Lily pawed at her face and ears, humming happily as she rubbed clean snow across her forehead. It was shockingly cold, but she didn't care; it was supposed to wake her up just as much as it was meant to clean her face, and she was in a great mood. The moon was shining up above, or so she assumed since she couldn't see it, the wind was blowing, and she might have been imagining it, but she thought it was a little warmer out on this particular night.
She finished with her face, which was becoming too cold for comfort, and lay down across another pile of clean snow, holding in an undignified shriek as she quickly attempted to rub herself more or less clean. There was no liquid water around for her to use, and snow had seemed like an acceptable alternative.
It was much less acceptable now that she had tried it, and her hindquarters in particular ached with the icy chill she had dropped into. She quickly retreated to Beryl's still-sleeping form and lay next to him, her side to his stomach since he was still sleeping on his side.
Doing such a thing just last night would have been awkward; they had slept back to back for warmth throughout this journey, but it had been something done of necessity and quickly forgotten what with everything else going on.
Now, it just didn't feel like anything important. She had seen, touched, and generally experienced every part of him, and compared to that, wriggling around to press her freezing underside to him and hoping he didn't wake was no big deal-
"Aaaaah!" Beryl screeched the moment she made contact, his eyes flicking open in an instant, and he immediately pulled away. He writhed madly for a moment and then ended up on his back, shuddering.
"What did I do?" Lily asked.
"Ever had snow in the worst possible place?" Beryl asked, curling up on himself and rolling back. "Why would you do that?"
"I didn't put any snow on you… intentionally." She flicked her wings and noticed a little puff of snow flying off. A guilty purr wormed its way out of her. "Unintentionally, however, I was cold and probably wouldn't have noticed if I still had some on me."
"You definitely did," Beryl grumbled, his paws kicking out to pull her close. "That was horrible."
"I'll warm you up again," Lily hummed, feeling a familiar warmth that came from inside. It wasn't enough to warm her up on its own, but his warm body pressed to hers was helping a lot, and they could be even closer… After what they had done the night before, she was feeling a lot more confident about trying it again.
"We should keep moving," Beryl said reluctantly, lightly draping a wing over her.
"There hasn't been a single sign of the hunters since we left that random landing site," Lily reminded him.
"I know…" he rolled his eyes and snorted at her. "You are much more confident this time."
"I know what I'm doing this time," she purred, and happily nuzzled his neck. She also knew exactly what she was getting into, how good it would feel, and just how much Beryl enjoyed it. There was nothing stopping her now, except possibly the threat of death by No-scaled-not-prey if they wasted too much time…
Which was a pretty effective deterrent on its own. She reluctantly stood and put a little distance between them. "But maybe saving it for the end of the night would be better," she conceded. "Let's get moving."
"There's something to be said for motivation," Beryl huffed, standing and shifting his back legs awkwardly. Nothing was showing, but Lily suspected that if she had a little more time to work on him, he'd have trouble walking-
Which wasn't what they needed right now. She set off in what her best guess was of the direction they were going, and didn't object when Beryl came up beside her and subtly corrected her course.
"Something occurs to me," Beryl said after they had walked for a little while. "The plant you ate last night… Why doesn't the entire pack know about it?"
"How do you know they don't?" Lily asked. They didn't, of course, but she didn't see how he would have come to that conclusion so quickly. It was not as if preventing eggs was a topic of casual conversation.
"Rain would be sleeping with random females for fun if he knew about it," Beryl explained. "Or he would at least have tried it. Also, Crystal told me she didn't want her eggs until she had them." There wasn't the slightest hint of accusation in his tone, but Lily bowed her head anyway, remembering that confrontation.
"At first, it was a secret only I knew," she said. "I didn't think to tell Crystal until too late. Past that, I have not told anyone because I haven't had time to make sure making it common knowledge would not cause any major problems or shifts in the pack's balance. Except Pearl, I told her because I used it on her back when she was with Claw."
"I'm guessing she thanked you for that," Beryl rumbled.
"And promptly ate one, so-"
"No," Beryl interjected, cutting her off with an outstretched wing. "I don't need to hear that. Pearl isn't my Dam, but I like to think of her as something close to one, and Ember is my Sire. What they do in their alone time, plant or not, is none of my business."
