CAUTION: Spoils aspects of Innocent Hopes, Twisted Realities, When Nothing Remains, and Usurpation of the Darkness.

Seriously, major spoilers here.

Assuming you wish to continue, read on…

Learning from Quartz was, in many ways, a matter of stealing time from his more important duties. The most obvious example of this was the pattern of when Lily had to be present; Quartz was a busy light wing and did not have much time to spare teaching her, so she only went to him every other cycle. Then there was how he taught; specifically that he did not, except for when he had nothing else to do. If anything else at all was going on, she might as well be another rock on the ground for all the attention he paid her. Worse still, she could not learn much of anything about his work, because most of it seemed to go on within the confines of his head and he did not speak his thoughts aloud.

Between these two factors, her learning was far from the top priority. Lily had attended three of these 'learning in the spare moments' cycles with Quartz so far, and felt that they could have covered all of what he taught her in one cycle with time to spare if he was concentrating solely on her.

This was not to say that he was not teaching her useful things. He told her a lot about the underground as a whole, which directions and types of caves were dangerous, and what else could be found beyond the local area. She learned how water tended to move underground, how to check with her flame for dangerous naturally-occurring gasses that would suffocate her in her sleep, and which kinds of rock were liable to collapse on her head if she fired on them or roared too loudly in their presence.

She also could not complain about what he considered more important than her education. He personally received reports from all of the returning scouts, sent out new scouts or modified their planned routes based on those reports, and spoke to everyone starting or ending a patrol. To do this, he spent all cycle crouched in a clandestine tunnel system criss-crossing the ceiling of the grassy open cave she had come through on her way to the Twisted Corridor pack, the last one before the tunnel blocked by the cleverly-positioned boulder and light wing guard. It was neither fun nor comfortable work.

Her inability to justifiably complain did not mean she was satisfied with the situation, though. She was tempted to ask Rose for help in finding someone else to teach her the rest of what he thought she needed to know, or to skip going to Rose and seek out a more amiable teacher herself. The latter, preferably, as she did not want him to think she owed him a favor.

Her desire to do something different was not easily defended, though. She could not say anything too disparaging about Quartz or how he taught, when he tried. He lectured, and without visual aids often could not make what he was talking about engaging, but his knowledge was clear, and he was thorough. The problem boiled down to the bare fact that Quartz did not like having to deal with her.

She was not a whining fledgling, to complain of someone not liking her on its own. She was more liable to find the right words and actions to fix that herself, and had done exactly that as a fledgling in the valley. However, the reason he did not like her was because teaching her was taking up the little free time he had. The first step to fixing his dislike of her would be to remove his reason to resent her, but if she stopped coming for lessons, she had no more reason to care whether he liked her or not. Solving the problem that way was self-defeating.

The alternative answer was to make herself useful during the times he was busy coordinating the pack's defenses, and she had resolved to try and do exactly that this cycle. The first step, which she had already taken, was arriving early. It was still rather difficult to judge exact times without the sun or moon as an always-present indication, but where she did not have the patterns of the cycle down yet, others did. She had woken early and left as soon as light wings began to move about in the vertical cavern, their equivalent to the crack of dawn, leaving Sola sprawled on her back in the middle of the alpha's chamber.

Sola could defend herself, if the need arose. She was far more capable than Lily.

Having left as soon as she was able, Lily arrived camouflaged, early, and unexpected, flying up towards the usual subtle hole in the ceiling. It was a finicky little opening, one that required she be in complete control of her ascent, as the opening immediately leveled out in a horizontal tunnel. There was little room for error, lest she smack her wings or head against stone.

Lily heard voices as she lined herself up with the opening. Muted and indistinct, she paid them little attention while propelling herself upward with the right amount of force. Once her paws were on the worryingly thin stone lip of the tunnel, though, she stopped and listened. Twisted Corridor pack etiquette might be to pretend one did not eavesdrop, but that did not preclude doing it.

She would not have cared if it were forbidden, anyway. She simply would have been more careful about when and why she did it. She was too ignorant and vulnerable to pass up unguarded knowledge, even if it was only about the light wings doing the talking, not anything they were saying.

Quartz was one of the two speaking, of course, talking to him being the only reason anyone came up here. "...want you to be discerning," he said, following up something Lily had not been in position to hear. He was growling, making his words harder to distinguish. "Do not be foolish and rush in."

"I know what I must do." The other light wing was also male, and also growling. Lily didn't know who they were by their voice. Not one of the regular short-range scouts; she had met all of those at least once, and there were not very many of them. "I am looking forward to it."

"Then go," Quartz snapped. "You know your route."

"And you know it as well," the other snapped back. Then there was a heavy silence, in which Lily thought she could hear Quartz breathing.

As far as sending out scouts went, that was one of the most tense encounters Lily had witnessed. Perhaps Quartz and that specific light wing had a history, or mutual dislike for each other. Not a dislike born of disrespect, though, not on Quartz's side. He would have taken the time to walk the other light wing through every step of their planned patrol route if he didn't trust they knew it well enough. She had seen it happen with others.

Quartz was riled up enough that she waited a few moments before thumping her paws on the ground and letting out an inquisitive bark to signal her 'arrival'. Best he not suspect she had overheard; she didn't need that bad attitude turned on her any more than it already would be. She was still camouflaged and would be for a while yet, so she sought Quartz out instead of the other way around, winding through the tangled web of shallow, short passages unlike anything else Lily had seen under the ground so far. She found Quartz waiting by one of the two openings that the scouts came through.

"You are early," Quartz growled.

"I wanted to be prompt," Lily said truthfully.

"You are only wasting your own time by arriving before you have to," he grumbled. "No matter. Ready your wings for a long flight. We will be going out this cycle."

