In other circumstances, Lily might have wanted to spend a lot longer lingering on her lucky reunion with Beryl. Other circumstances being somewhere warm and dry and private…
And not stinking like they were standing right next to a waste pit. Especially not when said smell was partially coming from her.
Beryl's nose twitched repeatedly as the wind shifted, and he let out a powerful sneeze that sent a little blue bolt of fire into a mound of snow. "Lily, if you don't mind…"
Lily knew exactly how nauseating the concentrated scent she had just swiped onto her paws was, so she wasn't offended when Beryl waved his tail and gestured downwind of himself. "Right," she purred, circling around to stand on his other side. The unknown gunk she had taken from the tree clung to her paws even as she stomped through the snow. It was as sticky as it was smelly. She wished she knew what it was, though.
"Can you keep following the smell?" she asked. "I want to know who helped me."
"Helped us, since following the trail led to you," Beryl rumbled. "Which might not be a coincidence."
Lily hadn't even considered that, though in retrospect she definitely should have. "Yes. I want answers."
"So do I." Beryl put his nose to the ground and began walking back and forth, presumably trying to get a scent besides the terrible one smeared all across the trees around them. "Got it!"
"That was quick," Lily said, following him away from where she had woken up. She inhaled through her nose-
And promptly choked on the fumes wafting up from her own paws. Beryl was definitely on his own when it came to tracking these creatures. She would have to help in a different way.
"I was walking through the snowstorm last night," she recounted, thinking back. Her memory wasn't the best; it had all seemed like one long, terrible moment, and she remembered the feeling of wandering in the snowstorm better than any specifics. "Small things dropped from the trees, I think… That's all I remember." They had definitely come from above.
"How small?" Beryl asked curiously. "Bigger than your paw, or smaller?"
"Bigger, definitely, but maybe not by much. I didn't get a good look." The little she did know certainly didn't match anything Pyre had told her about other sorts of kin. The only small ones he had mentioned were supposed to be colorful and not prone to sneaking around, which didn't fit this encounter at all. Not to mention he had never told her about any sort of person stinking so badly…
"That doesn't fit anyone I've ever met," Beryl rumbled, apparently thinking along the same lines as her. "I know small, and I know smelly, but never both at the same time. Are we sure they're connected?"
"I assumed they were…" Lily hummed thoughtfully. What did she actually have as evidence that the two were related? She didn't remember them stinking when she was ambushed the night before, though that might just mean she hadn't had time to smell them. The stench had been present when she woke up, but she already knew that was because of the unknown substance on the trees, which she had never seen anyone spreading.
"Which is more likely?" she asked. "That there is one sort of unknown creature responsible for everything, or that there are two unrelated things going on at the same time?"
"The simpler explanation is the more likely, you mean?" Beryl hummed. "I've heard that before… It doesn't really apply to the things that happen to my family, but maybe it works here."
"Doesn't it?" Lily asked.
"Ember's my first piece of evidence," Beryl snorted. "The simplest explanation is never the right one when it comes to him or the things that happen to him. Then you have Spark… The simple explanation had me thinking he had abandoned me." He huffed quietly, his head still down to follow the trail across the snowy blanket covering the ground.
"Which he didn't?" Lily guessed.
"No, it was a huge misunderstanding," Beryl rumbled. "But my point is, simple is not always right."
"Point taken," Lily conceded. "But speaking of explanations… What happened back there?"
"Back where?" Beryl asked.
"Back when we were running across the burned forest and we got separated," Lily elaborated. She had run, did her best to help him, and then fled again, and in doing so didn't know a lot of what had happened to him.
"There's not much to tell," Beryl said. "I was overwhelmed, but they had standing orders to not kill me if capture was an option. Grimmel wanted to do it himself. He gave a short little speech that I honestly didn't care enough to listen to, and then you blew his paw off and gave me an opening."
"It was a tiny shot, I don't think I did much damage," Lily grumbled. She wished she could have done more; as it turned out, Grimmel's obvious opening to being blasted out of existence hadn't been warranted confidence, it had been a genuine weakness. She could have aimed for his head and killed him outright in the process of saving Beryl.
"It did plenty," Beryl corrected her. He stopped to dig his paws into the snow and overturn a dark, brown-stained bit of slush that stank like her paws. "Ugh, now I know what I'm following."
"That stuff is everywhere," she said thoughtfully. "What happened after you got free?"
"I ran," he said, continuing forward. They weren't walking in a straight line anymore; he changed directions every few steps, presumably as the smell told him he was going the wrong way. "It was close for a little while, but I'm faster than any Deathgripper can be on the ground. They're bigger and that slows them down."