Lily stifled a laugh, sensing that he was serious. "Okay," she said instead, "agreed. No talking about that. Not that I intended to."
"Always best to be sure," Beryl muttered. "I never know… hear that?"
Lily was growing used to them being interrupted by more pressing concerns; she raised her ears and listened closely without bothering to ask what he thought he had heard. Aside from the wind in the trees, she didn't hear anything at all.
"Maybe it was nothing," Beryl growled, shaking his head. "Sorry."
"I am getting used to our conversations being interrupted by Deathgrippers, dogs, or No-scaled-not-prey," Lily said lightly. "It's not a problem. I'd rather be alive and interrupted than dead."
"It always seems to happen while we're talking, too," Beryl noted.
"That's an illusion," Lily said thoughtfully. "We talk often enough when we've got nothing else to do, and you're more likely to remember being interrupted while speaking than you are the many times you've said something and been able to finish your thought, that's not as dramatic. I doubt it actually means anything except that we're way too chatty."
Beryl snorted and gave her an approving nod. "So casual about our impending doom," he quipped.
"It's only impending if we count you hearing things as a sure sign of pursuit," she joked.
There was a large crash somewhere in the distance. They both froze.
"So… impending." Beryl resumed walking, and at a much faster pace that had Lily struggling to keep up. "No roaring that I can hear."
Another cacophony of snapping branches and falling wood sounded further away, far too quickly to be the same Deathgripper landing again. Two more came from the forest behind them, and then there was silence for a little while.
"It doesn't seem like they have any idea where we are," Lily hissed. "None to the other side or in front of us to surround us, nothing even close… They must be landing randomly." Or they were pursuing somebody else, but she found it hard to believe Deathgrippers would be actively chasing a light wing without a single roar. They just didn't do that, at least in her past experience.
"That will never work, and Grimmel must know it," Beryl growled. "I would like to consider him an idiot and be done with it, but that's a bad idea. If he has really lost our trail, this might be him struggling to catch us by pure chance…"
"But it also might be him changing tactics to something less reliant on luck that we don't yet understand," Lily said, completing the thought for him. Her legs were aching, partially from walking and partially because they were sore from other activities, but she thought she could keep going at their current pace for a while. The rest of her felt fine, save for the ever-present throbbing in her back that didn't count.
"Either way, all we can do is walk and outsmart him." Beryl tilted his head thoughtfully. "You met him, what was he like beyond what the prisoner said?"
"He wasn't anything beyond that," Lily said after a moment of thought. "Maybe he was clever, I didn't see anything to determine either way. We already knew he was obsessed with hunting your kind down, and I gathered nothing much beyond that about him. I would even say I learned more about the people around him, and I know hardly anything there."
"The people you surround yourself with can say a lot about you," Beryl mused. "Crystal, Mist, Rain, Clay, Pina… You're a difficult case because so many people are around you a lot, but I'm sure it still says something about you. That you're overworked, maybe."
"Maybe," Lily huffed. "In that case, what does a bunch of conflicting No-scaled-not-prey who do not agree on many things, and do not treat their leader with as much respect as one would expect, say about the one in charge of them?"
"That they think they know better," Beryl guessed. "Maybe. But if they're all going their own ways and don't respect him, it doesn't sound like he would be getting anything done. We've seen plenty of evidence that whatever the internal strife, their group as a whole works just fine."
"I can't make any good guesses, Pearl heard them and translated. I am just going off of what she said." Lily shook her head. "There is something more going on here, in any case." Another crash of branches somewhere behind them, distant enough that it was not all that worrying, punctuated that statement.
"I wonder… If they're doing this, does it mean they lost our trail when we went into the stream?" Beryl asked a short while later, sounding as if the idea had just occurred to him. "We have yet to hear the dogs, and haven't since before then. Maybe this is them trying to find us again."
"Or," Lily growled, guessing at what must be happening, "this is them trying to pick up our trail." The dogs were small, and the Deathgrippers obedient enough to not eat them on sight; she presumed that the latter could carry the former around with no issues. "Drop a Deathgripper down randomly, send the dog out to smell the area, leave if they don't find anything, and do it again somewhere else."
"That's… unlikely to work?" Beryl swished his tail to the side, back and forth, brushing snow behind them and occasionally sending some at her back legs. "Easier if we keep leaving pawprints."
