Announcement
↓ There are some CWs in this chapter↓
Spoiler
Internalised homophobia
[collapse]
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--- Sally ---
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Eventually Aylin fell asleep, while she didn’t exactly seem ‘okay’ in any definition of the word, she at least trusts me enough to be emotional around me. A step in the right direction.
And to be honest it was more progress than I expected after a half-assed speech like that. Cobbled together and shallow as it was, it worked for Aylin.
I slowly slipped out of the girl’s grasp, and slipped a pillow into the gap I left behind, and I slithered out of tent, leaving Aylin sleeping on her collection of Icaro memorabilia.
By this time the sun had set, leaving me wondering just how long Aylin had been soaking me with her tears. But, more importantly for my empty stomach, Orion was back! And with a chunk of meat sitting over a newly started fire.
“Hi Orion! Is What’cha cookin’ good lo-o-oo…” I crap-illy greeted him, almost instinctively repeating the catch phrase, ‘what’s cookin’ good lookin’’, that my mom through at me whenever we were cooking together. Always kind of felt like a joke directed at my appearance, but only my Mom would ever say that to me, and I definitely wouldn’t ever call Orion ‘good lookin’’.
Even if he was chiselled from the dreams of a twilight girl, still would never complement a guy like that, ‘cause I ‘aint weird.
“Good loo?” Orion innocently asked, tilting his head in confusion as tried to understand my nonsense.
“Don’t think about too hard. But did you go catch something?” I smoothly said, dodging Orion’s question while he rotated some sort of poultry over the fire, it looked like a mutated turkey.
“Yes, I didn’t want to sit around doing nothing, so I made some arrows and went hunting.” Orion reported, holding his hand up as a fletched arrow, obviously whittled into shape by a knife and tipped with a piece of stone. It was amazingly well made for someone without workshop tools, something straight of a display in a museum.
“Nice arrow, make it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You could’ve asked me for help y’know”
“You don’t have apposable thumbs” Orion helpfully reminded me, my little bit of sympathy shrivelling up and dying, like a forgotten little desk plant.
“Anyways… I talked with Aylin, and while she isn’t doing great, she’s capable of talking to us so… I’ll ask later about the map.” I explained. Orion just nodded, giving all the understanding I need from him.
After that short conversation, we sat in silence, peacefully enjoying what was left of the dwindling daylight. There was an itch to mention what’d happened this morning, but I’m glad that Orion didn’t bring it up.
Hopefully he’d just forget about it, I don’t why I was acting so weird, like a little f@ggot. But the less it was mentioned the better.
Eventually the sun fully set, and the chunks of meat in the pan above the fire seemed done, an attractive aroma emanated from it. I got up from my spot on the floor and tried to find some bowls to put it in and when I did, I tried to pick them up, but lord and behold, no f#cking apposable thumbs.
“Orion!” I shouted, dragging his attention away from the meat as I pointed at the bowls, he got the message almost immediately and lumbered over, dishing out two servings of hot unseasoned meat. The fact that they didn’t even have salt on them, which Icaro had in a bag somewhere, showed his lack of cooking skills.
But as Orion finished serving, I began to feel like I was forgetting something important. I glanced around, following the itch at the back of my brain as I spotted a little gap in the tent’s curtains, with two little beady eyes peering out of the parting.
“Orion.” I said again, nudging his thigh as I gestured towards the fatty girl. Orion immediately spotted her and grabbed another wooden bowl, splitting some of the food in his bowl with the new one.
He took the new portion of food to the tent and as soon as he held it out in front of the gap, a little hand snatched the food out of his hand and retreated back into the depths of the tent.
I sighed as Orion walked back, Aylin’s unwillingness to leave the tent worrying me a little.
“Any ideas on what we should do?” I quietly asked Orion as he sat on a wooden log beside me, picking up his diminished bowl of food.
“I… I don’t know.” Orion honestly admitted, leaving the both of us clueless with what to do about our new burden.
“I guess we wait.”
“Yes.”
“Oh! How did you carve those arrows?” I asked, mostly so I wouldn’t have to sit in silence while we ate, and for an excuse to use my voice a little bit more. The sound was smooth and entrancing.
“I used an axe.” Orion said, like it explained everything about the process.
“How does that work?”
“I find a suitable piece of wood and I whittle away at it until it’s straight and smooth.” Orion begun to elaborate, pulling on of his new arrows out of his skill inventory as he showed off his work.
“once the shaft has been made, I attach a head made of flint using some twine and with some treated feathers added to the base, it’s done.” Orion fully described, giving me a little bit of insight into how annoying it must be to make arrows that can fly straight.
But as I picked up another piece of meat to chuck into my mouth with my talons, I realised that Orion had run out of food already.
“Uh, did you want some more food Orion?”
“It’s fine.”
I just shrugged and kept eating, if he doesn’t want to eat, it just means more for me.
…
…
Everything was dark, the walls pressed against me tightly, I tried to push back, do something, anything to get out of this horrible place. My limbs thrashing and swiping at my coffin, my heart racing, tears of frustration blooming as all my efforts to escape just left me feeling even more trapped.
How F#cking helpless am I?
Am I going to die?
Why am I so scar-
“Sally?”
What? Who-
“Sally!”
My eyes snapped open, with Orion leaning over me, his hand gently touching my shoulder as he looked down at me with concern in his eyes. As my jittery limbs calmed a little, I finally remembered where I was, sleeping outside with Orion to give Aylin a bit of space.
