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…

It was disconcerting, how much past games of hiding and hunting as a fledgling had informed Lily's tactics for traveling unseen through unclaimed but potentially dangerous territory as an adult. Those games were good for more than just learning the quirks of her peers – though she doubted any fledgling, even herself, ever saw that as the main reason to play a game – or learning to interact, or even to hunt. In the valley, nothing could stalk a light wing except another light wing, and few ever tried because not even a light wing could easily follow another light wing who did not want to be followed.

The advantage in a faux-hunt of light wings, by light wings, would always go to the defender, the light wing attempting to avoid notice. Camouflage was inherently defensive, at its best when unexpected and immobile. Camouflaged hunters, though objectively more difficult to evade than their undisguised counterparts, were neither unexpected nor immobile, and so they gained much less from the ability.

Lily was running low on fire. She had flamed herself five times in a row, spaced out to the utmost to take the most overall warmth from her blasts, and thus to keep her camouflage up and uninterrupted for as long as possible. She flew along the edges of a winding, wide but not truly cavernous stretch of bubble-like conjoined caves.

In truth, the ability to camouflage slowly but surely killed off fledgling chase and seek games. She could not remember a single enjoyable game, whether it be one she had participated in, or witnessed, after the majority of her season-cycle group learned to camouflage effectively. It was not fun and it was in no way fair.

Prior to learning to camouflage, though? It was a whole different game.

She flew carefully even now, knowing that danger came solely from those without the ability to camouflage, because even when they had no fire she, Crystal and Granite had been competent, occasionally lucky hiders and ambushers. As would be the assorted dragons of the Noxious Fumes pack, but much more so. For them, it was a matter of life and death.

They would have to resort to the tactics of those who could not count on an easy, single-minded approach to visual stealth. Light and darkness, color contrast, movement, texture; these things mattered.

She flew high over a suspiciously uniform pile of loose rocks, each the size of her torso.

Without camouflage, a light wing was obvious. White scales and colorful unpredictable glints did not blend well with anything, not even snow. This could be fixed with mud or dust or ash, but even then it was far from ideal.

The Noxious Fumes pack did not have this problem. The two-heads were all shades of dull natural colors through and through, with knobbly bumps and shapes mottling their texture like clusters of rocks. The crawlers were different, black and dull yellow, but those too were colors that could easily hide in more natural environments. She had not seen the other two kinds, but she had no doubt that they would be well suited to blending in with the underground environment.

Lily reached a choke point in her path; a place where the directions she could fly while moving forward narrowed down to a jagged opening in the wall no bigger than her wingspan. Beyond that hole – for that was the way of this stretch of territory, expansive areas blocked from each other by razor-thin vertical sheets of stone – was the end of the natural cavern. The gradual tapering of stone walls to a natural end was marred by two boreholes, one set in either side of the cavern. More work of the elusive tunnelers of old, these holes were some of the most blatant proof Lily had seen of intentionally designed passages. They were out of place and far too convenient to be coincidental.

Convenient did not mean safe, though. There was no line of sight that covered both holes, and neither could be seen until one ventured through the initial opening in the vertical sheet of stone. When hunting a quarry one could not see, predictable choke points were essential. She had already learned that lesson, and then put the knowledge to use saving her own life. Here it was not so much of a danger; these caves were only accessible by routes currently under watch, and she of all light wings was well-apprised of the things those various watchers had seen, and not seen, while keeping an eye out.

Still, she landed, crept over the sharp opening without so much as knocking a pebble loose, and warily checked the cavern before her slightly shimmering form entered the borehole on the left. The Noxious Fumes pack could lie in wait for camouflaged targets. That did not always work, but it worked often enough for them to keep doing it, even when the entire Twisted Corridor pack knew that it happened. The trick was not to surprise someone with the possibility of such an attack. There was no trick at all, really. A light wing forced to pass through a small enough space would be noticeable doing so, and there were enough naturally-forming places where this could happen that one could never be truly alert for all of them.

There were no enemies waiting for her here and now, as she had expected but not assumed, so she continued onward. She still had a ways to go, and reaching her destination was not even the halfway point of this cycle's task.

There were other tricks to hiding from light wings without using the kind of camouflage that she was even now relying on. Actual, physical camouflage, hiding spaces, moving outside of lines of sight… And those were only the things she knew about. Other, more social fledglings would have more experience, and Quartz or any other older, battle-worn light wing would have their own observations to add to the discussion.

The best way to catch a light wing would always be to control where they could go, and when. Much of the last war, according to Quartz, had been fought with that in mind. The tunnelers hadn't been seen by anyone still living in the Twisted Corridor pack, but even unfathomable amounts of solid stone did not prevent crafty dragons changing the landscape to suit their desires. Not so long as those desires were destructive and acceptably vague. A thoroughly collapsed tunnel would be collapsed, no matter the exact shape the rubble took once all was said and done. If it collapsed on top of one or more light wings? So much the better, in the eyes of the Noxious Fumes pack.

Explosive gas was uniquely suited to this kind of destructive aim. Exploding things pushed outward; anyone who had ever come close enough to a detonating bolt of fire knew that from hot, forceful experience. Trapping it made it all the more powerful, and the smaller the space, the better. The latter Lily only knew second-paw. Unlike a normal bolt of fire, she had never experienced or even witnessed a large amount of explosive gas going off in a confined space. With any luck, she would see it today and leave unharmed.

It would be down to luck. As she had learned, there were two different ways to foil an attempted tunnel collapse if they caught it while the two-heads were still preparing the gas. Which way was a victory, and which an utter failure, depended a lot on the exact circumstances.

"Stop, you are drawing near danger."

Lily had been expecting an outward watch two tunnels from where she currently was, and the voice out of nowhere caught her in her own thoughts, unprepared. Still, the advantage of being so distracted that she was surprised was that her own reaction was similarly slow to surface, and she could quash it before any hint of it showed.

"I come with orders," she hissed, her voice low. Such a warning implied that were enemy dragons beyond here. Not too close, the rest of his group would be up ahead, but an unwary scout blundering onward might soon fly into the teeth of a two-head or worse.

"Messenger?" he asked. She still didn't know where he was, and that bothered her because the tunnel was small, there were no offshoots big enough to hide a whole light wing, and the echo bounced his voice around too much for her to find him by sound.

"Lily," she replied. Her name had been circulated among Quartz's upper command, a small group of light wings she had yet to meet all at once. She only knew one of them by name; the male with healing knowledge who had taken over her last excursion once they were forced to split up. Word would have made its way down by now.

"Come through." The guard's paws hit the ground all at once, betraying his hiding place even as he left it. She hadn't thought to look up. There was another small dead-end tunnel pointing directly down into the one she stood in, and though it was vertical, a light wing could cling up there with minimal effort. Looking up was still very important, even down under the ground. She would take this nonlethal reminder to heart.

They continued through the tunnel, which unlike many of the similarly-shaped tunnels she had been in had many branching paths leading off of it once they got further down its length. Two right turns and a single left later, she saw a large open space through her escort's mostly-transparent form.

This was a cave that did not lack for water; it dripped from the stalactites, pooled around the stalagmites, and ran in little torrents into cracks in the ground. Lily had not kept track of her elevation throughout her trip, as such was far beyond her or perhaps any light wing given the lack of reference points or easy ways to compare ascents and descents without being able to fly away and look at them all at once from afar. She did not know if this water came from the world above, drained into the underground lake she knew, drained out of the underground lake which was above it, some combination of the two, or neither. All she knew was that it was drippy, it was wet, it was cold, and it was everywhere, including on her back within ten heartbeats of stepping out of the tunnel.