Another oddity; if she counted the overheard tailend of a discussion, that made two. "Where?" she asked.

"Following one of the short routes, nowhere special," he said dismissively. He had not turned to look at her admittedly near-invisible form, and talking to his tail was getting annoying, but the tunnel was too narrow for her to pass him and face him or anything like that. "We will wait for some of the guards I have asked to accompany us."

"Because we cannot travel together while camouflaged," Lily guessed.

"That, and because this is not meant to be a real patrol, it is meant to be us showing our presence." Quartz's disapproving growl lightened for a moment. "You are right, though. That is why scouts go alone. It is hard to coordinate without giving positions away."

"Whose route are we following?" Lily asked, pushing what seemed to be a minor success. "One where the scout has been given the cycle off, or one that we do not usually follow so that if we are seen no real conclusion can be drawn about our habits when camouflaged?"

"We will be going along one of the established routes." That short denial, and the subsequent stony silence, spoke volumes about how Quartz felt about her reasoning.

Lily held in a sigh of frustration. The worst thing to do when trying to follow someone's thoughts was to jump ahead and assume they were thinking of something smarter than what they were actually planning to do. Or, it was the worst thing to do verbally, while they were listening, because there was no easy way to walk it back beyond thinking up an equally valid reason the better version would not work. Worse, even if she could do that, she would face the exact same problem of thinking it up before he did.

Lily decided to quit while she had, hopefully, broken even. She could try again later.

A short, very silent and very boring time later, Quartz's retinue arrived. They were not camouflaged when they flew in, and there were rather more of them than Lily had expected. She had thought two or three would be sufficient, but Quartz had asked for eight light wings, making ten when she counted him and herself. They crowded the tunnels, filing in through the openings and converging on her and Quartz.

Lily was beginning to feel inadequate, spending so much of her time around light wings who were, as a rule, all much fitter and in many cases bulkier than her. Sola was not an outlier; light wings down here trended toward being much stronger than she was used to. She expected that she would be feeling her own lacking physical condition by the end of the cycle, if she was going to be flying with these light wings.

So would Quartz, for that matter, as he struggled with walking short distances, let alone flying long ones. So she supposed she could not complain so long as he was coming along.

Quartz greeted the ones closest to him, said the absolute bare minimum in the way of pleasantries as befitting him not being a very pleasant person, and dropped out of the tunnel to begin their journey. The others filed out behind him, and Lily maneuvered to be the last out, since she was still camouflaged and thus would have to fly at the back of the group to avoid mid-air collisions.

As they glided over the grassy cavern, Lily pondered the spontaneity of this entire event. It had to be a sudden decision on Quartz's part, because otherwise he would have mentioned it the cycle before last. This sort of show of force – because that was what it was – could not safely be a regularly scheduled event, precluding this being something she would have known about had she been a member of the pack for longer.

So… Why, she wondered, was this the cycle for flying about en masse?

They passed through the bug-ridden ravine exit to the grassy cavern, landing long enough to walk through it before taking to the air again. Lily was preoccupied with driving away the swarm of gnats that had taken an interest in her abnormally warm body, and she barely noticed the next few turns and tunnels passing by under her wings and paws. A few stubborn gnats latched onto her ears and frills and would not go away, not even when she shook her head as hard as she could. Thankfully, it was easy to follow a whole group of visible light wings without any real effort.

By the time she drove off the last intermittent tickle between her scales, Quartz had fallen back into the center of the loose flying formation, and they had reached a set of caves Lily had never seen before. These particular caves had the advantage of being large and so wide that she could not see the far end. To balance that out, because few places under the ground were good in every way, the rare red crystal jutting from the floor bathed small portions of the cavern dim red light while leaving the vast majority in near-darkness, and nothing seemed to live there. Not even mushrooms or moss.

They flew in those caves for a long while before reaching the end of the range. Partly, this was because the caves were truly massive, and continued on at an irregular downward angle, a monumental crack between the stone layers of the world. She quickly learned that the angle also precluded flying fast. Pulling in her wings too much to descend dropped her into a dive that she had to pull out of immediately, lest she hit the floor, and gliding consistently pointed her head at the descending slope of the ceiling. The only way to fly with the slope of the cave would be to angle herself in exactly the same direction. There was no safe way to stop, while with every wingbeat she would gain speed. No, the only safe way down was by dropping and then gliding, over and over again.

Lily's camouflage wore off while they were doing this, and between the burning of her muscles and the cramping in her wings from having to carefully control her elevation every moment, she knew she needed a distraction to keep going. She flew up through the group, meeting the gaze of the light wings she was passing as she drew level with them, and found Quartz.

She had intended to ask him about this cave, and from there poke at topics until she found something he was willing to talk about. If she could get him onto a topic of actual substance, he would oblige her, but he would not offer one up himself unless it suited him. Right now, it did not, so she had to dig around to find something interesting. Quartz was not a good teacher, because he was not a teacher at all. He was a lake with fish, uncaring of her presence and unwilling to compromise. If she wanted the things he had, she needed to work to get them. A lesser light wing would have given up long before they figured that out.

That intention died when she saw how hard Quartz was pumping his wings to keep up with the laborious pace of the others. She could hear him wheezing from two wing lengths behind him, and he definitely did not have the strength to fly and talk. She should have remembered that.

Still, he was not the only light wing out here. "Do you have any stories about these caves?" she asked one of the males flying behind Quartz, pitching her voice to be heard by all. "I have not been here long and I do not know this pack's history very well."

"I swear, fledglings get stupider as the cycles pass," someone muttered behind her. "How can she not have been here long, we just arrived?"

"No, she means she has only just joined the pack, that is the female Pythia told me has been sleeping with the alpha," someone else corrected.

