Lily left the cave of shallow pools, fish, and frustration before either of the big, lumpy dragons could properly wake; it would have been just her luck for them to turn out to be hostile. A stupid, pointless end to her journey, dying in a dead-end far from anywhere she knew, alone except for someone she still hadn't even seen since setting out.
Her thoughts didn't get any lighter as she walked. Everything in her life was conspiring to crush her hope, and the lack of stomach pains only served to draw attention to how helpless she really was. She had only gotten food because someone more capable had wanted stories from her, and even that had been nudged along by Beryl. When she was hungry again, something she was sure would happen far too soon, she would be back in the same predicament.
That didn't seem likely to change even once she made it all the way back and began covering new ground, either. The little dragon had mentioned that this part of the underground was sparsely populated because of a lack of food and water; said lack would undoubtedly be even more pronounced for her, with her disabilities.
Her self-imposed quest probably wasn't possible, not for her. For someone more capable, more whole, maybe. Beryl could probably do it without issue, but then again, he didn't need to find an alternate way back to the pack. Holly's traitorous guards would probably let him in without a single objection. Maybe they would ask him what had happened to their horrible ex-alpha, or maybe they wouldn't even think about her.
She stalked back the way she had come not so long ago, dark, bitter thoughts filling her mind to no avail. Her sense of optimism, of certainty, was suffocating under the magnitude of her misfortune, her mistake.
O-O-O-O-O
She roused herself, now accustomed to having been put to sleep without any prior warning, and kept walking. There was nothing else she could do; every step forward was a retraction of one taken in the opposite direction, a tiny correction. For all the good it would do her, as she would have no way of knowing if the next path she chose to take would turn out any different. It wasn't inconceivable that Holly had unknowingly exiled her to a large cluster of caves and tunnels completely unconnected to the rest of the world except for the now-blocked passage back to the cavern her pack had claimed. That would be a special kind of torture, forever stuck wandering the same places, searching for a hidden way out where none existed.
The cave of stalagmites, holes in the ground, and shadowed spaces turned up in front of her, just as seemingly lifeless and insidiously creepy as the last time she had seen it, and she hesitated. It still stank of rotten… something… and sulfur. She still worried about the things lurking in the dark.
Her mood was dark, and her imagination darker, running wild with what she had seen last time. It would be just like a swarm of tiny predators to let her walk in one way, find a dead end, and only then return, tired and frustrated and off her game. Then they would swarm up and attack, preying on her hopelessness as much as her flesh.
It was a morbid thought, one she dismissed as needlessly dramatic and unlikely, but she still held herself carefully and stepped with light paws as she passed through. There were no squeaks, not a single sign of anything out of the ordinary…
At first.
Little skittering claws on stone echoed behind her, all around, in front of her, nowhere at all. The sparse forest of stalagmites and stalactites was a nightmare for tracking sounds, and she knew she was being toyed with. Or just taunted; for all that she was hearing things, she wasn't seeing anything, nothing was swarming up from the little holes in the ground, or nipping at her flanks, or otherwise threatening her.
Not that a lack of aggression now meant she was safe. She walked quickly, only refraining from running because that might be the sign of weakness they were waiting for. Her teeth were bared, partially from instinct and partially because anything that made her look dangerous might be vital, lest she be forced to show how much damage she could do.
She passed the smoking vent that had deceived her coming the other way, and spotted the odd half-circle depression along the ceiling of the cave that had made up part of the tunnel. Looking at it from this direction, it struck her as strange, even as she strained to hear the first sign of a change, to spot the first moving bit of shadow that would herald the assault. There was a clear sense of sequence, with this cave and the tunnel; the tunnel had come first, and the cave afterward, removing the bottom of a length of said tunnel as it formed, or collapsed, or however any of this came to be.
The clicking slowed as she approached the place where the straight tunnel along the roof met the wall of the cave, the place she had jumped down from. There was a boulder under it, conveniently placed so that the exit could not be missed.
She didn't remember whether that boulder had been there when she had come through the first time; it was entirely possible she had missed it upon jumping down. Her mind had been elsewhere, much like it was now, except with less despair and more determination.