As my body calmed down I wondered where these nightmares were coming from yet again. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t figure out why.
“I’m fine.” I hastily said, dismissing Orion before he could get anymore touchy. The archer retracted his hand and got back down onto his newly ‘borrowed’ bedroll.
I let out a sigh of relief as he backed off, my efforts to act normal paying off at least a little bit.
But as I tried to go back to sleep, my heartbeat sped up, the memories of what’d I just dreamt of not letting me rest. The harder I tried, the more I felt that jittery energy raise up, like some part of me was resisting the idea of me having a peaceful sleep.
The lonesome and dark minutes stretched on into the night as I just lay there, waiting for sleep, or for something to help me to leave the land of the waking.
But nothing changed, even as the exhaustion crept in, it did nothing for the creeping heart that turned into a thunderous rhythm at the mere thought of that… place.
So, I just gave up after a while and got up.
I walked around the campsite, looking for something to do, something to tire out my mind so it didn’t have the energy to think of that. That usually did the trick.
I went through a pile of gear that I really didn’t understand how to use, Orion probably would though. Eventually I gave up on the junk and moved on.
Then I managed to find a rather recently forgotten bag of spices, a collection of multicoloured powders and dried leaves stored in little glass containers, each stopped with a cork.
I went through a few of them, using my claws to pry off the corks before I smelt them, sticking my snout into the bottle and surprising myself with how sensitive it was. It is not comfortable when some mystery spice gets stuck along thirty centimetres of nasal track, though it does smell like it’d go well in a Mexican dish. Not that Orion would know, he couldn’t tell salt from pepper.
But there is only so much damage I can do to my nose before I had to give up and I looked around for something else to occupy my busy brain. But the only thing left unexplored around the campsite was… Orion.
I carefully creeped up on him, the man was sleeping on his back and his face was parallel with the sky, looking peaceful for once.
He was a strange one, he both managed to be so accomplished at everything he needed to do here to survive and yet he failed at the basics occasionally. He could hunt, skin and treat meat like a seasoned hunter, but he couldn’t just kill the Wendigo when he had his chance and that led too Icaro… well dying.
He acted like he’d been living in the forest all his life, without any proper human interaction. Somebody who’d been living under a rock, but that rock was in a verdant forest.
But that didn’t make sense, as far as I could tell he came from earth, and the same decade at the very least. I don’t know how somebody living in the 21st century could be living without being connected to the rest of the world.
I sighed quietly to myself as I kept watching Orion, mentally noting that I should probably talk to him tomorrow about who he was and about… the bond.
Now that I could talk properly and fully, there wasn’t a reason not to. It also felt like Orion had been avoiding bringing it up, not that I could blame him, I wouldn’t want to try and have a conversation about accidently treating another sentient human being like an animal.
But this bond, no matter how innocent it was at the start, what it’s done, what its doing? It infuriates me, I can’t trust myself with anything that relates to Orion. Despite everything that’s happened, what he’s done to me, admittedly unintentionally. I should hate him.
He helped kill my new parents, he got me kicked off a cliff, he messed with my MIND because he thought I was a baby drake, he failed to kill the Wendigo and got somebody killed.
But I… I knew that it wasn’t intentional, some instinctual part of me knew that I shouldn’t blame him. That he couldn’t have known what I was when he found me, and that it was his teammates who sucked. That bonding with me was just an honest misunderstanding, that expecting a young, unexperienced adult to kill something that was once human was unrealistic.
But the part that infuriated me the most was that I couldn’t trust those thoughts, were they me, or the bond trying to justify Orion being close to me. I couldn’t tell.
But while I was miserably trying to figure out if I was getting brainwashed or not, I spied the suspiciously well shaven upper lip of Orion, as an idea slipped into my mind.
I went over to the ashy campfire sight, and dipped a claw into the coals, getting a good amount of the chalky blackness coating it. I looked back at Orion’s face with a smirk as I thought about what to do to it.
…
…
I woke up the next morning to the bright rays of the sun on my face, my fitful sleep interrupted before Orion could wake up. While I still struggled to get to sleep, and it only felt like a couple of hours of the worst sleep I’d every had, even sleeping on an aeroplane was better. But messing with Orion was enough to help me relax, and I snuck away before he could see what I did.
And luckily I did, because Orion got up only a minute or two later. He hastily began to do some chores, busying himself with cleaning up miscellaneous things while I desperately tried not to laugh at him.
I wordlessly greeted Orion with a nod as I went to the tent, I hoped to see Aylin sleeping. But I saw what I expected, a scared little girl with her eyes wide open, and with deep purplish bruises under her eyes. It didn’t look like she’d slept that much at all, she had probably woken up soon after I left last night.
“Hey Aylin, did you sleep alright?” I asked softly and she didn’t respond, she just stared at me with her strained eyes, unrecognisable emotions hiding in their depths.
“Is it alright if I come over there?” I gently said, and when Aylin nodded I slowly made my way to her side, I sat next to her and waited patiently for to say something.
But as I lay there, all Aylin did was stare at me, with those two unblinking eyes.
“Aylin you can relax, you don’t have to worry about anything right now, okay?” I reassured her. But she didn’t react much to my words, so I shuffled next to her and drew her into a hug, wrapping my awkward two front limbs around her midsection while my neck wrapped around hers. A weird position, but it felt natural.