The cave was large, dimly lit, and echoed so consistently with the dripping, plinking, splashing movement of thousands of individual droplets of water that she did not fear her voice carrying any distance at all. It was somewhat flat, if one ignored the stalagmites, but there was a large dropoff in the distance where the cavern roof continued outward but the sparse forest of stalagmites disappeared. The distant sound of crashing waterfalls made her think that the cave continued onward below. It was noisy, unpleasant, and huge, an excellent place for a group of dragons who needed to remain in one place for an extended period of time without being detected.

There were two light wings perched on rounded off stalagmites wide enough to hold them. They were out of the water that pooled everywhere on the ground, and Lily was swiftly envious of them, even though they were overall much wetter than she was. "The two-heads continue their work down in the lower region," one of them said as Lily and the guard splashed their way up to the stalagmites. "Gar is watching. You have orders from Quartz?"

"There is nothing going on that would interfere with you stopping them," Lily relayed. That was from Quartz himself, but his words were not all she carried. If they were, she would only be a messenger. This task, specifically, she expected she would not contribute much more, but it was still part of her job to continue. "I need to see them, before I can tell you whether you should act now or not."

Were it her, being told by an objectively new and inexperienced younger light wing that their opinion would be the deciding factor, she would have resented it. But many of the light wings she had met down here, taking the fight to the Noxious Fumes pack, took anything Quartz said as inarguable and justified, so it was a toss-up. There was also tradition behind her; Linara and others had left the same pawprints she was now beginning to step into, and their position would not have been revived if it were useless or seriously resented by the ones she would be giving orders to.

"Yes, renew your camouflage and come with me," one of the watchers on the stalagmite agreed. "Be mindful, it will fade faster with all of the cold and wet. Do not worry too much about sound, but move slowly. We watch from afar, the water fouls sound, sight, and scent… But best not to tempt chance."

"Best not." She sidled up to one of the stalagmites and flamed it with her penultimate bit of fire, keeping only enough for one solid bolt in reserve. Once the stone was hot she pressed herself up against it, one side and then the other, and then all of the coldest extremities. Awkward though it might be, it had the convenient advantage of making no sound, almost no light on the other side of the stone, and being altogether more stealthy than leaping through an explosion of her own making would have been. It was a little wasteful, doing such a thing before her camouflage ran out on its own, but the last thing any of them wanted was for her to become visible within eyeshot of an enemy. Quartz had taught her a few tricks for escaping pursuit long enough to renew her camouflage and get away for good, but actually needing to do so would be bad.

He really had leaped into shoving useful information into her head, now that he had a use for her that required she know it. She was reminded of Sola's grievances with Quartz, specifically the way her friend had said that Quartz 'liked her as long as she could be useful for him'. In Sola's case that was with her fire – or was it? Lily didn't actually know, she was only assuming. Sola had killed for him. Sola was a phenomenal shot. The two facts seemed to go together, but perhaps that was only because they were the only things of any relevance that she knew.

Lilly cautiously trailed the uncamouflaged light wing, trusting that he was skilled enough at hiding himself to not need the assistance of camouflage. She would hope so, at least, given he was clearly avoiding camouflaging to make it possible for her to follow him. If he really needed it she could probably track him by his movement through the paw-high water covering most of the ground. But he did not ask, so she did not offer, assuming he was competent.

If he was not and everything went horribly wrong, he was the obvious first target and she could easily get away, even in this less than ideal environment. It was not her job to defend him if that happened. Quartz had not needed to make her understand that, as it was self-evident to her.

After a while, they stopped. The male sidled slowly behind a thick stalagmite, silently swishing his paws through the water, and nodded around the left side of it. "Go there, look down. They are by the wall. You will see the mud blockages."

Lily crept around the stalagmite, conscious of every stray drop of water that hit her camouflaged form. Once her tail was to it, she looked forward and down into a deep dropoff of the same cavern, straining to see anything muddy and unexpected against the confusing backdrop of waterfalls, streams of water, and clumps of stalagmites. For a moment, she didn't see the two-heads and worried that something had gone wrong.

Then she saw. Movement in the depths, on the right side of the cavern, at the place where the irregular wall sloped down into the ground. Piles of packed mud redirected the flow of water away from the wall, forming a slanted chest-high wall keeping a small part of the ground relatively dry.

Within the boundary of the low wall, two long, impossibly thin necks waved. One took the shape of an arch, rising up and bending down in turn. The other was sticking straight up, and an uncannily odd-shaped head stood vigil at the top, turning from side to side to survey the immediate vicinity. Two gimlet eyes turned her way and she froze, holding her breath.

Their gaze passed under her and continued on. She breathed out again. She was camouflaged, high up, and far away. She wouldn't be seen. Probably. But that risk was more than she was used to.

A few moments later, the arched neck straightened out and up, a second head coming up to join the first, trailing green gas. While they were distracted, Lily retreated, back around the pillar.

"Any thoughts?" her guide asked.

Thoughts? She doubted that he wanted to hear about how unsettling she found the very sight of the enemy. Tactically, she had nothing. They were doing exactly what initial reports suggested, and the only place that gas could be going was into deep cracks hidden from sight by the mud wall. This cave wasn't important to either side, but causing even a partial collapse might create another choke point, one that favored them. "I only saw two heads."

"Not many of them here right now," was the response.

"Do it now, then," she decided. There was nothing going on anywhere else that held weight here. No need to use this cavern, no reason to let it be blocked, and no purpose behind holding back. The Noxious Fumes pack had overextended and were unaware that they were under watch, and now they would suffer the consequences.

There were two ways to stop an attempt at caving something in via explosive gas in existing cracks. Either prematurely detonating the gas… Or prematurely ending the ones providing the gas, and letting the existing gas dissipate. The former was dangerous when they caught such operations near completion, whereas the latter was more generally dangerous. Since they didn't know how long this operation had gone on unnoticed, they couldn't risk detonating it.

When they reached the gathering of watchers, her guide clandestinely flamed himself. "We go now," he announced to the rest of the empty air.

Lily remained behind, waiting. For the silent claws in the dark to return. She had confirmed the order, but she wouldn't be the one carrying it out.

Next time, she needed to force herself to watch. Not that she wanted to. Rather, she felt instinctively that if she got into the habit of determining who lived and who died without ever seeing the consequences first-paw… That way led to callousness. Quartz was one big callous, physically and emotionally. She didn't want to be like him.

What he did was necessary. How he did it was necessary. How he, or she, felt about what was done… She would rather not grow too detached.

O-O-O-O-O

Two cycles later, waiting on the shore of the underground lake with a group of about a dozen others, Lily experienced the other side of the war she had joined. The side with just as much death, but far more meaning associated with each loss.

For Howl's family and friends, this ceremony was all they would be allowed. The Twisted Corridor pack had no dark side of the valley to leave bodies, and even if they did, during wartime they would not be able to retrieve most of them. There was no point in risking more lives to honor the dead, not when the dead themselves would be against it if they could somehow be asked now. Or so Rose had explained it, in gentler words delivered with the belief that Lily might take them badly.

Pyre's body still lay at the bottom of a lonely crevice, so far as she knew. Howl's passing would at least be acknowledged by more than herself and the ones who had murdered him.

She didn't say that to Rose.

Lily had arrived early with Sola. She believed she could have talked her way out of attending without sounding utterly heartless, but solidarity and more than a little wistful melancholy drew her in just as strongly as her ever-present curiosity. Also, friendship – if such a new relationship could be called that – with Agate and Shell, and the desire to ingratiate herself with the scattered pieces of her extended family down below the ground…

There were many reasons for her to attend, and none had questioned her presence. She stood with Sola on her right and Agate off to her left, with his family. There were others, light wings she didn't know by sight or by name, but strangely few of them. A small, dismal female with a pale blue tint named Cavana was Howl's Dam. His Sire, whoever he was, wasn't there. Two older females also attended, and a whispered question to Agate revealed that they were Howl's friends, but that they didn't have any real connection to the rest of his family. And that was all.

