is still impaled between its jaw and its gullet, and its life soaks the sand in hues of burgundy and red.
. . .
The post-modern revolution of medicine in the New World is a miracle in and of itself. Tonics and herbal blends that can transform bruised bones and cracking ribs into dull aches in time scales of moments and seconds – in many cases, it can allow one to shrug off what would otherwise be a fatal injury, or a crippling wound. But it has limits.
Hissing as Alma articulates my hand, I watch her wrap it and secure my wrist in a brace. It aches, but it will likely only take a day, maybe two to at most to be field ready again.
Though my utter inability to stand indicates I’ll be on bed rest for a while. I’m trying not to be too broken up about it.
Having Alma help me scramble incompetently off the Seikrat in front of most of the camp is a necessary step in the process of reaching my tent, if somewhat mortifying. Slumping into my cot, still too wired to do anything but think and do so furiously, I take pages of notes about the behavior of the Chatacabra. That, at least, is sharp and satisfying. Fulfilling in a way that little else is. After, though…there is not much else to do, so I fall back and try to sleep.
It doesn’t go well.
I spend hardly any of my ‘rest’ in bed, easily bored as I am.
It’s sometime around mid-morning, and I can’t stand to be inside anymore. Clambering off my cot I amble towards the corner of my tent. I’m already sweating profusely, and I am under shade, so I methodically cover my chest in wraps, shimmy baggy cotton shorts awkwardly over and onto my legs. I limp out into the shade of the taught linen sheets and fall into one of the chairs. I hide here for a while, under cover so my pallid skin does not redden, and peal. I read, I pace in shuffling steps, I stretch. When Nata comes back from a gathering expedition with Alma, I quiz him on the fauna he had seen – what were their distinctive features and behaviors? What areas did they frequent, how did they graze, and so on. He has a little trouble recalling some of the details, but, and I think this is not just conjecture here, he likes this. He asks how I built the habits to be aware all the time, which makes me smile because that is the right kind of question. Nobody, nobody can be consistently, totally mentally present and aware of every situation at every moment. Nobody. People who assume they are…die, often in a stupid, preventable fashion. It is habit, like he asked, that keeps you present. So, I guide him through basics: not everything works for everyone. I tell him so and give him a few variations on my own strategies for constantly looking, constantly moving his head, keeping it on a swivel and to stay moving.
He looks excited, seems keen to almost jump out on another expedition for herbs just to practice. It lights me up from my toes to my throat to see him have…something in him that cares about nature. I ruffle his hair, if a little awkwardly, and he preens.
Still. That is firmly the highlight of the day, and afterwards, apathy creeps and threatens to drag me into torpor, so I amble under the scathing sun, lean on a barrel, and watch Gemma work.
She, in order, startles, drops the annealing metal completely into the water, coughs roughly, picks it up sheepishly, smiles at me, drops it again, splutters, flushing really very red and just not looking at me. I consider maybe finding a proper shirt, but even Alma, who loves the heat, is moping about, sunburnt in a ratty singlet and an old pair of shorts, sweating buckets, so Gemma can deal with it.
I watch Alma miserably wipe her classes for what has to be the tenth time in as many minutes and feel an odd sort of suffering commiseration as sweat trickles uncomfortably down my spine.
With nothing meaningful to contribute or say to Gemma, I just watch.
She ruins two more swords and can’t seem to stop taking very unsubtle looks at me, which is…interesting.
. . .
Gemma frowns.
Forest is a noun.
Nata is breathless.
A forest can be as simple as a dense growth of trees, and a smattering of underbrush. It is also a transitive verb. You can say a forest is forested with things; a branch forested with invertebrates smaller than my thumb, a fallen log forested with moss.
This time of day is troubling. My vision is clear, and I can see the sky, crystal and radiant between the mottled canopies. That Alma is not watching for abnormalities in casted shadows or shades that moves in a non-normative fashion…prickles, and my legs tighten irresponsibly on my Siekret’s hips.