And in a sudden outburst of emotion, Aylin began to cry. It was an ugly heavy sobbing that showed how much she’d been holding back.
“*sniff* I-I’m *sob* swwwor-*sob*ry” Aylin apologized through her snotty tears, which immediately riled up some old and dusty emotions in me.
“Shh, you don’t have to apologise” I softly said, almost fully repeating the exact same thing that my mom told me when I got like this when I was younger, the bittersweet memories of her comforting me whenever those kids…
Self-pity doesn’t matter now, Aylin is the one crying. So, I continued to copy what my mother did, and I reached up with my pointy talons, and gently raked them through her hair, making sure to softly scratch the scalp.
And something about that simple reassurance mixed with bodily contact broke the fragile barrier made up of tension and fear stopping her from sleep and she immediately passed out from exhaustion. And this time, I didn’t make the mistake of leaving her by herself just for her to wake up again.
I sat there for a while with Aylin in my embrace, my ‘hand’ scratching her head for a while. Luckily it wasn’t that uncomfortable, Aylin had plenty of… padding.
…
After long period of Aylin falling back to sleep and then waking up again until I managed to get her resting again, she finally she seemed a little more tethered to reality. But she wasn’t well rested by any meaning of the definition, she still had those bags under her eyes, but they were a bit less intense, a bit less dark.
“You awake Aylin?” I asked, mostly just to remind her that I was still here, still wrapped around her.
“uh-huh” she mumbled, as she slowly took in her surroundings, glancing around the room until she eventually saw me, my head leaning around her shoulder. And for the first time in days, I saw a little bit of that smile that’d always been on her face the days before we went into town with Icaro.
“Aylin, is it alright if I ask you a couple of questions?” I gently said, to which she nodded, which hopefully would mean that she’d be willing to help.
“Can you read?”
“y-yes”
“Have you seen a map before?”
*nod*
“Great, is it okay if you come read a map for Orion and me?” I finally asked to which Aylin hastily nodded, and with a smile of my own I unwrapped myself from around the girl and walked to the entrance of the tent. I walked out into the cool night’s air, while Aylin had only been asleep for a short time, it was long enough for the sun to fully run its course.
“Are you still up Orion?” I said loudly, unable to spot the lumbering oaf anywhere.
“I’m right here” Orion said from right behind me, surprising me enough that I almost swore in front of Aylin, but not before I almost laughed out loud at the coal smudges still on his face. Aylin stared at his face with the most surprise and child-like wonder I’d seen from her in a while, but I raised a finger to lips to silence her before she ruined my fun.
“I was packing up all of the belongings.” Orion hesitantly explained while slowly growing more confused.
“Aylin, is it alright if you could take a look at the map Orion’s going to go grab?” I asked Aylin again while she stared at Orion with puffed cheeks from trying to hold her laughter in. He got the message and grabbed the map out of one of the two bags that he’d been packing earlier.
He laid it out on a stump and spread it out, the firelight faintly illuminating it. Aylin waddled up to it and looked at it, a vague sense of recognition appeared on her face, it seemed that she’s seen this map before.
The map showed many different and varied ecosystems all thrown together like many maps had been torn up and the remaining parts had been stitched together. A swath of green with little cartoonish trees I think is a forest was painted across the upper left corner of the map, above it was a region of ice and snow with bones littering the area.
In the middle was just another green patch with little grey triangles drawn on it, mountains I guess and to the right was blue, with a little sea monster drawn on it, like those pirate maps. And on the bottom half of the map was another splotch of green below the one in the middle, just a little lighter in colour. And below that was many shades of orange and yellow, with a dark red stain at the bottom of it all. And on all parts of the map were scribbles and scratches marking out what I presume were famous landmarks.
“Home is here” she said confidently, pointing at a little mark near the edge of the forest, a tiny little house scratched into the parchment where she pointed.
“And what exactly is this?” I asked Aylin, pointing at the forest area on the map with a talon.
“That’s the Divian Forest!” Aylin happily answered, the name sounding vaguely similar as she continued her explanation.
“Why can’t you read it?” Aylin asked with a childish curiosity.
“Because Orion and I are too dumb to read it” I replied, both the little girl and I giggling a little bit as Orion stared at me with a hint of confusion, but I just glared at him with a hint of a smile, and he stayed quiet.
“And-and that’s the windy place!” she said as she pointed at the place in the centre with the mountains.
“Giants grave! The Sea! The plains! And the sandy places!” she rattled off, pointing at the icy, blue, light green regions and the whole bottom yellow and orange part in that order.
“What’s that red bit at the bottom?”
“I dun’no, but Grampy said it sucks.” Aylin harrumphed. But as soon as she mentioned Icaro’s rather cute nickname her face fell, that fragile mood breaking and falling back into that depressed state.
“Do you know where the closest town is to here is?” I quickly slipped in before Aylin gets too distracted by those memories. She silently pointed to a larger mark on the map, a house with circle around it.
“it’s a… big town.” Aylin quietly said, her voice trailing off as she became as sad as before she had the nap.
“C’mon Aylin let’s go back to bed, it’s going to be a long day tomorrow.” I whispered to Aylin, wrapping my tail around her midsection so I could drag her back to the tent for some sleep.
