Wraith's Lament, chapter 2: Chapter 1

Right-aligned text written by CelestialOrca.

“Ah, I think I see now… a ‘yeet’ is a forceful throw away from oneself. And the sound imitates the human cry of effort and elation?”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds really dumb.”

Prendergast followed after his rider like a 10-foot-tall puppy as she and Samawat discussed the existential nature of the yeet. With one of the evil runners now contained, the camp had seemed to release a collective sigh of relief. Patrols were keeping an eye out for the others, of course, but a few more Taura-Naji younglings had ventured out of their tents to mingle and play. It was a stark contrast to the silent tension that had permeated the place just hours ago.

It was a good contrast.

‘What should we do now?’ Prendergast said, butting his head between Decima and the interloper. ‘Find some other stryx to talk to? Try that foot-skull game all the ‘Naji seem to love? Oooh, or maybe--’

“You go find your own fun,” Decima interrupted, never breaking eye contact with Samawat. “Mama needs her giggle juice.”

So off Prendergast had gone, wandering through the Taura-Naji camp alone in search of amusements.

He passed endless tents of Taura-Naji and Solish soldiers toasting and chatting. He said hello to some of the hitched-up runners on the edges of the camp, but as Samawat had explained  earlier, none of them quite knew how to talk back. A little Taura-Naji (Tiny-Naji?) tried to pull out one of his tail feathers for some reason, but a quick warning rumble scared them off. Everyone had someone else they could talk and relate to, except him.

Come to think of it, he didn’t really know what he liked to do in his downtime. All he had ever needed to be in life was ‘Fulvius Valerian’s service animal’. It was what he’d been bred for. Up until this very moment, it’d been enough. But now Decima was getting buddy-buddy with that Taura-Naji ‘Sam’, and he’d been left in the sidelines.

A tap on his shoulder startled him out of his thoughts, and he leapt up, every feather standing on end.

“You seem tense, big guy,” a voice said. “Here, try some of these.”

Prendergast turned around. It was one of those elaborately-dressed Taura-Naji he’d seen dancing around the campfire earlier, and they were holding out a palmful of what looked like dried plant stems.

‘Uh, who are you, again?’

“A humble messenger of Nokt, here to spread Her love. Just a little nibble of these, and all your worries will float away. Smoke from a candle.”

Fair enough. The casua opened his beak, and the ‘messenger’ crumbled the stuff in their hand and laid it on his tongue. Blech! Tasted like dirt, but he swallowed it anyway.

“Now, stay right there, and I’ll be back with a guide.”

Under normal circumstances, this would’ve tripped at least a few mental alarm bells, but Prendergast’s lineage hadn’t exactly been bred to understand subtext.

He sat down. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be feeling right now, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t annoyance. Had those Tiny-Naji over there always been talking so loudly? Where were their parents?

Come to think of it, where were his parents? Had he ever had parents in the first place? Of course he had, that was silly.

But what if?

The world around him was simultaneously too quiet and too noisy. The roaring of blood in his ears drowned out what sounded like a distant wolf howl, yet all the conversations in the tents nearby were too grating, too much to take in. He stood up again, the Taura-Naji’s order forgotten, and wandered off to a quieter part of camp.

Yes, much better. No, too much walking. His legs were wooden, he needed to sit down. But not sit ‘down’, no, because like he said, wooden legs. Why did they make Decima’s new foot out of metal? Metal was cold, heartless. Wood was so much kinder a material. Trees were born of love, after all. Right now, he would love a nice chair to sit on.

Pretty colours, had the ‘Naj camp always been so beautiful? Bands of green and purple and yellow and always flickering. And there was a pretty chair now. Step, step, step, sit. Oh, it clacked at him! It was moving underneath him! Step off. What an aggressive chair. Find a better, gentler chair.

What if… aggressive was good? Did he need to be more aggressive about his needs? ‘Decima, your constant talking-down makes me feel unloved’, ‘Decima, I didn’t actually like Octavius’s armor. I was just putting up with it for your sake.’ Yeah! Why did she keep doing all that stuff to him, anyway? Maybe he was tired of being nice.

Nice… what did that mean, anyway? Meow was a nice sound. Peep, meow. Peow. He looked down, and there was a little white puffball peowing up at him.

‘Pretty,’ Prendergast purred, stretching his wing down to pet it. It leapt up and clung to his feathers with its loving claws. What a good cat.

