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…
In Lily's opinion, the renewed war between the Twisted Corridor pack and the Noxious Fumes pack was more like a fish than a light wing. It did not fly bold and brazen, or hidden from all eyes. Instead, it swam beneath murky darkness, occasionally rising to the surface for brief glimpses of the light. There, always there, but not often clearly seen.
Sightings of enemies were few and distinct, but the total number was growing. One here. One there. A trio in a distant tunnel. Two more on the other side of a large cavern. Nauseating scents marking empty space, bare rocks. New rockslides, some clearable and some permanent. Fleeting glimpses. Reports that could not be confirmed by follow-up scouts.
Most of the war was fought by hidden action and reaction, with ambushes and secret sabotage carried out by both sides. Extending a paw to bat at the enemy's unattended flanks, never staying too long for fear of overextending. Close, direct encounters were rare, and outright conflict even less so. Every individual death was a substantial blow, and they did not come quickly or often. Ambushes were the worst, and even those sometimes ended in both sides retreating once the element of surprise wore off. Bleeding, broken, burnt, but alive simply because nobody wanted to trade lives, only steal advantages. If one could not attack with the expectation of escaping unscathed, one did not attack at all.
Most of the war was fought that way. With one glaring exception.
Clumps of dirt sailed through the open air, held together by the roots of grass that had been incinerated by the same explosion that tore a ragged, surprisingly deep hole in the formerly firm soil. Another bolt of blue fire passed over the hole, setting off a second, even larger explosion as it passed through thick green smog floating down from above.
"Steady, aim for the biggest clouds! Conserve your fire!"
Lily knew, thanks to Quartz's insistent tutelage, of one specific place that was a sore spot for the Twisted Corridor pack. The eminently pleasant, grassy, large and well-lit cavern connected to their home cavern by a single tunnel was everything they did not have, and yet they laid no claim to it beyond Quartz having operated out of caves in the ceiling in the past. They wanted it. But they did not have it, and not from lack of trying. This was made abundantly clear to Lily as Quartz orchestrated another attempt at taking it. He spoke of this cycle's offensive as a 'probing assault', an effort to take the cavern and hold it if they could, with the intention of cutting their losses early if they met the expected stiff resistance. There would be some resistance, that was guaranteed. Both packs always had eyes on such a tempting prize.
Thick clouds of green gas drifted down from the ceiling, pouring out of the very same shallow tunnel system Quartz had operated out of before the war reignited. They came in puffs and short bursts, unpredictable and numerous. Any individual cloud could be detonated by the slightest spark, but they were too far apart to set each other off in a chain reaction. Until, that was, the clouds drifted down to the ground and intermingled. Then they formed a thick, choking haze that would be lethal to anyone nearby or within when it was set off. The ground was clear now, but only because some of the light wings Quartz had hurriedly called up when things went bad.
A bolt of fire lanced over Lily's shoulder, uncomfortably close to her, and detonated four clouds in quick succession before they reached the ground. She looked back and saw that Sola was the one who had fired so close to her. She deliberately bit back on her terrified recrimination. Sola was that good, it only felt dangerous because it would have been for a less skilled light wing.
The gas intermittently drifting down from the ceiling was a problem and a terrible drain on their fire, seeing as if it ever gathered in a large enough cloud a stray spark could kill almost everyone in the cave. The Noxious Fumes pack were in just as much danger if that ever happened, but they didn't care, a calculated risk. As bad as it was, though, if it were only gas this wouldn't be a real battle at all. A few light wings could fight their way up into the tunnels, deal with the gas revealing their locations even while camouflaged, and kill the two-heads spreading it from somewhere in the tunnel complex.
"Stay back," a male light wing told Lily, stepping in front of her to bodily push her a few steps back toward the eight light wings who made up the firing line, who themselves had their tails to the wall on either side of the tunnel entrance leading back to the Twisted Corridor pack. The cavern was an open field in front of them. An open killing field.
No one on either side used fire out there, for fear of igniting a cloud that had quietly drifted too close. Shots from afar were one thing, but accidental detonation right by one's body was quite another. Teeth and claws and crushing blows were their weapons of necessity. There were more than a dozen light wings spread across the grass, fighting on paw and on wing to drive a roughly equal number of flame-skins back. Initially the light wings, on Quartz's orders, had secured all of the other tunnels leading into the grassy cavern. That orderly plan was long gone, and the mangled bodies of two light wings Lily didn't know were only remarkable in that they had been crushed, bodily, against the inner walls of one of said tunnels before being blasted out as the Noxious Fumes pack began their counterattack.
Things had gone poorly from that point onward; the plan was to retreat if the Noxious Fumes pack struck with any real force, but the crawler and two-heads that broke through immediately claimed the high ground and made indiscriminate fire a liability, clearing the way for the stink-spines and flame-skins to pen in and bloody the other light wings on the ground.
Lily had arrived shortly after the battle turned, coming in with the firing line Quartz left in reserve in case things went wrong. She wasn't there to fight, no more than any of those on the firing line were, and she had lent all but two of her shots to clearing out clouds of gas, but if things went much worse they would all have to participate in a fighting retreat.
Quartz was behind her, behind the firing line, in the tunnel out of sight. A concession to his fragility, forced on him by everyone around when he tried to join the fight, or so it seemed at the time. Lily was to be his eyes in his stead.
All she saw was blood and death.
But no, that wasn't true. Yes, she saw the suffering, the agony, the mangled bodies of light wings and flame-skins and stink-spines and one two-head who had been brought down on the flight up to their current vantage point. She also saw how the light wings out in the field were steadily retreating, either killing the enemy harassing them or drawing them back toward the firing line, depending on the situation. Both were important, but in different ways. One to her, and one to her and Quartz.
She had seen enough; she let her unofficial bodyguard usher her back into the tunnel. "It's going – not well, but it is going," she reported to Quartz. "We're losing people, but so are they, looks equal enough. The crawler is still in the ceiling."
"It will come down if we push them, crush our backs when we overextend," Quartz snarled. "Reinforcements?"
"Not that I saw." She could trust her eyes; it was the Noxious Fumes pack who had to fear seemingly empty air. They had yet to bring out a single acid-spitter since the war reignited, and today wouldn't be the day, not with the gas everywhere threatening to reveal invisible presences by flowing around but not through them. The light wings, Lily included, weren't camouflaged either. Too much danger of friendly fire, with their own side being the only one firing.