The Scarlet Forest is gorgeous in a way little things are. So much that you feel suffocated under the weight of it, just a little.
I like Gemma’s reaction the best. Sometimes the most you can do to cherish something is to shut up. Listen.
Some seventy paces down the river, I spy a gouge wider than my torso in the bark. It would be impossible to spot and differentiate burned leaves from fallen at this distance without the context. But I have it now, and suddenly every off-color patch around fallen wood is a warning, and the proximity and regularity I can spot them with is alarming.
I blink as Alma points out to Nata a sub-species of ants that wriggle up and down a wide, aged tree. I think of priorities and try to justify to myself that Nata’s first experience with an environment like this should be untainted by paranoia, and danger.
And I have to wrangle down my own ineffable counterpoint that teaching him that a landscape like this is safe is nothing short of short-sighted. Reckless and foolhardy. People who treat animals of prey like harmless, oversized plush toys get themselves killed faster and more efficiently than any predator species could hope to achieve. A herd of stomping Ceratonoth do not juggle the equations of calories expended versus calories gained. Often, many predator animals simply cease chase if they think the effort weighs more than the reward. A prey-animal has no such qualms. If it thinks you might kill it, if it can kill you, it will. Just to save itself the risk. And if it decides to waste the calories of your corpse, then it will merely be another that scavenges and picks at your bones.
A rut is an occasionally, often consistently recurring sate within male animals with which the behavior patterns associated with breeding desires are most prominent. Most species exhibit an uptake in their aggressive behaviors. To tango with a rutting Ratholos is to ask for a violent, gory, shrieking death. A rut is also a homonym, is a groove, or wear in the environment wherein something has passed. A channel, or a furrow. In nature, it is often indicative of the passing of a particular heavy creature, or a sign of conflict passed. Given the nature of winds and the ten thousand crawling little things that populate this endless green canopy, ruts usually fade quickly. That I have seen several now and they are still talking about non-hostile, un-agitated bird fauna no bigger than my forearm gripes. The fact that Nata is so enamored keeps my reprimand internal, and my short remark nothing more than a personal rancor.
I wish Alma would just shut up and let me listen.
“Does that hunter brain of yours ever turn off?” Molars are a blunt, wide bone. A tool used for crushing and breaking down matter so as to swallow it without complications. Mechanical digestion is the first stage of eating, and they sacrifice the tearing, snagging capability of curved, sharp teeth for the ease of a broader, more accessible dietary range. As it is, mine grind together over nothing but each other. I keep quiet and angry. Maybe I do not like Gemma as much.
And then I blink, shake myself and check the sky again, because this is such a childish, stupid thing to be upset over.
We pass by a wonderfully colorful flock of Dapperwings, and I tell Nata that they are loud, screeching things, and startling a group of them could get a predator’s attention off of you long enough to get help, or to get away. Nata nods slowly, perhaps a bit shocked at the reminder that there are things that can and will kill him with little consideration, but he is attentive, and I see him turning it over in his head. He looks back towards the birds and sees one stretching their large wings. It suddenly looks much larger, and I hope he recognizes how aggravating many of these could make a predator shift its attention. He looks at his hands, at the branch a Dapperwing rests on, and then at a pile of stones washed along the riverbed. His eyes look so young when he turns to me again, but there is a cleverness there that eases some of the tension in my jaw, and I nod approvingly.
Then Alma calls me a workaholic, Gemma and Nata laugh, and like that, Nata’s careful, attentive thoughtfulness is dead in the water. I drag my teeth together again, and do not bite back. My inattention directly and consequently results in death, suffering and a neverendingly increasing cost of lives. Nata giggles, and I try my best not to be annoyed at him because he is a boy and he does deserve this, needs time like this to grow into anything resembling an adult that will protect others, and I should be happy that Alma and Gemma have managed to turn this experience into something he can treasure.
I readjust the sword on my back, check the environment, close, then far, and try to be.
. . .
The earth is firm against my back when I fumble my way to the ground.
