Lily didn't know what she had expected, going into the attempt to regain her flight. She knew what she had feared; never waking up, bleeding out or getting sick from infection, wasting away while Beryl frantically tried anything he could think of to help her, all to no avail. Death without even the chance to say goodbye, or to avert her self-inflicted fate.
But those were the worst-case scenarios. She had hoped for a quick, mostly painless recovery. Maybe even an enjoyable one, in some ways. She had never gotten sick as a fledgling, though many fledglings caught minor illnesses that needed special treatment for a few days, and it might have been nice to be pampered for a short time with minimal discomfort. She wouldn't know, but it was possible she could find out.
That really was the best-case scenario, though, so optimistic it bordered on delusional. In between ran a wide array of possible outcomes, and she had no idea which were most likely. So when she woke up for the first time after getting her back cut open, she didn't know what to expect.
First and foremost, surprisingly enough, was not the pain of her back. That was there, always there, the throbbing of fresh wounds now, but it was not as strong as she expected. Something else was more annoying, harder to ignore. The most overpowering feeling plaguing her was in fact that of needing to pass water. Somehow, that was more annoying than the pain.
More importantly, unlike the pain, she couldn't wait for this annoyance to fade away. She would either need to go somewhere, or relieve herself where she lay.
Lily stirred, shifting her paws and legs, and then her tail. The base of her tail ached fiercely, because that was where Beryl had ended his cut, but other than that her various lower limbs were fine.
Her two upper limbs, on the other paw, were very much not fine. Every twitch of her wings sent fresh pain into her back, and both were spread to their limit, lying limp on the grass. The tip of her right wing occasionally slipped into the water before her body unconsciously twitched it back up onto the bank. Doing so hurt, and she suspected such a jolt was what had woken her in the first place.
It was pretty obvious that she wasn't going anywhere, not even the little waste pit she had dug earlier. "Beryl?" she called out, her voice hoarse from the howling she had done.
"Right here." He appeared in front of her, literally leaping in from somewhere out of sight. "What do you need?" he asked eagerly.
"To pass water," she admitted. "But I can't walk around."
"Just do it here…" he suggested.
She wasn't really in the mood to make jokes, but that couldn't be ignored. "Now?" she asked, tilting her head.
"When I'm not staring directly at you," he retorted without batting an eye. "Are you going to want fish? I brought some in earlier, they're still good."
"Sounds like a plan," she purred. The moment he turned to leave, she let herself relax and do as he had suggested. Hopefully she would be able to move about more or less freely before the need to drop waste became an issue; the grass was warm and now wet beneath her, which would have disgusted her under other circumstances. As it was, knowing she couldn't do anything else – or do nothing, for that matter – without suffering made it tolerable.
"How are my wounds?" she asked when he returned, blatantly taking control of any conversation to ensure he didn't ask about what she had done while he was gone.
"I covered them in saliva," he explained as he dropped two smaller fish in front of her, "and the small ones are already closing."
The small ones, where he had only cut a little bit and stuck his claws in to pluck out the source of her agony. The pains in those places really were small, surface pains instead of deep, aching frustrations. She wasn't used to being free of the deep kind of pain. Unlike what Claw had originally done to her, Beryl had not cut any deeper than the top layer of scar tissue. These were shallow wounds.
"The big one?" she asked, hoping it wasn't much worse.
"It's clean and no longer bleeding," he reported. "Stretching your wings pulled it wide open, which was the plan to start with. It seems clean enough, aside from all the blood, so I don't think it's infected at the moment."
Not at the moment. That really was the best he could say without tempting fate.
"Oh, here is something to look at," Beryl abruptly remarked, dragging his paw and claws through the grass. Lily was glad to see they were, if not clean, then at least not covered in fresh blood and who knew what else.
Then she saw what he was doing. He lifted his paw and gave her a good look at the four shards of stone he had taken from her back.
She knew these shards. They were blood-stained and discolored, a dark brown where they should be grey, but other than that they were exactly like the little annoying bits of stone the caverns back in the valley had sported. Such a small, innocuous detail to have been ruining her quality of life for season-cycles on end.
"Those were in my back." Four tormentors she had never suspected. "I understand now. Every time my back hurt, it was those four shards." She should have known something was amiss, it was so obvious in hindsight.
"How did they get in there?" Beryl asked, pawing at the largest of the four.
"After ripping my back to shreds…" Lily shuddered, wincing at the pain that brought. She didn't talk about that. It was a night she barely let herself remember, let alone discuss...
But it held no real pain now. Not now that she was healing, not after the very realistic torment she had just recently gone through. "After Claw finished with my back, he flipped me and pressed down onto me," she said slowly. "These kinds of little stone shards always littered the floor of that cavern. These must have stuck out of sight, I know Pina and whoever else treated me would have removed them if they had seen."
"I know these," she concluded after a moment of silence. "They have made me suffer for five season-cycles." Probably closer to six, now. Or maybe she was letting her lack of a way to keep track color her perception. She didn't care enough to really think about it.