She leaped up, and the clicking stopped in an instant. There was nothing in the tunnel laid out in front of her, so she whirled and stared down into the creepy cave. Into the territory of whatever had been threatening, be they myriads of small creatures, or even just one many-limbed thing scuttling around out of sight, long and spindly, thousands of limbs, like one of the bugs fledglings uprooted and then brought to show their parents-
A duo of tiny bits of stalagmite shifted in unison, silhouetted by a faded crystal in the background. One remained an unremarkable blob, only interesting because it had moved, but from the other, thin limbs unfolded in all directions, more than four, six, eight-
She broke and turned her back on the distant sight, bolting down the tunnel as fast as she could make herself run.
Nothing followed.
O-O-O-O-O
The one good thing about being put to sleep against her will was that it worked even if she was coming down off of a rush of adrenaline, terrified, and otherwise incapable of going to sleep normally even if she didn't have an issue with sleeping to start with.
She didn't know what had been in that cave, and she didn't want to know. Neither did she want to know whether the little dragon and its ponderous companions knew about those things, or how said trio had made it past them to get to their current home. All she wanted to know was that she was putting distance between those things and herself.
And she wanted to know for sure that she wasn't going to run into the territory of something worse the next time she stepped into a new cave, but there was no way she could know that.
Of course, she had stopped where she was for more than one reason, not just because her legs had given out. She had slept not a dozen paces from the beginning of a sheer descent, the top of the vertical tunnel she had proudly ascended not so long ago. It promised to be a strenuous undertaking, at best, and she had known she was in no state to attempt it fresh off her panicked run.
She walked up to the edge of the final sloped ledge, looked down, and did her best to ignore the little things in the corner of her eyes that had her twitching around to make sure she wasn't being snuck up on.
Even without phantom nightmares coloring her assessment, she didn't think she was ready to climb down yet. Her legs still shook from exertion, and there was no rush save for her body's needs. She wouldn't get any stronger if she waited, but she would recover. A little. There would be an optimum time of rest, one that balanced resting her limbs against the steady drain of time.
Until that time came, she could either think about the mostly unseen horrors she had fled from… Or about her situation going forward. Neither was at all appealing.
She gingerly lay on her side, ignoring the way the constant ache in her back changed with the change in orientation. Taking any and all weight off her paws was more than worth the jabbing reminder. At least that hadn't been her fault.
Claw mutilating her had been bad for her health, but not terrible for her reputation. It had given the pack a big push toward not being able to stomach his actions any more, and her slow recovery had only helped.
She couldn't help but see the parallel now, and groaned angrily at her own past folly. She was so stupid; she had put Holly through something identical in all but the specifics, a debilitating injury inflicted by an alpha mad over a perceived threat to their power. The only real difference was that Holly had gotten sick, not been crippled, so when she recovered she would be back to perfect health. In the meantime, she had two trusted friends to work for her, and they had managed to get the cruel alpha exiled immediately…
She didn't like that line of thought at all. She was nothing like Claw, had been nothing like him even at the height of her delusions. Her violence had been restrained to those she thought directly responsible for usurping her, and none of Claw's other depravities had any sort of mirror in what she had done.
But in tone, in mentality, she had been very much the same. In dealing with the young female rising up and telling her she was wrong, she had been all but identical. And if her departure, her defeat, could be compared to Claw… then any attempt at returning and taking power could be too.
If Claw had risen from the dead a few moon-cycles after Crystal and the others had torn him limb from limb, Lily knew exactly what she would have done. She would have done her utmost to ensure he died the moment one of her people saw him. Never would she have let him talk, or make 'apologies', not even to the most harmless of his mates. He would have been a threat to her power and the wellbeing of her people simply by existing. Even if he rose from the dead and just wandered off into the wild unknown, she probably would have sent a group to hunt him down and kill him. He had been that horrible.