"Yes, I guess you are," she murmured, remembering her desperate escape. Beryl might be faster, but she wasn't, or if she was, it wasn't by much. Thankfully, they had both made it out.
A flurry of snowflakes swept down on them, startling in its suddenness and intensity, and Lily looked up at the dipping, snow-laden branches above them.
"I hope we don't get another big storm," Beryl muttered, shaking his wings out to rid himself of the snow. "I barely made it through the last one…"
"I'm keeping my eyes open for a good place to rest," Lily said. "If we find one, we can drop this hunt."
"Yes… If we find one." Beryl to one side, then the other, taking in the empty, white-coated forest around them. "Hey, there's something."
Lily didn't see anything resembling shelter in the direction Beryl was heading, not even as they got close. "Where?" she asked, confused.
"Oh, no, not shelter, more of this stuff," Beryl explained, pawing at the tree he had stopped by. "It blends in, but the smell doesn't."
Lily cautiously sniffed the air, then hurriedly went back to breathing through her mouth. She could barely see the congealed gunk on the tree, but she could definitely smell it. "Are we sure we want to find these people?" she choked out.
"If only to sate my burning…" Beryl yawned widely. "Curiosity. Maybe smoldering is a better description."
"Maybe it can wait," Lily offered, thinking of how long it must have been since Beryl last slept. "How about we make one of those snow caves you and Ember taught my people about, and continue this pursuit at night?"
"Away from this stink," Beryl agreed, making an abrupt turn. They walked a short distance from the closest marked trees, and Lily took another tentative sniff. It still stank-
"Your paws," Beryl reminded her. "I'll get this started, you…" He waved a paw around and then mimed flaming it.
"Make sure I don't stink us out of our shelter, or suffocate us in our sleep," she finished with a snort. "Got it."
After a moment's thought, she went downwind and scraped her paws off as best she could on a clean tree, then used up a shot flaming some water out of the snow all around her. It quickly turned to mud as she stomped her front paws in it, but that was still better than the stuff she was cleaning off, so she didn't mind. Mud didn't make her want to vomit whenever she inhaled.
Not to mention this was warm mud, and felt amazing on her paws. She sighed happily and mashed her paws in a lot longer than was strictly necessary, just to enjoy the feeling. Running, walking, fleeing… she had done everything on these paws in the last few days, far more than she would ever do back in the valley. They weren't as sore as the rest of her - that was a high bar to pass even on a good day - but it still felt amazing between her claws.
Once she could bear to leave the rapidly cooling mud, she lifted a paw to her nose and inhaled. An earthy, wet scent was all she smelled.
"Success!" she called out.
"Great!" Beryl called back to her. "Now come help me before this falls!"
Lily hurried back, curious as to what he meant about something falling, and saw him bracing a wall of packed snow as long as she was and higher than his shoulder. "What is this?" she asked.
"A wall," he huffed. "See how I've got my wing out?" He did indeed have one wing stretched out, the edge on the ground to form a shallow slope. "I had to improvise, we only have two people and the stuff Ember and I taught needed four. Come over on the other side and shore it up so I can push away."
Lily saw what he meant and quickly pawed some snow over to the base of his little wall. "I see," she huffed as she worked, "how this makes one wall. How do we get snow over us?"
"That's too much effort for now," Beryl panted. "Just get me out of the wind and I'll sleep like a rock."
"Rocks don't sleep… do they?" She stamped down on her gathered snow, forcing it into place.
"Some dragons look like rocks when they sleep, and are very hard to wake," Beryl said. "Close enough. My point was that I'm tired so just getting out of the wind is good enough."
"Got it." Lily stepped back and examined her work. "That should be good."
Beryl grunted, the wall - more of a mound now that she had added to the side - shuddered… and held.
"Good, the hard part's done," he groaned. "Now, see the other big mound of snow I piled up?" He flicked his tail at it. "I'm going to lay down with my wing out. You push it all on top of me and then flame it."
"This doesn't sound safe," Lily objected.
"It's not comfortable, but the water freezes again and holds the snow up," Beryl explained. "Were you paying attention when Ember and I explained this to the pack?"
"No," Lily admitted. "I listened long enough to be sure you were making sense, then focused on other things." She had intended to travel with Beryl and his family, so she hadn't thought she would need to know every detail. Ending up alone, except for Beryl, had not been a possibility in her mind back then.
"Okay." Beryl shook his head, his entire body practically drooping with tiredness, and blinked a few times. "Here's how it works. I sit there and take up enough space for both of us. You put snow on me, except for my head, then flame it a little. I flame the ground under me to heat the inside. Then we wait while the water freezes again. Then you come in and we sleep there."
