Author's Note: Fair warning this is going to be one of the darker parts of the series. I don't think its any worse than anything we've seen in the Walking Dead or Gargoyles for that matter, but let me know if there are any tags I might need to add.

Chapter One: Calm Before the Storm

June 17, 2010

As always during the week of midsummer, Michonne's clan was abuzz. For humans the start of the new year was the first of January. For the gargoyles of the Altamaha River it was Kritapar[1] the time when the nights began to length once again. And though the timing differed the sentiment behind the celebration was the same. It was a time of new beginnings, of feasting as the first of the summer crops came in from their hidden gardens, of games and gifts and of general merry making as the cups of muscadine wine and cassina tea flowed.

Kritapar was also a time for old things to be shed away. A sentiment that made it the perfect time for the clan's fledglings who were now thirty years of age to make their first attempt at completing their First Flight or Dinlag Kulok[2] as it was called in the Old Language. And even though the rite was called the First Flight, there was more to it than being able to stay airborne.

After all, most gargoyles could stay aloft with little difficulty by the time they were twenty. No, the First Flight was when a fledgling gargoyle showed that they had both the abilities and the desire to contribute to the clan's wellbeing as an adult would. And it was in doing so that the fledgling would then shed their childhood name and either announced their adult name before the clan or choose to forgo a name altogether as they adopted the appellation of Negan[3] to honor Neganmok[4], who carved the first gargoyles from the stone of their ancient mountain home.

In truth there were a wide variety of ways that fledglings completed their First Flight. For some it was a demonstration of skill and the ability to work together as the fledglings set off into the nearby forest for their first unsupervised hunt.

Well, mostly unsupervised, as each hunting party was always shadowed by a member of the clan who was considering producing their first egg that Plitakmil[5]. It was a tradition that helped to ensure the young mates were ready for parenthood. And there had been more than a few off-season eggs[6] introduced to the rookery by couples who'd opted to wait another five years or so after they'd been saddled with a group of younger brothers and sisters who'd been a bit overzealous in their thirst to prove their maturity and managed to prove just the opposite.

Though this year's hunt was to be more closely supervised then they usually were because of the strange stories that were dominating the human's news. Stories of some kind of sickness spreading amongst the humans with the number of stricken seeming to rise every day. Of a fever that left its victims rabid and strange. Of riots in the street.

It was the latter most that had the clan concerned. Because, while human sicknesses rarely if ever took root in their bodies and even on the rare occasion that it did it was always banished with the dawn's light, human violence had a chance of spilling out from their cities and into the clan's territory.

And so it was with an anxious heart that Michonne watched as the young hunting party made last minute preparations at the edge of the tree line. There were three of them. The first a ruby skinned gargoyless with golden eyes that had earned her the hatchling name of Goldie. The second a serpentine male with such dark coloring he would look like a living shadow if not for his snowy white hair and luminous green eyes. And the last a lilac skinned female with wings to match her rookery brother's hair.

Their watchers were to be Maes and Cassina, a pair of fifty-year-olds who'd recently said their vows to one another.

But just as it seemed they were already to leave a call from across the clearing rang out.

"Hey, wait up," an ocher skinned fledgling in olive green overalls hollered over the ever present buzz of cicadas and the mating calls of frogs as he came hurrying over to them. The talons on one hand pressed against the crown of his head in a bid to keep his favorite red cap from taking flight as he ran.

"Q, I didn't think you were coming with," remarked Shadow the serpentine fledgling, an inquisitive hum coloring his voice as he pausing in adjusting the strap of his quiver. "I thought you were going to be running a systems check on the trail-cams around the perimeter?"

"Nah," Q waved him off with a reassuring chirrup. "I couldn't let you have all the fun. And besides the ladies aren't gonna be impressed by a gargoyle who passed his First Flight by typing on a keyboard or squeegeeing a solar panel. They want someone who can literally bring home the bacon," he boasted fluttering his two-tiered wings as though hoping to make himself look more impressive.

He was of course completely oblivious to the way his rookery sisters Goldie and Chaos were rolling their eyes at his expense.