"They've had their fill of death, then," Quartz ground out. Lily was surprised that none of the light wings around him, cramped though they were, had thought to physically restrain him. She had never seen him like this, seemingly ready to bite his own paw if it would get him out into a fight that he probably wouldn't survive. It didn't seem to be an irrational bloodlust; he wasn't being physically restrained. He just wanted to be out there in the thick of it, and was, as per usual, openly wearing his frustration.
She didn't think he was right. Not on their motivation; if the Noxious Fumes pack had, as he said, had their fill of death, they would be pulling back. Removing their two-heads from the ceiling and bringing in the remaining flame-skins to retreat. Instead they were bleeding the light wings out on the field, even as they themselves bled in turn. "I don't think so. They might be close, but they're not there yet and I don't think we should try and push them to it. We're losing light wings."
"We would lose them no matter what." Quartz huffed.
Two light wings, both coughing horribly, came up behind Lily. She squeezed to the side, rubbing roughly against their grimy scales as they pushed through. One choked out a huge glob of vile red phlegm right at her paws as he pushed past her.
A small, unassuming light wing behind Quartz and his guards counted down as both of the battle-scarred survivors passed her. "Fourteen, thirteen," she counted. "Thirteen left!"
Thirteen out in the field, not counting the firing squad keeping the ground clear… And not counting the dead. Lily hurried back out, her bodyguard in tow, and reared up on her hind legs to get a slightly better vantage point without taking to the air.
There were three light wings actively fighting on the ground. One more in the air. The two poor sentries who were killed right away, plus four more whose bodies were obvious, more red, brown and black than white. That left four unaccounted for.
They weren't actively fighting. They weren't confirmed dead. But there were places Lily couldn't see; behind big flame-skin bodies, in craters, and other such blind spots. The missing four would have to be badly wounded at the very least, or playing dead, but that meant that they might not be dead. Yet.
The light wing in the air dove and, in a risky move, coughed out a meager bolt of fire that successfully blasted the tip of a flame-skin's tail, blowing it off and distracting the much larger dragon for long enough that the light wing he was tearing into could rally and leap up onto his back. Between the two of them they killed the flame-skin, though Lily wasn't in a position to see how. They fled back to the tunnel after, joined by the other two active combatants. Light wings on the firing line covered the retreat, blasting what had to be nearly the last of their fire at the flame-skins, who took to the air in an attempt to flee the sudden overwhelming assault.
There were three of them. None of them reached the safety of the other tunnel entrances by air, though one did manage to crawl out of sight after taking a blast to the wing and crashing to the ground near it. Nobody on the firing line spared a bolt to finish him off, because there was a reason they hadn't fired on the flame-skins previously. The gas continued to fall, but many on the line were out of fire.
Sola had not fired on the flame-skins, though that might have been because she was holding her last few shots in reserve for a possibly greater need. Not that there was likely to be one; this battle was over. The threat of pooling gas was now only a threat for the Noxious Fumes pack, meaning that no light wing would intentionally detonate any more of it. The remaining clouds of explosive fumes would take cycles to fully dissipate, and in the meantime a single light wing, two-head, or flame-skin could set the slowly dissipating mass off at will. Nobody could occupy the cavern for now.
The last of the gas continued to float down from the tunnels, dispersing over a field of dead and dying.
Lily knew, deep down, that there would be no rescuing anyone who was injured but not yet dead. If they couldn't pull themselves to safety, out of the cloud, they would choke and die in it. Someone from the Twisted Corridor pack might be able to retrieve their dead, cycles from now, and that was the extent of what they could do.
She stayed and watched for any sign of movement until the gas was too thick to see through.
O-O-O-O-O
Eleven light wings were dead; ten on the battlefield, and one of gas inhalation a little while later. A substantial number of people, lost in an offensive action that gained nothing except the renewed certainty that the Noxious Fumes pack was still willing and able to fight for the same territory they had always wanted, even if the end result was that no one could have it.
Lily, having been with Quartz all cycle, could attest to the amount of work he put into dealing with the aftermath of the failed assault. From reshuffling patrols to account for less light wings flying them, to checking to be sure the Noxious Fumes pack wasn't taking advantage of the distraction to do something elsewhere, to dealing with no fewer than three distraught light wings who had to be told, coming in from their scouting flights, that they had lost a loved one… He did it all with an unflinching, uncompromising growl.
The cycle was long and arduous, but by the end of it Lily was confident that the worst was over. After all was said and done, the battle was just that. A single battle, not a prelude to anything more. Those who still lived could rest easy… For now. So long as they didn't think about whether the Noxious Fumes pack would launch a retaliatory attack in the near future.
Lily had a hard time falling asleep after the battle, shifting around on the translucent red crystal floor every so often, seeking a comfortable enough position to override her circling thoughts. She was wide awake when Rose returned even later on, with Sola in tow. She feigned sleep as Sola settled down with a weary sigh, a few paces away, and Rose retreated to his chamber. He must have spent his entire day managing everyone who hadn't taken part in, or even known about, the battle.
She wondered if Quartz had told Rose about his plans. Surely he must have… But Lily hadn't seen it happen.
A little while later, Lily was still awake. Enough to notice when Rose quietly emerged from his chamber. He lingered in the arched hole in the wall, illuminated well by the unchanging glow of the crystal floor. She watched, her eyes only mostly closed, as he stood still and silent. A chill swept over her, bringing with it an old, unwelcome memory. Of another alpha, another night. Another time in which she pretended to sleep.
Rose's gaze passed over her, unseeing, and landed on Sola. He squinted. Blinked a few times. Yawned, and shook his head, huffing quietly.
Then he approached her. Quickly, like he had worked up the nerve to –
Nudge her, with his paw. "Sola," he murmured.
Sola lifted her head, blinking blearily. "Hmm?" she murmured.
Rose lowered his head next to hers and said something Lily didn't catch. Sola blinked a few more times and responded, her voice also too low to hear. She looked far more relaxed than Lily ever could be with an alpha looming over her like that. Nothing was wrong, not for her.
Sola rolled her wing shoulders and very lightly thumped her tail on the crystal floor next to her, away from Lily, before setting her head down and closing her eyes once more.