Those words seemed to echo in the silent cave, and for just a moment, she felt a weight on her back, like uncaring paws or her own body pressing down against stone. The phantom sensation passed quickly, but the gut-churning mixture of dark feelings it brought did not.

Rose was not Claw. Not Claw, but she did live with him. It was different.

It had to be different. If she was making the same terrible mistake again, she did not think she would ever recover.

"Pythia is an incorrigible liar, I thought that was a lie too," the first grumbled. Lily silently approved of his skepticism; it might be purely by chance that his disbelief aligned with reality, but she would take anything that helped her shrug off the bad memories brought on by association.

"My Sire said that this cave was the site of a long-running battle with two-heads," someone else volunteered at a volume Lily was meant to hear. "But you would have to ask him about it."

"No," Quartz huffed breathlessly, "talking. Take this, seriously."

For a few moments, Lily could hear nothing beyond the wings of ten light wings. Then, whispering, so she casually drifted back through the pack in between strenuous descents and recoveries, placing the two gossiping light wings firmly in front of her. It was stupid; their words had already taken her mood and dropped it down a dark pit. But she needed to know what they were saying.

"Pythia is not a liar, you take that back."

"She said that I had warts on my tongue."

"You did."

"Not when she said it! Why should I believe her this time?"

"She saw them both in his cavern!"

"Oh, wow, she looked up like the rest of us. That does not mean she knows anything about what is happening."

This was what Lily had been expecting to hear since the first night; vapid words and even less substantial observations backing them up. She was darkly curious as to what, exactly, the rumors were saying about her, and who was carrying this gossip. She had heard little about herself in the last few cycles, little enough that she had wondered whether this pack was less prone to spreading salacious assumptions faster than actual fact.

Not so, based on what she was hearing. Which raised anew the question of why she had heard so little gossip of any kind prior to now. Perhaps she needed to spend a cycle or two wandering around for the sole purpose of listening in on conversations. There was so much to do down here, but unlimited time to do it, so her priorities were oddly skewed. Things that were short-term and important were more immediate than long-term plans of equal or greater importance, simply because there was no rush. If she could not accomplish something this cycle, what difference would it make whether she got it done the next cycle as opposed to many cycles later?

That was not how she would like herself to think, being the way of procrastination and laziness, but it was a tempting mindset to slip into. One based on a lie. Her situation now could not last forever. Something would happen, and she needed to be out before it all came crumbling down.

Like it had before.

The uncomfortably sloped cave finally came to an end after one last near-vertical drop, terminating in a small opening in the opposing wall. It was not a tunnel, but rather a crack no longer than Lily herself was. There were actually many cracks, and the wall was bumpy and irregular, but only that one was big enough to fit through.

Their little pack dropped down to file through one by one. Quartz insisted on being second through, after one of the bulkiest light wings of the group, and after looking back and finding her with his gaze, gestured for Lily to follow him.

"You," he panted as they squeezed through in single file, "must be careful. This is known territory. Owned by neither pack… But they have their haunts, as we have our patrols."

"Haunts?" Lily said, echoing the unfamiliar word back at him. She was grateful for something to focus her on the present, even if it was something ominous.

"They cannot camouflage." It was the bulky light wing in front who answered her as he stepped to the side. Lily emerged into a purple-lit low-ceilinged cavern, one that looked to be a continuation of the previous cavern, but thankfully on level ground instead of at an angle. She looked back at the wall they had squeezed through, and noticed that it was not actually a wall, but rather a precariously thin pile of rocks.

"And?" She understood what he had said, but not how it translated to a different form of watching territory.

"So they do not move through openly. They must keep eyes in hidden places, but they cannot do it all the time, so one is never sure whether there is someone watching. The word stuck long before my egg cracked." The male gestured with his wing for her to keep moving, so she did, following Quartz and the others as they took to the air once more.

As they traveled, now much more quickly, Lily continued to be impressed by how Quartz was keeping up. It could not be said that he was doing well, but he was still in the air. She would probably have commanded the pack to stop and take a break if she was in that condition, and in charge. Unless she needed to make sure that they did not see her as weak… From that perspective, she understood why Quartz was pushing himself so hard. Though he had put himself in this position, by taking them all on this journey to begin with.

Was it admirable, to persist in suffering, struggling with something that didn't need to be done at all? That was the sort of question Lily might have asked Pyre, if he was around. The kind that would spark a discussion, because whether or not they had the same opinion, he could always find another way of looking at it to challenge her with.

She pondered that and other, meandering thoughts for a while, but the silent travel did not last.

The flash and distant crack of a massive explosion served as quite a distraction. Far ahead, but still visible, the fireball bloomed from the ground out of sight and expanded to a truly massive size in an instant, cracking like a tail whipped against stone and turning to gray smoke just as quickly.

The blast's effect on the light wings around her was instantaneous; even Quartz reacted before she did. Lily belatedly followed everyone up high, as close to the roof of the cavern as they could get. They flew directly toward the explosion, spreading out so that no light wing was directly in front of another.

Height to avoid low-lying explosive gas, clearing of firing lines, increasing in speed, not announcing their presence – these were all things Lily recognized in abstract, but she was consistently several heartbeats behind in understanding why, and by the time she had fully understood that she was part of a group flying directly toward enemies, they were already disturbing the growing cloud of ash to intercede in what had been a fight.

Her first look at members of the Noxious Fumes pack was a quick glimpse, taken as she and the others hurtled over moving shapes highlighted from the side by a dull, cracked purple crystal embedded in the ground. Six large, long, flat, brown-green shapes with several flailing whip-like appendages each. They surrounded one broken, blood-stained white body.

Then she and the others were up and away, four bolts of fast, brilliant fire detonating amidst the hissing tangle of flexible limbs and huge wings.

"Two-heads!" someone cried out.