Lily could feel the absence of other family members; the shore was clear, as it was technically a little after the guards made everyone leave for the 'night', and she expected another light wing might have had enough extended relations to fill up much more of the open space.

One of the light wings who had attended to Quartz's wounds had remarked that both sides of Lily's family were deeply involved in the war, and thus deeply harmed by it. She remembered that as she looked around, and found that the observation – or perhaps it was a condemnation of her family's choices – rang true. This was all that remained of Linara's side. Pyre's side was even smaller, though they at least had not needed to gather to send off yet another of their dwindling number.

She was put in mind of another, similar ceremony with too few mourning. And of a ceremony that had never happened. Under or above the ground, her family all seemed to die alone, leaving only a few scattered memories. She doubted she would be any different, in the end.

Cavana had done all of the flaming; there was not a body, so instead she burned a small pile of brown mushrooms that had been brought along for that purpose. The smell was not at all like charred flesh, so in that respect it was a poor substitute or an outright improvement depending on how she looked at it, but it was heady and did not smell nice at all. It stung her nostrils and throat. Shell coughed several times, and Lily turned to the side to sneeze discreetly.

As she sneezed, she noticed another light wing watching them from afar. His too-sharp face and sunken features made it easy to place him, even with only a single glance. Quartz was not with the group, but he was here.

"He never was the same," Cavana said roughly as Lily turned back to the ceremony. "Not after he lost her." She swept her tail around the outskirts of the tiny mushroom ash pile, gathering gray on her fins, and stepped away.

And that was all. Rose's place in the ceremony was, it seemed, that of a silent observer. Claw would have made it about himself, if he could have been bothered to attend such a thing.

Cavana left, and Galen followed her, coming up beside her to say something that Lily didn't hear because for once he wasn't shrieking at the top of his lungs. His mate and sons stayed, and so did Sola and Rose. Howl's two friends lingered for a moment, looking out at the water, apart from the rest of the group.

Lily glanced out, confirming for herself that they were not looking at anything in particular. Just the gloomy, distant darkness.

"There is the matter of Howl's cave," Rose said solemnly.

His cave. The space that had been freed up by his brutal, unexpected death. But it was an available space.

Agate tossed his head irritably. "So is it mine or Shell's?" he asked.

"It will stand empty for long enough that the scent dissipates," Rose answered. "For now, it is no one's." He glanced at Lily, and continued speaking. "This is something we do for all vacant spaces, especially the ones that may soon have hatchlings in them. The lingering scents can be problematic."

Could they? She didn't think normal light wing scents were that big a deal. But then again, Lily was used to living outside, in the wind and rain. She had noticed that smells under the ground were a lot stronger and lingered much longer. She was willing to believe that they could even be detrimental in specific circumstances.

"Yeah, but after that," Agate huffed. "Nobody wants to talk about it, and I do not know why."

"As per pack tradition, it will go to whomever of the extended family has need of it," Rose said stiffly. "That is not simple, here. It is a cave meant for two, and we are not so free with space that we can ignore this, but your family has no mated pairs in need. Those who might become part of a mated pair soon are next in line, of which there are several. Agate, Shell… Lily."

She had not thought that her name would come up, but now that it had she could see why. This could be the answer to her biggest problem. She was living with the alpha temporarily, only for lack of available space. Howl was not a close relative, but he was not that far away in her 'roots' either, one of the brothers of Risa's Sire. Rose expected her to speak up. He had left a place for her to stake her claim.

Perhaps he hoped that she would not. He was not giving it to her, only leaving the obvious opportunity for her to reach for herself. If she did, she would be out of his reach…

But she wasn't going to, and maybe he knew it. Not like this, not now, not when it would be detrimental in so many different ways. She would be cheating Agate and Shell out of something they assumed would be theirs, and their parents too. She was the newcomer, the charity case who was only liked because she had not yet cost Galen's family anything they thought was their due. Even if that were not true, it would still bring with it some amount of resentment, maybe even provoke Galen's family into working to reclaim what they saw as rightfully theirs. It was not to be hers.

There was an alternate path to getting what she wanted, though. Shell or Agate could not sleep in two places at once.

"I will not be taking a mate any time soon," or any time at all, "so it would be a waste to give it to me," Lily said firmly. Sola cast her a very confused side-eye, and then nudged her with a wing.

"It is not in anyone's interest to leave a cavern half empty," Rose agreed, though he seemed reluctant. Either he too was confused by her refusal, or he was good at feigning mild confusion. "It will go to Agate or Shell, to be determined by their parents. But be aware that if it remains half-filled for too long, they may be required to give it up in exchange for a place befitting an unmated adult. First claim for family is a privilege, not an absolute right or a permanent stake."

That could have been Rose's ploy. Let Lily take the cavern that would pressure her into a relationship, or force her to trade for a much worse living place from one half of a newly mated pair. Maybe he hoped she would look so fondly upon her time in his luxurious home that she would look fondly upon him, by extension.

"If wasting space is a problem, both Agate and Shell could live there while they remain unattached." Sola nudged Lily again, so Lily nudged Sola right back, and flicked her ears when Sola looked over at her again. Not now, message received and discarded. If she claimed it, she would find herself maneuvered right back out of it after only a little while. It was a false choice.

Agate gagged loudly. "No thank you!" Shell, at the same time, turned and gave Lily a truly unimpressed look. Whether it was for suggesting he could not get a mate, or that he would ever voluntarily live with his brother as an adult… Probably both.

Emera, their Dam, threw a wing over Agate and forcibly pulled him in, muffling his ongoing gagging in the process. "Thank you, alpha, for clarifying this for us, and for being here for our family today. Some of us are still grieving." Shell straightened up a bit at that, seemingly chastised. Agate's reaction was unknown to Lily, seeing as his head was still covered.

Fledglings, the both of them. She didn't care how big they were, or how old they claimed to be.

Rose nodded, then awkwardly turned and left as Emera lifted her wing and tucked her head under it to begin scolding Agate in a hiss that was just shy of audible from the outside. Lily left with Sola, both giving up on there being any proper end to the whole affair at about the same time.

The sending-off ceremony had turned into a bit of a mess. "I do not think caves should be discussed right after the ceremony," Lily grumbled to Sola as they passed by the guards and into the tunnel. "Mixing grief and greed probably does not end well most of the time."

"It is not greed," Sola retorted in a low voice. "Lily, you know you could have asked for it. Rose said so."

Lily snorted. "I could have asked. I could have had it, too. For a short while. Then I would have been tossed right back out again."

"You would get the place of one of the mated pair who switched with you," Sola retorted. "For that matter, we could have lived there together."

Lily twitched. "That was an option?" she demanded.

"Well, no," Sola admitted, looking away. "Otherwise there would be even more competition for the better caves, with every pair of friends scheming to get in. Sorry, I spoke without thinking. It would be nice if that were allowed, but it is not. I do not think Rose would be willing to make an exception, either. Doing so would unblock a tunnel that could never be blocked again."

Then why suggest it? Why make Lily feel like she had missed something supremely obvious, when it was in fact not allowed at all? Lily let out a wordless, aggravated growl.

"The tunnels are not so bad, though," Sola continued. "I know this for a fact. You would end up there."

"They are worse than my actual plan," Lily huffed. "I do have one. It does not involve firing at the obvious target." Sola would have to understand that. "Howl's cave will not be occupied for some time yet." It had yet to finish airing out. "When Shell or Agate moves in, they will leave behind an empty space. Agate likes me, I know how to get along with Shell, and Galen loves that I listen to him. It will be easy to fit in there."

"That… makes much more sense. I did wonder." Sola hummed quietly, a tuneless low noise that quickly fell into the background ebb and flow of the vertical cavern's echoing ambiance. They took to the air, both headed for the tunnel up to Rose's cavern. It was late, and Lily was exhausted. She was always some level of exhausted these days. She might even be getting used to her muscles trembling all cycle, every cycle.