To Lily's immense surprise, Rose walked around her and sprawled out on the crystal where Sola's tail had been, not touching her but much closer than Lily was to Sola.
That was all that happened. Lily knew this for a fact, because she didn't sleep at all that night.
O-O-O-O-O
Lily left early the next cycle, before either Rose or Sola woke up. Her previous plans for this cycle were ash in the wind; everyone would be busy doing their part to try and make sense of the aftermath of the attack, and she was going to do the same. She wouldn't be able to concentrate on her aiming lesson with Sola or anything else, so it wasn't like she was missing out by going directly to Quartz.
When she arrived, flapping hard to lift herself above the lip of the cavern without any prior upward momentum, she found Quartz sitting in the dark, alone. In that respect this out-of-the-way cave was strictly inferior to the tunnel system in the roof of the grassy cavern, which had many sources of light and was, if not more open, then at least more expansive.
"It is not your cycle – no matter." Quartz looked her up and down. "Can you take over for the first part of this cycle? I have been called to attend a gathering of all the advisors. I had thought I would have to leave the scouts waiting for my return."
"I could," Lily said uncertainly. If everything went as it normally did, she had no doubts that she could fill in for Quartz. But what were the odds of that happening one cycle after such a disastrous fight? She was worried about having to make hard decisions she wasn't prepared to handle. "But I might not see the significance of some things you would. If no one is here then there is no chance important information will be lost, only delayed."
"If you cannot do it, you can at least come with me." Quartz coughed as he rose. "It will be good to have someone else witness their hypocrisy."
"What is this about?" Lily asked as they dropped off the ledge, going back the way she had just come. "Will the alpha be there?"
"No doubt," Quartz answered. "He has to be. Nothing will get done, otherwise. When they start blaming me," he paused to navigate a tricky intersection that was made even trickier by a hitch in his left wing, "say nothing. Say nothing at all. I do not want their attention on you. They have, questions, accusations. For me. Not you. Will not dare, to get rid of me." His breath was already coming in short pants.
"They're going to blame you for the attack." The one he came up with and coordinated.
"Yes." They flew the rest of the way without speaking, Lily because she had nothing to say and Quartz because he could not spare the breath to say anything at all. Once in the vertical cavern he led the way, down to an opening that she knew well, despite having only been there once.
Peat's cave of roots, the cramped little vertical crack in solid rock, was a strange place for a group of light wings more than three in number to meet. The wall stretched high, with blood marks everywhere, but there was little in the way of open ground to stand on. As such, Rose and his advisors – all of whom were already there – were forced to make do by standing on the parts of the spiral ramp in the opposite wall that faced out into the open air. Lily, having arrived last, was stuck perching next to Peat himself, who fretfully shuffled aside to let her up onto the spiral before returning to his nervous, unintelligible muttering.
Quartz stood alone on the narrow strip of floor between the two walls, forced to crane his neck looking up at the rest of them. Such positioning, in these circumstances, struck Lily as meaningful. Light wings standing aloft, aloof, distant and above the one they had grievances with. It was a situation that could never happen in the valley, because Claw was the only authority. He had no weight of numbers behind him, because no other opinion mattered. But looking down at the one he was unhappy with, standing high to gain a physical advantage? His rock was elevated, and he never called anyone up to stand on it with him while he passed down judgment on whatever problems were brought to him.
"Get on with it," Quartz growled to the group as a whole. "I have a pack to defend and we all know how this will end."
"Eleven light wings are dead." A side-effect of their positioning was that Lily could not see anyone else from her place beyond Peat to one side, Sulfa to the other, and Quartz down on the floor. Everyone else was well above her on higher parts of the spiral. All she had to go on were voices. Rose sounded strangely resigned. "Not in defense of our people, but in an act of aggression. An explanation is required."
"And you would do well not to assume you are untouchable," Sulfa hissed.
"The attack went badly. Worse than expected." Quartz huffed loudly. "Such is war. It was not negligence or foolishness. It happened. That is all, there is no greater meaning. I planned as best I could, took a calculated risk, and it failed. If a hatchling bites your paw you do not stop feeding it, you accept that occasionally the hatchling will get it into its tiny head to bite, and that it cannot speak so you cannot know when this will happen."
"The Noxious Fumes pack lost many–"
"Yes, Obsidian, they did," Quartz interjected, his voice dripping with disdain. "You may apologize to them for me if you ever have a chance to speak to them again. In the midst of mourning our own losses, I must have forgotten to consider the deaths of those who killed us!"
"This will only inflame tensions," the same male, Obsidian, continued. "I must question your fitness to lead, if you do not care about that."
"Dribble a few more sparks on an inferno and see if it makes a difference, this is much the same," Quartz retorted. "It was a risk. One that did not pay off. Nothing more. Unfortunate. Regrettable. But only in hindsight, knowing how it turned out. There would be no war if any of us could see the unforeseen. The only difference here is that I must make decisions that save or destroy lives in an instant. Your failed gambles take much longer to extract their price, no more."
"If you think risking lives is acceptable you should not be in a position to risk them!" Obsidian exclaimed. "There is no justification for this violence, our problems will be solved by compromise not bloodshed and you are making things worse!"
"Obsidian. Quartz." Rose's voice boomed, aided by the peculiar way in which sound bounced around in such a tight space. Everywhere Lily had been since venturing beneath the ground had some form of echo, but some were much stranger than others. "Stop. We are not here to challenge Quartz's judgment. We are here to understand exactly what happened, what went wrong, and what can be done to ensure future decisions do not have such terrible consequences."
Quartz lowered his head to look only slightly up, at Lily, and nodded. His prediction had come true; they did want to blame him for the disastrous consequences of the attack going wrong. But they weren't going to punish him for it.
Like everyone else who wasn't there, they wanted to know if there was some way the danger could have been avoided. If Quartz made some glaring oversight, if the entire endeavor was flawed from the start. Something they could point to.
Quartz began to speak, in a matter-of-fact tone, about his plans. Why he wanted to attack the grassy cavern, what he sought to gain from it, the history of such assaults and why it was technically not claimed by either pack. All things she already knew. Unlike Rose and his other advisors, Lily had been there when the plan was hatched.