"Do you want to burn them?" Beryl asked curiously. "Keep them somewhere? Put them on a rock and draw a bloody circle around them as a warning to anyone who ever comes through here? I wish I knew No-scaled-not-prey word marks, we could write out exactly what these did."
Lily dismissed those ideas with ease; the last thing she wanted to do was make a production out of it. "None of that. I want to take them and leave them at the cave-in I created all the way back at the end of the tunnel… but not until we leave this place for good. Keep them safe until then." She wanted to leave the shards of her tormentor where she had last faced him. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Whatever you want to do with them," he agreed. "I would blast them to oblivion if it were me."
"If I were you," Lily repeated agreeably. She would decide on something sooner or later. For now, they could sit in the grass and await their fate.
"Yes… How are you feeling?" he asked.
"I kind of expected to be in horrible pain right about now, and I'm not, so pretty good," she admitted. Her back still burned like fire, but it was about as bad as the shards had been on a normal day, if in different places and stronger when she moved. She was used to that level of pain, even if it spiked to unbearable levels whenever she tried to stand or walk.
"But you cannot bear moving?" he asked curiously.
"Would I have soiled my own resting area if I could?" she retorted wryly. "I think boredom and frustration are going to be my biggest concerns if everything goes well. And being uncomfortable." The grass under her was wet and acrid in smell, which was her own fault.
"Right, right, can't move," he barked. "I thought… here, let me go do something." He darted to somewhere directly behind her, much to her annoyance. Rather than craning her neck in an attempt to see, she settled for listening.
She heard a scraping sound, and then a series of wet pops. Little noises, the latter being annoyingly familiar and yet impossible to place…
Then he was back, walking up from the side. "Lift yourself a little if you can," he requested. When Lily did, he immediately began digging out the patch of grass she had soiled, clawing it away with a similar sound of popping things; the tiny roots of the grass snapping as he tore out a chunk of the dirt.
Then he shoved another chunk of grass-covered dirt in its place, chuffing happily. "Done. You can settle down again."
Lily let her hindquarters fall, and couldn't help but purr as she felt the dry and clean grass under her. "That's a lot of effort to go to just to make me a little less uncomfortable." A very kind gesture, too.
"Well, I would never do something so horrible as to leave you in your own…" He trailed off, ducking his head and taking the soiled grass chunk away without completing the thought.
It did not take Lily long to figure out what he had been about to say, and why it would make him uncomfortable. He had no reason to leave her in her own waste. Talking of leaving someone in waste probably reminded him of Holly, and what she had done to that light wing.
She didn't have it in her to be offended by the reminder; it was her own fault. She wasn't going to deny or try to forget it. When Beryl returned, she sighed sadly. "I did a horrible thing to her."
"Yes, you did," he said simply, without further judgment or condemnation.
"I saw her, back when we were dealing with the fear dragon." She wanted to talk about that. Maybe it would set him a little more at ease, or maybe not, but he had wanted her to talk about things, so she would.
"Did you?" He settled down in the grass next to her, only a small space separating his side and the end of her wing. A space she didn't appreciate, though she understood why it was there. Again, it was her own fault.
"Yes," she huffed. "I saw a lot of things then. Do you remember anything of that time?"
"I remember seeing green fog right as we came out into that cavern, and then nothing up to gradually realizing you were on top of me, and wondering what was going on," he said, shifting uneasily as he spoke.
"You missed a lot…" It wasn't quite as good as talking about the things that had led to her having those specific nightmares, but it was something. Something she owed him, maybe. Something she owed herself.
O-O-O-O-O
Days flew by on imaginary wings, ushered in and out by Beryl putting her to sleep, and endured in a mirage of boredom, conversation, and necessary exercise. It wasn't quite as bad as lying in a tiny, lightless cave back in the valley while her back healed, but it was close at times.
Lily limped along, treading gingerly. Walking wasn't bad at all, but doing it with her wings outstretched was an entirely different sensation, and not a pleasant one. Her wing shoulders burned fiercely, and while her back was mostly behaving, the usual amount of pain just added to the strain.
She took two steps forward, then three more in a stilted fashion, then let her wings collapse back to their usual position, folded comfortably.
"Twenty-three," Beryl intoned from beside her. "Good, but you can't quit right when your muscles start burning, that's when you want to push through. Your back might be healing, but the rest of you isn't fragile. You can do better."
She might have argued if her performance just the day before wasn't proof that he was correct. She had managed sixty paces with her wings fully extended. But on this particular day, her wing shoulders were sore from the previous day's exploits, and she just wanted to sit down and rest them.
"In a moment," she huffed. She hadn't stopped walking, even when her wings were folded in, and wouldn't until they were done. That, at least, she was fully capable of. It was a frustrating contradiction, being at once too energetic and thus fed up with walking everywhere, but too weak to actually use her energy where it mattered, building her wing muscles back up to something approaching normal after season-cycles of atrophy.
"Twenty paces, then start again," Beryl advised. "I know you can do it, we're already only going to be exercising for half the time today. Let's try for at least forty."