Rain abating, the now nourished soil and hard-packed earth is easy to lie on, bolstered by the roots and twisting plant-life below – vibrant and wonderful. My back hurts. My legs hurt. Everything aches, at least a little bit. But if I spend another minute in that cramped, tiny tent with Alma I am going to go insane.
The dirt is damp, still. The air is crisp, cold and stinging with ozone. My nose breathes impossibly clear, and my head feels light and full.
The strapping bandaging around my shoulder soaks uncomfortably, and I know that it’s not helping the wound underneath, that I risk infection. I can’t care though. Couldn’t find the energy if I tried.
My finger tickles and I remain impossibly still.
Chancing a glance down, I spot two little Coccinellidae trundling up my proximal phalange and onto my metatarsals. A dozen little legs pad across what scant few hairs remain on my scabbing skin, and my cheeks hurt. The air freezing and beautiful between my teeth.
The camp ambles on in the background. The quartermaster blows up at some poor bastard dropping a shipment; I hear Alma shout for me, more exasperation than urgency, and I can’t not smile. There’s something fond about her irritation, an undercurrent of worry to make sure I’m okay. I think about calling back, shift on my back and raise my head to do so, but…
Well, the ladybugs have started fighting now and I’m a little transfixed.
The telltale clinking of Gemma’s overloaded toolbelt alerts me of her long before she’s close, and the spare linen shirt she has in her hand for me is sweet, if a little redundant. I can’t lift my arms halfway to my collarbone right now, could hardly wiggle into any clothes such as that.
“Alma’s looking for you.”
“…I know.” The smaller orange-backed beetle almost flips the bigger red one and I’m invested now, rooting for the little guy, just a smidge. Something familiar in his bad odds.
“She-” I shush her. “What-” I shush her, louder.
The orange Coccinellidae beats back the bigger beetle, wobbles around in a little circle almost like a dance, and who couldn’t smile? He’s flying away before I can think to name him. A moment comes and goes. My sight strays from the sky to Gemma. She really does have very green eyes.
I push my back off the ground, lean on my elbows, which hurts, but less than my back was starting to. I have to look upside down to look Gemma in the eyes, can feel my loose, torn hair pulling lightly on my scalp under gravity, reaching down and towards the grass, touching. “My report will still be there tomorrow.” I feel loopy. I’m vaguely present enough to know that I’m a tad dopey right now. I’m not looking forwards to when it wears off.
Gemma hands find her hips, looks at me like she can’t believe me, all raised eyebrows and slightly open lips. I stick my tongue out at her, which seems perfectly reasonable.
She’s very loud when she thunks to the ground. I hope she didn’t crush anything but know that it’s unlikely, too.
There’s a long trail of ants crawling up and down a tree in a wibbly-wobbly line. A bumblebee touches a flower two hand widths from my head. It looks terribly busy, and very fluffy.
My eyes find Gemma again.
I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t. Gemma frets, picking grass and rapping knuckles over her knee.
“Y’know…I was wondering…”
“Dangerous.”
“Shut up.” She shuffles around on her butt for a moment; seems surprised at the easy way I laugh. When’d I last do that? Gemma, after a moment of indecision I can see, reaches for my hair. Her big hands cup the sides of my head gently, tangling in the white and pale strands. I lean into her, groan at her blunt keratin scratching the little hairs of my neck. I sigh. I smile. “…the leviathan. Why’d you…”
My face feels flat. A nagging sensation worms into my brain like nails and fog.
Gemma watches me. She looks sad, all of a sudden.
“…why’d you cry?”
I think about ladybugs. I take a long moment to think about those little beetles.
“…when I was, what, five? I used to think bees were the coolest thing in the world.” I don’t look at her. “I’d sit near them and their flowers for hours. Sometimes, a few would land on my fingers, rest on my hands and plod around.” I look at the sky instead, and it is very pretty today – grey hues, gentle clouds and the soft beginning of rain. My ribs hurt. Breathing hurts. I sigh again, and that hurts, too. “Now, I haul around a giant, sharpened rock and kill precious things that live.” I look at Gemma. I look at her. For a moment, she looks younger than me. Much younger…is she? She can’t be more than twenty-five, surely. I feel old. I feel my age. “You tell me.”