Lily caught his meaning and began swiping her tail whenever they passed over a patch of snow, brushing the powdery wetness back into some semblance of smoothness. Her tail smacked against his a few times as they worked out their timings, and neither of them remarked on it.
She purred to herself as she remembered wrapping her tail around his, how easily it had all gone… He held his tail lower this evening, as if far less wary around her on some instinctive level, and there was no question as to why. She was less wary too, though not of him.
She was less wary of her own mind. Her only previous experience with anything close to mating was terrible, but she had pushed through and made new, good memories. It was nothing like all of her other pains and bad memories, Claw's physical abuses had always been ignorable, but she could imagine a hundred ways her first time with Beryl could have been sabotaged, and none of them had happened. She had not lost her interest halfway through, or been beset by sadness and remembered pain, or anything like that.
She felt more whole than she had in a long time, even now as they swished their tails and walked faster than was comfortable and fled potentially fatal pursuers. None of that was internal, and when it came to her internal problems, she had one less this evening-
A short braying noise rang out over the trees, cutting off with a yelp. Lily tensed, her wing shoulders shifting unconsciously. "Dog," she growled.
"Silenced, too, but not by me," Beryl breathed. "And I know why. I killed the last group by following the sounds and ambushing them. They want to do the ambushing this time, and silent dogs are part of that."
"I didn't know they could be silenced," Lily growled, forcing her already sore legs to move faster.
"Tie a vine around their muzzle and they've got no way to howl, but they can still track us just fine," Beryl said pragmatically. "Ember's the one who makes things, but even I know that much."
"Unless he taught you to make something useful for this exact scenario," Lily said, hoping that was the case even though it seemed very unlikely, "he's not all that important right now. Figuring out how we respond to this is." If that dog had howled and been silenced, it had howled for a reason, and the last time she heard that howling, it was when the dogs were on their trail. It didn't seem like much of a leap to assume their trail had just been picked up somewhere behind them.
"We just lost whatever lead we built up," Beryl said gravely, breaking into a fast trot. "We can't rely on hearing them from afar. They can't assume we will flee them directly, but if they're spread out to either side of the trail then we can't go at an angle without losing even more ground, so we have to try and run directly away anyway. I'm not sure what to do here."
"Run," Lily panted. "I'll let you know… if I think of something better." Just like that, they were back to where they had started a few nights ago, enemies close behind and nothing to do but flee. Far more comfortable with each other, and with some nice, warm memories to spur them on, but that didn't seem all that important in the face of the relentless enemies behind them.
O-O-O-O-O
The night wore on with excruciating slowness, every moment dragged out and punctuated by the constant crunch of eight paws on snow, and as Lily tired, the occasional swish of her tail dragging on the ground until she mustered the willpower to hold it up again.
There were dogs and Deathgrippers behind them; she and Beryl had heard the occasional Deathgripper taking off or landing from behind, not all that far back, which seemed to be reinforcements swapping in. The tired were giving up, and the freshly rested taking their place.
If the first attempted hunt had faltered and failed when Beryl killed the dogs, then this was what it had been meant to be. A relentless pursuit, continued indefinitely with fresh replacements until their quarry collapsed from exhaustion.
Lily had not thought of anything useful; when she could think at all, she puzzled over the unapproachable problem, finding no solutions. There was nothing one flightless dragon and one dark wing could do that would not end in one or both being caught and possibly killed, not with the current situation. Not that she could think of, and judging by Beryl's silence, she wasn't the only one totally out of ideas.
The only saving grace was that something about how the pursuit was being conducted was slowing the enemy down; they had not caught up, not yet, though the night had to be closer to over than not. The sky was overcast, or what little she could see of it was, so she didn't know for sure, but the hunger gnawing at the bottom of her stomach seemed to indicate they had been fleeing for a long while.
Another series of crashes came from somewhere ahead and to the left of their current path, and Lily breathed a sigh of relief as Beryl slowed to a stop. "Left or right?" he asked briskly.
"More… left." Lily said slowly, her chest heaving. "I need a moment."
"You've got time," Beryl said gently, stalking ahead to stare through the trees. "They are slower now. It would be nice if we could find another stream, though. We need something to get them off our trail again."