"What are your qualifications for designing my recovery plan?" Lily asked irritably as she walked. In the back of her mind, a little count was going up with each step, inexorably bringing her closer and closer to his deadline of another twenty paces.
"Training an entire pack of out-of-shape light wings for moon-cycles on end, knowing all about keeping healthy through recovering from an injury, seeing first-paw what happens when injured dragons don't use their bodies while they heal…" He tilted his head impishly. "Should I go on?"
"I'd like to see how long you can blather before you run out of air," she huffed, spreading her wings out to their fullest extent once more. She couldn't help but feel a little thrill of pure relief that they went all the way out; every time she brought her wings in, a little nagging worry whispered that her back might heal badly before she could spread them again, and this would all have been for nothing.
The burning in her wing shoulders had never really gone away, so she wasn't at all surprised when it came back with a vengeance not ten paces in. She gritted her teeth and bore it, one step at a time. These same wings were supposed to hold her up in the air on their own indefinitely, she had to be capable of more than a few score steps at a time.
Beryl was with her, though her awareness of him faded as she concentrated entirely on keeping her wings out and taking that next step. It didn't count if she stopped walking, though it should have, since walking was not the thing she was testing. She just had to keep going, to ignore the pain in her two least-used limbs–
A wing slid under one of her own, propping it up. "Lily, stop," Beryl ordered firmly. "That's enough."
"How… how far?" she asked, letting her wings drop. No casual folding back to a comfortable position this time; she didn't have the willpower. The leading edges of both wings dragged along in the grass.
"Fifty, but I stopped you because your wings were spasming," he explained. "That's not good. We're done for today."
"Does this mean I… won't be able to fly?" she asked nervously. That would be it, the slap in the face that she was waiting for, the other paw dropping to quash her hopes.
"No, it just means you need to rest now, and build yourself up more tomorrow," he said.
Lily took a chance, hoping she wasn't crossing a line, and leaned to the side, putting some of her weight on him. "Okay," she rumbled tiredly. Not physically, except for her wings, but mentally. "I pushed as hard as I could…"
Beryl let her lean into him and even shifted to help her do so more easily. "You might be too good at that," he explained. "That's why I had to stop you. There is a difference between building yourself up and hurting yourself. I can keep you on the right side of that line, and you'll be back to flying strength in no time."
"No time," she repeated. She wished she believed it would be that easy.
"We have all the time in the world down here," he assured her. "There's no deadline. Just your recovery, and how fast you can go without sabotaging yourself. Trust me."
"I do," she said. Both in this, and in other things. If he said it would happen eventually, she believed him.
She wished she could be certain other things would heal correctly. Their relationship was still stepped back, nonexistent as anything other than friends with a history. She didn't want it that way… But she still didn't quite know what her future would be, and defining it based solely on him was the same mistake she had already made once, with being alpha. She couldn't do that again.
O-O-O-O-O
"How does it look?" Lily asked hopefully, craning her neck to watch Beryl licking her back. She could see some of the wound, but not all of it with the lingering stiffness in her neck and back, so he had a better view. It hurt a little, but far less than it had in the beginning of her recovery, and she was beginning to think that once it had totally healed, it might not hurt at all. That was a foreign concept to her, and she knew better than to believe it, but it did make her hopeful.
"Better," he grunted, running his tongue along the places that hurt most. The wetness was soothing to her, but his tongue was not exactly smooth, and the rough texture sometimes made her flinch.
"How much better?" she asked.
"Very much better," he quipped, being deliberately vague.
Lily growled warningly. She was not in the mood to joke, not when it came to her own injuries.
"My humor is not appreciated, message received," he said dryly. He finished up with her back, but remained right over it, looking down with a critical eye. "As you know, the four minor wounds have mostly closed, except for the middle of the one right on the big wound. The outsides of that one have closed, at least."
None of that was new, and she did indeed know. Further, she understood why that one particular minor wound was slower to heal than the others. They spoke of five wounds instead of four because the place he had extracted the first shard was its own separate, slightly deeper injury compared to the larger line that ran across it. Said line would probably be interfering in it closing as quickly as it could. "And the big one?"
"Closing, slowly but surely." He licked her back again, apparently seeing a place that was not completely coated in spit yet. "I think these injuries are going to leave a different shade of scar tissue. It looks that way so far."
"So everyone will see a long line, an intersection of two smaller lines on that line, and three more crossed slashes spread across the rest of my back, all on a big patch of scar tissue in a different shade of grey." She didn't like that very much. It made her feel damaged and used. These weren't like Beryl's scars, individual marks of pride and memories as those undoubtedly were. Hers were just a littering of lines and mismatched colors denoting her weakness.
Some of her unhappiness must have shown in her voice; Beryl hummed soothingly at her. "It does not look so bad. When your wings are folded in it will look no different than before."
"Sure." She didn't really think he meant that. There would be some way it showed, and even if it did not, she wanted to fly again. There would be no hiding her scars then.