It was obvious, but now she knew, her enemy confirmed. She mimicked the light wings in her field of view, slicing the air in a sharp turn that she had to make wider than anyone else, and came in behind the group.

She had never been in a true fight before, but her fire came easily, without hesitation. She placed a heavy bolt directly at the stocky paws of one of the two-heads, sending it reeling. Some of those who dove in front of her landed, taking the fight to them directly, but that was beyond her, so she followed the others back up for a third pass.

One that never came because she was physically herded out of the group by Quartz, who bodily drove her to the side and down. It was almost, but not quite, harsh enough to be an attack, just shy of painful, and definitely startling with her blood already pounding in her ears.

"What are you doing?" Quartz barked in a single breath as they both recovered from his ridiculously risky maneuver. "You do not know how to fight!"

She did not, but when the options were break from the group or go along with the group, she chose to follow the people who knew what they were doing. That they knew how to fight and were doing that was secondary; they wanted to live, and she wanted to live, so what was best for them would probably be best for her. Unless she couldn't do what they did, which was Quartz's point.

"This is not safe for you," he continued breathlessly, bodily blocking her from turning around by hemming her in with the wall. They had slowed to a near-glide, but he was still entirely out of breath. "You should not… be here. Go back. Tell the pack. Everyone must… know. They broke their false peace!"

The red-streaked – bloodied – and soot-stained – blasted – heap of white. One of the scouts. It was the obvious conclusion. She could hear the shrieks, some from light wings and some not, behind them.

This was not her place. "I'm going," she said seriously.

Quartz's eyelids drooped for a moment. "Good," he huffed. "With all speed. If any get away… they will know we know."

That was an aspect of this that Lily had not considered, and those words dove through her mind over and over again in the scant moments she took to reorient herself. She had already begun flying back, so when Quartz peeled off she only had to keep going, and her mind leaped away to something else entirely as soon as she ascertained her direction.

This was a fight to the death, far from most of their respective packs. If any of the enemy left, they would tell of what happened.

If any of the light wings left, they would tell their pack what had happened.

Something brushed over her back as she realized that, with her intuition flying just a little bit faster than her conscious thoughts, she had naturally drifted down to flying lower. With it came a reflexive flinch even further downward, and then a heartbeat after that, something larger than she and much heavier clipped her wings on the upbeat, instead of plowing into her side much like Quartz had done moments ago.

She reeled, letting her wings fold in for an instant to drop as fast as momentum would allow, and caught sight of something bulky, obscenely muscular, and lacking in wings landing on the side of a nearby stalactite and clinging to it.

If this was to be an ambush with no survivors to warn her pack, they would have taken precautions to avoid a premature escape. A whole group showing up had ruined that, but one light wing fleeing the scene?

The crawler on the stalactite rushed around it, out of sight as she recovered far too close to the ground.

One light wing could be taken down easily enough with the right tactics.

Especially one who didn't know how to fight.

But behind her there were explosions and shrieks of agony, and she didn't know who was winning, or who would win. Danger stalked her from all sides, and she knew nothing about her choices beyond the bare numbers of the matter. Many enemies and many allies behind. One enemy and no allies ahead.

It was a false choice. The sound of heavy claws scraping on stone rang from a different stalactite, to her right whereas the crawler was on one to her left.

How many were there?

More than she could hope to fight. One was more than she, personally, could stand against.

Lily bolted. She flew, pumping her wings frantically, straight between the two suspect stalactites. She caught a glimpse of the crawler to her right, and he – big and bulky, striped yellow and black, a nightmarish vision in the corner of her eye – flung himself out, leaping without wings into her flight path.

Her mind was all she had to defend herself with, and she knew that it was not the strike she saw coming that she needed to worry about. Given a heartbeat of time before she needed to react, she waited, waited, and then pushed the air, throwing herself up to pass directly over the one who had leaped, by only the slimmest of margins.

His body hurtled under her, just barely out of reach of her paws, and she immediately twisted into a dive after she cleared him, trusting that something without wings could not redirect in the air. Two impacts sounded on stone behind her, close behind.

They could jump, but she could fly. She could fly fast, and she could camouflage herself. She did so, ascending as rapidly into her own blooming bolt of flame as she could without sacrificing acceleration. Faster, higher, harder to see.

The crawlers followed. Scraping, silence, thumping, staccato noises on her tail. Leaping from stalagmite to pillar to stalactite, ascending with her but in fits and starts. She left them behind, slower than she would have liked, but she was pulling away. She would have escaped them entirely…

But they knew where she was going, how could they not? There was one place they could expect her to be any moment now, coming up in front of her. The crack in the landslide, the rock wall. Why come for her beyond that crack, like these two had? That was the place to catch and kill something one could not see, if there was any place.

She would bet her life on there being a third waiting for her. Rather, she would not bet her life on there not being a final enemy lying in wait there.

The next tall stalagmite she needed to fly around was her chance. Camouflaged but not totally invisible, she used the momentary break in any line of sight her pursuers might have had to drop, all the way to the floor, and land as lightly as she could with how fast she was moving.

Then, fitting with some of her previously unhelpful, conflicting instincts, she froze. Fight, flight, or freeze, and when camouflaged that last option became valid. It was much harder to see a patch of distorted air that did not move. Without a line of sight to follow her down? With knowledge of where she should be going, and urgency?

Lily had positioned her head so that she saw both of the crawlers once they had passed her by. They really were leaping from pillar to pillar, completely ignoring the fact that a single fumbled jump or landing might lead to a nasty fall. When they had to crawl on the sides of the pillars they were fast, like spiders but with enough mass behind their movements to crush her skull if they ever caught her.

They kept going, angling for the crack in the far wall. As far as they or anyone else knew, they were hounding her toward a fixed point.