And while I pulled her along, I gestured at Orion with my head, inviting him into the tent with us, there was two beds in there after all.
With an affirming grunt he followed us into the depths of the tent and laid down on the thin mat, I wasn’t too sure what they were made of, but they didn’t do much to soften the hard floor. While I was helping Aylin get into bed, gestured at my upper lip while I Orion happened to be looking my way, finally letting him know about the moustache I painted on his upper lip last night. He rubbed it off in confusion while I silently laughed at him again.
The still exhausted Aylin fell asleep instantly, and Orion didn’t take too long either, the two oafs passing out without a minute of hitting the slightly padded floor. It took a while for sleep to find me, and even though Aylin made for a great pillow, rest was just out of reach.
The constant thrumming of thoughts in the background and that… the thought of that darkness kept me awake. It was a continuous cycle of worries about the bond, Aylin and what to do with her, this new and constant fear of that crushing black and my general anxiety about the future in a world with giant cannibal monsters.
Y’know, the usual.
But before I could continue my spiralling into thinking about my general lack of a future, Aylin rolled over and pinned me between herself and Orion. I just silently sighed and accepted my situation, not much to do except wait to fall asleep.
And keep waiting…
…
…
I woke up much earlier than the two people that were perhaps the worst people to share a tent with. They’d somehow managed to end up tangled together in a mess of limbs, both of them starfished on the floor with me trapped in the middle.
The pale light of dawn slightly illuminated the tent, and it enough of an excuse for me to get up. I gently nudged and moved their limbs so I could slip out.
I stepped out of the tent and breathed in the fresh air outside, but a mist had settled in the forest overnight and the fog was sifting through the trees lazily, twirling through the branches with the faint wind.
I took a second to admire the scene, of the tree trunks stretching up into the obscuring mist, making them look like the legs of some towering monster in the fog above. And the morning light was diffused into a glow that softly illuminated the campsite.
For a moment I was tempted to start the final preparations to leave, but I really couldn’t be bothered to. After my poor night’s sleep, an achy tiredness still lingered in my head and eyes. But with that and my ‘lAcK of APpOsaBLe tHuMBs’, I was happy to let Orion do it.
So, I just tried to relax as I enjoyed the new scenery, I’d never seen mist or forests like this back home, it was a flat place, that was either hot and windy or hot, raining, and windy.
Eventually, after spending a fair while staring into the twirling fog, Orion emerged from the tent, wiping the sleep form his eyes as he joined me outside. He wordlessly sat next to me, reminding me of something important I’d spent allot of time thinking about.
“Orion, can we talk about…” I began to say, my smooth voice trembling with emotion as I began to encroach the topic that both of us had been tacitly avoiding. It felt like an irreversible conversation, a step that can’t be untaken, but the bond wasn’t going to go away without talking about it.
“-The bond.” And as soon as I mention it, there was a slight wince that made it through his stoney exterior.
“The bond… what do you… want to discuss about it?” Orion slowly said, the trepidation shared by the both of us leaving an awkward silence in the air.
“I think you know…”
“I do?”
“*sigh*, you do realise that this bond it… messes with us, right?” I tried to explain to him, but all he did was frown slightly.
“It just says ‘emotions shall flow uninhibited’?”
“That means its messing with us mentally! That’s B-A-D, bad!”
“oh I…”
“Orion! It. Is. F#ckin. With. Our. Heads. What? Do you like that?” I angrily bit back, getting annoyed at how casual Orion was being about these proverbial brain worms, but he just gave me a blank stare.
“I’m not… I’m not blaming you for it, it’s just that the bond sucks and I want, no need to get rid of it, understand?” I firmly decided, Orion giving me another of his icon blank stares before nodding.
“Well can you get rid of it?”
“I… don’t think that I can do it.”
“Well hopefully somebody in the city can figure it out.” I sighed as Orion sat there blankly.
“What’s the bond?” Aylin curiously called out, the little girl sticking her head out between the flaps of the tent, and for once she didn’t look that tired, a bit more animated than usual.
“Oh, nothing important.” I said, quickly dropping the topic as Aylin walked over, the three of us, or rather Aylin and I chatted aimlessly in the way only young children can while Orion quickly finished up the packing up he started last night.
And before long, we were ready to go, Orion had most of the camping gear we could bring on him, pans and pots hanging off of him like he was a pack horse.
But as Aylin and I readied to go, Orion stopped and stared straight up, map in hands.
“What?” I asked him, I was itching to get started. While I didn’t have my usual ride, my legs and wings were finally useable.
“I can’t see the sun.” he stated, staring directly into the mist above us.
Oh right, the sun, our compass.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it!” I chuckled as I started to run, building up my momentum as I spread my wings. With a jump I was off, soaring through the air as I climb up through the branches, piercing through the canopy and mist and into sunshine above.
I let out a loud screeching laugh as I took in the forest, the sky and the sun. The pure adrenaline rush from being up here, with the trees and land far below.
There was nothing but me and the sky.
It’s like a dream up here.
I let out another chittering laugh as I climbed higher into the blue above.
Cherrys_chapters
Hi everyone! This chapter marks the end of the first part of this series, with the next section focusing more on personal development, the developing relations between the three and what the bond actually does/means.
But I'm also curious of what you all think of my series so far, what you like, dislike, general comments, I wanna hear your thoughts!
and thank you for reading this far! I appreciate it!