"No really, it is not bad at all." He nosed at the place where old scars met scales by her wing shoulders. "Look, it just means you not only survived, you had someone else go back in to make the most of it. That shows way more courage than any of my scars do. I fought with the idea of stopping enemies from giving me scars. Every single one of mine is a mark of failure."
"And what are mine, then, if not also marks of failure?" she asked.
"Courage." He huffed some hot air onto her back. "The first one, the big one, is courage. You stood up to a tyrant and paid the price."
"Strength of will." He moved his nose to hover over one of the cross-shaped wounds that was even now healing. "You somehow lived with stone in your back for five season-cycles."
"Closer to six," she murmured.
"Determination," he said without listening to her halfhearted correction. Now he was over the base of her neck, right at the start of the big cut down the middle of her back. "You asked someone to literally cut you open in order to take back something that was stolen from you."
Then he moved out in front of her. "See this one on me?" he asked. "I didn't dodge fast enough."
"Which one?" He had a lot, and hadn't gestured to any one in particular. She wasn't sure whether she was supposed to be looking at the faint lines across his chest, or the claw marks, or the vague discoloration on his neck–
"All of them, that's my point." He did a sarcastically slow spin, as if showing off the many subtle grey marks that littered his body. "These all have that same explanation. I didn't dodge fast enough. That's all. There's no courage or determination or anything. To top that off, the worst injury I ever had, the only one that really would have a different explanation, didn't leave a scar for long. It grew back."
"Stop putting yourself down to make me feel better," she requested. "I get your point."
"It's not putting myself down if I'm not bothered by that," he quipped. "Because while each individual scar just says 'too slow', having this many says 'too slow, but still dangerous enough that it's never enough'. Never enough to actually take me down."
"See, that is better," she agreed. "So, since you're the expert on injuries, how long?" He was the expert when it came to first-paw experience, anyway.
"Until you can quickly move your wings without tearing it open again?" He shrugged his wings. "When it totally closes over. A little while yet, but then you are probably going to have to flap them a lot for a while before you can do anything else with them."
Lily stood, easily getting up. Her legs were not injured, and she had too much energy, not a lack of energy. "Am I clear to walk?"
"You've been clear to walk for a while," he said with a confused rumble. "You have been walking back and forth to pass the time every day for a while now… Are you messing with me?"
She very carefully folded her wings in, taking care to hold them correctly despite having been able to hold her wings any which way without hurting her back for a while now. "I can make it not hurt like this." When she stepped, when she stomped, her back barely twinged beyond the ever-present pain.
"Great," he warbled, still clearly unsure of where she was going with this.
"I'm saying I can walk, and if I can walk I can do more than walk." She began walking out into the middle of the cavern, moving faster as she went. From a walk to a jog caused no pain at all. From a jog to a light run was the same.
"Lily?" Beryl called out.
Lily was caught up in her testing now. She leaned into a long stride, feeling the muscles in her sides and legs stretch and release from far too long left unused. The wall of the cavern was quickly approaching, but she just turned and kept going. Every especially hard impact caused a small lance of pain in her back, all along her spine, but it was nothing compared to the deep, aching pain she had lived with for so long.
Her body stretched as it had not in nearly six season-cycles, moved how it was meant to move. It was weak, and she was panting in moments, but it was not fighting her or holding her back for the first time since she had been injured.
She would slow down in a moment; there was no point in risking disrupting the rest of her healing like this. But for now, she ran as fast as she could, and savored how little it hurt.
O-O-O-O-O
Lily lay in the grass, close to the pond but not so close that the bugs noticed her, listening to their little noises. In a cavern that was otherwise devoid of anything moving, not even wind breaking the monotonous stillness, the clicking and chirping and tiny splashes from their miniscule lives were more interesting, more present than they otherwise would be. Or they had been, for a while. Now, though, they were boring again.
Beryl lay across from her, also presumably listening to the bugs, and also presumably bored. There was a lot of that going around.
"Tell me the truth," she requested, so bored she was willing to bring up anything interesting, even the things she would usually rather not think about. This subject in particular… she didn't want to know, but she did at the same time. "What did you think of the other light wing pack? The ones we found down here?"
Beryl blinked at her, not answering immediately. "I did not think you would want to bring them up," he admitted. "They were a sore spot for you. You were very quick to hate them and their alpha, and I did not hear a lot of what he said, so that might have been entirely justified.."
"I was not thinking clearly," she admitted. "But I want to hear your opinion on them, not your opinion on my opinion. Don't soften it or humor me, we both know I don't have an unbiased view."
"Well, I did not get to see much, but I do not think you were totally wrong to worry," he began.
"Beryl," she growled, "don't humor me."
"I'm not, there are legitimate concerns." He stood and began pacing back and forth. "Let me think. First, there was their obvious need for space. We had it, they needed it. That would have caused problems, will cause problems in the future if nothing is done to change the situation."
"How do we know-" she began.
"I don't know how much you saw of their cavern," Beryl interrupted, "but they're packed really tightly into there. If you had said 'anyone who wants can come over' we would have been swarmed by them just spreading out for once in their lives."