She almost missed what came next. Had she not been looking, following the one on the left with her eyes, she would have seen nothing.

Nothing turned into a blur in the air, which in turn morphed into a blur impacting the back of one of the crawlers with a flash of blue fire so close the light wing looked to have belly-flopped on the crawler's back with the explosion between them. The blur hurtled back the way it had come on a much more ballistic trajectory, arcing away, but the crawler fell just as badly.

The other crawler noticed, but did not turn back for his companion, landing on the wall over the crack and scuttling down to slip into it with fluid grace.

That one and the hypothetical third lurking somewhere were out of sight, but decidedly not out of mind. The first, and the light wing who had struck him, were much more present concerns. They had both landed closer than Lily would have liked, and amazingly neither were out for the count.

Lily crept closer, indecisive, as the crawler grappled with something on top of it that she could only really see by the positions the crawler took. Burning pus spouted from the crawler's back as it rolled around, spreading smoldering bile on the ground beneath it, and vicious, blunt paws batted at something at its stocky neck.

Then it seized upon the unseen assailant, ripping him or her off and rolling over. Their positions reversed, the crawler stomped down, growling deeper in its chest than any light wing ever could–

Breathe out, breathe in, aim, catalyze, shape the air as it exited her throat. Hear the pained shriek. Ignore it. She was close and her target clear, unaware and vulnerable.

Nothing else mattered. Only the explosion that struck the crawler on the side of his blunt head and rocked him off the camouflaged light wing he had pinned. Then the next one that flew over the prone blur to blast the crawler's sprawled, muscular torso. Then the third that struck the crawler's face full-on as he scrambled to right himself. That explosion ripped into scale, flesh, and more, destroying what the first had weakened. The crawler fell limp.

There was no need for the fourth shot that left her a pair of heartbeats later, save for further obscuring the gory consequences of the third shot. The distorted blurring of the light wing as they stood was a mercy in that regard.

The noises that were assaulting Lily's ears failed to penetrate the roar of her own heart pounding through her chest and up into her throat. She saw the blood-spattered blur of the light wing approaching her at a slow limp, but she couldn't hear him coming at first. Only once he drew close, and the clamor inside her chest withdrew. Not gone, not slowed much, but manageable. Distant.

"Let us, take care, of the rest," the bloody light wing panted. His voice was unmistakable, but the emotion behind it, how it wavered then solidified…

She hoped that was newly-hatching respect she heard in Quartz's voice, because something good had to come from this nightmare. After what had just happened, it would be mutual.

O-O-O-O-O

Lily's inclination, upon surviving a frantic, fast-paced flight for her life, was to find safety and curl up there until she was certain the danger was gone.

This was not an option. Not for her, and not for any of the other light wings who had accompanied Quartz. He was very insistent on telling everyone who would listen exactly how bad an idea that was, no matter what.

"No, I will fly," Quartz snarled. He had finally regained his breath, and that only made him more forceful, despite currently being stuck on his back while one of the other light wings carefully pressed at his chest with one paw.

"You have at least one broken rib," the light wing said. His name might be Stal, but Lily might have heard their terse exchange wrong so she wasn't sure. Now, waiting at the tail-end of a line of variously injured light wings, was not the time to ask for confirmation.

She herself was not hurt. One of the crawlers had clipped her wings with his body, but that would be little more than a set of bruises along the leading edges of her wings. So far, she had not felt any pain at all from them. Thus, she was at the back.

The light wings who had done the real fighting, including the four that had pursued and brought down the other two crawlers, were all hurt worse. Everyone was hurt in some way.

Two had bite marks on their necks. They would live, but were vulnerable to infection and already thoroughly nauseous as two-head bites carried traces of their gas, forming a sort of weak topical venom on their teeth. They were otherwise roughed up, but not in any real danger.

Several more had broken bones from blasts and physical violence; being slammed into things, pummeled, stepped on by heavy bodies. It took a lot of force for one light wing to break another's bones, but two-heads and crawlers both were stronger and larger, and could do so much more easily. They, too, would live, but depending on the bones might be temporarily grounded, left incapable of walking easily, or in Quartz's case, both.

"You will not fly, you will walk and you will be thankful that it is too dangerous for any of us to stay put here." The light wing moved his paw higher up and pressed. "Breathe in. Can you?"

"Yes," Quartz hissed after a long, sucking breath.

"Good thing you stayed away from the two-head gas," the light wing remarked. "You cannot afford to damage your lungs any more."

He had stayed away from that fight in favor of, Lily had deduced, shadowing her escape and interceding when she was ambushed. She had not had the chance to speak to him about that, though she had helped him limp back to the safety of the rest of the group. His labored breathing made casual talk inadvisable.

"Flying will shift your ribs, which might puncture a lung. Do it if you wish to die." The light wing backed off, and Quartz immediately rolled over, though not without a low growl of anguish. "I mean it. You do not listen to your own body telling you to stop, so listen to me."

"I am just getting started," Quartz retorted. "Do not fear that I will skip out on all of what is coming."

"You would not miss it for anything." The light wing chuffed. "Get going."

Quartz limped over to join the other wounded, and the next light wing in line hobbled forward. Lily would be next, as the rest had been seen to.

The lightest injured, two light wings who had caught the edge of gaseous detonation and been thrown away from the fight, were not with the rest of the group. They were perched on blunt stalagmites, watching the cave. If reinforcements came for the enemy, they would sound the alarm. What Lily, Quartz, and the others could do with that forewarning wasn't as clear. Camouflage themselves and hide as best they were able, Lily supposed.

Enemy reinforcements shouldn't be on the way, as far as Lily knew. They had happened across an ambush in progress, and all involved on the other side had been killed. Six two-heads and three crawlers, in total. The crawlers had been lying in wait to avoid their target getting away, but they were on the offensive. They would not have brought an additional observer along solely to watch from afar and slip away if they were attacked. Being attacked was not on their minds, they were doing the attacking.