This is where most people leave. False or real sympathy followed by any quick excuse to excuse themselves. How do you comfort someone about that? I certainly wouldn’t know. If someone says ‘I love people, work in soup kitchens at night, knit scarves and blankets for anyone I see, smile at strangers and give people a reason to be happy’ then tells you they kill people for their day job, what do you even say? That they’re fucked up? Something crossed in their brain? How do you experience that kind of empathy and still roll out of bed every morning to kill something dead, forever?
Gemma shuffles forward, crossing her legs. Lays my head onto top of her lap as I relax down. My shoulders rest against her knees, a little itchy from the bandaging. I look at her. She looks at me.
After a moment, “…you’re amazing.”
I blink.
She leans over me. Her breath is warm, smells like smoke. She smells like smoke. Her ratty shirt dangles and tickles my nose. I see more than is probably decent. She hesitates, stalls for a moment, whatever courage she has flees. Her fingers tighten in my hair absentmindedly, then tug my head closer and down, experimenting. I gasp a little. Gemma blinks, closes her eyes tight, all scrunched skin and building nerve. Then, she surges down really very quickly and kisses me upon the crown of my skull. I blink. She tries again, softer this time. Gentle. Warm. I make a little noise that embarrasses us both.
This is new.
This…
Gemma holds me. Digits massage into my skull in bonhomous little movements, and the world feels a little brighter. Rain trickles between the tree canopies. A fat drop explodes on my nose and I yelp, wiggling and squirming in a panic when all of a sudden it starts absolutely bucketing.
My face hurts. Gemma seems a mirror, seems so happy, looking at me.
The rain gets worse, instantly.
We scramble to our feet in a frenzy. I’m giggling. The roar of torrential downpour drowns out almost all noise. But I hear Gemma laughing and laughing and laughing. She has my wrist in her hand, leads me back under cover towards Alma with twinkling eyes and a flush, looks back smiling.
. . .
Realistically, we should’ve accounted for Nata. I’m too focused on the catastrophe in front of me. Frantically counting every worst-case scenario of two apex-predators hauling and burying each other into fulgurite and soil. I don’t hear Nata. Don’t consider him any more than the fact that I have three people unqualified for combat and a civilian within eyesight of the white-wraith and the flying wyvern. Evacuation is needed, but we can’t let this-
The rock flying past me puts me through my paces. Hopeless and helpless I watch it sail, buffeted by the wind and guided by spite against my panic; it chinks Rey-Dau’s lower mandible.
It can only spare us a moment of attention, but-
It’s a signal flare in an enemy’s grid-square, ten cracking twigs in front of a tiger, spitting on a Rathain’s mouth and having the utter gall to think that it won’t snap you in half, tear you screaming limb from bloody limb.
Grabbing him by the base of his neck, I haul him backwards. He is kicking and howling and making far too much noise. He raises his arm with a rock in his hand again, all intent, bleeding hatred and not thinking a single damned thought and-
I slap him. I am not proud of it, but what he almost did was a phenomenally stupid, selfish, dangerous thing that could have killed four other people and himself in a violently quick and brutal way. We have just seen these monsters rip the very earth around them into sparking, broken pieces. Nata is meat, fat, and teeth, and above that, a boy. That he thinks it is in any way excusable to draw the ire of two apex predators hyped up on adrenaline and territorial anger is the final piece of evidence I need to know that we have been far, far to slack in building within Nata habits and procedure, the steps and footmarks of things that will keep him safe.
Tearing him away from the clashing, howling commotion of two beasts larger than our flying tall ships trying to tear each other apart, I manage to look at Nata. He’s staring at me, and his small hands hold his reddening cheek. He told me that he thought I was cool. Smart, clever and strong. He said he looked up to me. I look away from his quivering lip like a coward and try not to feel the roiling shame that’s pooling in my gut like rot.