Though, that did not match with her current situation. She huffed quietly, unrelieved by the mismatch. The comparison wasn't perfect, but most of it was close enough as to make no difference. If she returned to her pack, whatever her reason, Holly would have her driven away. At best. Killed, at worst, and the difference between those two outcomes might ride on something as small as who was sent to deal with her, or what the exact wording of their orders was, or even how Holly had been feeling that morning, what mood she was in before she heard of her hated rival reappearing from paths unknown and saying…
Nothing. Nothing she said would make a difference if word got back to Holly, and by extension that meant the majority of the pack could not be approached in any way. News of her presence alone would be enough to bring down the wrath of a wronged alpha on her dangerous predecessor; anything else tacked on to said news would be ignored as an afterthought.
They were wary of her, afraid, and she only had herself to blame. Holly was taking advantage of her mistakes, but that still required her to have made said mistakes, and Holly hadn't had more than a slight paw on the events leading up to them. Some minor disagreements, a bit of lingering resentment, and a few vague conversations… Even if she had been plotting to the degree Lily vaguely remembered being sure of, she hadn't done anything openly, so Lily's own actions were still mostly unprovoked. Suspecting a vast conspiracy didn't make hurting some of the ringleaders without any direct provocation any more acceptable when the conspiracy could never be proven.
Unless, of course, she somehow got Holly to admit to manipulating everything… But that would be too stupid, Holly knew how to keep her power. Keeping her mouth shut and working with the already overwhelming circumstances in her favor was the most she needed to do. Being savvy to the ways of manipulation and maneuvering weren't required to hold power from such a strong position, but having both the power and the understanding made her all but unassailable.
Lily realized she had let her eyes drift shut, and quickly opened them. The passage was still empty in the direction she had come from, and she knew there was nothing down the other way. She still shivered, remembering the distant silhouette and the endless tapping.
Holly. She needed to think about Holly… But there was no point in that, either. She had nothing to use against Holly, no opening to exploit. She was a pariah who the pack would not tolerate or listen to. She might get a brief grace period if she went in camouflaged, enough to find certain light wings and maybe get them to somewhere isolated to talk, but even if she could convert some of those who had been closest to her, they would be powerless. Holly had built her own support structure, and it definitely didn't involve anyone Lily could sway.
A few powerless supporters were all Lily had at the start of her last attempt at usurpation, but this was different. There, she was obviously in the right; everyone knew it, once they stopped and thought about what was happening. Here, she was obviously in the wrong, so obviously that the pack hadn't hesitated in getting rid of her. They had cast judgment, or their leaders had and they agreed with the outcome. Unless she came back to find Holly turning into a tyrant…
She shuddered at the very thought. Her pack was all she had, she couldn't bear to think that Holly would turn around and abuse them once she had power. She wouldn't do it; not only was she currently sick and not in the position to abuse anyone or anything, her sisters would stop her. Aven would never let such things happen, for one thing. Lily didn't really think Holly would, either, but knowing that there was someone there to curb her if she tried was reassuring.
Somehow, she had gone from planning to get her people back, to being thankful that the one in charge of them now wasn't incompetent or cruel. That was a bitter truth to swallow, as bitter as the realization that her dream of going back and reconquering the hearts and minds of her people was just that, a dream. With all the feasibility that implied.
She rose to her paws, stretched, winced at the pain in her back, and crept to the beginning of the descent, placing her paws one at a time. She backed down into the tight passage without letting herself think about it. One paw in front of the other, or in this case, behind the other. Wings out.
No thinking about the depressing misery that was her life. She had a task to complete, one of the few things left that she could actually do.
O-O-O-O-O
The climb down was long, far longer than the climb up, and just as exhausting. Lily's neck ached from twisting to look down without moving her body, and the rest of her ached from small cuts and bruises obtained in the process of backing mostly blindly down a near-vertical tunnel.
Once she was back on safe, level ground, she staggered a few dozen paces down the tunnel, just to prove she could, and then collapsed. If climbing down hadn't been such a mammoth undertaking, she would be bothered by her lack of progress. As it was, she settled down and did nothing.
Beryl didn't immediately come to put her to sleep. She found that odd, despite the fact that he'd only been doing it for what had to be a pawful of days, no longer.
Beryl… She wished she could think of him without feeling betrayed. Without thinking of how he had come to her, only to carefully check whether she was sane, and then to deliver the verdict of her enemies… How he had told her he couldn't help her with what she really wanted.