She was not so exhausted that her body would fail her in an unexpected time of need, though. She never let herself be pushed that far. Just in case. "What did you wonder?" Lily asked.

"Nothing now, I suppose, but then again…" Sola trailed off as they landed and entered the tunnel. Once they were fully inside, she stopped, and Lily stopped too, because the only alternative would be climbing over Sola to continue forward. "Do you actually want to move out of the alpha's chambers?" Sola asked.

Coming from another, more shallow female, Lily would have assumed there was a pro-Rose rant coming. Who would want to not live with the available alpha? She expected better from Sola, though. "That was always the plan, nothing has changed," Lily said, going with the obvious answer while she tried to determine what had Sola asking that. Was it pure concern for herself? A desire to not go back to her cramped single-light-wing sleeping nook? Suspicion that Lily was attracted to Rose after all? Probably not that last one, because Sola was not that stupid, but the first two made sense.

"It was, but you are going about it in a way that is much more complex than it needs to be, if all you want is to get out," Sola pointed out. "You were desperate, to begin with. What has changed?"

"Nothing." She pawed at the ground, wishing they could have had this discussion somewhere wider and more open. But Rose was up ahead, and the entire pack was behind. It was here or nowhere anytime soon. "It will take the same amount of time, regardless. Just because I hide my desire to have a place of my own…" She still felt the creeping unease. Sola's presence was a reassurance, but she still slept within easy reach of someone she did not, could not, entirely trust. "I would rather not have a cave all to myself, but you know what I mean." Galen and his family would serve the same purpose as Sola if – when – she moved in with them. Galen himself could be counted on to screech loudly enough to alert the entire pack if something bad happened.

Not that it would. Surely she would be out of Rose's possible reach, with them. She had to believe that.

"I suppose you have many reasons to not want Howl's cave." Sola's ears twitched as she stared ahead. "There would be hurt feelings, if you took it, on top of those other things."

"Exactly." Lily sighed, thankful Sola saw things from her point of view.

"And you might feel bad about benefiting from the death of a relative," Sola murmured.

Would she? At least something good would have come from Howl's death. She couldn't say the same for Granite. She couldn't say the same for Pyre.

Lily shivered, her chest constricting as she held in a whine.

The saddest sending off ceremony was the one that had never happened, attended by none. All others paled in comparison.

O-O-O-O-O

Life flew on, heedless of those who no longer flew with it, and life in the Twisted Corridor pack flew with a regularity that prodded Lily back into her routine without missing a single wingbeat, inexplicably mixed feelings about Howl or not.

Galen was one of the many forces contributing to that push for normality. His influence was of the verbal, completely impossible to ignore variety, and all the more effective coming from someone who had just lost his brother. He mourned – she was sure he mourned – but he never stopped pushing her and a still very reluctant Shell and Agate in their exercises.

Sola was another force for normalcy; their aiming lessons continued apace. Lily was seeing small, gradual improvement in her ability to hit targets at a great distance, and a much more pronounced change in how she thought about how she aimed. Neither was proving to be all that useful in the rest of her life, but she didn't mind that. It was still better to know than to not know.

Then there was Rose. He was normal in that he was rarely present for long, always off doing whatever it was that kept him so busy as alpha despite having so many advisors. Out of sight, out of mind… until she thought about what he might be doing when she wasn't watching. His scent never carried even a hint of wrongdoing, but there was always the possibility. That, too, was what passed for normal.

When she wasn't with Quartz, Lily led a very busy life. The little free time she did have had a way of slipping through her claws when she least expected it. That was, when it wasn't outright commandeered by something she couldn't pass up.

"It has been a while," Lily said to Agate as they flew. She kept her voice low, in keeping with Agate's generally furtive demeanor and the subject of their little excursion. "Why now?"

"It will not keep much longer," Agate said mysteriously. "Our target is in place. Posie is already in position. We did not have to bring you, you know."

"I know," Lily hummed. Agate angled down toward the tunnel out to the underground lake, and she followed. "About that–"

"Quietly, now," Agate hissed as they set down. "Follow my lead."

As opposed to what, exactly? She still knew next to nothing about what they were doing. Only that it required something a water-glider could provide, and that it was secret. Agate knew everything, and she had to follow him.

This had better not be something extremely juvenile, like dropping a crab on someone's rear end and watching them shriek when it pinched their base fins.

Lily snorted, tossing her head as they reached the underground shore. It was busy, with light wings everywhere. The usual set of guards, all of her fellow pack members taking in the colder lake air, those taking off and landing on the edge, a few more leaning down to drink…

Sulfa was there, Lily noticed, standing off to the side with a few of the usual shoreline guards, discussing something while they kept an eye on the dark horizon. It was always notable when Lily saw one of Rose's advisors going about their usual business instead of being pulled away from it to teach her something. Quartz lived and breathed his duties, but aside from him the others had a very sporadic touch on the pack as a whole. Obsidian was never around – out being a diplomat? Whatever that actually entailed. Peat could occasionally be seen hunting someone down with a single-minded efficiency, to obtain a renewed blood sample or otherwise pester them with intrusive questions related to their family's history. Gilla actually spent a lot of time outside of the main set of caverns, attending to the plants that did not grow in safe territory.

Lily had avoided Gilla, and the plants that were her domain. Plants, in her mind, were inextricably Pyre's in a way that made her sad now. She didn't see any way such an encounter could make her feel better about that. Only the same, or worse.

Sulfa, on the other paw, was not someone Lily wanted to avoid or approach. She was a neutral party, only important now because she seemed like the type to come down hard on any potential mischief she saw brewing.

"It's time you tell me what we're doing," Lily murmured to Agate as they casually walked across the stony shore. Ahead she could see Braun and Tellur, waiting by the waterline, but Posie was missing.

"Nah, you will see for yourself," Agate hummed smugly. "Posie should be releasing them any moment now. Ready, Braun?" They arrived at the shoreline, and he mimed leaning down to take a drink.

"So ready," Braun chortled.

"We are going to be in so much trouble," Tellur muttered. Lily empathized with him a lot more than the other two. What had she gotten herself into? Better question: How could she get herself out of this before blame was heaped on her head too?

"Nobody will be able to pin this on us, relax," Agate muttered. He straightened up.

Sulfa roared, loud and hoarse and instantly recognizable. Lily whipped around, startled, just in time to see Sulfa rearing up on her hind legs, stumbling back, and falling over as the guards she was with all began stamping their paws and flaming something too low to see. Elsewhere near them, light wings began taking flight, many shrieking with surprise, fear, or in some cases pure disgust. A few broke out running toward the shoreline, toward Lily and Agate's friends, and behind them–

Lily shuddered, and only forewarning stopped her from taking to the air then and there. Many-legged crabs, taller than any she had seen, with small round black shells lifted all the way up to the height of a light wing's chest by their knobbly, spindly legs. They moved so fast! And nimbly too, one sidestepping the repeated, panicked attempts of a male light wing to stomp on it. The male jumped about, using his front paws, having apparently forgotten his tail, his hind legs, and his wings in his desperation to end the creepy little bulb chasing after him. Others were using fire, but the crab-spiders were so fast that while they didn't miss, they often had to hold their fire because they would have hurt someone else, or blasted the ground too close to their own face.