"So they can… do this again and find us." Lily shook her head. "We need something to cover… our trails permanently. If that exists." She could think of a few smelly plants that might do the job, but-
"Yes, cover," she panted, looking around hopefully. She remembered, with a pang of deeply-buried sadness, that Pyre had enjoyed eating a particularly stinky root. If there were some around, they could maybe use them…
But she didn't see any of the plants associated with those noxious tubers. They would be obvious if they were around, long free-standing stalks of green jutting out of the ground, and there weren't any within sight.
"Ready to keep going?" Beryl asked her, oblivious to her potential solution.
"Yes," she huffed, lifting and shaking her paws one at a time. They had to keep moving for now, and if she saw any of those roots, she would stop and dig them up.
Beryl led her off at an angle, moving right to avoid the Deathgrippers that had landed to the left of their path, and Lily followed, panting hoarsely. The cold, dry air was wreaking havoc on her chest, and her insides felt dried out like a leaf at the start of the cold-season. They had not found any water, and snow was icy cold, doing little good for her throat and chest even as it provided water for the rest of her.
A distant shriek rose from their right, one not from any dragon that she knew. It was absolutely piercing, long and loud in the night.
"Sounds like… someone is torturing a rat," Beryl huffed. "Heard that once, didn't like it. No-scaled-not-prey can be brutal, even the ones that don't want us dead."
"But so can we," Lily panted, her back itching in the cold, though it would be agony to scratch. She felt she had more experience being the rat, whatever that was, than most, and it wasn't a No-scaled-not-prey who had hurt her.
"Yes… Does it sound like it's moving?" Beryl stopped for a moment and tilted his head, both ears on alert. "It is moving. It will cross our path if it keeps going."
"So we stop here and wait for it to go, then keep moving," Lily said, turning to lope back around to him. She didn't want to fully stop moving until she was sure they were going to wait; getting up right after laying down would take more willpower than she had at the moment. Her ears rang with the shriek, though as it came closer it sounded smaller and smaller, loud but coming from a tiny body.
"There it goes," Beryl said as the creature, whatever it was, passed from their right to their left, moving through the underbrush somewhere ahead of them. They couldn't see it, but that didn't mean it was far away; visibility was severely limited in the forest, and from the noise alone Lily assumed it had probably passed within firing distance.
"That was…" Lily searched for a word that described her confusion. "Unexpected."
"Yes, but it cost us time," Beryl said, beginning to walk once more. Lily followed behind, wishing she could muster the seemingly endless reserves of energy that he had to call on. "It would have been a great distraction if we were idiots, though. Maybe Grimmel sent it."
"A shrieking little thing for us to chase around while we're being hunted?" Lily asked. It seemed ridiculous… But she only had to think of someone like Honey to know that it could work. Not that Honey was stupid, but her attention was easily caught and held, and in a moment of stress she might make a stupid decision just to feel like she was doing something.
Lily sighed as she pushed herself to move faster. She wished she knew where Honey, or anyone else for that matter, was. That they were alive and well, at the very least. Not knowing ate away at her every time she thought about it.
The shrieking, which never stopped for more than a few heartbeats at a time, continued to fade into the distance. Whatever little creature was howling its lungs out, it wasn't coming back around, and probably had never even known she and Beryl were around-
Whiteness leaped out into the open in front of her and Beryl, small and rotund, and Lily almost thought it was a light wing fledgling. She stumbled to a stop, her abused paws catching on a root she would otherwise have stepped over, and bumped into Beryl for what had to be the hundredth time that night. Beryl, for his part, stared incredulously at the little thing in front of them.
It was not a light wing, she knew as much the moment she noticed the lack of wings, a tail, a neck, or anything remotely resembling her kind. It had puffy fur balled up around it, a narrow head with brown skin, and eyes that bulged out of its skull.
"Sheep?" Beryl murmured. "Here?"
The creature bleated loudly, barely even looking at them, and walked straight into a tree, knocking its head on the bark, rearing back, and doing it again before falling over.
Lily didn't know how to react to such random, irrational actions. "What is this?" she asked.
"Prey of a sort, though I didn't think any like this lived here," Beryl rumbled, circling the sheep, which kicked its spindly legs and bleated randomly. "And it is not acting normal…"
"Prey worth hunting?" Lily asked immediately, conscious of the growing pit in her stomach.