"C'mon Chaos, let's get out of here before we start growing moss," Goldie huffed to her rookery sister as she sank her claws into one of the sturdy trees the clan like to use as a launch and began to climb.

Her rookery-siblings with legs followed swiftly after her, while Shadow began his ascent at a more sedated pace. The serpentine gargoyle coiling his long lower body around the tree's trunk tightly before raising his torso up so that he could sink his talons into the wood for an anchor point, then loosening his tail to recoil it higher up the tree; the archer repeating this process until he was high enough in the tree to use it as a launch.

Once the quartet was airborne, the toweringly tall Cassina and her serpentine mate Maes shared a brief but tender press of brows before they too followed after their charges.

"So much for thinking we had another decade before the hormones started kicking in," Rosie chuckled, scarlet eyes dancing in his pale face as their largest clan member looked up from where he was watching his mango skinned protégé shave the teeth from the fronds of palmetto they'd harvested earlier with her specially manicured talons.

It was always easy to tell a basket-maker by their talons as they all deliberately kept the ones on the thumb and littlest finger of their offhand longer than most would find comfortable. The thumb so that they could shave the teeth from the frond's stem with a couple of economic pulls, then with the same motion they could also shave off thin strips from the stalk's woody inner core. The talon of their littlest finger serving in place of the flattened nail a human would need to use when making the gap needed to sew the sweet smelling coils of a basket together.

Michonne had enjoyed the few small baskets she'd made as a hatchling when she and all her rookery siblings had been testing out different crafts and the like to figure out what their calling for helping their clan survive might be, but she'd never quite had the knack for getting one started. Never mind the skill of a master who could coil a basket tight enough to hold water.

Furthermore, after a near miss with a sleeping rattler while helping harvest palmetto, she'd decided to try her hand at other things. After all, while working with metal had its own hazards, snakebites weren't one of them.

"Well Rosie not all of us get a hatchling when an off-season latches a hold of us, isn't that right Altie," The rose colored male's rookery sister Lucille teased as she finished tying her favorite crimson scarf around her hairless head and reached down to give the juvenile Altamaha-ha resting at their feet a scritch behind his horns. The six-foot long baby river monster blinking open eyes like polished brass as he gave a burbling whale-song squeak and thumped his wide paddle-like tail on the ground in appreciation of the attention. "Where is your little hatchling anyway?"

"Hardly little now that he's forty and past his last growth spurt," Rosie chided, before giving a ponderous hum. "Last I checked he's getting his supplies ready. He seems convinced someone's going to come back missing half their feathers or with a toe they had to fish out of a gator's belly or with a pair of fishhooks stuck somewhere painful."

"Why a pair of fishhooks," Michonne couldn't help but ask. Encountering discarded hooks and other such river debris were common enough hazards living where they did while going around with bare feet and vulnerable bare bellies in the case of their serpentine kin, but picking up two hooks in the same place was uncommon unless you stumbled across someone's forgotten trotline. A pair of sandspurs on the other hand – well that was another beast entirely and almost enough for her to consider shoes.

"The fledglings were watching something the other night and apparently one of the humans in it decided to remove the first hook he caught himself with by using a second, so Willow's concerned that Shadow might've given himself ideas," Rosie explained good-naturedly.

"And why shouldn't I be worried you over grown goonie bird? He already had the 'bright idea' of using his own feathers for arrow fletching," a deep voice rumbled.

'Ah, speak of the devil and he shall appear, as the humans would say,' Michonne hid a smile as Rosie flailed nearly catching his spindly former-charge with an oversized wing.

But Willow, who was well used to Rosie's dramatics, dodged dark feathers with only a twitch of his long tapered ears to show his irritation.

"I thought you were making preparations at your lair –" Rosie began only to receive a pointed look and an even more pointed elbow to the ribs from his protégé – "I mean lab?"

The lanky, tiger striped healer's answering grin was entirely too full of teeth as he purred, "I was. I'm just here to fetch my latest victim – I mean apprentice for her Dinlag Kulok."