She knew they wouldn't get the answer they wanted. There was no one thing that made Quartz's plans flawed in hindsight. Only that he had not known the unknowable, that there would be various enemy forces so close and so quick to respond. It was such an unremarkable plan that it had not stood out to her in any way while he was making it, one of many only unique in the location. Light wings went out on his orders and set up in various caves every few cycles. Most of the time, nothing happened. When there was an enemy watch on such a place, the light wings sent to occupy it were sometimes driven out by creeping gas or threatening stench or physical violence. No more. The grassy cavern had a history, but not one that provided anything solid to extrapolate from. Those who died the day before would not be the first to meet their end in that cavern, and they would not be the last. Both packs still wanted it and would still fight for it. There was no purpose or reason in that.
Lily did her best to listen, but she had heard it all first-paw and the conclusion was already known. Quartz would continue to lead the war efforts because he had not done anything intentionally wrong, and one bad battle did not a lost war or an incompetent leader make.
O-O-O-O-O
"You joined our pack on the verge of… interesting times. I am sorry about that. This is not how I would have wanted you to find your place."
Another full cycle of stress had not done Rose any favors. His voice was ragged, and there was something peculiarly unguarded about how he spoke to Lily the moment she walked into the alpha's chamber. It was just the two of them, so long as she didn't count the guards within earshot, which she didn't… One way or the other.
"It's not how I would have wanted it either," she said candidly. Who would want to join a pack only to immediately get pulled into their latest war? She would still prefer this to suffering under Claw, but that said next to nothing about the situation here.
"But since you are here." Rose huffed and sat down, pulling his legs in underneath his chest and hindquarters. "I would like to hear your opinion on what you have seen."
"Of Quartz?" This was not dangerous ground, not yet, but unsteady nonetheless. Rose was nominally her alpha. Quartz was her teacher. She did not want to betray one to the other.
"I would like that," Rose said tiredly. "I need a clean opinion, unmarred by hundreds of grudges or thousands of cycles of arguments. This attack."
"What do I think of it?" Here, honesty would be the best policy. Her actual opinion was rather diplomatic to begin with, and there was little she would want to add to it. "It was, I felt, routine. Something he had done before, and without trouble. This was not the first thing he planned, or the tenth, not even that cycle. It was the only one that went so badly wrong, though."
"Ill luck?" Rose asked. "Was that all?"
"No," Lily admitted. "Bad luck was part of it, but this attack was riskier than most. It was never meant to stick, unless we caught them unaware, but we underestimated how severe their response would be."
"As we all heard, and as I heard from him after the questioning," Rose sighed. "In between the growling about me not telling an old light wing how to fish."
"Nobody should speak to an alpha like that," Lily grumbled. It just wasn't right. Quartz had his attitude, and most of the time it was either justifiable or ignorable, but venting it on the alpha was beyond that.
"Quartz is Quartz," Rose huffed. "He was the same way with my Sire."
"I think he messed up a little," Lily said. "With the attack. I didn't know how much they wanted that cave, not really, but he did." He had to have. "But it was also bad luck. And maybe bad timing. Not something that should happen again. That's my honest opinion."
"And Obsidian's points?" Rose asked.
"I don't know enough about him to say whether he has the right to tell Quartz what he should have done," Lily said, "but he must not be a very good negotiator."
"Why do you say that?" Rose warbled, shifting uncertainly.
Lily realized that she was still standing, looking down on him, and casually moved to settle down opposite him. "If he truly wanted Quartz to listen, he went about it in the worst possible way. If he was good at his role, he would know that, so either he is bad at it, or he is so immature that he leaped at the chance to provoke Quartz."
"I do not know if it is as simple as that," Rose said doubtfully.
"You wanted my view, and I am only basing this on what I saw this cycle," Lily said firmly. "So far, Obsidian does not impress me. Quartz at least is competent in what he does."
"Yes, and he is the only one we have." Rose shook his head mournfully. "If I ordered him to start training more light wings like he is you, do you think he would do it?"
"I think he should," Lily said. "But I have thought that, and said that, before. He is not willing. I still do not understand why he thinks I am worth bothering with." Not in a way that she could put to words.
"He will be lucky if that is all I and the others ask of him, after what happened," Rose said. "This was unacceptable."
"But you're accepting it," Lily noted. "By not replacing him," she continued, seeing that he was about to object. "You could have told him that someone else would be taking his place."
"No, I could not have," Rose said. "We have no one skilled enough to take his place, and we will not have any such person for many cycles to come even if we force him to start training a replacement this cycle. I know this. He knows this. Obsidian and the others know it, whether or not they will admit it."
"Is that what you would be doing if you ordered him to take on more assistants?" she asked. Another, more ominous thought struck her. "Is that what you hope to do with me?"
"To do with you?" Rose's gaze fell to the floor between them. "I mean to do nothing with you."
Rose was safe. She had accepted that. Even if it did not feel that way sometimes, when her memories got the better of her. "It's not bad if you want me to help the pack. But not this way. I can't do what he does, I've barely begun learning." She was a paw deep in a bottomless ocean of experience and knowledge, whereas Quartz spent his time on the seabed.
"I know." Rose sighed. "Thank you for telling me what you think of all of this. It has been a long few cycles. But I cannot complain when others have it so much worse."
"What do you do?" Lily asked, a low purr removing any possible harshness from her words as she seized the opportunity to learn more about his daily life, a question that had bothered her since she'd arrived. "As an alpha. Where do you go, most days? What takes up your time? Why do I never see you in the vertical cavern, or by the shore?" Except for a grand total of one announcement and one sending-off ceremony. There would be more of the latter, but that did not account for even a tiny portion of the many full cycles of absence.
Claw, for all his uncountable flaws, had a presence. He was always around. Which was impressive when she considered how much of his time had to have been taken up by his lust and his many, many mates. She hated him, and in the end she hated how his lurking presence was everywhere.
Even outside of Pyre's cave.
"I am the alpha," Rose said slowly, unaware of the dark tangent Lily had fallen into. His words helped bring her back to the present moment. "Where I go is easy to answer, there is a place. You must not have seen it. If you follow the spiral in the root cavern up to the top, there is a passage to a small chamber with no other exit. That is where I meet my advisors every cycle. Where we are now is not a place for arguing and planning, it is for the alpha and his family." He looked directly at Lily. "I had not realized how empty they truly were until you and Sola came."