It was a betrayal… But he had come after her anyway, following from out of sight. She didn't know what drove him to chase after her, if he was chasing at all.
She didn't know what he would do if she did achieve the highly improbable and became alpha again. It was possibly his family wouldn't even be there when she made her way back; they had never actually joined her pack, their presence was one of an exploratory nature. They weren't looking to settle down here, they had a home somewhere above the ground, where the sun and moon held sway over an endless sky, instead of nothing presiding in cramped caves…
They would have left, and Beryl would go with them. Of course he would. He would grow tired of following her, or disgusted with her weakness, or something else. Whatever he was doing would come to an end; she couldn't imagine him trailing her for the rest of their lives. He was smart and strong and had so much ahead of him. His life wasn't a smoldering, waterlogged husk of its former self.
She wished she could go with him. It wasn't possible, couldn't happen, but the idea of fleeing all of this and just going with the wind… She would love to feel the wind again. But that would mean giving up.
Her thoughts turned to the past. To the moon-cycles she had spent travelling with him, only him. Those had been a few of the best moon-cycles of her life, looking back. Being with him, in all senses of the word. Knowing that there was nothing else she needed to be doing, knowing that she was where she was supposed to be, with the person she was supposed to be with. Carefree, whenever she could get her mind off what was waiting for her at the journey's end.
She should have figured out a way to make having him as a mate feasible; it had been a thorny problem that threatened her status as alpha, her authority, but that was ash in the wind now anyway. Maybe if she'd had him close, been able to be with him in public… Maybe she wouldn't have gone crazy. Maybe he would have pulled her back, kept her in check when she needed it.
Or maybe not. Even if not, she would still rather have had him with her. It had all come crumbling down anyway, so she should have seized what she wanted, forced the problems to get out of the way, and made it hers. He would have wanted it too; she had promised him that she'd rethink the whole problem once the pack was settled down and safe. As if that day would ever come, now; she was gone and they still weren't safe.
She blinked slowly, heavily. Her mind was lethargic, her body as still and comfortable as was possible, but she couldn't pass over that last hurdle into sleep. Not on her own… but she knew that. Beryl had been doing it for her.
He had been doing it for her… He wasn't now.
Her thoughts immediately leaped to that horror-filled cave with the creatures and the clicking, but she knew he hadn't disappeared then, he had put her to sleep afterward. It made sense that he might not be in a position to put her to sleep now, she was facing the direction he would logically have to come from if he had gone ahead of her.
She shuffled around, casually putting her back to where he had to be. He would have no trouble sneaking up on her now. He should have had a lot of trouble, some of the times he'd done it before now, so it didn't make sense that this would be the time that stumped him, but she didn't really know how he was doing it…
She wasn't too proud to admit that she needed his help. Not now, not when her aspirations had been crushed like a bug under the weight of finding out she had accomplished nothing since setting out. It was comforting to know she wouldn't slip back into a spiral of not sleeping and slowly going crazy…
It would have been comforting, if he came to help her now.
He didn't.
O-O-O-O-O
Lily never slipped into slumber on her own, and Beryl never came. By the time she blearily struggled to her paws and began to walk again, she knew it had happened. Beryl had gotten fed up with her and was gone. It had made little sense that he was following in the first place, and he had a family waiting for him back in the cavern… There were a hundred possible reasons for him disappearing now, and none of them implied he'd be back.
She was alone. Like she had wanted. Her steps dragged, her paws aching fiercely.
She didn't have the heart to convince herself that this was a good turn of events; whenever she thought about it, she thought about how she had slowly become more and more irrational without sleep, how it had been frustrating and frightening in turn, how she had stopped caring and started focusing on other things and lost herself without ever even realizing…
It was a terrifying fate he had left her to, and she couldn't say she didn't deserve it. Maybe he had only come along with her to try and fix her sleep problem, but had left once he saw that she was broken beyond repair.
It wasn't like him to abandon someone who needed help, but for her, maybe he could make an exception. It was what she had wanted, after all. Though she would take it back now, if she could.