"Got it." She eyed his tail, which all but dragged on the snow. "Can you hold it up for long enough? Maybe I should be the one under the pile." The last thing they needed was their makeshift shelter collapsing on top of him before it was done.
"Do you want a mound of snow pressing down on your back?" Beryl asked rhetorically, already settling into position, his side against the snow wall and one wing outstretched like it was already covering her… Which it would be, once they were done.
"Point taken," Lily sighed. "I'll try to be quick…"
O-O-O-O-O
Lily woke slowly to the sound of claws scraping wood. She didn't really care about the noise at first, either; it was quiet and she was warmly tucked under Beryl's wing. He would have alerted her if it was anything dangerous.
Then common sense caught up to her groggy, overly confident thoughts. Beryl had been absolutely exhausted, he might sleep through anything. She was supposed to be the one watching for danger.
She opened her eyes and saw… nothing. Not even the view of the forest that she'd had upon last closing her eyes. There was a little wall of snow in the way, one that definitely hadn't been there earlier.
The scratching came again, closer. It sounded like it was being made by many small claws, though Lily wasn't sure whether she was actually hearing something that made her think that, or remembering her last encounter with unknown creatures in the dark and assuming it had to be the same ones.
Either way, she wasn't content to just listen and guess, so she shimmied forward until she would poke her head up over the little wall of snow and see the forest.
It was dark, snow was falling gently, and four little dragons were rubbing up against a tree.
Lily blinked and looked again, but they were still there. She had never seen such strange little creatures. They looked more like half-sized No-scaled-not-prey than light wings, standing upright with big hind legs and no front legs to speak of, brown and with round, pointy faces. Pointier than No-scaled-not-prey, if she was being fair; they had bony protrusions for noses, but these dragons looked as if their whole face was that one protrusion, like birds with beaks.
They also smelled awful, even though they were a good five wing lengths away and there was no wind. The four rubbing their little heads against the tree were leaving smears of a familiar brown liquid, and the fifth…
The fifth was clawing at something in the snow, standing on one leg as it poked and pulled at a dark thing the size and shape of a fish. If it smelled like one, Lily wouldn't know; the stench, as always, overpowered absolutely everything else. She was just glad to see that the liquid she had put on her paws was coming from the strange dragons' mouths, and not anywhere else.
The fifth one looked up, one beady eye staring in her direction, and froze. The others all followed suit a moment later, when they noticed their companion's lack of movement.
"Carry on," she said. It wasn't the most diplomatic thing she could have come up with, but it was the first halfway-decent response to the situation that came to mind.
"Our territory," the one by the fish piped. "You are just passing through?"
"Just passing through," Lily confirmed in a quiet, gentle voice. "What do you call yourselves?"
"We are tree-eating-smelly-spit-sneaky-kin," the little dragon chirped. It had been a while since Lily heard anyone naming something with the sort of word-string most light wings stopped using sometime in their fledgling seasons, if they ever used them at all, but she got the meaning easily enough.
"It is always good to meet new kinds of kin," Lily hummed. Especially for her, given this would only be the third new kind she had ever met, assuming dark wings counted as different at all. "Were you the ones to help me last night?"
"Yes, we want peace," the little dragon said quickly. "No fighting. No talking. We helped you, we want nothing in return. Just that you do not stay."
"You'll get that," she assured them. The other four looked ready to bolt the moment she looked away, but the one she was speaking to seemed marginally more relaxed. "What have you got there?"
"Good-intention gift," the little dragon said. "Fish. A lot of fish."
"Then you've earned my appreciation twice over," she purred. "Thank you."
"You are not so bad," one of the dragons by the tree chirped.
"What's going on?" Beryl rumbled sleepily.
Lily pulled her head back, glad to give her outstretched neck a break, and responded. "Our mysterious friends came to us."
Beryl leaned forward to look. "They did?"
She snorted in amusement, guessing what she would see when she looked up. "Let me guess, they're gone."
"I see nothing but some scratches on a tree, some of that gunk, and… is that fish?"
Lily heard Beryl's stomach rumble. "Yes, it is. Are you done sleeping?"
"For food, yes," he declared, standing and throwing off the icy roof of their little den in his haste. "Though maybe we could take it away from here…"
"The smell," she said. "We should, yes. While we do, I'll tell you what they were like." She was curious as to whether he would have any insights; he was the one who had travelled the world and seen so many things. Maybe he would be able to draw conclusions where she didn't see anything of interest.