"What happened to your Sire and Dam?" Lily asked, having immediately noticed his meaning and guiding the conversation away from it. "Where are they now?"
"Dead," Rose sighed. "It was not a bad passing for either of them. Old injuries caught up to my Dam, and my Sire did not long outlive her. My Dam's parents still live, but they keep their distance out of respect."
Respect? Lily had next to no experience beyond the light wings of this pack, but family who stayed away did not sound respectful to her. That did seem to be the way of things here, though, so she let it go. "I'm sorry."
"I was not bothered by the question. That chamber above Peat's little domain is where I go, to return to your question." He shrugged his wing shoulders. "It is cramped and dim, but it provides privacy. My cycles go to coordinating my advisors. Most return to me for instruction and coordination far more often than Quartz does. He is quite independent."
"You tell them what to do?" This flew in the face of everything Lily had seen of Rose and his advisors.
"I coordinate and direct them, and I listen to their explanations when they tell me that something will or will not work. It takes up… Much of my time."
"All of it?" Lily asked.
Rose grimaced, a low groan escaping him. "Almost all. It takes much more time for me than it did for my Sire. He had my Dam to help and knew so much more than me about everything under stone and crystal."
He also probably had the respect of his advisors. "Are all of your advisors old enough to have served under your Sire before you?" she asked.
"Yes, most for much longer than they have served under me," Rose confirmed.
They didn't respect him. Not enough. Not like they had his Sire. "Your Sire, was he good at coordinating and directing them?" she asked. She was getting somewhere with these questions, but the destination was still a mystery.
"Very good," Rose said proudly. His ears were up, and he continued without prompting. "He often took me to watch as he sent them out. I did not like the cramped cavern up above Peat's domain, sometimes I went down to listen to Peat talk about old light wing families instead, but my Sire always came out after he sent them on their way and took me for flights around our territory. We went everywhere, every cycle. He knew everyone by name. I could never do that. I do not have the time."
"Oh." Oh. Many little things, previous observations and old confusion, finally fit together into one cohesive whole. An observation and an explanation.
The Twisted Corridor pack did not know its alpha. Not really. They did not know him because he had come to power as a matter of course, not ambition or desire, been overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, and not realized that one of the key parts of leading a pack was knowing, and being known by, said pack. He had neglected to make himself known, and in his absence they revered him like they had his Sire. Just… Without him accepting it. Without knowing who he was. They respected the position, not the person, because the person was a little too nervous, a little too stressed, and much too quiet and unassertive to understand that the truly important part of his Sire's day was never the meetings in the isolated little hole, but rather the flights afterward.
Rose was not incompetent. He was not even that badly suited to his position. He knew how to navigate his advisors, how to fly in their circles. He just didn't know, or know that he needed to know, how to relate to his people. The rest of the light wings, the ones he didn't see every day to coordinate the continued survival of the pack as a whole.
Did he really need to spend his cycles in a cramped little hole? No. But he thought he did, whether his reasoning was that he wasn't as fast as his Sire at getting things done, or something else. Maybe his advisors were taking up a lot more of his time since he was letting them. Maybe they were squabbling a lot more and using him as an intermediary, a power play, or perhaps it was something else. But whatever the reason was, it only existed in his mind. He didn't feel like he was doing as well as he should, he might never have felt like he was doing enough, so he doubled down, again and again, on 'being alpha'. The part of being alpha that he recognized.
Maybe.
She had learned not to trust herself. Not with assuming she understood everything, not even when everything made sense. She could be wrong, anyone could be wrong. Even if she did know the problem, tackling the solution on her own… No.
Her plans more often than not ended up burnt to ash. There were too many bodies in her past, and too many of them were people she loved. She wouldn't put Rose's happiness or life in her own paws, not like that.
"It sounds to me," she said, "like you could use an assistant of your own. Have you thought about asking Sola to come along some cycles? Just to see if she can give you an outside perspective."
For now, she just wanted a second opinion on what Rose actually did with his time.
O-O-O-O-O
It wasn't often Lily flew into their dark little outpost to find Quartz in the middle of grinding a young male light wing's face into the ground, while three other light wings stared, aghast, at the one-sided violence. In fact, this was the first time it had happened.
"Finally, someone with some sense," Quartz said without preamble. He punctuated his words by leaning harder on the male's head, a pinning paw pressing it ever more forcefully down. Much harder and he would start to do real damage. The trapped male's entire body quivered as he tried in vain to lay still. "You can do something very important for me this cycle," he continued, addressing Lily with total disregard for the situation she had happened upon.
Lily was not amused, and more importantly she was not all that intimidated. His vague statement was not an answer to the obvious question she knew better than to ask. "Get off him before his teeth or bones start cracking," she said firmly.
Quartz obligingly shifted his weight back and lifted the single pinning paw. The male sprang back, scraping against the wall of the cave in his rush to pull away and sit up on his hind legs. He pawed at his nose, whining pitifully.
"These," Quartz told her with a disdainful sweep of his wing, "are the fledglings I have been sent by Sulfa in her unending wisdom. They are intended to be your counterparts."
The three light wings who had, up until this point, stood aside, shifted uneasily at that. They were probably wondering what they had gotten themselves into. The injured male, on the other paw, let out a nasally cry of anger. "M'not a fledgling!"
"Yes you are," Quartz said bluntly. "In every way that matters. Lily," he turned his back on the male. "There is already too much for me to do. Can you make these fools into something useful?"
Could she? She had no idea. She knew nothing about these light wings. Three males, one already injured, and a female who was doing her best to spontaneously camouflage with using her fire or moving a single muscle. She didn't even think she knew enough to properly do the tasks Quartz regularly gave her. "I cannot teach what I do not yet fully know," she said. "And why would you use inexperienced light wings for this?"
"Everyone who could do better is already doing vital work elsewhere," Quartz reminded her. "I will not weaken our pack's defenses unless absolutely necessary. Which it may still prove to be. Can you make them useful, yes or no?"
"Useful?" She thought about it. She could start by using them as her own proxies, sending messages and acting as scouts in a more personal capacity, while making them sit in on the lectures Quartz gave whenever possible. She was a lot easier to work with than Quartz, so she would have them go through her… Eating up her time for no benefit greater than that provided by the messengers and scouts already used to doing the same things, aside from learning from Quartz.