It was chaos, and Agate was loving it. He, Braun, and Tellur were all laughing uncontrollably, and if anyone hadn't been caught up in the mad dash to get away from the crab spiders they would know who was responsible at once. When Lily realized that, a few heartbeats after she recovered from the instinctive terror of the spindly little creatures scrambling erratically across the shore, she threw herself into the air. To avoid any of the things coming near her, and to distance herself from the obvious culprits. Making friends with Agate wasn't worth being blamed for this! Setting dangerous things on the pack–

Though, now that she thought about it, the little crab-spider-monsters were missing two traits that crabs and spiders had, respectively. Pincers and fangs. She couldn't make out eyes on those semi-spherical domes, let alone a mouth or fangs, and all of the many spindly legs were the same, with none of the larger arms crabs tended to pinch with. They weren't doing anything particularly malicious, either – scuttling about madly, yes, but aimlessly.

Or perhaps not so aimlessly after all. She circled back around to watch as Agate, Tellur, and Braun finally abandoned the shore and the crab-spiders converged on the waterline. They were looking for the water. Not to disappear into the depths, but rather to lurk where the water met dry stone, hunkering down one after the other in the little ripples that passed for a tideline. Like a row of rocks placed by some enterprising fledgling, noticeably uniform but not at all threatening.

Agate, Tellur, and Braun slipped off in the chaos of the airborne mass of light wings, not camouflaging because they thought doing so would draw attention, or because they were stupid. One or the other. Lily rejoined them, as it looked like they had gotten away with it. Nobody was looking for the source of the sudden infestation, only at the things now inhabiting their formerly peaceful shore.

"Did you hear the way she screeched, like she was gargling nettles!" Braun laughed as Lily came up behind their little trio. They were beginning to circle back around toward the shore, so she flew right up into their collective blind spot and inserted herself into the formation at the rear.

"You certainly caused a lot of chaos," she observed. Tellur and Agate jerked to the sides mid-flap, not having seen or heard her approach.

"Those lurkers took so long to hatch and grow," Agate chortled after he recovered from the surprise. His good mood was a lot like the crab-creatures; hard to put down. "But it was so worth it!"

"Totally!" Posie's voice rang out from above. That startled all four of them, including Lily. She was still keeping one eye on Sulfa and her guards, but they had only just ventured back to the shore to start flaming at the, as Agate called them, lurkers. "They kept bumping at my sides, so gross. How did you keep them in the hole, Agate?"

"Weeds, pinned down with stones," Agate explained. "They were not very big at first."

"So you bargained for lurker eggs from the water-glider, kept them until they hatched, hid them while they grew… All so you could set them loose for a few moments of entertainment?" Lily tried hard to keep the judgment out of her voice. It was kind of funny, but not funny enough to merit all of the effort and the likely consequences were they to be caught.

"All so I could get Sulfa back," Posie retorted. "She had the gall to try and make me stop flying with my friends, and my own Dam backed her up until I put my paw down. This will show her."

"Well, no it will not, because she will not know you did it," Tellur said timidly. "Right? That was the plan? Sulfa will be really mad if she finds out we set them loose."

"It is the principle of the thing," Posie said grandly. "Agate, thank you for setting this up."

"No problem." Agate backwinged to fly by Lily, then tipped into a long, sweeping turn. "We should fly some more though, before we try and leave." His friends were amenable to that, so they turned back toward the distant, empty darkness above the lake.

As they flew, Agate drifted closer to Lily and gave her a long, pleading stare, before tossing his head at the shimmering blur that was Posie as her camouflage wore off. Then he growled to himself and flew forward, up to Posie.

"I was thinking… Posie, would you come with me for a moment?" Agate asked. "Just over here." He gestured with the tip of a wing to more of the large, open expanse all around them.

"Why should she go anywhere?" Tellur huffed. "I was about to tell her – everyone – about what I saw scouting last cycle."

"You saw a mushroom," Braun said dismissively. "They only send you on the fledgling routes."

Given Lily had never seen Tellur while working with Quartz, she suspected that might actually be true. But this was all giving her a bad feeling, one that she had no words for. Nothing was wrong, they were all still jovial, but the tension was working its way up.

"Why, Agate?" Posie asked. "If this is to try and splash me again, I will not fly that close to the water so you should not bother."

"No, not that," Agate huffed. "To get away from these two. Oh, and Lily…" He blinked and looked back at her, presumably trying to work out how he could get Posie by herself while also benefiting from Lily's assistance. Not that she had shown any indication she was actually going to give it right now.

"I beat my Sire at wrestling this cycle," Braun announced. "What do you think of that, Posie?"

"I do not care?" Posie warbled.

Braun growled, but not as loudly as Tellur, who gave him a thump with his wing in exchange for dropping down a few winglengths in the air as he recovered from the missing flap. "Stop trying to look good," he said to Braun. "You do not. You should have been a scout–"

"You are playing at it," Braun shot back. "Posie does not care about that either."

Agate chose that moment to speak up, tossing more flames on the already smoldering situation. "Posie thinks you are both fledglings, we already know that. Unlike me."

Posie snarled at Agate, but it was a noise as laden with confusion as anger. "Do not speak for me, and what is going on with you all?" she cried out. "Stop fighting, what do you even have to fight about?"

Something within Lily, a little bit of emotion, drove her to finally break her passive silence. If she did not, something she could not bear would happen. "Agate! Tellur! Braun!" she roared. "Shut up! Or we'll get caught!"

She would have gotten a lesser reaction if she drenched them all with freezing water. They might laugh and joke, but none of them wanted to face an angry Sulfa. Even Posie flinched and craned her neck to look behind them.

Lily didn't give any of them time to think about what she was saying; she had seized control of the spiraling conversation, but her grip was tentative and she had to put an end to it before she lost control again. "Split up, Tellur, Braun, Agate, go home. Posie, with me, we should not all return at the same time. Move it before Sulfa's guards notice us all together!"

There was no real reason to do what she said, but the authority in her voice and the lack of hesitation, along with clear directions, carried the moment. Tellur broke off first, then Braun in a different direction, and finally Agate when Lily gave him a very significant look. He brightened, turned to leave, looked back as he realized he was getting the opposite of what he wanted, and then finally committed to flying away as he came to the mistaken conclusion that she must be working for his benefit in some other way. Or so she assumed; it was possible nothing at all was going on in his head beyond 'Lily is on my side, let Lily do all the work for me'.

Whatever their reasons, whatever they thought was going on, the three males dispersed, headed back to the shoreline where Sulfa's guards had finished cleaning up the lurkers and light wings were beginning to land once more. Lily and Posie flew on parallel courses, distant from everyone else and to a lesser extent distant from each other, mentally as well as physically.

Lily had snuffed out the impending explosion… this time. With how easily and nonsensically it had flared up, she doubted she had killed it for good. More likely, it would come back the next time the four of them were in the same place. Things had come to a head like she knew they would. Amazingly, it seemed like the last one to understand was Posie herself, despite being the center of the problem.

"They are…" Posie hesitated, then drew in a huge breath. "I do not understand why they are so stupid of late," she exhaled. "This was supposed to be funny and that was all, what made them fight like that?" The question wasn't directed at Lily, it was directed at the empty waters below. Posie didn't expect an answer, she didn't understand that there was an answer to be had.

It fell to Lily to… explain. But that wasn't really the word for what she had to do now. It was far too benign, too simple. Like knowing the truth would make everything okay. Like it would fix something.

Her finally knowing the truth of Claw fixed nothing. Pyre finally knowing the truth about the pack and what was going on outside of his sight fixed nothing. Posie understanding that all of her friends were fighting over her would not make it better. But Lily still had to tell her, because leaving her ignorant would be much worse.

She could at least try to break it to Posie gently. "It's not your fault," Lily began.

"Of course it is not, you did not see me egging them on," Posie scoffed.

"I did not," Lily agreed. "You did nothing."

"Tellur's stupid scouting duties, and Braun's wrestling and fighting, and Agate… I thought Agate was being weird about the lurker thing," Posie continued. "But fighting about… what, which one of them I think is the least stupid? They are my friends, and they are all rock heads. There is nothing to fight over with that."

"They were fighting over you," Lily said, abandoning her attempts to talk around the problem.