"Yes, but… no." Beryl leaned down and took a big sniff of the white, lacy bundle around the creature's body. "It smells wrong and is acting wrong. It shouldn't be here."
"We shouldn't eat it, then," Lily growled, seeing the implications. If something was in the forest with them and shouldn't be, odds were it came from Grimmel… who tended to use poisons and trickery. "It will make us stupid and slow, or kill us outright, or any number of other things. They have given it something to make it stupid."
"Good call," Beryl growled, backing away from the sheep. "Too bad, though."
"We need to keep moving." Lily turned her back on the odd bundle of noise and whiteness and shook her head. "These tricks are slowing us down."
O-O-O-O-O
More prey crossed their path, or passed to either side of them, as the night came to a close. Some were shrieking in fear, others wandering aimlessly, and a few even tried to fight when they saw her and Beryl, eyes wide and bodies quaking with unnatural rage. They were instantly dispatched, being worth little more than a perfunctory clawing, and none were safe to eat. All, from the shriekers to the fighters, smelled faintly of strange things, and acted very blatantly wrong.
At first, Lily considered it a stupid, wasteful tactic that would only work on the unwary, and thus of absolutely no use against her and Beryl. But as the night wore to a close and the grumbling in her stomach intensified, she saw that it had more than one effect. Not only could they not spare the time to hunt something, still fleeing slow, relentless pursuit, they could not even risk eating anything they happened across.
She said as much to Beryl after he disposed of the third rotund, tusked creature to run grunting at him and earn a quick disembowelment, and he nodded in agreement as they moved on. "Meaning fish is my only safe option, and therefore not safe at all. We might be going hungry for a while."
"Better that than you flying up into the open just to find that they're all on you in an instant," Lily said firmly, though the gurgling in her stomach urged her to reconsider. She wouldn't; Grimmel's forces felt a lot more present than they had just the night before, and she didn't think Beryl could easily fly anywhere with so many eyes turned their general direction. It was only the vast, tractless obscurity of the trees that kept them anonymous on the ground. Anything emerging from that same cover would be noticed.
Off in the distance, another set of Deathgrippers landed at random. Lily instinctively looked toward the noises, though they were far away. They would probably be switching out another set of fresh No-scaled-not-prey and dogs, to continue the pursuit…
"If we can't get food tonight, we'll live, but if this keeps up we're never going to actually get away," Beryl said sombrely. "We need to consider our options for the day. It'll be here soon."
"We're running through the day, because if we stop they'll catch up," Lily said. "Unless you have a way to change that…" She didn't mention her idea with stinky plants; there didn't seem to be any in this part of the woods, as frustrating as that was.
"No, I don't…" Beryl shrugged his wings. "I guess we're doing nothing but running," he added.
"You have the energy to do anything else?" she asked incredulously. She wanted to spend some more quality time with him, but in the same way she wanted to run ceaselessly like he could; even if she tried, her body would prove it impossible.
"No," Beryl admitted with a snort. "But I was looking forward to it."
"When we get out of this," Lily promised, flicking her tail forward and then running it down the length of his. "Now let's… keep going." She groaned loudly, voicing her dissatisfaction with the situation even as she continued to walk… always walking, sometimes running, never making any progress.
Beryl was to her side, turning to join her once more after walking around a tree, and then he was not. Lily instinctively dove out of the way as he leaped for her, but he corrected his course and shoved her to the side anyway-
Just as a Deathgripper passed through the empty space where she had been headed, streaked with the noxious white muck she had grown to hate the smell of. It bore a rider, who raised a thin wooden stick to its mouth.
Lily snarled from where she lay even as Beryl rose, but while he leaped forward, she inhaled and built up a blast in the back of her throat. The Deathgripper surged to meet Beryl, throwing its rider off, and when they clashed Lily let loose a small, focused bolt of fire to strike the No-scaled-not-prey right on the face. She knew what those sticks did, she had been put to sleep by them before.
But the No-scaled-not-prey wasn't the only threat. Beryl snarled and fired a blast at point-blank range into the Deathgripper's chest, but though the dragon roared in pain it still fought, pinning him down with its talons.