I do not regret stopping him. His actions were inexperienced and ruinous. But…
I cannot think of something to say, and before I can even get the chance, Rey-Dau is revived in a shrieking scream of lightning wider than an ancient oak and a thousand times taller, and suddenly we just do not have time.
Throwing myself back onto the Seikrat and flicking its reins, yipping, it starts into a trot, then a gallop straight down into the pit with the flying wyvern. Hooking my boot into the foot strap, I swing sideways and down, grabbing one, then two large, sharp stones from the sand. Clicking one after the other onto my wrist, I aim for its ears. The first is true, and Rey Dau hisses in an echoing, ear piercing cacophony. The second is caught by its lower mandible reflexively snapping shut. But it does the job.
Alma has taken charge, dictating herself and Gemma on evacuative duty (they know Nata the best, after all) and so Erik remains as my handler, substitute.
In less than a handful of seconds, Rey Dau shrieks, and every glistening rock of fulgurite around it: discarded chunks, shattered bits and pieces wobble, then lift. My ears pop from the change in pressure. The side of my face closer to it feels more tingly than the other. I watch, cautious and wary as the charged stones flit and line Rey Dau’s spinal column, some sort of wildly strong internal magnetism bringing it and binding it there.
Quills and fins along its spine flares, and a screaming noise simmers, simmers and builds, and builds, and builds – like the churning ocean, like hell, like god’s own kettle boiling over. Light flashes, energy flies, and enough force to vaporize nearly any living thing strikes the earth two, maybe three paces behind me.
I blackout.
I come to.
I dismount, and not intentionally. The chainmail around my chest and shoulders protects my skin, muscle and tissue from being shredded and minced over the sparking rocks, but it does little to disperse the impact.
Scrambling to my feet, I lift my sword from my back. Rey Dau’s eyes are dark, angry, and clever. My head hurts, vision’s already swimming and I can tell even now that this will be so far removed from the concept of easy.
The bruising on my back and collarbone aches – and it is not more than a minor injury, but it hurts like anything else, will distract at possibly the worst moment. I set my teeth and put one foot in front of the other. The air itself is charged, and the wyvern eyes me balefully with a stare like the roiling earth, beginning to match my circling in long, balanced strides, watching the glint of my blade carefully.
I shrug my shoulders, readjust my fingers, and settle in for the worst.
. . .
Hours. By the time I finally cleave my blunting, warped weapon into its bruised, wounded neck, finally bursting through scale and sinking into the flesh and vasculature beneath, I am so beyond exhausted. Every finger, every toe, and every articulating joint on my body is shaking. Every hair on my form that has not been seared off is standing on end. The tight bun of my hair was scorched, and the half-charred remains of the back of my hair hang loosely at my shoulders. Fragmented, broken rings of mail dig punctures into my arms in uneven, bleeding rows.
I feel dehydrated. Run raw. An exposed nerve ending, left to endure a sandstorm.
But it goes down. It goes down. A half-warbled shriek that shakes me, reverberates my very skull, but finally, its legs give and its whole-body slumps to the ground. But the worst part is not over. The worst thing that it could ever do is not flay my skin, not shatter my bones nor burst my organs, pop my chest like a grape. No…below, or now to the side of its neck, where I am, when it falls, it’s neck twists, and disperses the sand in one big poof when it lands. Its shredded wings shift slightly, wiggling and trying to lift, but failing to do anything but burrow further into the sand. Its bisected tail sways slightly, and the length of its bruised, battered spine settles as its head finally comes to a rest. But I am next to it. Reflexively, I jump, start three steps back and into a half-crouch, reaching for my knife. It’s dying, but it is not dead. Even with such a severed major artery, something as large as this takes time to die, and it would not take much for it to snap its jaws around me, crack every one of my bones to bits in a final, animal act of spite, defensiveness and revenge. But then it whines, and my hand falters on the leather-wrapped handle. It looks at me, and it is afraid, and that is the worst thing it could have ever done.