"Who," Lucille asked, but before Willow could answer a serpentine fledgling with a thick mane of dark hair came slithering over with an equally toothsome, though slightly less alarming, grin on her face – well less alarming until she poke that was.

"You'll really let me try out the bone-saw Mat-Michonne[7] made for you if the others bring back a deer," Sunny demanded as she practically bounced on her coils.

"You do your part of the restock to my satisfaction and I'll show you how to saw through a femur in less than a minute," Willow promised as the pair turned to head off in the direction of the healer's little hut of horrors with Altie bounding along behind his favorite members of the clan.

"Great, and now there are two of them," Lucille's mate, a lean male with violet skin, groaned as he joined them, a half-purred, "hey, beautiful," rumbled into his mate's ear as he crouched down beside her.

"Well, I think it's good to see Willow making friend," Rosie beamed in the direction of the departing trio.

"Oh, no. No. That is not a friend, that's a minion if I ever did see one," Negan refuted, mantling his elaborately tattooed wings around himself and Lucille. "And you can go ahead and wipe the 'that's so precious' look right off your face, Rosie-Posey. Your definition of 'cute' is broken. You thought he was adorable when he was using your head for a chew-toy thirty years ago."

"My horns not my head," Rosie corrected mildly, running a basket-maker's talon over the crescent of little fang marks that dotted on his right horn fondly.

In response Negan just tossed his head back and laughed like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all night.

"And why is Negan laughing his tail off," a sibilant voice queried as Michonne's rookery sister Jocelyn joined them as well, her owl-like orange eyes bleary even as she sipped on a steaming mug of cassina tea.

"Rosie's just being sentimental about Low gnawing on his head again," Michonne informed her, eyeing the mug. "You have day watch?"

"Mmm," Jocelyn hummed her agreement. "Lot of movement on the roads when I did my rounds. I swear Mich, you'd think Alex was heading here instead of Mexico with the way the humans are heading inland."

Michonne gave a low rumble of concern. The clan was careful to keep a close eye on any storms that might be heading their way. The clan's main roost was far enough inland that storm surge wasn't a worry. Heavy rain fall though could mean flash floods and no one wanted to risk waking up under water. But as far as she knew the sky in their corner of the world was suppose to stay clear.

"Dominic's says your mate's on day watch tomorrow so I passed that cursed rock off to him," Jocelyn went on only for her fan like ears for flatten in a wince as a high-pitched staccato call reached them from the water's edge. "You know, I think we can all agree where the no-so-little-anymore gremlin gets it from," she huffed, nodding to where the eldest of their elders, Mariama was teaching a trio of ten-year-old hatchlings how to stalk frogs in the shallows.

"Oooh, that's a big old croaker, Peanut," they could hear her cooing, her long ears bobbling as she praised the male hatchling with skin a shade lighter than Michonne's own pine green as he presented his catch to her.

"Now don't go chewin' on his head," the elder was swift to caution before the little one could stuff the frog in his beak. "It's tempting, but he might be poisonous. You don't wanna start foaming at the mouth, do ya?"

"Eww," a little female with Jocelyn's periwinkle skin cried, her muzzle crinkling in disgust.

"But if their poison, why catch them at all," asked a little golden eyed female with a questioning hum as she held her own catch at arm's length by a squirming leg.

"Cause even the poison one's legs taste pretty good when you cook them right," Elder Mariama explained. "It used to be that you just had to watch out for the toads being poison, at least around here. Then the humans let these big fellas here loose – not sure why they did that – but maybe Q can look it up for you when he gets back – he's handy with human gadgetry that way. Or maybe Chaos, she's always seemed interested in such things."

'That is putting it mildly,' Michonne mused. Chaos was the white winged female who'd just left with her rookery siblings and she was passionate to say the least about keeping the length of river they called home healthy. So much so, that it was almost curious that she'd decided to go on a hunt for her First Flight since she could usually be found working with their clan mates on how to improve their hidden gardens without damaging the native greenery.