Lily fired again, this time a full-sized blast, and struck it on the side, the only place she could hit with any reliability as it and Beryl struggled. Beryl took advantage of the distraction to rake his claws across its underside, and the white of the snow beneath them bloomed red.
The Deathgripper thrashed a few more times, but Beryl drove home his assault, clawing at it until it fell still.
Lily let out a long huff of relief as the light left its eyes. "They're not so tough," she said shakily, rising to her paws. Her heart was pounding relentlessly, and the soreness in her legs had fled at the first sign of true, imminent danger. It would be back, but for now she was riding the high of being ambushed.
"Not close up, not without a rider," Beryl growled, turning to lick at his side.
"Are you hurt?" Lily asked, suddenly immensely worried.
"Just a scratch," Beryl assured her. "Long but shallow. Not really even bleeding. We have bigger problems."
"It came upon us without us hearing it land," Lily said. "A chance encounter? It could have landed a while ago and roamed the forest, hoping to run into us."
"Yes, but not that," Beryl said, limping past the No-scaled-not-prey's corpse, not even looking at the exploded top half. "Your shots, the roar… They must have heard us."
Several crashes in the trees close by proved him right, and Lily broke into a run without any further prompting. Beryl followed, letting her take the lead, favoring his left back leg as he moved.
A flash of red and black showed through the trees straight ahead, and Lily swerved to the side, headed inland. She leaped over patches of snow, sticking to the wet, leaf and mud-covered ground, hoping to make as little noise as possible. Even now, her body was starting to return to its fatigued, tired state, and her lungs ached, but she kept going.
More worryingly - she was seemingly always suffering through any sort of run - Beryl was still only barely keeping up with her, in stark contrast to how it had been before the fight. She found herself glancing back every few moments, just to make sure he was still with her. He didn't even notice, his eyes on the forest to either side of them and his gait labored.
A Deathgripper roared from behind them, sounding as if it had come across the carnage they left behind. Lily pushed herself harder, panting raggedly, every short breath coming out as a plume of steam. There was a glow on the horizon, the orange and red of the sun rising on a clear morning…
Lily was tired and distracted by her worry, so it took her far longer than it should have to realize that something was wrong with that, but it stuck in her mind, anomalous even though she couldn't spare the attention to think about it. The rising sun's glow was good and normal, but…
The sky was blanketed in dark clouds. The sun shouldn't be rising at all, and the clouds hadn't cleared to let it shine through; she could see dark grey illuminated from below.
"Fire," she gasped, stopping abruptly. It was not close enough to be heard, not close enough to see through the trees, but nothing else would light up the cloudy sky like this.
"Good," Beryl grunted, continuing past her. She got a good look at the jagged gash running down his thigh; it was shallow, as he had said, unlikely to be serious, but it had to be painful. "We can run through it… the dogs and riders can't. This is our chance!"
"No," Lily said, though she kept moving. "Something more is wrong, wouldn't they know we would not be stopped by it?" She had never actually tried going through a forest fire, having never seen one, but Pyre had long ago assured her that the only real danger was the smoke, not the flames themselves, so long as she did not linger. Normal fire was, as a general rule, not much of an obstacle.
"Does it matter?" Beryl huffed. "It will clear out our scents and stave off our pursuers, they don't send Deathgrippers in alone. Maybe it was an accident or chance, it might not be a plot."
"It might… not," Lily agreed, struggling for the extra air needed to talk. "But it might. And we might be running into it."
"Lily, we can't run much more," Beryl said. "This helps. We get to the edge, dig out a spot to hunker down in, and shelter in the middle as it burns through. This is a chance to rest, they will expect us to keep going."
"Have you… ever done that… before?" Lily asked.
"No, but we can't pass this up," Beryl said. "What else can we do?"
Lily had nothing to say to that; she certainly didn't have any better ideas. If the fire would give them a place to rest safe from pursuit, and destroy their trails after them, it was worth trying.
As they ran, the glow spread across the horizon, an ominous light painting the sky orange, and a smoky haze blurred the sky even further. She knew they were close when she began to see flickers through the trees, and the smoke drifted on the otherwise cold breeze.
"Surprised everything is burning so well," Beryl said shortly. "Cold out."
"Dry out," Lily countered, ignoring all the snow around them. It didn't count, not in the face of the immense amount of dry underbrush branching off of trees and bushes everywhere. "Enough to light."