Announcement
↓ There are some CWs in this chapter↓
Spoiler
Internalised homophobia
[collapse]
-------------------------------------------------
--- Sally ---
-------------------------------------------------
Eventually Aylin fell asleep, while she didn’t exactly seem ‘okay’ in any definition of the word, she at least trusts me enough to be emotional around me. A step in the right direction.
And to be honest it was more progress than I expected after a half-assed speech like that. Cobbled together and shallow as it was, it worked for Aylin.
I slowly slipped out of the girl’s grasp, and slipped a pillow into the gap I left behind, and I slithered out of tent, leaving Aylin sleeping on her collection of Icaro memorabilia.
By this time the sun had set, leaving me wondering just how long Aylin had been soaking me with her tears. But, more importantly for my empty stomach, Orion was back! And with a chunk of meat sitting over a newly started fire.
“Hi Orion! Is What’cha cookin’ good lo-o-oo…” I crap-illy greeted him, almost instinctively repeating the catch phrase, ‘what’s cookin’ good lookin’’, that my mom through at me whenever we were cooking together. Always kind of felt like a joke directed at my appearance, but only my Mom would ever say that to me, and I definitely wouldn’t ever call Orion ‘good lookin’’.
Even if he was chiselled from the dreams of a twilight girl, still would never complement a guy like that, ‘cause I ‘aint weird.
“Good loo?” Orion innocently asked, tilting his head in confusion as tried to understand my nonsense.
“Don’t think about too hard. But did you go catch something?” I smoothly said, dodging Orion’s question while he rotated some sort of poultry over the fire, it looked like a mutated turkey.
“Yes, I didn’t want to sit around doing nothing, so I made some arrows and went hunting.” Orion reported, holding his hand up as a fletched arrow, obviously whittled into shape by a knife and tipped with a piece of stone. It was amazingly well made for someone without workshop tools, something straight of a display in a museum.
“Nice arrow, make it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You could’ve asked me for help y’know”
“You don’t have apposable thumbs” Orion helpfully reminded me, my little bit of sympathy shrivelling up and dying, like a forgotten little desk plant.
“Anyways… I talked with Aylin, and while she isn’t doing great, she’s capable of talking to us so… I’ll ask later about the map.” I explained. Orion just nodded, giving all the understanding I need from him.
After that short conversation, we sat in silence, peacefully enjoying what was left of the dwindling daylight. There was an itch to mention what’d happened this morning, but I’m glad that Orion didn’t bring it up.
Hopefully he’d just forget about it, I don’t why I was acting so weird, like a little f@ggot. But the less it was mentioned the better.
Eventually the sun fully set, and the chunks of meat in the pan above the fire seemed done, an attractive aroma emanated from it. I got up from my spot on the floor and tried to find some bowls to put it in and when I did, I tried to pick them up, but lord and behold, no f#cking apposable thumbs.
“Orion!” I shouted, dragging his attention away from the meat as I pointed at the bowls, he got the message almost immediately and lumbered over, dishing out two servings of hot unseasoned meat. The fact that they didn’t even have salt on them, which Icaro had in a bag somewhere, showed his lack of cooking skills.
But as Orion finished serving, I began to feel like I was forgetting something important. I glanced around, following the itch at the back of my brain as I spotted a little gap in the tent’s curtains, with two little beady eyes peering out of the parting.
“Orion.” I said again, nudging his thigh as I gestured towards the fatty girl. Orion immediately spotted her and grabbed another wooden bowl, splitting some of the food in his bowl with the new one.
He took the new portion of food to the tent and as soon as he held it out in front of the gap, a little hand snatched the food out of his hand and retreated back into the depths of the tent.
I sighed as Orion walked back, Aylin’s unwillingness to leave the tent worrying me a little.
“Any ideas on what we should do?” I quietly asked Orion as he sat on a wooden log beside me, picking up his diminished bowl of food.
“I… I don’t know.” Orion honestly admitted, leaving the both of us clueless with what to do about our new burden.
“I guess we wait.”
“Yes.”
“Oh! How did you carve those arrows?” I asked, mostly so I wouldn’t have to sit in silence while we ate, and for an excuse to use my voice a little bit more. The sound was smooth and entrancing.
“I used an axe.” Orion said, like it explained everything about the process.
“How does that work?”
“I find a suitable piece of wood and I whittle away at it until it’s straight and smooth.” Orion begun to elaborate, pulling on of his new arrows out of his skill inventory as he showed off his work.
“once the shaft has been made, I attach a head made of flint using some twine and with some treated feathers added to the base, it’s done.” Orion fully described, giving me a little bit of insight into how annoying it must be to make arrows that can fly straight.
But as I picked up another piece of meat to chuck into my mouth with my talons, I realised that Orion had run out of food already.
“Uh, did you want some more food Orion?”
“It’s fine.”
I just shrugged and kept eating, if he doesn’t want to eat, it just means more for me.
…
…
Everything was dark, the walls pressed against me tightly, I tried to push back, do something, anything to get out of this horrible place. My limbs thrashing and swiping at my coffin, my heart racing, tears of frustration blooming as all my efforts to escape just left me feeling even more trapped.
How F#cking helpless am I?
Am I going to die?
Why am I so scar-
“Sally?”
What? Who-
“Sally!”