If Quartz were easier to work with, the answer would be yes. If the war was less time-consuming, the answer would be yes. If she already had someone else sharing her position, to spread out the load of acting as Quartz's proxy, yes. But none of those things were true.
"They would be more use learning to scout or guard from experienced scouts and guards, who could then come in and share my position instead once they had trained their replacements," she concluded. The more Quartz's students knew coming in, the less likely he was to drive them off with his abrasive disapproval. Light wings he already respected, if only to do their less complicated duties, would have a much better chance of being able to work with him, and would take less time to bring up to speed.
Quartz purred, and Lily realized that she had just unwittingly passed a test. "Correct," he rumbled. "Now," he turned on the four light wings, "you heard her. Get out! Tell Sulfa that she can put you somewhere you stand a chance of attaining mediocrity!"
The injured male slunk out immediately, but the other three hesitated.
"I said," Quartz snarled, baring his teeth and taking a menacing step towards them, "get out!"
They fled, leaping one after the other over the ledge and into the dark tunnel below the overhang.
"Sulfa will learn not to stick her nose where it can be burned," Quartz growled. "She has no business telling me who to take on. Snot-nosed fools who would report back to her every time they disagreed with a decision of mine, all four of them."
"Do you really think they would do that?" Lily asked.
"She is in charge of safety, and she told me to my face that she thinks my decisions of late have made the pack unsafe," Quartz answered. "I knew then that she would try something. She cannot oust me yet, but she always has looked to the future. Putting sympathetic light wings under me to learn? It would only be a matter of time before she brought them before the alpha and had one or all of them take my place. Fool that she is, she would do it before they were ready and with no consideration for whether they were suitable in the first place."
"And you don't want to be replaced," Lily added.
"Not by someone less capable," Quartz grumbled, drawing his claws in as he slowly calmed down. "Or with the wrong attitude. Obsidian could never keep the pack alive in my position, not even if he could think ten times as fast and fight off twenty crawlers on his own. He would hunker down and offer gestures of peace until we had no more to give, and then bemoan our lack of generosity even as we were slaughtered. Those fools would be no better."
"Do you know them like you know Obsidian?" Lily asked, genuinely curious. Was it paranoia and unfounded certainty, or did Quartz have solid reasons? She did agree that Obsidian was wholly unsuited to leading a pack's war efforts, and would be no matter how much knowledge was beaten into his head. But she didn't know the others, the ones who were actually being proposed to learn.
"I know that Sulfa does not have the right mindset either, and I know she chose those four from dozens of options. I know she is confident they will be loyal to her above me, and that she thinks they would be safer in my position than I am. She disqualified them by choosing them. Her judgment is sound, so I trust that she successfully selected for the wrong qualities." Quartz coughed once, a low, rough sound. "I hope I sent them running hard enough that she will think twice about this. If she does not, I expect she will try and go through the alpha." He looked at her and tilted his head, an unspoken question.
"If Rose wanted insight into your decisions he would ask me, not approve Sulfa's schemes," Lily said. She intended to leave out the fact that he had already asked and received her honest opinion. She didn't want to be used to influence Rose, and more than that, she didn't want to expose Quartz to that temptation by putting the idea in his mind any more than could be avoided.
And if he did ask her to lean on Rose… Well, at least she would know where he stood. Though she couldn't deny that the prospect of him doing such a thing made her uncomfortable. Rose was good about not asking her to influence Quartz, and she hoped that Quartz would be the same.
"I doubt that she told him she was planning this," Quartz conceded. "And she is not one to twist the truth. This is probably the end of it."
Distant flapping, audible at the edge of Lily's hearing, caught her attention. The first scout returning from his route.
Time to get back to work.
O-O-O-O-O
The foreign tunnel stank of stink-spines and blood. Lily's nose itched with the wretched scent, and she resorted to breathing through her mouth as her light wing escort led her deeper in. She was a full cycle's flight from Twisted Corridor territory, out on the far edge of the tunnel systems either pack bothered with, and her cycle up until this point had consisted of slow, tediously careful travel. This was not an improvement, but at least she was finally doing what she had come all this way to do. "Where are the bodies?"
"Up ahead, obviously," her guide remarked. "It is a tunnel. Where else could they be?"
Lily coughed, grimacing at the taste lingering in the back of her throat. "Hmm," she grumbled. The corpses could have been pulled to the tunnel entrance, at the very least. Though she would have had to go in anyway, to see where they were found. She was here to provide a thorough, trained eye.
"Here." Her guide stepped aside, pressing himself against the wall of the tunnel, and Lily squeezed past him to see what she had come for.
Her stomach flipped, but she clenched her throat and rode out the sudden nausea. The smell was bad, worse now that she knew what it came from, but the sight before her was just as nauseating in its own right.
A section of tunnel about half a winglength across was scored clean, grimy surfaces clearly separated by a pitted, scraped patch of rock that extended across the floor and up the left wall. The stone there was lighter, where it was not stained by blood and other unnamable fluids seeping from the mess in the middle of it all.
Two bodies. Stink-spines, by size and by stench. Dead for some time. Their deaths were not easy or clean, but the exact cause was obscured by there being so little of them left.
Obscured, or perhaps revealed. "You did not mention the ground," Lily remarked.
"Is it important?" her guide asked. "I have never seen the like, but I do not know this tunnel well. This is my first trip along this route."
His first trip here, and probably not far from his first trip ever. He wasn't much older than Lily herself. Not old enough to have fought in the last major flare-up in this war. Certainly not old enough to have seen the aftereffects of acid-spitters. She only recognized the sight because Quartz insisted she learn all of the things that could kill her, and exactly what they did to scale, flesh, and stone alike.
"Acid-spitters," she told him. "I've seen enough."
"Already?" he yelped. "Why did we fly all the way back here if–"
"Does this tunnel lead anywhere near the surface?" she asked, cutting through his indignant complaint before he could finish it. She turned around and fixed him with a very unimpressed stare. Unspoken was the fact that if he was better informed, she would not have wasted a good two cycles on a trip to determine the origin of dead stink-spines not killed by light wings. There were many other things she could be doing with her time.
"No," he answered, caught off-guard.
"Then we shouldn't linger." There were two things she knew about acid-spitters as they related to the conflict between the Noxious Fumes pack and the Twisted Corridor pack. One was that there were acid-spitters living in a place that was located such that they had to pass through the former's territory to reach the surface. The other was that they sometimes worked with the Noxious Fumes pack in exchange for safe passage.