"Most importantly, do they know anything about Grimmel, my family, or your pack?" Beryl asked. "And why were they so nice to us? They brought ten good-sized fish, that had to be a hassle if they're small." He eagerly gathered up half the fish, spitting out snow as best he could, and Lily did the same.
Only after she had the fish in her mouth did she remember that she needed an empty mouth to talk. "'Ot 'ure," she tried anyway.
Beryl cast her an amused look and tossed his head, breaking into a run. There was a weak wind now, pushing snow into Lily's face. She didn't mind; it was refreshing now that she was rested and awake and not running for her life, or struggling to keep moving. The prospect of a good meal at the end of their short run also might have played a role in lightening her mood; she hadn't even thought about how long it might take to hunt down something edible, and skipping that whole process was convenient.
They came across an oddity in the mostly repetitive landscape of the forest, a flat, raised surface in the snow, and stopped there. Beryl pawed at it, revealing a stone beneath the snow, and unceremoniously dumped his fish. "You were saying?" he snorted, before tossing his head back and swallowing one of the smaller fish whole.
"I wonder how this boulder got here," she said.
"Rocks are everywhere," Beryl rumbled. "This one is just convenient. Or maybe our visitors moved it here."
"No way," Lily said firmly. "They're way too small and spindly to move boulders." She bit into a fish and ripped it in half, hoping to savor the meal. Her stomach was all but growling at her to eat as fast as possible, but that would just lead to an upset stomach later.
"That gives me an idea," Beryl remarked.
"About moving rocks?" she asked.
"No," he snorted, "not that. Don't tell me what they looked like, I'm going to try and guess."
"Good luck," she said. She would never have thought her mystery rescuers looked anything like birds or walked on two legs at all. Maybe Beryl could do better, but she doubted it.
"There's a lot of information to work with," Beryl rumbled, pausing to eat another fish. "I can safely assume they're nothing like any of the rock-eaters I've met, because you say they couldn't move a boulder."
"Perhaps," Lily mused, doing her best not to give anything away. Usually, she would be confident in her ability to hold a straight face, but Beryl was far better than most at seeing through her. That, and she might be out of practice. It had been a while.
While Beryl was busy eating and presumably trying to infer things about the little dragons, Lily did her best to think back and determine how long they had been on the run. It was harder than she would have thought, so much of the pursuit blurred in hindsight by exhaustion. She knew that they had just slept through most of a day, and she had slept the night before. The day before that had been spent hiding in and fleeing flames.. Or had it been a day? It would have been impossible to really tell in the midst of flames under a cloudy sky.
"I don't know how long we've been out here," she said aloud after finishing her last fish. "How many days has it been?"
"That's… a good question." He tilted his head and stared off into the distance for a moment. "I think, if we count the night we left the valley as the first night, then tonight is the sixth night. Five days."
"It feels like twenty, at least," she said vehemently.
"It does," Beryl agreed. "Now, as to my guessing… The slime they were leaving on the trees was all at about the same height."
"It was," Lily agreed. Which, of course, it would be; they put it there by rubbing their head, or mouth, or whatever the term was, on the tree. She had seen it.
Beryl hadn't seen it, but he seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "That means either that's the height their tails reach, or it's level with their claws when they rear up, or something else like that. And I know they're small, so that rules out a lot of possible positions…"
"Which leads you to what conclusion?" Lily asked curiously. "That seems like a dead end."
"It is a dead end," Beryl admitted. "But there are other things to put together. They like lurking in the trees."
"Correct," Lily hummed. She put one paw up on the rock and began running her claws along some of the subtle grooves that lines its surface, just for something to do.
"And I doubt Grimmel and his No-scaled-not-prey would just ignore a bunch of little dragons, so I can assume they're not flying around, meaning they're sticking to the trees or the ground," Beryl continued.
A memory rose from the depths of Lily's mind, and she growled to herself. A brown object thrown down for Grimmel to inspect… She had seen it, back when they were lurking in the fire, plotting their escape. Not that it mattered now, but if it ever became relevant, she knew Grimmel had seen at least one of the little brown dragons.
"Meaning," Beryl continued, unaware of her minor epiphany, "that they're probably comfortable on the ground or in the trees. I'm thinking long, prehensile tails, four limbs, the sort of body that makes tree-hopping easy. If that's true, then I'm betting they stand low to the ground, so the tree-markings probably aren't coming from under their tails… I bet the liquid comes from their mouths."
"Perhaps," Lily said casually. "Any other deductions?" She was secretly amused that he was so badly wrong, but she wasn't about to let that show, lest he change his guess.
"They've met light wings before," he said seriously. "They knew how to put you out like a fledgling. That, or they're close enough to our kind to have the same pressure point, but I doubt that given how small they are."