'Or maybe it's not so odd,' she decided. She, Shadow and Q had been all but joined at the hip since the day they'd hatched. 'And for all we know she may be hunting mushroom instead of game.'

She was drawn from her thoughts by Elder Mariama giving a trill catch the hatchlings attention. "Now, how about we see if we can't catch a few more to go with Peanut and Honey-Eye's friends, then I'll show you how to fix them," she hummed, gesturing towards the water with the walking stick she'd fashioned from a cypress knee and soon enough they were right back at it.

"You know, I heard Q's been having problems getting his gadgets to work," Rosie murmured, brow ridges furrowed in concern.

"He has," the young basket-maker Snips confirmed, gathering her strips of palmetto into a loose coil and setting them into the bucket of water at her feet so that they would remain flexible until she wanted to use them. "It's one reason he wanted to do a hunt for his Flight. The connection's been spotty for days now no matter what he does – he thinks the problems on the human's end not ours. And then there's the things the humans have been chattering about when things are coming through clearly," she shuttered, the segments that made up the bony club on her tail rattling as she did.

Michonne felt her own brows furrow as her worries from earlier returned full force. For all that they stayed away from humans as much as they could, with the wonders of modern technology it was now much easier than it had ever been for them to keep up with the goings on in the wider world. And in all her years, Michonne couldn't remember a time when the humans had been so panicked about an illness. Even her elder brothers and sisters seemed convinced that there was something about this outbreak that was different from the flu that had passed through during their hatchling days.

And given the reports she'd seen she couldn't blame them. The flu from nearly a hundred years ago had killed a staggering number of humans, but it hadn't turned the infected rabid like this sickness was. Furthermore, with Jocelyn saying that there were more humans then even regular summer travel could account for on the move…

"I'm not sure we should have let the fledglings leave," she said at last, drawing the attention of her clan mates.

"You thinking we could call them back," Lucille asked, sitting up from where she'd been leaning against her mate's chest.

"I'm not sure," she hedged. "I don't want to ruin those four's First Flight, but I also don't like the idea that Cassina and Maes are the only one's keeping an eye on them either."

"Well, you're Dominic's second," Negan mused uncharacteristically serious. "It's within your rights t'send someone out after them. It's within your rights to send a whole cavalry's worth of backup out after them if you feel that's the best play."

She considered her options for a moment. While it was a second's job to question their clan leader to make sure that they were considering all options. It wasn't their place to undermine them, which sending the clan out in force without his okay would be doing.

"Would you go out after them," she asked at last, because for all that he acted like an over grown fledgling himself sometimes Negan had always been protective of their younger clan members.

"Of course you'd ask just after they got the basket on top of the pokko[8] pole," he groaned, an actual pout twisting his mouth and making him look more like his usual self.

The sound Michonne made was half groan, half growl of frustration as she felt the headache that always seemed to accompany talking to Lucille's mate for any length of time build in her temples. Thankfully, the pale blue gargoyless came to her rescue.

"Negan, I can kick your jaw loose playing pokko when all y'all get back," she said consolingly and the violet skinned male instantly brightened.

"You promise, Beautiful," he purred.

"It's a date," Lucille rumbled in return, fixing the collar of the leather jacket Michonne knew she'd made for her mate last Kritaphar.

"Oh, I'm gonna throw up," Snips gagged as she mantled her wings up and over her head to block out the couple who were so engrossed with one another they weren't paying her any mind.

Rosie, on the other hand, just gave a chuff of laughter and climbed to his feet; giving his black feathered wings a quick, stretch before refolding them against his back.

"C'mon, Enid," he said to the fledgling giving her wing cocoon a poke with the tip of his tail. "Let's leave them alone. Besides, I smell coontie bread baking."

The young gargoyless looked up through her wings startled.

"I – what did you call me?" she gaped.

"Enid – it's what you're planning to choose as your name isn't it," the large gargoyle said simply.

"I – yeah, but I have to pass my Flight first, Tab-Rosie,[9]" she argued, looking like she wasn't entirely sure she knew why she was arguing with her mentor.