"Over me," Posie repeated. "No, that is stupid too. They are all my friends. We have been since we were hatchlings, almost. None of that was about me, it was about which of them was the most impressive."

Lily waited, but it seemed Posie still couldn't connect the dots. She knew the feeling. It had taken her far too long to accept what Claw really thought of her. How he saw her. "They are growing up. So are you."

"We are friends," Posie repeated. "Fledglings or adults, what is the difference?"

"Taking a mate." Lily had slowly drifted in to fly beside Posie, so now she could look her in the eye. "They want you. All three of them. So they are fighting over you."

Posie looked blankly ahead. Her wings flattened out as she settled into a nearly horizontal glide.

"That is stupid," she eventually said.

"It is true," Lily retorted. "It explains how they are acting–"

"That is stupid of them," Posie clarified in a light, absentminded voice. "We are friends. Why would I want one of them as a mate?"

Here, Lily was out of her depth. She couldn't exactly draw from the nonexistent well of personal attractions and romances she had experienced. If she took from her own life for inspiration, Posie would fly away screeching with disgust and fear by the time she was done. She had second-paw accounts, Pyre and Risa, Crystal and Granite, but those would not help.

"They do not feel that way," Lily said instead. Simple. Factual. Not at all a solution to the problem Posie now understood she had.

"Too bad for them," Posie declared. "They will just have to get over themselves. I like to play with them, not… that. I want a mature, intelligent male. An older male, maybe. I would love to have a chance with the alpha. If not him, someone who knows what they are doing."

If Posie was about to ask Lily to help her romance another light wing, she would be sorely disappointed. Lily wasn't even going to be able to uphold her promise to Agate, the last thing she needed was to make another promise of the same ilk.

Besides… Invisible pinpricks of cold disgust poked their way up her spine. Posie's words… Too much like Honey. Too close to things that Lily avoided for herself. Too close to too many things, too many thoughts.

"That's not a good idea," she said. "Someone your own age, or at least not the alpha."

"Just because you do not like the established, distinguished type does not mean I have to feel the same," Posie complained. "You live with him, do not tell me you do not think about having him approach you and sweep you off your paws–"

Posie could make her own horrible mistakes from now on. Lily needed to go think about something else. Anything else. Now. She pumped her wings, ascending rapidly, and broke away from Posie, then dove through a fireball of her own making for good measure.

Posie was no longer ignorant.

Too bad for her.

O-O-O-O-O

Working with Quartz could be slow, boring, and often frustrating. But at least it gave Lily every possible excuse to focus on the moment, and not on the uneasy dreams that talking to Posie had elicited in the nights that followed. That part of her life, that danger, was behind her. She needed to keep her eyes and her thoughts on the ones all around her now.

Two-heads. Flame-skins. Stink-spines. Crawlers. Lily had been told what they could do, and now that she was fully immersed in the ebb and flow of the conflict, she was learning what they tended to do, which was not the same thing at all. Capability versus strategy. They had some sort of leadership–

"How does the Noxious Fumes pack make decisions?" she asked Quartz. They were in a lull at the moment, waiting in Quartz's dark little alcove for scouts to return and make their reports. If Quartz decided someone needed to be sent out right away, Lily would have to go and inform them, elsewhere in the maze of passages. She expected those who were 'on call' were struggling to keep each other entertained by this point in the cycle. It would be time for her to leave soon, and the fact that she knew that without any way of checking what part of the cycle it was just proved that she was becoming used to the ebb and flow of life below the ground.

Quartz had his tail to the far wall, and his eyes trained on the emptiness of the stone lip by the exit. "They have an alpha," he answered, not looking away from his mostly pointless vigil. "We think. We do not know. One of our greatest shortcomings is our inability to effectively spy on them in their home territory. Almost no one is willing to try it."

"Because there's a long list of dead who did try?" Lily guessed.

"Got it in one," Quartz chuckled mirthlessly. "We are due someone attempting it anyway. It happens every generation. Keep an eye on Agate. Galen is keeping him and his brother back from the fighting, and I bet that is beginning to chafe them something fierce."

Any amusement Lily had felt withered away. She would keep an eye on Agate. And Shell for that matter. If it could not be done, it could not be done. "Do they know any more about us?"

"Yes, and you can thank Obsidian for that, not that it really matters," Quartz grumbled.

Silence returned to their dark hole in the ground, but not for long. Claws clicked on stone a short while later, and air moved against Lily's face as a blur leaped up to land in front of them. Quartz let the fire he had prepared die down as the nearly imperceptible shimmer stopped there. He watched the ledge for a reason, and as far as Lily could tell that reason was wanting to get the first shot off if anything other than a light wing found them. Which in theory she approved of, but in practice required unending alertness of the sort that she thought would just make her tired and inattentive anyway.

"Report," Quartz barked.

"Situation in the three-pillar open cavern by the waterfall," the scout, a female based on her voice, said seriously. "It smells of stink-spines. I went in, checked that the smell was everywhere, and saw a crawler, so I left. They did not notice my presence."

"Right, dismissed." Quartz paused. "No. Lily. Question her."

"About this?" Lily shook her head; of course it would be about this. "You only saw one crawler? Or did you see multiple enemies, but the crawler is why you left?" The original wording was ambiguous, and it would be bad to have the wrong impression because she interpreted the report differently than it was meant.

"Just the one crawler," the scout answered. "There might have been more? I would not say for sure that there were not."

"Anything else you noticed that was out of the ordinary?" Lily asked. In truth, she didn't know what else to ask about. There were a lot of different things to take into account when thinking about fighting underground, elevation and airflow and all sorts of environmental considerations as well as what the enemy was doing, but if any of that was noteworthy, it was the role of the scout to notice and report it. Her questions were superfluous.

"No… Should I have noticed something?" This was a test for Lily, but the scout sounded like she was beginning to think she was the one being tested. It was hard to tell while she was camouflaged.

"No, just checking." Lily shrugged her wing shoulders. "Quartz?" Was this a teaching moment? Had she missed something?

"Go on," Quartz waved a wing. "Typical," he said as the scout left. "When it comes down to their skin or their understanding, they choose their skins. And they are not wrong to do so. A dead scout cannot report anything they know, no matter how important."

"So did I miss something?" Lily asked.

"No." Quartz huffed. "You need to get into the habit of questioning them. That was all."

"Right." She could do that. Even though he didn't actually like it when she did.

"And now you need to…" Quartz trailed off, pointedly looking at her.

This, she knew. "Go send another scout that way, with forewarning, to find out more." The first had not been noticed, so the second could expect to be relatively safe unless they made a mistake. If the first had been chased away or seen any indication that their camouflage was noticed, then she would not have been so quick to jump on sending another right away. These were lives she and Quartz were ordering around, and a single careless oversight could get someone killed.

Worse, in her mind, was the certainty that at some point even the right decision would get someone she cared about killed. But the alternative, inaction, was no better.

O-O-O-O-O

As time went on, Lily was more and more certain that the light wings who were not actively out risking their lives did not have a realistic view of the war. She objectively knew more about the war than nine out of ten light wings in the Twisted Corridor pack, so her own opinion was going to be more informed than theirs, but she was not using her own knowledge or perspective as the baseline. Even compared to some of the normal light wings who volunteered to fight, most of the pack was not taking things seriously. Everyone should have been more worried. More consistently nervous.

Instead, life inside guarded territory – which was everywhere light wings lived – went on mostly as normal. The average noncombatant behaved like they had heard rumors of possible future danger, not like drawn-out conflicts and lethal fights were happening every few cycles, with permanent consequences. Perhaps their mild, non-debilitating fear was the sort of mindset a pack used to constant warring could fall into when the need arose, but it was not for Lily if so. She would rather be rightfully worried than illogically at ease. She was taking every chance to improve her odds of survival, and beyond that her unease would keep her alert.