Reasonable logic, all in all, but hideously flawed because all the reasoning in the world could not compensate for actual certainty. They did not know whether, by planning or by chance, someone was right now flying back to the Noxious Fumes pack to tell of what had happened.

"Cough for me," the light wing instructed. His patient did so, then kept coughing, continuously, for a good few moments. "You inhaled some gas, not enough to be dangerous on its own," was the verdict. "Do not use your fire until after you next sleep. That will be long enough for all of the gas to leave your system."

"Through which end?" his patient asked seriously.

"Get going." The light wing moved over, and it was Lily's turn. "You look good," he said to her.

"They barely touched me," she said. "I am sorry, what is your name?"

"Stal," he replied. "That is good, but I need you to cough for me. Just to be sure. This was your first fight with two-heads or crawlers?"

She coughed, once, and replied. "With anything at all."

"Sending you away was the right call, then," he noted. "If not for the crawlers. Where did they strike you?"

"My wings." She leaned forward and spread her wings to give him a better look at them in their entirety. She was a little uncomfortable with all of this; she could not remember anyone in the valley pack ever doing this for other light wings, and at its core this situation consisted of a male she did not know examining her body in detail. But it was something the others had all done, they had a half-dozen onlookers, and this was for her own health.

She would be more comfortable if she knew the reasoning behind everything he did. Another time, perhaps, when they were not sitting out in the open, in possible danger if they lingered too long.

"Bruising," he observed as he brushed his face against the outer edge of her left wing. It stung, a little, even though he had only rubbed a few scales together. "Nowhere vital. No burning liquid on your body, at all? Even in unimportant places?"

"None," she reported, folding her wings in.

"Then your first kill was nearly bloodless," he remarked. "Good for you. Try to keep that streak alive. You will have many opportunities to lose it if this cycle's events are any indication. Quartz!" He turned and raised his voice. "Two including you cannot fly or walk well. Two should not fly but can walk. The rest are fit for flight. No serious gas inhalation. What in the depths are we going to do now?"

"They killed Howl," Quartz snarled. "We are going to make sure they regret it."

Lily had been trying not to think about that. The body has been moved by some of the more lightly injured, and was hidden behind a cluster of stalagmites. She had seen them dragging him. It, because a dead body was not, never would be, the person it had once been.

Waiting among the rocks, abandoned to decay alone and unwanted…

Worse still, was the name.

Howl.

She knew that name. Knew where she knew it from. Peat, her living relatives. Howl was Galen's brother.

"We cannot leave his body here," she said aloud. She did not know how this pack put their dead to rest, but anything was better than being left here. Howl died for them.

She could not leave another relative to rot in the rocks in some far-away place.

"No, we cannot, and we will not," Quartz agreed. "Some of us must stay here, we will see to him. Those who cannot fly will remain, with one who can fly. The rest will go back and tell the alpha. Get moving, now. There is no time to waste. We will either remain here, or leave someone here to direct reinforcements to us."

They would be in real danger. Whether or not the Noxious Fumes pack knew of what had transpired here, they would probably notice that nine of their own were missing after some time had passed.

But that danger was unavoidable for them; Lily doubted a grounded light wing could follow the path back to the Twisted Corridor pack with any real speed, and they would be out in the open if they tried. They had to hide somewhere and wait for their bodies to heal, or more likely, for friends to arrive and form a big enough force that they would not be attacked even if the Noxious Fumes pack knew where they were.

Injuries down beneath the ground were dangerous well beyond what they did to one's body, and Lily was doubly grateful that she was not one of those grounded or worse. She was happy to be a part of the group flying home to deliver the news.

Said group was gathering, while she stood and thought. She needed to be more aware of her surroundings, really, but after what had just happened she was feeling numb. Numbness did not lend itself well to awareness.

She joined Stal and a few of the others, and watched as Quartz stiffly directed those who would remain out of sight. They walked, some limping badly, into the scattered stalagmites.

This was not a good place to hide. It was not a maze so much as a forest of stone, and a sparse forest at that. They would have to be careful and clever about what they did.

"Up, and watch your wings," Stal ordered.

Lily took off with the rest of her little group, one of only five light wings. Between the distribution of injuries and the need to keep one flight-capable light wing around, they were evenly split. They left behind five living and ten dead.

One of those dead could have been her. The danger had not departed; she could still die any time now. Another unexpected ambush, however inexplicably unlikely it would be. Some future battle she was dragged into, like this one. Encountering a single crawler when there was nobody around to save her.

Lily's wings trembled, but not from pain, and oddly enough, not entirely from fear.

She had felt worse. Faced worse, though of a different kind, a different enemy. Claw, and now this… Neither asked for, neither sought out. Both inescapable when they came for her.

Her greatest weakness was her literal weakness. She could not protect herself. Whatever the motivation, a big male who wanted to throw her onto her back and harm her could, right now, count on being able to do so.

That needed to be corrected.

But first, she needed to concentrate on her surroundings and the nerve-wracking flight ahead. They had a long way to go, and there would be no idle talk this time. Not with the boulder of bad news they carried with them.

O-O-O-O-O

What was ominous but bearable on the way out had become downright impossible to ignore on the way back to Twisted Corridor territory.

They were alone, but the walls had eyes and ears.

Not in the literal sense; if Lily had seen a single slitted orb, scaled appendage, or anything that did not belong sticking out of an otherwise blank stone wall, she would have fired on it. So would the other light wings flying with her.

But the way that their little grunts and huffs of exertion failed to echo, the lingering, anticipatory silence that greeted them as they entered new caves, the total lack of life to be seen, the ever-present feeling that they were not alone?