My eyes snapped open, with Orion leaning over me, his hand gently touching my shoulder as he looked down at me with concern in his eyes. As my jittery limbs calmed a little, I finally remembered where I was, sleeping outside with Orion to give Aylin a bit of space.
As my body calmed down I wondered where these nightmares were coming from yet again. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t figure out why.
“I’m fine.” I hastily said, dismissing Orion before he could get anymore touchy. The archer retracted his hand and got back down onto his newly ‘borrowed’ bedroll.
I let out a sigh of relief as he backed off, my efforts to act normal paying off at least a little bit.
But as I tried to go back to sleep, my heartbeat sped up, the memories of what’d I just dreamt of not letting me rest. The harder I tried, the more I felt that jittery energy raise up, like some part of me was resisting the idea of me having a peaceful sleep.
The lonesome and dark minutes stretched on into the night as I just lay there, waiting for sleep, or for something to help me to leave the land of the waking.
But nothing changed, even as the exhaustion crept in, it did nothing for the creeping heart that turned into a thunderous rhythm at the mere thought of that… place.
So, I just gave up after a while and got up.
I walked around the campsite, looking for something to do, something to tire out my mind so it didn’t have the energy to think of that. That usually did the trick.
I went through a pile of gear that I really didn’t understand how to use, Orion probably would though. Eventually I gave up on the junk and moved on.
Then I managed to find a rather recently forgotten bag of spices, a collection of multicoloured powders and dried leaves stored in little glass containers, each stopped with a cork.
I went through a few of them, using my claws to pry off the corks before I smelt them, sticking my snout into the bottle and surprising myself with how sensitive it was. It is not comfortable when some mystery spice gets stuck along thirty centimetres of nasal track, though it does smell like it’d go well in a Mexican dish. Not that Orion would know, he couldn’t tell salt from pepper.
But there is only so much damage I can do to my nose before I had to give up and I looked around for something else to occupy my busy brain. But the only thing left unexplored around the campsite was… Orion.
I carefully creeped up on him, the man was sleeping on his back and his face was parallel with the sky, looking peaceful for once.
He was a strange one, he both managed to be so accomplished at everything he needed to do here to survive and yet he failed at the basics occasionally. He could hunt, skin and treat meat like a seasoned hunter, but he couldn’t just kill the Wendigo when he had his chance and that led too Icaro… well dying.
He acted like he’d been living in the forest all his life, without any proper human interaction. Somebody who’d been living under a rock, but that rock was in a verdant forest.
But that didn’t make sense, as far as I could tell he came from earth, and the same decade at the very least. I don’t know how somebody living in the 21st century could be living without being connected to the rest of the world.
I sighed quietly to myself as I kept watching Orion, mentally noting that I should probably talk to him tomorrow about who he was and about… the bond.
Now that I could talk properly and fully, there wasn’t a reason not to. It also felt like Orion had been avoiding bringing it up, not that I could blame him, I wouldn’t want to try and have a conversation about accidently treating another sentient human being like an animal.
But this bond, no matter how innocent it was at the start, what it’s done, what its doing? It infuriates me, I can’t trust myself with anything that relates to Orion. Despite everything that’s happened, what he’s done to me, admittedly unintentionally. I should hate him.
He helped kill my new parents, he got me kicked off a cliff, he messed with my MIND because he thought I was a baby drake, he failed to kill the Wendigo and got somebody killed.
But I… I knew that it wasn’t intentional, some instinctual part of me knew that I shouldn’t blame him. That he couldn’t have known what I was when he found me, and that it was his teammates who sucked. That bonding with me was just an honest misunderstanding, that expecting a young, unexperienced adult to kill something that was once human was unrealistic.
But the part that infuriated me the most was that I couldn’t trust those thoughts, were they me, or the bond trying to justify Orion being close to me. I couldn’t tell.
But while I was miserably trying to figure out if I was getting brainwashed or not, I spied the suspiciously well shaven upper lip of Orion, as an idea slipped into my mind.
I went over to the ashy campfire sight, and dipped a claw into the coals, getting a good amount of the chalky blackness coating it. I looked back at Orion’s face with a smirk as I thought about what to do to it.
…
…
I woke up the next morning to the bright rays of the sun on my face, my fitful sleep interrupted before Orion could wake up. While I still struggled to get to sleep, and it only felt like a couple of hours of the worst sleep I’d every had, even sleeping on an aeroplane was better. But messing with Orion was enough to help me relax, and I snuck away before he could see what I did.
And luckily I did, because Orion got up only a minute or two later. He hastily began to do some chores, busying himself with cleaning up miscellaneous things while I desperately tried not to laugh at him.
I wordlessly greeted Orion with a nod as I went to the tent, I hoped to see Aylin sleeping. But I saw what I expected, a scared little girl with her eyes wide open, and with deep purplish bruises under her eyes. It didn’t look like she’d slept that much at all, she had probably woken up soon after I left last night.
“Hey Aylin, did you sleep alright?” I asked softly and she didn’t respond, she just stared at me with her strained eyes, unrecognisable emotions hiding in their depths.
“Is it alright if I come over there?” I gently said, and when Aylin nodded I slowly made my way to her side, I sat next to her and waited patiently for to say something.
But as I lay there, all Aylin did was stare at me, with those two unblinking eyes.
“Aylin you can relax, you don’t have to worry about anything right now, okay?” I reassured her. But she didn’t react much to my words, so I shuffled next to her and drew her into a hug, wrapping my awkward two front limbs around her midsection while my neck wrapped around hers. A weird position, but it felt natural.