The rest of the pack was not doing the same, as evidenced by the one-on-one session she was about to have with Sola, assuming Moth did not defy all expectations and show up at the last possible moment.

"Perhaps she is afraid of the shore," Sola murmured to Lily as they waited by the water's edge. Cold ripples lapped against smooth, water-worn stone just beyond Lily's claws. Sola was facing the other direction, looking for Moth, but Lily would rather have her own back to safety, as opposed to the dark, endless expanse in front of her now.

It was not wrong to fear empty air when camouflage meant that no air could truly be proven empty by sight alone. The Noxious Fumes pack had much more reason to fear invisible enemies than she did, but that was only a relative imbalance. Absolutely speaking, she still had plenty of reason to be wary.

"Perhaps that is a convenient excuse she will pull out if called on her absence later," Lily suggested. Sola had implied Moth would come up with some sort of excuse. The only thing that had changed between now and then was that, thanks to Agate's prank, one had been dropped into her reach without her even working hard enough to create a plausible lie… And that she had attended several more lessons than Sola's original prediction accounted for. Not nearly enough, they had barely gotten started, but perhaps Moth thought that she had seen enough, or perhaps she held the altogether too common mentality that baffled Lily. Sticking her head in the sand and avoiding any mention of the thing that scared her.

This was another thing Lily suspected she would never understand. Acknowledge, yes, and account for because she could not accurately predict people otherwise, but never understand. Who used the excuse of imminent danger to avoid something that might be the difference between life and death? Someone who had either an overinflated sense of self-importance, or no understanding of the odds. Minor inconvenience or anxiety now, to avoid unlikely but possible death later?

Lily was dedicating her morning to this without a single regret, and that was the last word on the matter as far as she was concerned. Moth could glide by or reap the consequences of her priorities, whichever ended up happening. "We can begin now if she is not coming," she told Sola. There was no point in waiting any longer.

"Yes, we can." Sola turned to face the water, stepping beside Lily. She was close, her wing rubbing against Lily's side, but the contact was not undesirable. "We have taken many shots at stationary targets, and I think it would be helpful if we did something else this cycle, to approach the problem of aiming from a different angle."

"I would like that. What is it we are doing now?" She noticed that they had not taken to the air. That was probably intentional.

"Firing on moving targets… far enough away that you cannot just fire and assume you will hit." Sola began breathing deeply, which for her was very deep indeed, and Lily copied her as best she could. In for eight heartbeats, out for ten. "The further something is from you, the more precise you must be with your aim. Once you go past a certain range, you must start to take drop and wind and other things into account. How do you think this will change if you are aiming at something moving?"

"My first thought," Lily mused as they stared out into the dark, "is that there will be more time for my target to move. This is worse if they are not moving predictably, worse still if they are watching me, and absolutely terrible if they are far enough away that they can actively try to dodge." That was never a problem with her fire… But of course it was not, because her fire was lightning-fast at the distances she was willing to use it. All of Sola's teachings concerned the use of fires at distances that she instinctively balked at, a reaction that she had begun to notice now that it had been pointed out to her.

"This explanation is going to go very quickly if you continue to give me the correct answers," Sola remarked. "Yes, time to move is the big problem. The further away, the more they can and will move, so the more you have to lead your shot. This also necessitates firing around where they currently are, which means that if you are also flying you need to precisely time when you begin to aim and when you fire, ideally putting those two things as close together as possible." She nodded to herself. "Which is very difficult. This cycle, you can fire while standing still. Really focus on what you are doing."

"Will it be different in the air?" Lily asked. She was somewhat concerned that all of the things Sola had taught her previously, in the air, would be different when standing on the ground. She could still try, of course, but she didn't want to start from scratch again.

"You will have to fly in addition to firing, and you will have angle and wing beats to worry about… But it is not different in the air, only harder. I would start every new light wing who comes to me on the ground if I could." Sola stepped back and looked around, turning to gaze at the mostly-empty shoreline studded with wary guards. "Sometimes it was too crowded for that to be practical, but those cycles are long gone."

There were only a pawful of light wings fishing within Lily's line of sight, and all of them were well out of any reasonable firing line she might have; the lake cavern was not very wide, and if Sola meant to go far enough to force Lily to rely on what she had been taught, she would not be hugging either wall. All she had to do was fire, not worry about collateral damage…

Except to her target, which was not collateral in the sense that she was intentionally trying to hit something or someone. "What will I be firing at?" she asked.

"That is always the tricky part of teaching moving targets," Sola admitted. "I will be taking a large rock out with me. You are not to fire on it until after it has left my claws. That will be safe enough. And before you ask," she continued as she stepped back up to the waterline and flared her wings, "the guards know what we are doing. So do not worry about anything except my rock!"

Sola took off from the shore, launching herself into the air, and circled around to glance off the back wall of the cave, seizing a rock about the size of Lily's head, but more cylindrical and thus much easier to keep a hold of. Lily was rather impressed with Sola's coordination in doing that, because she didn't falter for a moment despite the significant weight of a rock that size. Her speed in flying back out over the water while carrying it was impressive too…

Someday Lily would be able to do those things just as easily. Perhaps even someday soon. For now, she waited and kept control of her breathing, holding herself steady just to get into the habit.

It took Sola a little while to fly out far enough. During that time, a few light wings came in from fishing, a few more went out, and the guards fidgeted and stood around, not awkward because most of them were too tense to be bored or fed up with their assigned watch. Maybe that tension during guard duties was something that would fade as time went on, and the guards grew complacent, but if so it had not been nearly long enough yet. For now, everybody was jumpy. Just not jumpy enough.

Sola fell into a wide banking turn, far out over the water, and began to glide across the cave from left to right.

This had to be it. Lily tensed, her fire growing in the back of her throat. She was learning, yes, but there was something important at stake here. Her time. Even if Sola could get more rocks from the walls way out there, this was not something they could do many times in a cycle. Every shot, and what she could learn from it, counted.

Sola flew straight. Slightly down, gliding. The rock held in her front paws, and then not, falling, picking up speed. Breathe in, breathe out, exhale to–

Fire on the bulging scaly mass beating on an invisible target–

Lily let her shot go a heartbeat too late. Such was the distance involved that she had time to flinch, tell herself that the memory of the crawler fighting Quartz was real but irrelevant and not at all helpful, and then watch as her shot detonated prematurely. Not that it would have hit even if it had survived the entire trip. She fired too late, so it would have gone over the rock, which splashed into the underground lake completely intact.

Sola was too far away to offer advice, and flying back would be hugely inefficient, so it was no surprise that she flew over to one of the walls, tacking back and forth to look at it, and then fired herself, blasting chunks out of the hard but not impenetrable expanse.

Lily would have a few more shots before Sola came back to correct her form based on how those shots failed. At least she could only improve on her first attempt.

A few light wings, she noticed as she waited, were watching her. Her shot into nothing drew their attention, and though the guards knew what was happening, the average fishing light wings did not. They had to deduce it for themselves. Two individuals on the shore – some of the few who still lingered after catching their fish even with the increased wariness of the pack as a whole – continued to look at her even after they must have figured out what was going on. She noticed them because they were relatively close, a double-pawful of long strides from where she stood on the shoreline. Within hearing distance, if distantly.

They were both males. Neither young nor old, and not particularly interesting to look at. She didn't recognize them, which was the more likely outcome given how many light wings were part of the pack and how few she had interacted with in any significant fashion. There was nothing suspicious about them, aside from the fact that her first thought when giving them a subtle side-eye was that they were suspicious.

"Plenty of fish, you might as well shoot for one," one of the two said to the other, likely concluding some thought that Lily wasn't privy to. The speaker was the larger of them by the slimmest of margins, and that was his only distinguishing feature. That, she realized, was what had set her attention so firmly on them. Their nearly-imperceptible green glints, their sky-blue eyes, their physiques– they were identical in a way that no two light wings should be.