It might have been paranoia, or rather leaping at shadows as it could not by definition be paranoia when there was an enemy who wished them harm. Or, their senses were telling them, subtly but surely, what they were already primed to believe. Their passage had not gone unnoticed. The battle had been witnessed.

By who? Lily didn't know. She could assume, but she did not know. Perhaps there were others who lived in the territory her pack and another spilled blood over. Small, silent things, to escape notice, or more perfectly camouflaged than any light wing could dream of. Unexpected, unseen observers. Scuttling watchers in the dark corners.

Such were the well-worn paths her mind circled around as she fought her own body's screaming exhaustion to ascend the slanted, endless-feeling if not endless in truth, cavern. Such was the only thing in her head while she rested with the others in a near-stupor halfway up, with Stal keeping watch. And such was her fear as they entered the grassy cavern, the last empty space between them and safety.

If something was to happen, it would happen then and there. The same instincts that warned her of the first crawler were creeping down her spine and tail now, making her antsy even as she flew. The others didn't feel it; she would have noticed if they were as tense as she.

But perhaps they were right not to feel it, because nothing happened. They landed, entered the tunnel home, and though she felt possibly imaginary eyes on her tail up to the moment the oblivious guard let the boulder roll back into place, nothing happened.

Perhaps they had been seen, but if they had, those doing the seeing had more on their mind than attacking. Maybe they were carrying news, or striking at the much more vulnerable target Quartz and the others presented.

The only thing she and the others could do for Quartz was bring the news as quickly as possible. But once they were past the guard, Stal announced a very different set of plans.

"Everyone to the heated pools to be tended to by someone more intelligent and observant than I," he declared as they plodded along. "I will go tell the alpha. If you do not think you need further care, go home and do not speak of this. We cannot start a panic before the alpha has time to prepare a response."

This was not how Lily envisioned their return going. She had thought it would be more urgent, more… uncontrolled. Not because that would be better, quite the contrary, but because she hadn't really expected Stal to have a plan. She was glad Quartz had brought along someone who knew how to take charge. She would not have thought it of him. He had struck her as the kind to see competence in leadership as a threat to his control. Perhaps that was unkind of her.

They reached the vertical cavern, which was eerily empty. A few light wings flew from place to place, mostly to and from the few openings Lily knew led to waste pits, but otherwise the cave was empty. Like the middle of the night in the valley, the only ones not awake were those who could not sleep for one reason or another.

Their little group split up then; three went down, while Lily and Stal took to the air.

"You do live with the alpha," Stal remarked as they flew up to the tunnel opening at the top of the cavern. "That keeps slipping my mind."

"Yours and no one else's, once they hear," Lily said absently.

"It is not normal," Stal said. "We remember that which we did not expect. The current alpha, Rose, has not had companions in his chambers since… never. It has been a long time."

Lily chuffed, uninterested in that line of thought beyond ensuring that there was nothing more to it.

"We may see him taking a mate soon with the war making life more dangerous for all," Stal continued as they landed. He set off at a brisk pace, despite looking just as exhausted as Lily felt. A sort of nervous, last reserve of energy pushed her to keep up with him, but it was not going to last for much longer, and when it ran out, she expected she would be hard-pressed to stay standing.

Next to that, and all that had happened, Stal's uninformed, overly optimistic observation was a mild source of dread. She would rather not think of Rose in that light at all, ever. It was probably untrue, anyway.

The guards on Rose's quarters were not inclined to let Stal through, once he turned the final corner and came into view. "You are not meant to be here," the older one growled. "What is your purpose?"

"We come from Quartz with urgent news," Stal growled. "This cannot wait. If he is not up, he must be woken. Lily sleeps here, you must trust her enough to allow her in."

Whereas some random light wing with no prior permission was not allowed in at all, apparently. Lily hadn't taken notice of the usual protocols for light wings regarding the alpha's chambers; she had unfettered access, and so did Sola. This had been true since she arrived, but it of course was not true for most of the pack. She had seen advisors up here, but nobody else. For all she knew, normal light wings were bodily thrown out of the tunnel if they came far enough for the guards to notice them.

"We could do that," one said dubiously.

"Good, problem solved." Stal said urgently, squeezing himself up against the wall to let Lily pass. She did, tiredly avoiding stepping on his paws, and plodded into the main chamber. Sola was there, asleep, but Rose was further in.

Lily had never needed to enter Rose's little side-chamber, and she avoided doing so now, either. He only had that space to himself, and she would rather not give even the appearance of being willing to enter it. Rose was visible from the opening and visibly asleep, though rather fitfully if his twitching tail was not just a product of her entrance disturbing his slumber. She barked, once, and his eyes shot open.

"The Noxious Fumes pack," she said. "Quartz sent us back to tell you. They killed–"

His eyes widened at a rate that would have been downright comical if the cause was not news of death and impending war. He was on his paws by the time she said Quartz's name. "Is there immediate danger?" he barked.

"Uh, no, they don't know yet," she replied, taken aback. "Stal is waiting to tell you more, Quartz put him in charge. He's out–"

"With the guards, yes…" Rose huffed out a long breath. "You were not in any fighting, were you?"

"Talk to Stal," Lily deflected, stepping aside. She was too tired to relive those recent memories, and her part in the events were much less important than the whole of them, which Stal could give better than her.

Rose nodded and hurried past her. Lily wanted to listen in on what Stal told him…

But she just didn't have much left in her by this point, and Rose took Stal down the tunnel almost immediately, to go rouse his advisors and start preparing for the mess that had tumbled down onto his pack.

Her job was done. She was alive. She was safe.

She was so tired.

Lily mustered the strength to walk over to Sola, plopped down right beside her, and threw a wing over her own face to further muffle sound and sight.