"That… is a good point." She knew for a fact that nobody in her pack had ever met those little dragons, certainly not since she had come into power, and Pyre hadn't known of them… but then how else would they know? "But you're totally wrong on most of your other guesses."
"Oh, come on," Beryl groaned. "I had to be close."
"The slime is spit, and it does come from their mouths," Lily revealed. "But they only have two legs and two wings, their tails are nothing interesting, and they walk like No-scaled-not-prey or birds."
"Wow, I was way off," Beryl huffed. "And it all sounded so good and logical…"
"You didn't have enough to work with," Lily said.
"I'll have to be smarter about the next big problem we have to solve," he replied. "How do we make sure we're totally out of the woods when it comes to escaping Grimmel?"
"We're not out of the woods," Lily deadpanned. She turned in a slow circle, staring at the trees all around them, just to rub it in.
"I'm not taking that bait," Beryl snorted. "You know very well what I meant."
"I do," she admitted. "And my best idea is going back, getting some of that slime, and covering our scents as long as we can." So long as they weren't spotted again, scent would be their biggest liability.
"We can do that," he agreed. He walked around the rock and scooped up some snow with his tail, spreading it across the flat surface. "And we can hide evidence of our presence. Remember the tail sweeping trick to hide our tracks?"
"Of course." She walked a few steps while swishing her tail back and forth, just to demonstrate. "Though it's going to get cold if we have to do it all night."
"The rest of us will be warm, we can just sit on each others' tails to warm up." Beryl eyed her hopefully. "And now that we are no longer running for our lives, no longer hungry, and no longer exhausted…"
"And not yet stinking like waste pits," Lily added with a purr. "Yes, I think now is a good time." If she could do anything on a whim; she hadn't spent days thinking about Beryl and holding back, the urge wasn't already burning inside her-
But Beryl delicately ran his nose down the side of her neck, apparently intent on fixing that. She shuddered, leaning into his warm side as her legs went weak, and found her doubts about wanting to climb onto him quickly and easily silenced.
O-O-O-O-O
It was cold, and snow fell intermittently, but Lily found she didn't really mind. It wasn't just the afterglow of being with Beryl, either, though that did help. Compared to the blizzard she had stumbled through, light snowfall was nothing.
It also helped that the forest was silent, save for the crunching of their paws and the swishing of their tails. No searching roars came from above, and no quickly-silenced barks or howls from behind, and no shrieks of prey running around mindlessly. The night passed without a single hint of renewed pursuit from Grimmel.
"We should rest soon," Beryl rumbled, breaking the silence. "Sun's coming up, I think."
"Hard to tell," Lily replied. "How do you know?" There was no telltale glow on the horizon, they couldn't even see the horizon. As far as she knew, it might just as well have been the middle of the night.
"It's mostly a feeling, I'm getting tired and that means we've been walking for a while," Beryl said. "Wouldn't mind some food, either, but I'm not getting any prey trails."
"Nothing worthwhile," Lily agreed, wrinkling her nose in irritation. She could see a few sets of tiny tracks in the snow right now, for all the good they did. Nothing big was around, leaving either the risky prospect of fish, or nothing.
"We've not heard any Deathgrippers all night, not even in the distance," Beryl remarked. "I could maybe risk a short flight to the ocean and back."
"If you can explain how you'll fire at the water without making yourself an obvious target, how you'll get back down into the forest without hurting yourself, and how you'll find me again, then sure," Lily said tiredly. She had already thought all of that through, and he had too.
"Empty stomachs it is, then," Beryl conceded. "Are you sure your little friends aren't still with us?"
"We must be well out of their territory," Lily said. She wished it wasn't so; a second delivery of fresh-caught fish would be perfect. "We've not seen any of their marked trees in a long time."
"That's true." Beryl huffed and shook his wings out. "Let's spread out and check for tracks. Maybe we'll get lucky. If not, then we can at least look for a good place to spend the day."
"Right." The forest around them wasn't all that distinctive, so Lily made her own landmark by swiping up a tailful of snow and smashing it against the bare side of a tree. Some fell off, but the rest remained, caked in the cracks between the wooden scales, leaving an obvious reminder of where they had been. "Meet back here," she said, choosing a random direction and going that way.
"Don't spend too long looking," Beryl said, his voice fading as he went. Lily looked over her shoulder long enough to confirm that he had broken into a run. She, on the other paw, kept to a quick walk, her head down to better pick up scents.