Curious. Very curious. She paused her examination of them to turn back to Sola and her distant target practice, because that was much more important in the moment and Sola was setting into another gliding flight across the cave, but this was not over. Not by a long shot. Such an unexpected little mystery deserved to be dug into and solved. This was going to bother her all cycle, otherwise.

Distracted though she undoubtedly was, she did try to run through more of Sola's techniques this time around. She straightened her back and pointed herself, paws through head and wings, squarely at the target, the very distant Sola. Her eyes tracked Sola's current location, but she tried to guess at the other light wing's speed, and kept her head off-center by what she hoped was the correct margin, physically leading her target so that she only had to correct when it came time to fire, not guess in the moment. Her fire waited, banked and maintained at the top of her chest.

Sola released the stone. Lily inhaled, shaped the charge that traveled up her throat as she exhaled, and spat it out with as much precision as she could muster. The stone arced forward, tracing a downward curve as it dropped, and Sola glided on over it and Lily's blast, which did make it to the stone, but missed by a matter of two wing lengths above it. Not appreciably to the left or right, though, which Lily had not expected.

Her estimation of its momentum was on point. It was her approximation of how fast it was falling that needed readjusting. Which was a singularly odd feeling when combined with the lingering certainty that she shouldn't be firing at something that far away. She wished that feeling would go away already, but according to Sola that took a long time.

The two identical males had moved while she was distracted and were talking more quietly, too quietly for her to hear. She twisted around to feign examining her back right paw and watch them. The larger one moved stiffly, and his ears were all the way back, whereas the smaller one tossed his head and laughed after saying something short and, if Lily had to guess, that he thought was dreadfully clever, but his twin - that was the word for them - didn't appreciate it. The larger one huffed, his chest heaving, and sat down, his rear planted firmly on the stone.

The other made a show of walking around him, and then 'wandering' in Lily's direction. She was not deceived by his meandering path, because though he didn't know she was watching, she knew his eyes never left her even as he took an elaborate route in and out of what he probably thought was her line of sight.

"You must be very dedicated." He had a pleasant voice, low but not rough or too gravelly, and stopped far enough away that she didn't feel threatened. Both of these were pure luck, so she could not use them to judge him as a person, but she wasn't inclined to dislike him, which was more than she could say for some people. "Those are not easy shots to attempt."

"They are not truly difficult, either," she said casually, straightening up from her false examination of her paw to look directly at him. "Only using ideas and strategies I have never had cause to practice until now. But thank you."

"I do not think I know you," he continued. "But, may I be direct?"

"Go on," Lily allowed, though she really didn't know where this was going and had half a mind to instead say no just to gauge how he would react.

"You can do much better things with your time than this," he said seriously.

Lily blinked, outwardly unaffected by his statement. Inwardly, she was in a holding pattern, one that required she find out more about his motivations before she decided how she wanted to react to this. She could always growl in his face and tell him to go away after she knew for sure what he meant by telling her that. "Explain?" she asked with an inquisitive hum.

"Fighting is always up close and dirty," he asserted with a shrug of his wings. "Like some other things, but less entertaining." He tilted his head and looked her in the eye. "I could teach you those things, instead, and your time would be much better spent."

Oh. So it was like that. Lily was honestly, genuinely disappointed. She had thought there might be something more going on here, but instead her ill fortune had seen fit to throw that kind of light wing in her path once more. She would have preferred… almost literally any other explanation. Even the bad ones would provide more intrigue than a substandard proposition. Gold was at least elaborate and shameless. This just struck her as hollow. She only wished she could have seen it coming somehow, so that she could have avoided it entirely.

"I rather like what I am doing now, so no. No thank you." She chose to act as if she didn't understand his half-hearted subtext. With such a lackluster attempt at innuendo, she judged it possible that he might just give up.

"Most of the light wings I spend time with prefer my instruction to hers," he offered, a little spark of indignation lighting his gaze. He was still maintaining eye contact, but that just made it more obvious what he wanted. Perhaps some other, more receptive female might find his steady gaze attractive, but she only saw it as unwelcome.

"If you say so," she said, changing tack, "most of them probably found your attention flattering." Though why, she could not imagine. Physically he was standard, if better than most of the males in the valley because the standard here was higher. In terms of personality, this particular shade of lust and confidence seemed far too common to count as more than an annoying commonality among the unmated males of this pack and the few in the valley. His personality was nothing to brag about either. "So why don't you go proposition one of them?"

That dragged a small reaction out of him. It didn't strike her as genuine, the way his eyes narrowed. If he was smart enough to hear her dismissal and take it as an insult despite her neutral tone, then he was smart enough to know how he was coming across.

That thought did more to make her wary of him than any of his bland insinuations or the thinly-veiled offer. If she assumed he was not simply the mediocre light wing he was presenting himself as… He had a reason for this stunted attempt at a conversation, and it could not possibly be the obvious one, since he was failing so badly. Or, remembering his twin, someone else had a reason for this conversation.

He looked away from her, and she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Sola was going for a third drop. "I think we are done here," she said, turning to set herself up to fire on it.

She ran through her aiming routine once more, but her heart was barely in it and most of her attention remained on the presence a few steps behind and to her left. He didn't move as she aimed and fired. Her blast detonated closer to the falling rock this time, at least vertically. Horizontally she thought she might be leaning slightly to the right. Annoying. More annoying was the fact that he had not taken her rude dismissal as a reason to leave.

"Sola does not know what she is talking about," he said a few moments after she had fired.

"I find that she knows more than I do by a fair margin," Lily retorted. If this was not meant to succeed, then it was meant to fail. If it was meant to fail, then what was the aim? To anger her. To annoy her. To repulse her. To provoke antipathy toward this light wing. "What is your name?"

"She likes to make herself sound smart," he argued, a day late and a fish short. He could not even manage that much, so he had no room to criticize Sola.

"A truly smart light wing would know when he is actively angering the one he is failing to impress," Lily pointed out with a low growl. "I believe the phrase is 'quit while you are behind', is it not?" She no longer wanted his name; this entire encounter was too clumsy and bone-headed to be part of a larger plot. Just another male who saw her and immediately wondered whether he could climb on top of her. Gold, Claw- He was not in good company in her mind.

"I was only attempting to save you some time," he said sullenly. "Sola is not all that. I would know. I know her better than anyone. Especially how she looks on her back."

"Fancy that," she said, her voice and flat gaze hopefully conveying just how little she believed his claim.

"Ask around," he huffed. "You will see. Everyone knows, even if it might take you some time to find someone willing to explain it to you. I was the best thing to happen to her." He left in a huff, walking back to his twin, who looked singularly unimpressed with his actions.

There was not enough time in a cycle to dedicate any to that stupidity. Lily truly did not care whether there was any truth to his claims; he failed to rouse her easily-captured curiosity. If Sola had a history with her pack's version of Gold or the like, Lily would rather not know. That could easily make up the substance of the little secrets she knew Sola was keeping.

She had come too close to falling in with Gold to feel any curiosity as to this flat-pond reflection of him with even less false charm. It didn't matter. He was probably lying anyway.

She looked away from the twin light wings, glancing down at the ground. Too-quiet grumblings barely reached her ears, audible if only she strained to listen, which she did not. Some mysteries were not mysteries at all, only banal or sordid truths too uninteresting to bother unearthing. True danger was not so blatant and shallow. She would not relax her guard as to social maneuvering, but she had little time to actively chase irrelevant intrigue. Especially not when it made her want to claw at a certain obnoxious light wing.

Gold had done nothing in the end, but it was his ilk that aspired to be like Claw. Better for this male and his twin that she had not gotten his name.

He wouldn't like what happened if she turned her ire on him.