She was out in moments.

O-O-O-O-O

Wings, when used and abused to the point Lily had reached and then surpassed the previous cycle, ceased to be wings and instead became aching weights attached to uncooperative wing shoulders, good only for tormenting her and weighing her down.

Some time later, much earlier than she would have liked, Lily woke to her own weight pressing on her very sore left wing. She tried to use said wing to push herself over, failed miserably, and resigned herself to sleeping in the awkward position.

Then her wing began to cramp, and she was very invested in not letting that happen. She flipped onto her back and tried to stretch her wings out across the crystal floor, preempting the cramp by keeping the muscles involved extended to their utmost until it passed. This was an agonizing test of endurance, because doing anything with her wings hurt. And here she had thought that the flight from the valley was enough to toughen her up and strengthen her wings! Perhaps flying when and where she wished, and taking breaks whenever she wanted, was not the best for truly working her wings.

By the time the danger of painful cramps had passed, Lily was regrettably awake and feeling like only her scales were keeping the various aching pieces of herself in all the right places and together. Her stomach was rumbling, too, but that was a very distant secondary concern. She was alone in the main chamber, and down below… She squinted, blinked the blurriness out of her eyes, and saw quite a lot of movement. Everyone was out and about, all at once. More so than normal.

She was content to sit there and look for a little bit, letting her head slowly catch up to the rest of her body in being fully awake. There was a truly dense packing of light wings on the floor of the vertical cavern, and most of them weren't moving at all, their attention on one of the few light wings standing on a ledge above them.

This was, she realized after an embarrassingly long stretch of confusion, an announcement. One given to the whole pack, by Rose, who was standing on that ledge. One she was missing. Had missed, because the crowd was beginning to break up, and Rose had taken to the air.

Too late to do anything about it now. She felt the urge to get up and do something, but it was tempered by the utter and total lethargy dominating every part of her body. What she needed to do was go back to sleep and wait for the soreness to die down.

She was in the process of trying to do exactly that, and failing, when Sola's unwelcome voice broke the silence. "Lily, you are awake!" she exclaimed.

"For now," Lily conceded. She attempted to stand, found that her legs at least were not miserably aching, and turned to face Sola. "What did I miss?"

"What did you miss?" Sola repeated. "You were in the thick of it, from what Rose told me, and that was the last place you were supposed to be!"

"It wasn't intended," Lily defended herself… or possibly Quartz. She wasn't sure who Sola was mad at, only that she was mad at someone.

"You got here less than ten cycles ago, you should not have been in the middle of a fight!" Sola fretted, coming close to Lily and peering at her chest and head with her open eye. "You were checked for injuries, right?"

"Yes, I am fine… Very sore, though." Lily huffed. "What happens now?"

"Now?" Sola shrugged her wings. "We are at war again. I am not old enough to say that we have always been at war in my experience, but it is not unfamiliar."

"As someone who has no idea what it was like before the recent peace, I am feeling very uninformed," Lily said dryly. "What changes now?"

"A lot of tactical things beyond our view," Sola said seriously. "More patrols, but pulling in from some of the longer-range ones. Fights, real ones. Offensives."

"But what does that mean for you or me?" Lily pressed. "Am I going to be told to go somewhere and kill on command, or to watch a pass and hope that I am not ambushed, or to sit and watch while someone else goes out to attack them?" These were thoughts that had not bubbled up to the surface of her mind the previous cycle, but were too thoroughly defined to be new. What was going to happen to this pack, and what would she be asked to do as part of it? How much control would others have over whether she lived or died, and which risks she would take versus which risks she would avoid?

"Oh, I see," Sola said. "Lily, do not worry. It will not be anything like that." She sidled over to stand next to Lily and tried to put a wing over her, but reacted quickly to Lily's subsequent groan by retracting it. "Sorry. You are very young, less than ten season-cycles. Almost nothing will be asked of you. The older, more experienced fighters will be on call to defend the pack's territory, and the best scouts will be tapped to guide groups to where they need to be sometimes. Young adults like you might be asked to go on low-risk flights, to serve as lookouts or messengers, but that is voluntary and those roles only go to the ones who most want to be fighters some cycle. You will definitely be asked to serve as an extra guard on occasion, but that is really it."

"If things get bad?" If the older, more experienced fighters died?

"An unwilling combatant is a useless combatant," Sola recited. "We, as a pack, know this. There will be no shortage of willing light wings, either."

"And if I were willing?" Lily murmured.

"What do you know about fighting?" Sola asked.

"Nearly nothing, but that must change as quickly as possible." She would not be swayed from that. The previous cycle was not the first time she had felt trapped and helpless, nor the second. Being good with people was not enough to protect herself. Not from the Noxious Fumes pack. Not from Claw. Not from… anyone else.

"Well, I will not be of any use in teaching you to fight up close." Sola huffed loudly. "I was never one for getting close to danger. But I will have all the time in the world to help you with your fire since I will not be going out to fight for the pack. It is much too easy to come up on me from an angle I cannot see." Something in her tone said that this was not the only reason she would not be fighting, a sort of weary determination.

"Who should I ask for help for the rest?" Fire was good. Fire had saved her life. But she needed more than one line of defense. What if the two-heads had spewed enough gas around the battlefield that fire would have sent everyone up in flames? She needed the rest of her body to be a weapon, too.

"Rose might know someone," Sola said. "You will need to gain strength in the meantime. I can bring you along on my flights and such until you figure out your own routine. You will need to build up, but I can show you where you are aiming to be."

Lily looked at her noticeably bulky, muscled friend, and envisioned leaping straight into a routine that produced such a form. Yes, this was going to be miserable. But she had suffered worse for far less purpose.

She might suffer worse in the future if she didn't put in the effort now.