Not that there were any; aside from the many little tracks from worthless prey, the wintry landscape in front of her was untouched. Again, she pondered the obvious scarcity of prey. Prey ate plants or other prey, and the former was present everywhere. Water could be a problem; they hadn't run across any sources of fresh water since the stream, which had been days ago. But was it the problem preventing animals from inhabiting these forests? She didn't think so; the little animals needed to drink too, and they were here.
A small trickling sound caught her attention, and she followed her ears to its source… a patch of snow just like any other. The noise came from below her, and she stuck a paw out to try digging for it-
Her paw went down through snow, cracked right through a layer of ice so thin she barely noticed it, and plunged into a paw-deep stream. She held in a surprised bark and kicked around a bit, clearing enough ice to comfortably drink from the stream. It was as cold going down as it had felt on her paw, but fresh water she didn't have to melt herself was nice…
And it was fresh water, right here, completely disproving her already unreliable theory about a lack of water causing the lack of prey. On the bright side, everything needed water… big prey included. There was no scent to follow, but why would she bother following something, when she could wait for it to come to her?
O-O-O-O-O
Lily's stomach gurgled, and she imagined she could hear it echoing, it was so empty. A day's sleep hadn't made her any less hungry, that was for sure. But trying to catch prey after a whole night's walking hadn't seemed like a good idea, so here she was… Still not catching prey.
"How do I do this?" she asked.
"You dig your claws in and pull yourself up," Beryl said, giving her a confused look. "You've lived next to a forest your entire life. Do you really not know how to climb a tree?"
"It was never a priority," Lily said primly. Not to mention, she suspected her back would object the moment she actually tried it. She was only planning on doing it now because it was the best way to stake out the stream without immediately being spotted or needing to renew her faulty camouflage every so often.
"Just dig in, as hard as you can," he concluded, rearing up on his hind legs to slap both front paws to a thick tree. They stuck, and Lily could see his claws piercing the bark. "The outer layer can just strip off like a scale in a fight, so be sure to dig deep enough to get real wood. Then, just pull-"
He hopped up, his tail slapping the ground, and latched his back paws on. From then on, he never stopped moving, scooting up the tree with his usual grace, until he was high enough to stick paws on a sturdy branch.
Said branch shook, cracked, and broke immediately, falling to strike the ground with a muted crunch.
"Never," Beryl called down, seemingly unsurprised, "try to perch on a branch. We're heavy, and the trees around here aren't strong enough. Always expect anything but the main trunk to break at the worst possible time."
"So how do I stay up there?" Lily asked, craning her neck to look up at him.
"Find two good branches close together," Beryl said, shimmying up again until he clung to the trunk next to two such branches, "and put one paw on the base of each." His back paws slid down, tearing a few pieces of bark off the tree, and perched on the very base of both branches.
"And then?" Lily asked.
"That's it," Beryl revealed. "Dig in, hook your tail around something else if you can, and wait. I can see the water from here, and unless you're looking straight up, you won't see me. I won't fall off unless I fall asleep, and maybe not even then."
Lily took in his posture. Belly to the trunk, back paws wedged up against it and branches, body vertical, head craned forward… She didn't think she could fall asleep like that even if it was perfectly safe.
"There's no better way?" she asked.
"Not with these trees," Beryl said seriously. "But we don't have to do this. We could just keep walking, and maybe come across a trail like before."
"This seems more likely to work," Lily huffed. "We don't know where prey might be, but we do know where they want to go. Here."
"Okay, I mean, I'm up for it," he said.
"One more thing," Lily called up to him. "Show me how to get down." She could imagine climbing up, successfully making it to the top of the tree, spotting prey… and not being able to get down fast enough. It seemed prudent to ask.
"Almost forgot that," Beryl snorted. "If you're close to the ground, jump. But if you want a gentle way down, just get out in the open," he pulled himself off the branches, "and loosen your grip."
A moment passed with no visible change, and then Beryl fell. Lily felt her heart jump, even though she knew it was part of the plan, and it didn't stop hammering at her chest when the noise of shredding wood and the slowness of his fall revealed that he was sliding, not falling at all. A rain of chunks of wood followed him down, and when his back paws hit the ground, a collection of bark fragments bounced off his head and wings.
"That's how you get down," he said, turning to face her. The strip of bark lodged between the little frills between his ears spoiled the otherwise impressive moment, but Lily didn't point it out. "Can you do that?"
"If I jump, I'm going to regret it, so let's hope I can," Lily huffed. It would hurt, neither way down would be painless for her, but sliding was definitely better than leaping and hitting the ground at full speed. Beryl would handle that if any prey worth leaping on did show up.
She tilted her head as a thought came to her. Technically, if Beryl was going to be hanging around in the trees waiting to strike, she didn't need to be there. She could avoid climbing at all, and instead find somewhere to sit around, far away from this place so she wouldn't scare any prey away.