And in a sudden outburst of emotion, Aylin began to cry. It was an ugly heavy sobbing that showed how much she’d been holding back.
“*sniff* I-I’m *sob* swwwor-*sob*ry” Aylin apologized through her snotty tears, which immediately riled up some old and dusty emotions in me.
“Shh, you don’t have to apologise” I softly said, almost fully repeating the exact same thing that my mom told me when I got like this when I was younger, the bittersweet memories of her comforting me whenever those kids…
Self-pity doesn’t matter now, Aylin is the one crying. So, I continued to copy what my mother did, and I reached up with my pointy talons, and gently raked them through her hair, making sure to softly scratch the scalp.
And something about that simple reassurance mixed with bodily contact broke the fragile barrier made up of tension and fear stopping her from sleep and she immediately passed out from exhaustion. And this time, I didn’t make the mistake of leaving her by herself just for her to wake up again.
I sat there for a while with Aylin in my embrace, my ‘hand’ scratching her head for a while. Luckily it wasn’t that uncomfortable, Aylin had plenty of… padding.
…
After long period of Aylin falling back to sleep and then waking up again until I managed to get her resting again, she finally she seemed a little more tethered to reality. But she wasn’t well rested by any meaning of the definition, she still had those bags under her eyes, but they were a bit less intense, a bit less dark.
“You awake Aylin?” I asked, mostly just to remind her that I was still here, still wrapped around her.
“uh-huh” she mumbled, as she slowly took in her surroundings, glancing around the room until she eventually saw me, my head leaning around her shoulder. And for the first time in days, I saw a little bit of that smile that’d always been on her face the days before we went into town with Icaro.
“Aylin, is it alright if I ask you a couple of questions?” I gently said, to which she nodded, which hopefully would mean that she’d be willing to help.
“Can you read?”
“y-yes”
“Have you seen a map before?”
*nod*
“Great, is it okay if you come read a map for Orion and me?” I finally asked to which Aylin hastily nodded, and with a smile of my own I unwrapped myself from around the girl and walked to the entrance of the tent. I walked out into the cool night’s air, while Aylin had only been asleep for a short time, it was long enough for the sun to fully run its course.
“Are you still up Orion?” I said loudly, unable to spot the lumbering oaf anywhere.
“I’m right here” Orion said from right behind me, surprising me enough that I almost swore in front of Aylin, but not before I almost laughed out loud at the coal smudges still on his face. Aylin stared at his face with the most surprise and child-like wonder I’d seen from her in a while, but I raised a finger to lips to silence her before she ruined my fun.
“I was packing up all of the belongings.” Orion hesitantly explained while slowly growing more confused.
“Aylin, is it alright if you could take a look at the map Orion’s going to go grab?” I asked Aylin again while she stared at Orion with puffed cheeks from trying to hold her laughter in. He got the message and grabbed the map out of one of the two bags that he’d been packing earlier.
He laid it out on a stump and spread it out, the firelight faintly illuminating it. Aylin waddled up to it and looked at it, a vague sense of recognition appeared on her face, it seemed that she’s seen this map before.
The map showed many different and varied ecosystems all thrown together like many maps had been torn up and the remaining parts had been stitched together. A swath of green with little cartoonish trees I think is a forest was painted across the upper left corner of the map, above it was a region of ice and snow with bones littering the area.
In the middle was just another green patch with little grey triangles drawn on it, mountains I guess and to the right was blue, with a little sea monster drawn on it, like those pirate maps. And on the bottom half of the map was another splotch of green below the one in the middle, just a little lighter in colour. And below that was many shades of orange and yellow, with a dark red stain at the bottom of it all. And on all parts of the map were scribbles and scratches marking out what I presume were famous landmarks.
“Home is here” she said confidently, pointing at a little mark near the edge of the forest, a tiny little house scratched into the parchment where she pointed.
“And what exactly is this?” I asked Aylin, pointing at the forest area on the map with a talon.
“That’s the Divian Forest!” Aylin happily answered, the name sounding vaguely similar as she continued her explanation.
“Why can’t you read it?” Aylin asked with a childish curiosity.
“Because Orion and I are too dumb to read it” I replied, both the little girl and I giggling a little bit as Orion stared at me with a hint of confusion, but I just glared at him with a hint of a smile, and he stayed quiet.
“And-and that’s the windy place!” she said as she pointed at the place in the centre with the mountains.
“Giants grave! The Sea! The plains! And the sandy places!” she rattled off, pointing at the icy, blue, light green regions and the whole bottom yellow and orange part in that order.
“What’s that red bit at the bottom?”
“I dun’no, but Grampy said it sucks.” Aylin harrumphed. But as soon as she mentioned Icaro’s rather cute nickname her face fell, that fragile mood breaking and falling back into that depressed state.
“Do you know where the closest town is to here is?” I quickly slipped in before Aylin gets too distracted by those memories. She silently pointed to a larger mark on the map, a house with circle around it.
“it’s a… big town.” Aylin quietly said, her voice trailing off as she became as sad as before she had the nap.
“C’mon Aylin let’s go back to bed, it’s going to be a long day tomorrow.” I whispered to Aylin, wrapping my tail around her midsection so I could drag her back to the tent for some sleep.