"Okay, but neither I nor their alpha was about to do that," she retorted, falling into the easy groove of amiable argument. It wasn't quite the same, talk of the other pack and things she had done as alpha left a bad taste in her mouth, but it was close enough to be nostalgic.
"Rose?" Beryl hummed. "I can't say I know much about him, but I know he wanted to be your mate for convenience and power, however well-intentioned, so I'm not unbiased on that subject. We'll ignore him. Also, are there roses down here?"
"I don't even know what a rose looks like," Lily said wryly. "I would assume so, somewhere. Or maybe someone who went up and came back down gave them the word." If a light wing from above could be named after a crystal, then a light wing from below could be named after a rose.
"We might never know which it is," Beryl hummed, "aside from that… You were also right in saying allying with them would make us vulnerable. More territory, and apparently less defendable territory at that."
"I wanted your opinion, not a reinforcement of mine," she reminded him.
"Okay," he said agreeably, "here's my opinion. You were over-cautious with them, and isolation definitely wasn't the answer, but you weren't wrong that allying was a bad idea. Carefully allowing some interactions on a regular basis would keep the channels of communication open, and getting to know Rose could not hurt, simply because he is the will and personality with power equivalent to yours. The more you know, the more you can predict and counter."
"See, that sounds like what I should have thought and done," Lily agreed. "What did Holly do, if anything, while I was out? Before you left." She knew someone had brought in representatives of the other pack to observe how she was handled, or something along those lines, but there was a whole selection of different diplomatic paths that could have been taken to reach that point, all with their own unique consequences.
"I wasn't there to overhear the actual message they sent, and I think it was Aven and Cara who made the decision, but they asked for someone knowledgeable on sickness for Holly, and a few witnesses for… you know, how they were going to handle…" He nodded to her.
"I knew that much," she agreed.
"I do think they are going to have to give something back after asking for those favors," Beryl quickly continued. "Obviously, I cannot be sure, but Rose seems like the sort to try and argue for merging the packs again, now that someone else is in charge. How he plans to do that, though…"
"Aven was more than up to the task of getting to know that male in charge of peace for their pack," Lily muttered. "Maybe she'll do some merging of her own, and Rose will not have to do anything." In retrospect, she really should have kept an eye on how the other she brought along interacted with Rose's people. It might have only taken a few carefully planted words to sow seeds of doubt, if they were not already there.
"What better way to ensure peace than to mate the two peacekeepers with each other?" Beryl joked. "I'm sure that crossed both of their minds."
"Mating the two alphas," Lily countered. "I'm sure that came to them first, given how quickly Rose latched onto the idea."
"Well, that could very well happen now," Beryl noted speculatively. "It's not like Holly has a secret dark wing friend."
"Do you know what Spark has been doing with his free time?" Lily asked. It was a joke, but at the same time… Holly picking her own dark wing 'friend' could very well have happened. It would work as a method to bind the dark wings to her, or at least to create a tie, and sharing the position of alpha might mean that one co-alpha taking a male as a mate wouldn't be as much of a power shift...
"Probably not, he…" Beryl trailed off with a distant, sad look. "I… wait. Spark knows Holly?"
"Yes?" Lily rumbled. "Of course. They've met. I'm sure of it." She had no idea why he would think otherwise; it was not unlikely.
"I… Yes, I knew that." He shook his head vigorously. "That's… never mind me, I'm just confused. You know how it is."
"Sort of?" she chuffed. She didn't quite know what he meant exactly, but she had certainly made stupid mistakes and assumptions that were absolutely ridiculous in hindsight before. Not often, but still.
"Good," he huffed. "I was going to say something else… Oh, right."
"Yes?" she rumbled. He was starting to worry her with this sudden bout of absent-mindedness.
"You seem okay with talking about all of this," he finally remarked. "The pack, how you left them, all of it."
Lily took her time thinking about how to respond to that; it was a tricky thing to properly explain, when half of what she was doing was just ignoring it, and the other half was trying to look at it from different angles. "I'm not okay with them hating me, or fearing me, or distrusting me," she admitted, "and it tears me up inside to think that Crystal or Pina or Root might, but the rest… I can speculate without pain." She was finding distance. Slowly but surely, and it hurt more than she let on, but still. Knowing her pack was in competent paws, despite her personal reservations about Holly and her sisters, was a huge help, now that she could look at it somewhat objectively.
Looking objectively, Holly had balance, and far less personal issues to bring to the job. She also had experience leading, and sisters to take the bulk of the minutia off of her back, freeing her up to concentrate more effectively. She and her sisters were perfectly suited to lead, at least as far as general circumstances were concerned…
And Holly had been chosen to replace Lily by unanimous decision, according to Beryl, while only asking for temporary power. That was more than Lily could ever claim.
Of course, it could all go wrong. But in having Beryl cut her back open, she had been tacitly admitting that she wasn't planning to go back and retake control. In order to risk herself, she had to admit the pack did not need her, meaning she did not need to take it back.
It was a slow process, accepting all the things she had done and moving on, but she had nothing but free time. She was trying.