Practically speaking, that was probably the better plan. But she dismissed it anyway. She wanted to do this, to take part in keeping them fed, and to prove that she could do it, so that if she needed to in the future she didn't doubt herself. There was a whole collection of good reasons to do it even if she didn't have to right now…
And chief among them was that she wanted to. That was what she was supposed to be doing, after all. Following her desires, acting on them. Not thinking about the things she couldn't help. It was getting easier to keep her pack's possible struggles out of her mind, though only because she really couldn't do anything for them-
She shook her head and deliberately walked up to the sturdiest tree she could see, picking one close to the partially-hidden stream, but not too close. If she had to think about something, she would think about this possibly painful endeavor, not that.
"Keep moving once you start," Beryl advised. "But not so fast that you lose your grip."
"Got it." She reared up and smacked her paws into the tree, digging in as hard as she could. Claw pierced wood, and when she tested her grip by pulling down, everything held.
"The worst that can happen is terrible agony," she said aloud.
"Yes-" Beryl began, clearly intended to say something reassuring.
Lily leaped up, pushing off with her back paws and tail as she had been shown, pulling her claws up and out of the tree, and immediately dug them back in again, all four paws this time. The moment she stabilized, she stretched and tried to jump again, keeping her belly on the rough bark. It wasn't an easy movement, not even close, but it was doable.
Another scraping leap had her stomach stinging, and her body as a whole one light wing higher in the tree. She heeded Beryl's advice and didn't stop, pushing herself up over and over again. The constant stop and start was tiring, and her back was throbbing, though not nearly as badly as she had expected, but she was getting higher and higher.
And then she was passing the two branches, one slightly higher than the other, that she had planned to use as support. She stopped then, her paws aching, and stuck out her back paw, fumbling around until she found the branch. From there, it was a simple set of movements to put herself in the position Beryl had demonstrated, and then she was still.
All was silent, save for the wind knocking branches together as it passed. Lily leaned to the side and looked down. She wasn't that high up, but Beryl still looked small from where she perched. Thankfully, season-cycles of being grounded had not left her with a fear of heights, though she really should have thought of that before climbing the tree.
"Perfect!" Beryl barked, before going back to his tree and ascending once more. They were on opposite sides of the hidden stream, both looking down at it, and he was in the perfect position to stare into her eyes from slightly higher up. "Now, to gaze upon your beauty…"
"Gaze upon something edible first, please," she snorted, secretly pleased. She didn't think she was beautiful, not even close, but it was nice to hear him disagree. He wasn't prone to insincere flattery; he saw something beautiful about her, though she didn't know what.
She didn't intend to ask him about it, both because she didn't feel like questioning it, and because making noise by talking would negate the entire purpose of climbing trees and waiting, that of stealth.
Time passed, measurable by heartbeats and the rhythmic flicking of Beryl's ears, back and forth with impeccable timing. The small movement wasn't enough to give them away, apparently, and once she grew bored with watching blank snow - which happened quite quickly - she began trying to copy him. It was deceptively hard to get her ears going in sync with any consistent timing, and the challenge was a nice distraction from the boredom.
A duo of tiny little furry creatures hopped into view a while later, moving like a hyper fledgling, drank from the stream, and left. Lily had no intention of pouncing on those; the two together wouldn't have made a mouthful. She and Beryl were waiting for something worthwhile. But it was a nice proof of concept; the little prey animals hadn't noticed anything amiss.
Then the world lit up with a single ray of moonlight. Lily squinted, surprised by the intensity of the single ray as it lit up the snow near the base of Beryl's tree, pure light reflecting off a white, glittering surface.
Beryl's face split into a wide, gummy grin, and Lily mimicked him. She had missed light, actual unfiltered light, and she wished there were no trees blocking her from seeing the moon. Her claws digging into the tree now felt slightly more justified, since it was helping withhold that from her.
She was just contemplating other methods of revenge against trees when a massive prey animal stepped out into the beam of moonlight, massive horns jutting out and casting shadows as it moved through the lit area. She froze, her eyes wide and locked on the fat, brown creature. It sniffed the air warily, but it would get no warning from scent; the wind was blowing in their favor.
Lily flicked her ears at Beryl questioningly, and he nodded. This would be the tricky part; the bulk of his body was currently on the wrong side of the tree. He could fire at the prey, but that carried its own set of risks. A small bolt would probably kill, but if it didn't, the prey might alert every living creature within earshot of their presence, and that might restart the hunt for them. And if he made it big enough to definitely kill, the detonation would do the same, along with scattering their food in many possibly burnt chunks.