They passed through a small hollow, the ground dipping down and then sloping back up again, and walked around a few large pine trees, and almost tripped over a smoldering bush.
Lily was struck momentarily speechless by the sight laid out in front of her. Every tree and plant in front of her was burning wildly, the flames licking at some parts while utterly devouring others. The bush they had stopped at flickered to life with a small tendril of fire at its base, and quickly succumbed. Smoke wafted through the forest, rising up far too slowly, and Lily coughed as some wound its way into her already dry throat.
"Okay, we're here, time to hunker down," Beryl said, sounding as if he was talking as much to himself as to her. "The heat's fine, it's breathing the smoke that causes problems. We're not fireproof on the inside." For some reason, that made him chuckle.
"It's rising," Lily said, referring to the smoke.
"Yes, it does," Beryl agreed. "And the wetter stuff isn't burning so well." He retreated, heading back into the small dip in the ground, and Lily followed him. There were no trees in the depression, just a lot of weeds and vines… but those things were flammable too, and there were trees all around. The air was clearer down in the hollow, but it wasn't even close to perfect…
"Here?" Lily asked.
"I can't see anywhere better," Beryl confirmed. "I'm thinking we dig down more, so we can't be seen from above."
"You do that," Lily said, turning in a circle to examine their surroundings. Embers were drifting on the wind, fizzling out in a mud puddle, sparking up on dry brush… The flames might follow them right to the hole Beryl was beginning to dig.
So long as there was something to burn. She bent down and flamed the ground, walking in a small circle around him. Leaves were incinerated, pine needles curled up and disintegrated, and nothing was left in her wake but dried, cracking mud, albeit in a thin line not much wider than her head.
Beryl continued to dig, and she flamed, walking in wider and wider circles. She used up all of her remaining fire and scorched most of the depression. Freshly dug dirt piled up on top of her work, and Beryl gradually sunk lower in the ground…
The trees closest to the advancing fire were burning in places, gradually catching more and more thoroughly. The more flammable underbrush had already ignited all around the place they were claiming, and Lily watched as the larger fire met the furthest of her burned lines, and found nothing to burn.
Not that it would necessarily make a difference; she wasn't worried about the flames, she was worried about the smoke and potentially falling trees. Pre-burning an area around their hiding place could stop the smoke from coming up from right next to the hole and cutting off their air, if that was even a thing that happened, but what she had done made no difference when it came to trees burning in the wrong places and becoming unable to support their weight.
"Okay, done," Beryl grunted, backing out of the hole. "You first."
"Why me?" Lily asked, looking at the hole dubiously. "How are we both fitting in there?" It was big enough for one at most, a depression in the ground.
"You first because if something falls on us I think it should not land on your back," Beryl rumbled. "Go in, lay down, and I will do my best to lay on top of you without hurting you."
"Oh," she said shortly, her wings shifting as if of their own accord. She crept down into the hole, her claws sinking into the loose dirt, and did her best to press down as far as possible. There was a claw-length of open space between her nose and the steep dirt slope that made up the sides of the hole.
"Ready," she called up, bracing herself for pain. She hadn't rolled onto, brushed against, or otherwise hurt her back since being captured by the No-scaled-not-prey, but it was still raw from that.
Beryl stepped down carefully. His front paws pressed into the slope to her right, and his back to her left. He yelped as some of the wall gave and he slid the rest of the way down in one quick move, his chest and stomach hitting her wings-
And her back. She gritted her teeth and stabbed her claws deeper into the ground, holding in a shriek as his weight thumped down.
"Sorry!" Beryl barked apologetically. He relieved the pressure a moment later somehow, probably getting a better hold on the walls and lifting himself up, she didn't really know and couldn't see. His tail curled around to rest near her face.
"Is this okay?" he asked. "Because I'm starting to second-guess my whole plan. I don't know if this is going to help us any."
"Is your back below ground level?" Lily asked anxiously. She was hurt, but she was always hurting in one way or another. She cared far more for his safety at the moment, enough to put that pain aside.
"Yes, barely," he confirmed.
"Then if a tree falls, it might land across the hole instead of squishing you," she said. "It's helping." It wasn't the best form of protection - the best possible thing to do would be to not be in the middle of a wildfire in the first place - but it was the best they could do with what they had.