"That's good," Beryl hummed. "I'm happy for you. Not being able to think about entire pieces of one's own past isn't healthy, and I was worried you would not be able to change how you handled trauma. It is not as if I am some expert, I am just going off a vague feeling of what is right and what does not work."
"It's mostly your influence," she said, unwilling to let that little bit of self-depreciation fly. "You told me to talk about the things that happened, to think about them. I am just… doing that. Whenever I can stomach it."
"Rebuilding your emotional muscles as well as your physical ones," he said sagely.
Lily stared at him. He stared back.
"Ugh," she groaned dramatically, fighting to hold in an amused purr, "that was so bad. Never use that metaphor again."
"Does 'regrowing your emotional scales' sound better?" he asked innocently. "Or 'cleaning off your emotional rock, smoothing the rough edges–"
Lily jumped at him, whacking at his head and broad chest with her paws, flailing and pushing him ineffectively. He reared back, kicking her unguided strikes away, and generally pretended to be shocked by her attack. The fight was on. She could work on her own problems more later.
O-O-O-O-O
Beryl was asleep. At first he had slept only while she was awake, so as to keep watch, but after many days of complete isolation, along with exploring both potential exits and finding both devoid of threat, he had relaxed. Now he slept at a partial remove to Lily's own times of rest, going to sleep at some point after putting her down, and waking up later. She suspected he did it to give her some time 'alone' every morning, though she wasn't that alone with him slumbering in the same cave.
At the moment, she appreciated the time to herself. After so long healing, walking, running, and flapping her wings at nothing, there was something she wanted to try. Furthermore, there was something she wanted to try without him watching.
It probably wouldn't have bothered him if she tried to fly right in front of him; he kept saying she was getting close to being fully healed, close enough to start thinking about flying. But she didn't want to just try and fly away with him watching. That felt like far too much pressure to succeed.
It was ironic, in a way, that she had begun their relationship specifically not caring what he thought of her when she probably should have, but was now at a point where the opposite applied. She did care, though she really shouldn't.
One test. A single leap into the air. If she fell, she got a few bruises and a sense of where she stood when it came to what she would have to relearn. Alternatively, if she didn't fall and everything about flying was exactly as she remembered it, then she could surprise him by just up and flying the next time he suggested they try and think of something new to do or talk about.
Lily snuck out to the center of the cavern and shook herself out, mentally and physically preparing. She wanted to get some height first and foremost, so direction was a secondary concern to pure upward power...
She stretched her wings out, savoring how right it felt to be able to fully extend them. They had been sore for the first few weeks, but as soon as it was not agonizing to her back, Beryl had set her to consistently stretching and slowly flapping them, so as to regain some strength before attempting flight.
Running did not hurt. Flapping her wings did not hurt, and in a few more days or weeks, her back would not hurt. She truly believed it now, because every day brought less and less pain. The stones had stopped her from totally healing inside, but now they were gone. Now the pain could go away for good. Her scarred back still had relatively little feeling, but far more than she had expected now that she could feel anything other than agony.
Enough thought. Enough revelling in something that used to be normal, a lack of pain. She had a clandestine test to get done with before Beryl woke up.
She tensed, feeling every muscle in her wings and shoulders and knowing they were not strong. Stronger than they would otherwise be, Beryl had seen to that, but nothing like how they should have been. But they would do for the moment, or they would not and she would know where she stood on the path to recovery.
Lily leaped into the air, using her legs and tail to propel herself off the ground with all the force she could muster, and flapped down, hard.
She rose past the height of her leap alone. Her paws left the ground and stayed in the air. She flapped again, barely remembering the movements for ascent, but physically responding as if she had only taken a week's break from flying, not what felt like an eternity's break.
Then something went wrong; she flapped a little too hard, leaned to the left, and tried to correct herself with her tail, only to falter further and drop into an uneven descent that had her tucking her wings out of pure instinct–
She hit the ground with a muted thump, tumbling through the grass in what was a relatively mild crash landing. She rose with nothing more serious than a bruised ego and a thankfulness that they had not chosen to do this in a cavern with a rock floor. Neither of those was a barrier to her trying again.
The fall had taken the wind out from under her wings in a more metaphorical sense, however. She decided to go wait for Beryl to wake up and try again with him watching. Something had gone wrong, after all, and he knew more of flight than she did.
Lily settled down a few paces apart from Beryl with a soft sigh. He was lying in a different position, but his eyes were still closed–
"That was good for a first try after so long grounded," Beryl remarked with a yawn, revealing his seeming slumber to be nothing more than an illusion. "I was worried you would need to be taught everything from scratch."
Lily hung her head. "I didn't know you were watching," she admitted.
"I got lucky and noticed you leaving," he explained. "You're not perfectly silent. Like I said, though, you did great. What made you fall?"
"Something weird with my tail and fins. It wasn't my wings, I think." She had to hope it was just a one-time anomaly.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"No, I'm just waiting for you to get up and coach me," she replied with a wry purr. "Like I said, I thought you were asleep."