"Enid you can weave as well as you coil, you know how to harvest and prepare your own materials, you know how to make most if not all the types of baskets we make by rote," Rosie listed on his talons. "And you invented a new lid style for your sweetgrass baskets last year – you've been ready to pass since then as a far as I'm concerned."

"I – Low's right you're such a goonie bird," she groaned, climbing to her feet and scowling up into the eyes of a gargoyle she didn't even come up to the chest on. But when Rosie smiled encouraging, she gave a small huff of exasperation, then squared her shoulders and hopped up on to the sun bleached log the pair had been using as a bench and gave two sharp cough-like barks followed by a trill to catch the attention of all their clan members.

"My name is Enid," she announced for all to hear before repeating it in the Old Language to make it official, "Anik tuhin Enidtem[10]."

The full range of the cheer that went up was one that could only be properly heard if one was a gargoyle or some other species that could hear subsonic vocalizations. To their ears there was a second sound beneath the first, a series of low rumbles that were produced by allowing an exhale to resonate in the chambers of their skulls just behind the thick yet flexible tissue that made up their brow ridges.

The clan primarily used this tone to communicate messages over great distances and that was what they were doing as they announced for all who could hear that their clan had a new younger sister.

As the din died down, Negan addressed Michone his face set and serious.

"I'll go out after them and help keep them safe so they can choose a name for themselves as well," he promised.

And if Michonne had known then what she would later, she would have gone straight to Dominic and convinced him that they needed to move the entire clan to one of the islands that dotted their stretch of the river. But as things were she could only dip her crown of horns in thanks and offer a quietly murmured, "Nasap[11]."

Glossary of Terms

[1] Kritapar – A five night celebration that marks the Gargoyle New year. The final night takes place on mid-summer, which is the longest day/shortest night. After which the nights begin to lengthen and the gargoyles have more time awake.

[2] Dinlag Kulok – literal translation "First Flight". It is a coming-of-age ceremony where a fledgling gargoyle (age 30 and up) get to sho that they are beginning to be a responsible adult. It's usually when they choose their adult name or decide to forgo a name all together.

[3] Negan – (non-canon Atlantean) In this universe it means Nameless One. It's a spiritual title and is fairly rare amongst modern gargoyles. Most who go by Negan also have intricately tattooed wings.

[4] Neganmok – (non-canon Atlantean) The Great Nameless One. The suffix –mok being an amplifier (examples: Mebelmok – The Great Flood & hatepmok – The Great Army). Neganmok is the gargoyles' creator deity

[5] Plitakmil – literal translation "Dark". This is a sort of mirror celebration to Kritapar given that it takes place around mid-winter. It's also considered a romantic holiday as its when female gargoyles lay their eggs.

[6] Off-Season Egg – I'm fiddling with gargoyle biology a bit here and making it to where they can have more than just three shots at having a kid, though that is still usually how many they have. Basic idea is that a gargoyless can lay her first egg at 50 and then at twenty year intervals after that until they're past their fertile years at 110. My way of doing things still starts at 50, but adds the idea that a gargoyless is fertile ever five years unless she's laid a viable egg, then her bodies like nope were devoting everything to the care and raising of this hatchling until its 10. The exception is that if that egg goes bad during the ten year incubation it releases a scent that tells her body to try again and she'll then goes into heat early.

[7] Mat – Mom (Generally added as a prefix to the name of any older female clan member who was old enough to lay the egg a gargoyle hatched out of)

[8] Pokko – A variant of the Apalachee Ball Game played by Michonne's Clan. The name here comes from the Muskogee word for ball. There are two teams who are trying to get a ball the size of a large walnut into a basket at the top of a sixty-foot pole without using their hands. The gargoyle version allows for gliding, but at the players own peril. Same for someone trying to carry the ball in their mouth.

[9] Tab – Father/Dad (Generally added as a prefix to the name of any older male clan member who was old enough to have sired the egg a gargoyle hatched out of)

[10] Anik tuhin Enidtem – "My name is Enid".

[11] Nasap – literal translation "Return safely home."