"Everything is burning," Beryl murmured. "All around us. Meaning nothing except a dragon can come through here… And unless they're stupid, none would want to."
He lapsed into silence, and all that could be heard was the crackling of the fire all around them. Lily was unable to see anything except a small portion of the treecover directly overhead, and that remained mostly untouched for the time being. "How are the trees doing?" she asked.
"Slow," Beryl said shortly. "They're burning in a few places, but the flames are mostly passing them by. They are wet, it will take them much longer to really catch… and they'll make a lot more smoke when they do."
"We should leave when the smoke gets bad," Lily suggested. They could withstand the heat easily enough, especially as the occasional wintery breeze swept through, but choking to death would be another matter entirely. She could taste the taint already hanging in the air, and if it got too bad it would be dangerous.
"I'll let you know if that happens," Beryl rumbled. "Try to get some rest."
Lily huffed and shifted her wings under his stomach. "What about you?" she asked. She didn't think he was even laying down, not really; it felt like he was standing over her, and that took effort.
"I'll manage," he said. "This is still better than walking or running. It would be better still if I could really lay down, but that's not an option."
"If you have to, do," Lily said. "It's just pain, I can handle it." She was willing to, too. He was protecting her with his body, quite literally, and she wanted to return the favor.
"Let's… try it out." He shifted his paws and lowered down onto her once more, slowly resting his weight more on her wings and back. "How much does this hurt?"
"Not enough to make me say stop," Lily gritted. She shut her eyes and concentrated on breathing, on ignoring the four sharp, painful spots Beryl was laying on, and the more general throb of the rest of her back. Even more panic-inducing than the pain, the memories it was bringing back lurked at the edge of her mind, clawing at her composure.
She remembered lying in the net, shrieking as it rubbed her back raw only a few days ago, and she remembered being rammed into a tree, her back rubbed against the jagged bark as Ivy tried to force information out of her with pain. Worst of all, she remembered fleeting glimpses of being smashed onto her back long ago, screeching senselessly as-
Beryl's tail batted at her face, and she almost bit it, opening her eyes in surprise. The pain had receded, and Beryl was back to standing above her, only lightly touching her wings… and licking her side frantically, the only part of her he could easily reach. "Lily," he called out worriedly.
"That was not fun," she groaned, hoping that speaking would reassure him.
"Did it hurt too much to bear?" he asked.
"No, not that," she said dully. "Bad memories."
"Oh." He said nothing for a long moment, but when he continued speaking, it was with more trepidation than Lily had ever heard in his voice. "I know this might sound really weird, but… want to talk about it?"
That wrenched a small laugh out of Lily, in spite of everything. It wasn't funny, he was serious, but at the same time there was something so hilariously ironic about him asking if she wanted to talk about her past trauma now, in the middle of a wildfire after a whole night spent fleeing No-scaled-not-prey and their minions.
"That's a no?" Beryl rumbled.
"It's not a no," she snorted. "But not now. Maybe some other time." When she wasn't hurt and tired. When she felt like digging up all of those terrible memories. She might, someday, but that day certainly wasn't today.
"That's progress," Beryl hummed.
Lily nuzzled his tail, glad she had broken the tension between them before this particular moment. "Maybe it is," she agreed.
The fire raged on around them, presumably spreading wildly in the endless forests, and hopefully driving their enemies away entirely… assuming it wasn't all some ploy by Grimmel himself. Lily wouldn't have felt confident enough to say either way, and the more she thought about it, the more it worried her.
She and Beryl had been pursued for a full night without end, tempted with random prey, sought out by blindly-landing Deathgrippers, and tracked despite killing anyone who actually found them, or got too close. But Grimmel hadn't given up, and she was abruptly sure this fire wouldn't be enough to stop him, either. He was out there, somewhere, planning his next move. Hopefully, he was at least concentrating on her and Beryl, and nobody else.
It was a small comfort, knowing that their long, laborious attempt to escape was probably helping her fledglings get away, but small comforts were all she had.
Small comforts, and one big one right above her. She purred, despite her dry throat, and let her eyes close once more. There would be no sleeping, not now, but she felt safe enough to relax a little. Until they were forced to move on once more.