Beryl rose with a yawn. "Well, let's see what there is to see. Try ascending again. I want to see if it happens a second time, now that you know to expect something odd."
She nodded and crouched right where she was. There was no buildup this time; she had already done it once, and something about failing made failing again far less worrying. Her takeoff went without a hitch, but again she felt herself tilting–
"Don't forget to set your tail for an ascent, not a glide," Beryl barked from below her.
The moment she thought about it she realized she had been holding herself wrong; the correction was as simple as twitching her tail to the side to correct, no more and no less, and she was back to flying up and forward.
It was a slow flight, a laborious one. Nothing special, without even the wind or the open sky to greet her. That didn't make it any less breathtaking, any less amazing. She leveled out into a glide with a proud roar, relishing the feeling of resting solely on the wind beneath her wings. It was a novelty, a relief, a thousand other things all rolled into one tight bundle of ecstasy.
The air caressed her wings as she turned, flowing past her head, down her sides and back, tickling her base fins, and running down over and under her tailfins in one smooth, ever-flowing current. She twitched her tail, leaned to the side, and the air parted beneath and beside her, turning from a solid support to an uneven pressure, leaving her to slide down to one side… All that to say she turned, but it was so much sensation for what would have been a simple motion for anyone more accustomed to flying.
She flapped; her wing shoulders ached, but her body responded, and the air pushed back, returning height she had lost in her turn. Her movement was jerky, slightly uncoordinated, inefficient, but she barely noticed. Just to be free of the ground was good enough, more than good enough. Skill and efficiency and fancy flying tricks could come later, just gliding and turning was a delight right now, and she didn't feel up for anything more. Not when a mistake might have her crashing and losing this joy at the worst possible time...
A black shape glided up under her, flying low. "Looking great!" Beryl roared happily, before flipping around to fly beside her. Lily noticed the way his wings twitched in time with his base fins, how he slipped through the air with an ease that she didn't have, a subtlety that was less pushing and more demanding the air do the bulk of the work. He barely had to flick his tail and flap to rise to her height. "For someone who has not flown in a long time, anyway. You are amazing in that respect. But while you're relearning flight anyway..."
"I'll learn the right way, the most efficient way, and the best way," she finished, knowing what he wanted. "Definitely. But that might take some time. We should do that learning on the way." She was in the air, and she didn't want to land. She definitely didn't want to sit around in this cave any longer. The exits were within reach, now as easily accessible as walking across the cave. The world beyond awaited.
"On the way?" Beryl turned as she did, keeping beside her. "Lily, it's not like we have a deadline of any sort. You should do that readjusting here, not out in the unknown world."
"I want to keep moving, now that we can," she argued. "I'm sick of being cooped up here." She wanted to keep exploring, even if there was something to be said for learning in safety. She couldn't stay in the same place any longer.
"That's not smart," Beryl growled. "Let's put it this way. If you can keep up with me in a chase, it's safe to go out there. We can't do a chase in here, not really, so we'll substitute endurance tests. If you can fly until I say drop, right here and right now, we'll leave now. If not, we're staying until I say so."
Lily almost overrode him. Then she thought about the fact that he was an equal, and how ignoring others had gotten her into trouble before. He would know better…
But if she could pass his test, then they could go. "Deal," she roared, settling in for a long flight, even if it was just flying in circles. Her wings were already a little shaky, but surely she could hold out long enough to satisfy him.
O-O-O-O-O
An embarrassingly short time later, Lily set down, her wing muscles burning almost as much as her pride, though the former was from overexertion and the latter from embarrassment. "Fine," she exclaimed as Beryl landed in front of her, "I need to work on my endurance."
"Of course you do!" he agreed, as if she was stating the obvious. He even pawed at the ground for emphasis. "You haven't so much as flapped in more than five season-cycles! I'm amazed you held out for any amount of time like that."
"But how long will it take for us to be able to leave here?" she asked pleadingly. "I want to keep exploring, to find new things. I like doing that."
"Do you?" Beryl purred knowingly. "So do I, though not quite as much as you seem to. Since when?"
"Since… now?" she offered. "Since being thrown out here? I guess I've gotten used to travelling around. I'd be fine if we were here because we wanted to be, but I've just become capable of leaving, and I want to take advantage of that freedom."
"Interesting." Beryl said with a low hum. "Well, consider this your training to be able to explore as much as you want later, safely. We're not leaving here until you can stay in the air for an entire day, just in case that ends up being a necessary skill."
She knew she had to agree to that; it was an entirely sensible requirement. Flight meant she could go places she couldn't walk, but only if she also had the strength to fly all the way to the next place where walking was possible. Falling to her death out of exhaustion was not an acceptable end to all of this.
Even if it meant hanging around who knew how much longer. She had a feeling she was going to be clawing at the walls sooner rather than later...
O-O-O-O-O
Lily scratched a line into a stone wall. She did it deliberately, savoring how long this line was. All the way down from the top of her reach on her hind legs, almost down to the place where the stone met the grassy ground.