And while I pulled her along, I gestured at Orion with my head, inviting him into the tent with us, there was two beds in there after all.
With an affirming grunt he followed us into the depths of the tent and laid down on the thin mat, I wasn’t too sure what they were made of, but they didn’t do much to soften the hard floor. While I was helping Aylin get into bed, gestured at my upper lip while I Orion happened to be looking my way, finally letting him know about the moustache I painted on his upper lip last night. He rubbed it off in confusion while I silently laughed at him again.
The still exhausted Aylin fell asleep instantly, and Orion didn’t take too long either, the two oafs passing out without a minute of hitting the slightly padded floor. It took a while for sleep to find me, and even though Aylin made for a great pillow, rest was just out of reach.
The constant thrumming of thoughts in the background and that… the thought of that darkness kept me awake. It was a continuous cycle of worries about the bond, Aylin and what to do with her, this new and constant fear of that crushing black and my general anxiety about the future in a world with giant cannibal monsters.
Y’know, the usual.
But before I could continue my spiralling into thinking about my general lack of a future, Aylin rolled over and pinned me between herself and Orion. I just silently sighed and accepted my situation, not much to do except wait to fall asleep.
And keep waiting…
…
…
I woke up much earlier than the two people that were perhaps the worst people to share a tent with. They’d somehow managed to end up tangled together in a mess of limbs, both of them starfished on the floor with me trapped in the middle.
The pale light of dawn slightly illuminated the tent, and it enough of an excuse for me to get up. I gently nudged and moved their limbs so I could slip out.
I stepped out of the tent and breathed in the fresh air outside, but a mist had settled in the forest overnight and the fog was sifting through the trees lazily, twirling through the branches with the faint wind.
I took a second to admire the scene, of the tree trunks stretching up into the obscuring mist, making them look like the legs of some towering monster in the fog above. And the morning light was diffused into a glow that softly illuminated the campsite.
For a moment I was tempted to start the final preparations to leave, but I really couldn’t be bothered to. After my poor night’s sleep, an achy tiredness still lingered in my head and eyes. But with that and my ‘lAcK of APpOsaBLe tHuMBs’, I was happy to let Orion do it.
So, I just tried to relax as I enjoyed the new scenery, I’d never seen mist or forests like this back home, it was a flat place, that was either hot and windy or hot, raining, and windy.
Eventually, after spending a fair while staring into the twirling fog, Orion emerged from the tent, wiping the sleep form his eyes as he joined me outside. He wordlessly sat next to me, reminding me of something important I’d spent allot of time thinking about.
“Orion, can we talk about…” I began to say, my smooth voice trembling with emotion as I began to encroach the topic that both of us had been tacitly avoiding. It felt like an irreversible conversation, a step that can’t be untaken, but the bond wasn’t going to go away without talking about it.
“-The bond.” And as soon as I mention it, there was a slight wince that made it through his stoney exterior.
“The bond… what do you… want to discuss about it?” Orion slowly said, the trepidation shared by the both of us leaving an awkward silence in the air.
“I think you know…”
“I do?”
“*sigh*, you do realise that this bond it… messes with us, right?” I tried to explain to him, but all he did was frown slightly.
“It just says ‘emotions shall flow uninhibited’?”
“That means its messing with us mentally! That’s B-A-D, bad!”
“oh I…”
“Orion! It. Is. F#ckin. With. Our. Heads. What? Do you like that?” I angrily bit back, getting annoyed at how casual Orion was being about these proverbial brain worms, but he just gave me a blank stare.
“I’m not… I’m not blaming you for it, it’s just that the bond sucks and I want, no need to get rid of it, understand?” I firmly decided, Orion giving me another of his icon blank stares before nodding.
“Well can you get rid of it?”
“I… don’t think that I can do it.”
“Well hopefully somebody in the city can figure it out.” I sighed as Orion sat there blankly.
“What’s the bond?” Aylin curiously called out, the little girl sticking her head out between the flaps of the tent, and for once she didn’t look that tired, a bit more animated than usual.
“Oh, nothing important.” I said, quickly dropping the topic as Aylin walked over, the three of us, or rather Aylin and I chatted aimlessly in the way only young children can while Orion quickly finished up the packing up he started last night.
And before long, we were ready to go, Orion had most of the camping gear we could bring on him, pans and pots hanging off of him like he was a pack horse.
But as Aylin and I readied to go, Orion stopped and stared straight up, map in hands.
“What?” I asked him, I was itching to get started. While I didn’t have my usual ride, my legs and wings were finally useable.
“I can’t see the sun.” he stated, staring directly into the mist above us.
Oh right, the sun, our compass.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it!” I chuckled as I started to run, building up my momentum as I spread my wings. With a jump I was off, soaring through the air as I climb up through the branches, piercing through the canopy and mist and into sunshine above.
I let out a loud screeching laugh as I took in the forest, the sky and the sun. The pure adrenaline rush from being up here, with the trees and land far below.
There was nothing but me and the sky.
It’s like a dream up here.
I let out another chittering laugh as I climbed higher into the blue above.
Cherrys_chapters
Hi everyone! This chapter marks the end of the first part of this series, with the next section focusing more on personal development, the developing relations between the three and what the bond actually does/means.
But I'm also curious of what you all think of my series so far, what you like, dislike, general comments, I wanna hear your thoughts!
and thank you for reading this far! I appreciate it!