This was not an acid-spitter fighting his or her way through if this tunnel did not connect to anywhere approaching the surface, so she had to assume it was the latter. Somehow. Despite the dead bodies.
Or perhaps it was something else entirely. There was no way to know. The acid-spitter might be long gone.
Or there could be invisible eyes looking at her right now.
O-O-O-O-O
"Nothing came of it, though," Lily concluded. "I felt like someone was watching me the entire way back, but that was all it was. A feeling. There was definitely an acid-spitter there, but I don't know where it could be now." She kicked at a pebble, sending it skittering into the water.
Sola hummed thoughtfully as she opened her mouth and methodically lined up a shot on the distant black of the underground lake. This cycle's lesson involved something that Lily happened to know about already, the way that water changed angles. The purpose was more abstract; becoming more actively aware of that change instead of firing and letting her instincts sort the difference out. As an actual skill it was less than worthless, but the exercise of taking something she did without thinking and reclaiming it as something she actively considered was valuable in its own right.
Also, it was something simple that gave Sola plenty of time to ask her about her first multi-cycle trip away from the pack for Quartz.
"That is not good," Sola said after a moment. "I would much rather know where the invisible danger is. I suppose that is how the Noxious Fumes pack must feel all the time, so perhaps it is more fair this way."
"Fair has no place in war," Lily said. "But I do know what you mean." Quartz didn't have much to say about the ways in which acid-spitter camouflage differed from their own, but the details he could give her were all discouraging. They lacked the telltale shimmer and did not need to flame themselves to disappear from sight. If they had a limit, no one knew what it was. Without some form of weakness to rely on, she was left hoping for any possible acid-spitter spy to make a mistake that she, or someone else, would catch.
Or that there was no spy at all. That was the worst-case scenario of one being sighted at all. "The details do not really line up, though, so I am not too worried," she told Sola as they stared into the water.
"Was there or was there not an acid-spitter?" Sola asked.
"There was, but one who killed two stink-spines," Lily reminded her. "We are used to having them as enemies or not caring about them at all, so we have to assume the worst, but usually the ones that work with the Noxious Fumes pack don't kill their dragons." If she had to guess? The acid-spitter wanted to go to the surface, like those before them, and lied to the Noxious Fumes pack to get there. The Stink-spines were taking her to do something for the war, and when she got far enough away, she killed them and set off on her own once more. Not in the right part of the cavern system to get to where she wanted to be, but free and past the Noxious Fumes pack.
If that was what happened, Lily would wish the acid-spitter luck. She had fond, if melancholy, memories of the one that had shown her the way to the sinkhole, back when she was traveling alone. She'd not even known what they were, back then, but there were not many who could camouflage and were not light wings.
Sola fired into the water at a shallow angle, and Lily belatedly remembered what she was supposed to be doing. Figuring out, consciously, how the water changed the angle of things. It was hard to tell from looking instead of doing, as there wasn't much to look at in the water itself. It was deep, dark, and studded with distant light sources on the bottom of the lake. Fish were intermittently silhouetted from below. Those silhouettes would sometimes be in places she didn't expect, and that was what she was supposed to be thinking about. Seen from above there was no displacement, but at an angle like this?
She understood the concept, but she wasn't getting it like Sola said she would. It was just… something that happened. If she looked at something in the water and did her best to hit it with a blast of fire, she could count on succeeding. How, though, remained a mystery.
A duo of light wings flew into Lily's vision, far from the shore. One had just shimmered her way out of camouflage, while the other was fully visible. They were fishing, diving down to retrieve the fish killed by their perfunctory blasts.
Lily recognized Agate right away; he was a familiar sight, and she could probably pick him out of a crowd after all of the time spent flying around him under Galen's uncompromising tutelage. The other was Posie, which was a heartening surprise. She hadn't heard a word of that entire affair since she broke up the four-way argument before it could properly kick off, and disillusioned Posie. Agate had never brought it up again, and while she knew something must have happened in the meantime, she had little free time to press Agate about it. If he was willing to let the matter lie, so was she.
Her attention was inexorably drawn to the two of them, rather than the water. It was too much to hope that Sola wouldn't notice. "Something the matter?" Sola asked.
"I am glad to see Posie and Agate have made up." She wondered if anything had actually been resolved. How had Posie approached Agate and the others? Was she on similarly good terms with Tellur and Braun? Had they accepted that she had no interest in them? If so, Agate was handling it extremely well. She would have expected him to mope around for a moon-cycle, at least.
"Have they?" Sola watched the distant interplay of the two light wings with sharp eyes. "She does not look happy with him right this moment."
Posie and Agate, having each retrieved their fish, had soared upward to settle into a safe glide high above the water's surface. Posie was, at the moment, busy veering away from Agate as he tried to offer her one of his fish. He swung it from his teeth once, twice, three times, swooping up and down in an ill-advised attempt to get close enough to toss it to her, while she jerked out of the way to avoid him crashing into her.
"That's just how they are, always messing around," Lily assured her. The four of them did stupid things on the regular. She couldn't exactly cite the lurker incident – they'd gotten away with it after all – but Sola would get her meaning.
Agate flew in one final time, committed to the toss by releasing the fish at the height of his arc, and swooped underneath it, clearly angling to brush against Posie's underside as she soared overhead to snatch it with her talons.
Instead Posie backwinged, quickly took aim, and blasted the falling fish out of the sky, the explosive pressure sending Agate tumbling down. Toward the water.
Lily's heart leaped into her chest as she watched, her wings rising impotently. Agate flipped and flailed at the air, knocked completely off-balance by the detonation so close to his head, and quickly lost most of his height. Posie dove down below him, then around him, fully in control but powerless to arrest his fall without fouling her own flight, and for a moment Lily was certain that he wouldn't recover in time. That he did, snapping his wings in to control his tumble before swinging them back out again in a bone-creakingly hard swoop, was not at all a sure thing. He could just as easily have failed that last-moment recovery and crashed into the unforgiving waves, far from dry land or help of any kind.
"Foolish fledgling!" Sola barked. "She could have killed him!"