Almost. Not quite, a few pawlengths of bare stone separating it from the grass. Any day now. None of the dozens of other vertical lines to the left of this one went quite that far. They wouldn't; she was getting better every day.
"I think that's about right," Beryl remarked from behind her. "But you're not there yet."
"If you are going to be negative, keep your opinions to yourself and let me measure my progress in peace," she shot back. She had come up with this method of marking how long she could stay in the air at a time with lines, a claw-length for every lap around the cavern, and there was something satisfying about visibly seeing her improvement. It also helped take her mind off of her aching, sore wing muscles, another benefit to doing this after each day's endurance test.
"Negative? It has not even been two moon-cycles, but you are almost up to what I would call normal for a light wing of your… the pack." Beryl pushed on, ignoring the small awkwardness. "Those light wings aren't as strong as most dragons with flight, because of living in a place where walking takes one pretty much everywhere just as well, but it's good enough for travel."
"Maybe I don't want to hear about how my entire pack was weak?" Lily suggested calmly, moving away from her wall of progress. She walked out to the pond to get a drink.
"Maybe you don't like the truth?" Beryl lightly retorted, trailing along behind her. "Were you there for the time I had to embarrass Cara and a dozen other young light wings in order to prove my point?"
"If that was you teaching the advanced class after I stopped looking in regularly, no, and if it was flying, then definitely not," Lily reasoned, not remembering the incident he was speaking of.
"They thought they were in good shape," he explained with a sly purr, "so I challenged them to remain in the air all day, and went up with them. None of them made it to noon…" He trailed off. "I think. Or maybe one did. I don't remember exactly, the point is they did not even come close."
"So maybe the pack wasn't in fighting shape," Lily conceded. "They handled the travelling we did later well enough." She knew what he was going to say before even finishing that rebuke. "And yes, I'm aware they only had to match those of us walking." Both in speed and distance, too.
"We're only arguing now because it's something else to do," Beryl observed, catching on to the fact that she knew she had lost. "But yes, you were all out of shape. Not badly, but still."
"And you're telling me I'm almost but not quite up to 'out of shape.'" She snorted. "That's very encouraging." She stepped on a few weeds at the edge of the pond and leaned over to drink.
"For someone who had to be cut open to get this far, yes it is!" Beryl stepped up beside her and made a show of sitting on his hind legs to look down at her . "How is your back, by the way? Does it hurt after long flights like this?"
"Let me show you." She backed away from the pond, then dropped and rolled, writhing on her back in the grass for a few long moments. "This," she called out, still upside-down, "would have been uncomfortable at best, and agonizing at worst."
"And now?" he asked, looking down at her. Though he quickly glanced away after a moment, reminding her that there was probably something somewhat indecent about wriggling around on her back… She wished they were in a place where he would not care. She certainly didn't.
"Like it should be, absolutely nothing." She enjoyed lying around on her back sometimes, now. Even sleeping on her back, though that left her with a cramp in her neck that made it somewhat inferior to how she normally slept.
"That is great," he purred, causing her heart to flutter a little. "I had worried it would still hurt."
"You dug the cause of the pain right out of me," she replied, reluctantly rolling back to her paws. Your scars don't hurt, why should mine?"
"Bigger, nastier, all of that?" he suggested. "I was just worried."
"So was I." Truthfully, she had actually assumed she would feel no better once healed. That was how her life usually went. Even successful risks came with consequences.
"Well, worry no more," Beryl said cheerfully. "If the other paw has not dropped by now, it never will. I think you will be ready to go in three days."
"Oh, now you are eager to leave?" Lily snorted. "After making me wait a whole moon-cycle just to build up my endurance? I have half a mind to make it take five days, just to spite you."
"I trust your impatience to protect me from such petty revenge," Beryl said smugly. "Am I wrong?"
"Never underestimate the power of spite," she shot back… Though he was right, she couldn't possibly wait any longer than was absolutely necessary. "Maybe, if you please me by getting fish for me now…"
"I can do that," he quickly conceded, leaping into the sky. She toyed with the idea of following him, but her wings were aching…
And there was something else she had been waiting to do. Now felt like the right time for it.
O-O-O-O-O
Lily had not personally journeyed back to the rockslide she had created moon-cycles ago, not since leaving it behind back then. Beryl had, but she hadn't. She was glad to see the main chunk of stone she had blasted out of the ceiling was still unbroken and uncracked. That mental image of the nightmare dragon cracking through still bothered her in a vague way, after all this time.
She might have said something about it, some sort of taunt to the absent nightmare dragon just to make herself feel better, but talking was a bad idea. She had the four stone shards in her mouth, and the last thing she wanted to do was knock them out from under her tongue and accidentally swallow them. That would be terrible and more than a little bit ironic.
Lily stopped in front of the rubble pile and spit out the stone shards, glad to rid her mouth of their bloody, sickly taste. Her spit was tinged red from the blood that had mixed into her mouth from them, and she was glad to be rid of that too.
She left the shards there with no further ceremony. Claw and the nightmares that had brought him up could keep them; she was moving on and moving up.