She stepped out into the muddy cavern, and a part of her noticed that she was finally back to where she could pick a new path and move on to new places, but her heart wasn't in it. There was no point. She couldn't reclaim what had been lost, Holly was too firmly entrenched. She had no pack. No people. No Beryl. She had nothing, and it was her own fault. Her own fault for driving them away, for succumbing to whatever had taken hold of her, for not letting herself have anything other than the burning need to be alpha.
Her own lack of purpose now was the result of putting all of herself into a single, unerring pursuit. Of assuming and trusting that she would always be alpha, that she needed nothing else. Beryl was the only concession made to what she herself wanted, and now she had driven him away too. It was obvious in hindsight, now that she was actually looking at her actions without forcing herself to believe they were fixable… But that just meant she was acutely aware of how she had ruined her life so thoroughly.
Lily whined quietly, acutely aware that there was absolutely nobody around to hear her. She didn't know what she was supposed to do, if she couldn't go back and be alpha. Maybe she could find some miserable, lonely cavern with food and water enough to last her the rest of her life, though that would be a pitiful existence ending in a lonely death of one kind or another. She could find and take over another pack...
Her heart rebelled at both ideas, isolation and conquest alike. Maybe another dragon would not be so bothered by the idea of living alone, but she couldn't do that. She also couldn't imagine trying to take over another pack, because she could not consider herself any more fit to lead than whatever leader that other pack undoubtedly already had. Not after how she had failed so utterly. If she was fit to lead anywhere, it would be with the people she knew best, and she was not fit to lead them, so by extension she was no more worthy to take over somewhere else.
There was nothing for her to do. No cause to fulfill, no reason to exist, from the grandest of scales to a single person wanting her around. Nothing at all.
Lily gave in to the despair flooding her and fell completely to the ground, mud squelching up to coat the entire bottom half of her, from her chin to the bottom of her tailfins.
"I have nothing," she moaned loudly, voicing her feelings, if only to hear them echo back. "I can't go back." She closed her eyes, letting the scattered droplets of water wash over her eyelids. "I did this, I brought myself here. It's all my fault."
There was no reply. She couldn't even hear her own echo, and there were no more unseen ears listening in. The endless patter of rain was all that could be heard.
"I'm no better than Claw," she admitted. No smarter, either, no matter what she might have told herself or believed in the past. "Cruel. Manipulative. Lying." And more, when she lost even the smallest shred of self-control. Beryl's discontent with how she had handled Root's tormentors a while back now took on a very different light. He had told her what she'd done was unnecessarily cruel.
That was just who she was, it seemed. A horrible person. One who hid her worst traits, one who tried to stop them from affecting how she acted, but a horrible person all the same. She was cruel and condescending, and had a scarily tentative grasp on her own mind. Not sleeping removed what made her Lily, and not just an amalgamation of the worst parts of Cressa and Claw. Such a small thing had such big consequences, and it didn't work that way for anyone else. She was broken, somehow, and could never be fixed.
It wasn't a nice thing to think about herself, but she knew it was true. That truth was what had brought her here.
"I'm… sorry," she huffed slowly. Nobody could hear her, but this was not the first time she had apologized to someone when they were not able to comprehend her or even know she was doing so. Pearl came to mind. This was a familiar gesture.
"Where did it start?" she asked nobody, standing awkwardly in the mud and staring out at the damp, mushroom-infested expanse. "When did I start wronging people and not even noticing?" She thought further and further back, but there was always more she had done, more people she had wronged. And if she skipped right back to the very start…
"Pyre?" she whined to herself, feeling the usual sadness at his memory. Guilt, too, partially because of what had happened to him because of her, and partially at the thought of how disappointed he would be. "I lied to you, back then. To keep you safe, but it didn't work in the end anyway, so I hurt you for nothing."
She had lied to him, kept him blissfully unaware of what was going on in the valley below. Unaware of the suffering and dying of others.
"Granite," she whined, reminded of what she had been hiding. His death was her fault, more directly than most. "I let you die. I should have seen and stopped you long before. If I had helped Pearl, you might have been around to see today, or maybe even prevent it. My fault."
A keen rose, unbidden, from her throat. She crumpled down into the mud. "I'm sorry, brother." It had been so long since she thought of Granite except in passing; Pyre, at least, was always popping up in her thoughts, but her own brother was nothing but a distant memory. There was a reason she hid from the memories, locked them away, but here and now she really couldn't see it as anything but an excuse. She had done him wrong once by not saving his life, and then again by forgetting him.