It's likely the fading adrenaline, every raging chemical process in my body at last having a moment to slow down, to finally try and restore some semblance of homeostasis and so the resulting plummet in my mood takes me by surprise, as it always does. That is to say, I start to cry. Keen, really.
Rey Dau whimpers pathetically on the floor, broken, damaged and dying. This wild, devastating, beautiful and clever thing, bleeding into the sand. I take a step. Then two. A blink and suddenly I find myself above its head. Its jaw is scratched to buggery. Two of its four mandibles have been shattered clean in half. The muscles around its neck are shaved, and leaking fluid.
The winds are quieting now, the deafening screaming whooshing in my ears dying down to a dull breath. Particles billow past, the sky is clearing, and the early morning sun warms my shivering skin and shaking teeth as the sandstorm finally lets up.
Rey Day shudders, and even wrecked as it is, ruined and bloodied, its glistening scales glow gorgeously in the rising sun, like life, like heaven and like fire.
I fall to my knees, wrap my arms around its head. Its superior mandible on this side of its head twitches, and then shifts out of the way, and it makes room for me. I have to choke on a sob. I hear the padding plods of Erik approaching on a Seikrat coming to a stop, but I don’t pay him much mind.
I wonder if it’s getting cold. I hope that the rising sun warms its scales, soothes its leathery skin, grants it some semblance of comfort, some hint of kindness, more than I could ever give.
There is nothing beautiful in death, no glory in the dying. Every body is precious, every breath is sacred. There is only one of every thing. Fights, battles, final stands and wars are often glorified, fetishized in literature or theatre, as if they can be something that is honorable, noble, or great. There are so many delicate, wonderful things about being alive, but none of it is protected, not one thing is safe. Every inch of skin is ruinable, every hair, every tooth, and every arm of no more import than just one ant, than a pinch of dirt, or a singular drop of water.
That is to say, when I hold Rey Dau, it is with shivering lungs, and a snotty nose. Every part of me hurts, and what a double entendre that is. I curl my arms around it like a shield, hold my body over it like a mother, wish desperately that there was any other way this could’ve ended, and look it in its wide, scared eyes as it whimpers and watches me too, crying, shivering and hugging it.
It goes still.
It goes still.
I hate this.
. . .
“It’s a like a rotten apple.” I pause, not sure of what more to say. “What I feel, I mean. I don’t…I don’t know how else to d-describe it-”
“Hey- Hey, that’s okay, alright?” Gemma shifts, and the hammock rocks strangely. She lays a palm over my stomach, the other cradles my face, her thumb stroking my cheek gently like a lover, and like love. I feel sick. I feel pretty. Spoilt and spoiled. I am so, so tired. She says, “Oh, baby come here.” Like a kiss, like…and oh, I’m crying. When did that happen? A shiver racks me like the cold, and her arms are already coming around me.
She has to wiggle up the hammock like a particularly blonde, sweaty slug to do so, she bumps my hip right on the sore spot twice in a decidedly very unsexy way, and she almost pokes my eye readjusting her hand on my head. But she is warm, body and soul, when she tugs me gently into her collar, kisses the crown of my skull like hello, and scratches nails into the little itty-bitty hairs at the base of my neck. It’s perfect. It could never be anything other than perfect. She rocks slowly, swaying the hammock ever so slightly. Whispers in my ears and holds what she can of me together whilst I cave in; like buried waterholes and falling rocks.
“I hate it. It’s never the same, but it always is, too.” I’m not sure where this is coming from. But… “I hate it.”
I guess it’s a lot easier to cry when a pretty, and very naked young woman curls up by your side, calls you her baby and wraps around you like a blanket, like home. She makes me feel like a girl, like a flower. Like more than muscle and a cardiovascular system carrying a sword. It’s…
“…c’mere.” Gemma pulls her arm out from behind me and scoots closer, reaching over and settling a hand on my hip, moving herself up a bit to rest her chin in my hair. And, consequently, burying my face in her tits.
Which, well, you know. It’s nice.