So, instead of firing, he was going to pounce… Or maybe drop was a better word. Either way, that meant he needed to be able to leap in the right direction, which he couldn't do at the moment. Neither of them could, and as Beryl began very tentatively shifting his body, Lily wondered whether that was an oversight to their entire plan, not just an inconvenience.
The prey lowered its head on its long neck and began drinking from the stream. Beryl leaned back, pulled a paw out, and began circling around the tree as quietly as possible. His grip looked very precarious to Lily, and she was glad she wasn't the one having to do it. If climbing up the tree was simple, climbing around it definitely was not.
A chunk of bark snapped off and fell, twisting in the wind. It hit the snow so quietly Lily didn't hear it, but the prey looked up. Then, after a long moment, it went back to drinking.
Beryl shuffled around a little bit more, then tensed and leaped off. The prey startled at the not-so-subtle noise of four sets of claws pulling bark out of a tree, but Beryl flared his wings halfway down and corrected to land squarely on the prey's back even as it tried to run. One loud crack later, and he was on the ground, a big prey animal in his paws.
He looked up at Lily, stepped off the prey, and grimaced, kicking at the horns. "That was close. I was hoping for one with less of these, or none at all. If you jump on them wrong, you can hurt yourself."
"Duly noted," Lily said. She wanted to get down as quickly as possible, and her stomach agreed…
But another idea had entered her mind, and she was already part of the way up the tree… "I'll be down soon," she said, bracing herself and leaping up from her safe perch. First, she wanted to see the moon, and this tree seemed to be solid and thick all the way up, taller than the other trees by a fair margin.
The climb up was less scary this time around, no longer something she was only trying for the first time. She was probably more worried about going down, since she would have to either break through a few branches, or stop and reposition to avoid them on the way down. Going far enough up was no big deal.
She stopped just short of the last few bare branches, basking in the mostly unblocked moonlight. Then she slowly pushed her head up, out into the open air.
The vast emptiness of the sky nearly took her breath away, it had been so long since she last saw it. The clouds were scattering, revealing a star-filled sky and massive nearly-full moon… and not a Deathgripper in sight. Everything was highlighted by the moonlight; she would have seen any dragon flying around, save for a camouflaged light wing, and there were none.
Except, she noticed as she turned her head, for two in the far distance, flying slow, steady circles above something. They were in the direction of the shore, and she would have bet part of the prey she and Beryl had just caught that they were guarding one of Grimmel's ships.
She lingered there for a few moments longer, enjoying the open air, then braced herself and loosened her claws-
An undignified shriek escaped from her as she slid down the tree much faster than Beryl had. Her tail hit one of the branches she had meant to avoid, and it snapped instantly, but the jagged end scraped all the way down her underside, and then her tail hit ground and she hit ground.
"Lily!" Beryl barked, rushing to her side. "You're bleeding!"
"Badly?" she asked, rolling onto her side. For once, she hadn't landed on her back at the worst possible time.
Beryl didn't answer until after he had licked her from chest to hindquarters. "No… You got lucky. It's just a scratch and a splinter." He leaned in again, and she felt a tiny pinch. Then he leaned back and spit out a piece of bark no larger than a blade of grass.
"Lucky, indeed," she laughed. "I went too fast?"
"It takes practice, I guess," Beryl rumbled apologetically. He licked her face, and she smelled fresh meat. Despite her still-racing heart and aching chest, she felt a pang of hunger.
"You started without me," she snorted, waving a paw until he backed away enough to let her back onto her paws.
"You were busy staring at the sky," he said defensively. "See anything interesting?"
"We're not being hunted anymore," she reported, remembering what she had seen. "They're not landing randomly to find us, or searching at all. So long as we don't draw attention to ourselves, we're safe."
"Safe to hurt ourselves jumping on prey and sliding down trees," he snorted.
"Safer," she corrected herself. "The rest of this journey should be downright boring in comparison to what we've had to deal with so far."
"Are you calling me boring?" he asked indignantly. "Because you didn't think so earlier tonight."
"No, not you," she said with a purr. He was the reason she was looking forward to the rest of this journey, instead of begrudging every moment she spent on it. Boring, to her, just meant there would be time and no outside pressures. Boring was good, in this case. Especially since she knew it couldn't last forever. They would find the pack again eventually.
Author's Note: You won't find this chapter's new species of dragon in canon; it's my own invention, and most closely resembles the Hoatzin in real life (though believe it or not, I didn't know about the Hoatzin until I decided to google 'smelly bird' to see whether there were any real-life examples to draw additional inspiration from). Look that up if you don't know what it is; it's cool!