"Crystal," she quietly gasped, forcing herself to continue. She was worthless if she couldn't even do this much. If she couldn't even bear to remember. "You lost your mate because of me. Pearl, nobody helped you. I didn't, except too little and too late. Bone, all the other males Claw killed while I sat around and didn't do anything… All my fault."
If that was all she was guilty of, she would already hate herself. But it was just the tip of the iceberg.
"Pyre, again, I lied to you and then when I stopped lying it was because I had nowhere else to go, not because I thought it was wrong to lie," she whined. She remembered that terrible night and fleeing to Pyre the next day. She remembered how he made her feel safe despite everything, despite his anger, how he gave her such hope for the future for just a few moments…
Hope that involved coming here. To the pack she had spurned and the underground realm that had contributed to her losing everything. Maybe it was a fool's hope to begin with… Or maybe Pyre would have made it work. Maybe for him, it would have worked exactly as he thought it would.
But it had all come crashing down so soon, before they could even begin Pyre's plan. "It's my fault you're dead, you would have lived if it weren't for me," she bawled. Mud grit her mouth as she spoke, but she couldn't bring herself to care, engrossed in her own misery. She couldn't have stopped whining if she tried.
After that, it was all a nightmare of abuse from Claw and maneuvering on her part, things she had done for her own benefit… but also the benefit of those around her. It figured that she had done the least harm to others when she was so focused on herself, on alleviating her own suffering. She had wronged Crystal by keeping the secret of the blue-green bush from her, but she had actually tried to make up for that, and apologized at the time. Other than that… She briefly thought of Ivy, but his fate was mostly his own fault, he had approached her and tried to extort her.
"Root," she choked out as she seized on the next person harmed by her litany of errors and thoughtless cruelties. "My plan, my fault." He hadn't been killed by Claw, but he had lost his eyes, and only intervention from someone outside her control had helped him get over that loss.
Her choking sobs died down, mostly because her throat hurt enough that she was forced to curtail them. She was left gasping quietly, still prone in the mud. "Cressa," she whispered reluctantly. "I didn't have to exile you. It was as good as sending you to your death." It wasn't something that would have her bawling again, but it was a horrible thing she had done nonetheless, the first step on a path to ruthlessness that would see others harmed later. Sending her own Dam to die in the wilderness she was in no way prepared to survive.
After that… Those first few season-cycles were a blur of securing her rule, of countless little cruelties as she knocked down potential problems before they reared their heads, but nothing she could point to and feel bad about now.
But then Beryl had come, and with him, a whole slew of mistakes and miserable little snaps in his direction. "I treated you like dirt," she whined, remembering the struggle to see him and his brother as anything other than a threat, through no fault of their own. "And then like dangerous dirt, and then like a subtle version of Claw, and every step of the way it was just me being horrible." He had bit back, often enough, both in response to her issues with him, and to how she treated her own people…
"Shara?" she murmured to herself, trying to remember the name of the female she had terrified to tears, the one Beryl had comforted and then chewed her out over afterward. "No, Shalla. I could have been kinder, less vengeful. Less spiteful." To all of them, but she had taken it the most to heart.
"Then Grimmel came," she whispered, the name like poison on her tongue. "Grass, dead for me. If she wasn't there, she wouldn't have died. Crystal's Sire, dead for no reason, just because Grimmel felt like it. Because I felt like sending him in that group." She was entirely to blame for the first death, and more or less blameless for the second, but they both hit so very, very hard.
And with their loss came a horrible oversight she hadn't even thought about except in passing. "Crystal," she keened. "I lost everything, you were there for me, season-cycle after season-cycle." She remembered her best friend comforting her, over and over again, without even being asked. And what had she done?
"I abandoned you to your misery, sent you away with others to do my job for me," she whined miserably. "You lost your Sire, and I wasn't there. I pushed you away, then and after. I gave you the hardest jobs, I leaned on you without ever doing anything to earn it." Crystal was one of those she most needed to apologize to in person, though it would probably never happen. This wasn't a satisfactory substitute, not by a long shot, but it was still better than saying nothing. "I don't deserve to call you my friend, not after how I abused your friendship."