“Hey! Hey you! Casua!” An azure corva called out, making her way over with a few quick flaps of her wings. “Is that chick yours? Or did you find it just wandering around the camp?”

Chick? No chicks here. Prendergast told her as much, but for some reason his ears heard, ‘No cat’s ear.’

Well, that didn’t make any sense. Cats had ears! Very pointy and elegant ones, too. Best leave the strange stryx to it. Heh. Strayx.

With the pretty white cat still clinging to his wing-arm, he wandered off in search of a chair worthy of the two of them.

“Woah, wait!” The corva shouted, stepping in front of him. “That is a stryx chick. She just hatched. If you could hand her over there won’t be any trouble.”

The blue stryx reached her wings out as if to take the kitty.

This strayx was getting out of claw. ‘Getch own cat,’ he hissed at her, taking off on the least pulsating path he could find.

Whew, he was booking it! Whatever that meant. Why did they say ‘book’ when they meant ‘run’, anyway? Books didn’t run. Prendergast, on the other wing, was running it, even with his wooden legs.

No more tall and colourful tents now. No more stryx either. Oh, except that spotted monster lurking around behind that rock. It was making an annoying clicking sound, too. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him be?

‘I’m no’ afraid of you!’ he yelled at it. The big raptor snapped its head up, although in Prendergast’s mind it seemed to sprout a dozen heads and recede back into one. It screamed back at him. Oh, the head-rattling screaming! Always yelling. Soft voice, soft word, soft baby bird. That was the way. But before the casua could tell it that, it cocked its head at something beyond him and vanished. Or it ducked its head down. Either one. Then the strayx landed in front of him again.

“Okay bud, tempted as I am to leave that little runaway with you, you clearly are on something and are in no state to be handling chicks. Or cats for that matter. Just give her to me and I’ll be on my way.”

Then a sudden lightness, as Laika eased the corva chick off his wing.

“Uh, stay right there. I’ll go find someone to make sure you’re all right and bring you back to camp. It’s probably not safe for you to just be hanging out here in the open.” and flew away back to the colorful tents, leaving him all alone again.

Big blue brute took soft kitty away from him. Why should he trust a word she’d said? Peck that. Why should he trust anyone? He was Tullitoft Prendergast, the culmination of seven generations of pedigree conformation, and, and…

*

It felt like he’d only closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them again, the swirling patterns were gone, replaced by a stark and boring clarity. The too-loud noises were still there, though. No, wait, that was just normal screaming.

Prendergast blinked the trip out of his brain. All the epiphanies of the past few hours were gone, leaving only an empty longing of what had been. That world had been full of happiness and a certain innocent freedom. This one was just responsibilities and things going wrong all the time.

And gone wrong it had. The camp was in ruins, all the tents wrecked or on fire. He had a good overview of the carnage from this rocky outcropping he’d somehow managed to crawl up onto. Icebreath stryx were running around putting out fires, runners were pulling Tiny-Naji out of the debris-- oh, Decima!

The casua rose up on his decidedly-flesh legs and sprinted into the fray. He passed ever more collapsed tents, knocked-over hitching posts, voices shouting for medics left and right, and things were starting to look bleak until he saw a familiar flash of red cape amid the Noktus greens and blues.

‘Decima!’

His rider looked up from where she’d been pulling a Taura-Naji out from a fallen tent. Prendergast bent his head down, gathered a mouthful of vest in his beak, and yanked up, pulling them clean out of the wreckage.

‘Are you alright? Hurt? Can you walk?’

“I’m fine. Luckily, Sam’s ideal spot for a glass of bubbly happened to be the only tent with metal struts.” She swept her hand at the nearby command tent, which looked a little shaken-up, but still standing. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the camp.

‘But… what happened?’

“Raptors-on-steroids happened. Three of them, probably mad we nabbed their friend. Jokes on them, though, because we got another one. At the cost of great suffering and grievous injury, but still.”

“But two rhakos remain on the loose, gone into the Haunted Wood,” Samawat concluded, trotting up to them with a rearing windhound on lead. “What say you? Ready for another hunt?”

“Oh, you know it.”

Prendergast took one last look at the camp as he crouched down to let Decima saddle him up. He wondered if he’d ever see that blue bird and her weird cat again. Or if it was even a cat in the first place.

Strange how that was the only thing he’d retained out of everything that had happened to him.