She couldn't linger on Crystal; her memories leaped forward again, dragging the rest of her to see her next sin, to remember it. "Aven," she sighed, her throat raw and pained from the whining, now. "I traumatized you and thought nothing of it. Holly, I never let you work for my trust. Cara, I lumped you in with your sisters."
"Holly…" She hated the memory that stood out to her amongst the hazy recollections of her recent past. A light wing, coated in waste, falling back into the waste pit, a glint of red at her throat as she narrowly avoided death at the claws of her tormentor. Holding claws to Aven's throat afterward was like an afterthought, even if it was objectively horrific. "I tortured you, tried to kill you and Aven, and for what?"
She choked out a half-sob, half-laugh, and coughed miserably. "Because you jumped on a rock!" That was all, just a stupid token show of defiance! Masterfully planned or not, that was what had warranted the most horrendous thing she had ever done.
"So stupid, so cruel," she whispered. "And then to top it all off, I pushed Beryl away. He was only trying to help, and I already did not deserve it in the slightest." She had almost forgotten trying to convince his little brother to go on a suicidally dangerous mission; that was only not a horrible tragedy because Beryl or someone else in his family had stopped him in time; he had been thinking about it.
"Sorry to you too, Thaw," she whispered to the empty cave around her. "And you Ember, and Pearl, and all the dark wings… Sorry."
"Sorry, everyone," she said so quietly that someone crouching by her head wouldn't have heard her clearly. She was so tired, so miserable… "I was a horrible alpha. I got people killed… I ruined lives."
"I'm so, so sorry," she whined, just as a general conclusion. "You're better off without me. And I don't know what to do now. I wish I did. I wish someone would help me figure it out. But I don't deserve help."
If someone was going to announce their presence and help her in any way, that would have been the moment. If she was unwittingly playing on some unseen spectator, cynically pulling on their heartstrings, this would have been the time. Right after she finished whining out all the reasons she didn't deserve it, slumped sadly in the mud and rain.
But she knew nobody would come; this wasn't a ploy to gain sympathy. She was alone, like she would be forever. Nobody heard, nobody knew that she was sorry. Nobody cared; they had put her out of their lives and out of their minds.
Maybe it was better that way. If she couldn't lead them, if she couldn't help them, at least her memory might not hurt them so badly, if they forgot her. Even if the idea of being forgotten tore her up inside.
Water splattered on her wings, her back, her head. The mud was chilly, uncomfortable, sticky. She was tired, growing hungry, and would be thirsty for more than the occasional droplet of water soon.
She languished in the mud anyway. There was no point in getting up that very moment. Eventually, her body would drive her to move, to keep moving, because she never stopped, it wasn't in her nature… but for now, her regrets were enough to pin her down and keep her there.
O-O-O-O-O
A short breeze hit her back some time later.
Four squelches of mud being squished underpaw nearby let her know where he had landed.
"You'll get sick if you stay here," he said quietly, standing just out of reach.
The only feeling she could muster was one of cold, sad indignation.
"You weren't supposed to hear," she found herself mumbling.
"I know," he replied.
"I don't know what to do now," she added. She was so cold… She was probably dreaming his presence. She would have said she was not one to fantasize, but just this once, she would clutch this comforting fantasy with both paws. Metaphorically; she didn't feel like moving.
"You didn't want my help," he replied. There was nothing in his voice, no inflection to let her know if he was mad, or relieved, or… anything. She didn't know why he had followed her out here, why he had left her alone, why he was showing himself now.
She didn't have it in her to ask about that. Not yet. Not when he might just disappear again, leaving her alone as she so rightly deserved.
"It's not going to be like before," he warned. "I did not come out here chasing a lover."
"I know." She didn't deserve that, either.
There was a silence between them, one that would have been awkward if Lily cared enough to feel anything except a dull regret.
Rain dripped from her face in tiny intermittent streams.
Somewhere in the distance, a mushroom fell off a stalagmite.
"Come on," Beryl said, "Let's get you somewhere warm."