"She knows that now," Lily said anxiously. Agate flew with shaky flaps, and immediately veered away from Posie as he worked to regain all of the height he had lost and then some, soaring close to the distant roof of the cavern. Posie, for her part, circled beneath him for a little bit. When he abruptly changed direction and barked down at her, she let him go. They were both angling for the shore, but opposite ends.
"Playing with fire, not expecting someone else to be burned," Sola growled dangerously. "I am going to go give her a talk. That was unacceptable, and she will listen all the more attentively when I am the one snarling at her about it!"
Lily wondered if Posie was going to be forced into Sola's lessons. Only time would tell, as she had higher priorities than tagging along to listen to Posie's admittedly well-deserved safety lecture. "I'm going to make sure Agate is okay."
They both took to the air, with Sola gliding over to Posie while Lily flew for the exit tunnel. She hoped that it wouldn't be too hard to track Agate down. He could have gone anywhere in his panic, ducked into one of the many long, cramped tunnels or flown into the largest flock of light wings he could find.
Or he could be on the ground, in the vertical cavern, in plain sight the moment Lily stepped out into the open from the tunnel. He looked okay, though perhaps still slightly dazed. "Agate!"
"Lily!" Agate barked back, his eyes focusing on her. "Hello. Were you, uh," he looked over her shoulder as she approached, "on the shore? You did not see–"
"You almost drowning in the lake?" Lily huffed. "Are you okay? Is your head ringing? You can hear me without ringing or distortion?"
"Sire always said I have a hard head," Agate assured her. "Look, do not spread this around? If Braun and Tellur hear they will be insufferable."
"If the three of you continue to ignore Posie's feelings, someone is going to get hurt." Lily could all but see the slow, mossy boulders of stubbornness in Agate's head, refusing to move even with the weight of bodily harm pitted against them. "It might be you. Or it might be her."
"They will not get a chance to hurt her," Agate growled.
Perhaps she needed to be more direct. "Stop pestering her. Tell Tellur and Braun to do the same. Or I will enlist your Sire, your Dam, their parents, and the alpha himself to put a stop to it."
Agate shot her a hurt look. "Lily, you said you would help me."
"I am helping you not die, not scare Posie, not repulse her, and not ruin whatever shreds of friendship you still have!" Lily stomped her paw on the ground, then again when Agate opened his mouth to complain. "All three of you must stop. Step back. Keep Posie out of your stupid contest."
"Oh!" Agate's ears shot up. "I understand!"
"Good." He had better.
"I have to beat them before I approach Posie!" he said.
A lingering desire to not burn her rapport with Agate to the ground held Lily's tongue. Mostly. "Yes. You do that. Because that is exactly what I was saying." It would, at least, keep them away from Posie for a little while.
Agate nodded happily and leaped into the air.
Lily, for her part, turned to go back to the shore. She needed to take a long, silent, solitary flight. She was taking a lot of those lately. Blowing something up would also serve to release the frustration she kept pent up inside, but after Sola's justified anger she didn't feel like using her fire to destroy things.
Agate could have died today. It was only dumb luck that his disorientation was not fatal. Didn't this pack have enough problems without them doing stupid things to each other? The place and the history might be different, but light wings were light wings no matter where they lived.
O-O-O-O-O
For all that the assault on the grassy cavern was a painful loss for the Twisted Corridor pack, it did seem to have had a chilling effect on the war as a whole. On their side of things, Quartz had reluctantly scaled back on offensive actions, only taking the most reliable opportunities to interfere with or ambush Noxious Fumes dragons. On the Noxious Fumes' side, the ambushes had all but stopped, and they were even more elusive than before. The number of sightings by scouts dropped off a cliff, and didn't recover in the following cycles. The evidence of an acid-spitter in the area remained just that, evidence for something otherwise unconfirmed.
This did not mean that she and Quartz had endless free time on their paws, but there was more time for Quartz to lecture while they waited in between scout reports. Sometimes he took advantage of that, and sometimes they sat in silence.
When Quartz spoke up, breaking said silence late one cycle, Lily expected another lesson on some obscure but nevertheless relevant topic that had flown into Quartz's mind and refused to fly away. Different rock types and how they absorbed gas, or the dangers of flying downward in unknown tunnels, or something similar.
"You do know that you are flying into dangerous territory?" Quartz asked her.
Lily's first reaction, once his words sunk in, was to look around and wave her wings, visually and physically checking the seemingly empty air around her. Their slanted, dark cave in the maze of tunnels was clear, as far as she could tell. Also… She wasn't flying. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"Not like that," he scoffed. "Not physical danger."
"Then you should not have said it like that," she retorted.
"Hmph." He rose to his paws, stiffly wrenching his neck back and forth in a pained approximation of a stretch. "I meant that your name is being bandied about. You and the alpha are close."
"Not this again," Lily huffed. "Baseless talk. I thought you were better than that." Close was exactly the right word. Not together, not touching, but not as far apart as she would be comfortable with.
"I know you are not sleeping with him," Quartz clarified, entirely unamused. "The talk, among his other advisors, is about whether they would approve if you were. They did not ask me, they know I could not care less so long as he gets on with ensuring we still have an alpha if something happens to him, even one too young to rule. The pack has survived a change of ruling roots, but we do not need that happening right now. I thought you should know."
"I'm never going to be with him." She was entirely sure of that. "So it doesn't matter."
"Fledgling, what part of this sounds like you'd be asked?" Quartz demanded. "Think. They do not want you with him. I am telling you this so that you can get ahead of it and make sure he will not ask you himself, whether or not they would approve."
"He, as in Rose?" She ignored her growing anxiety. It was stupid to be afraid of the unknown when the alternative was making it known and dealing with it.
"Yes, Rose, the alpha." Quartz seemed to have had enough of her inability to keep up with his own line of thought, turning around to examine the empty lip of the cave's ledge. "You are close, but not that kind of close. If you want to stay close, you need to clear the air. Make sure he does not have expectations. You and the other one." He grimaced at the very mention of Sola. "We both know she will not take a warning from me seriously, so do us all a favor and keep my name out of it when you tell her."
"Sola would not ignore a well-intentioned–"
"They are going to start pushing him again," Quartz overrode her objections. "This will not be about what he wants. We have let him go about not so much as looking at other light wings for long enough. I do not care who he ends up with, not like they do, but I agree that he needs to pick someone and get on with it. You came up as possibly having his eye already. Do I have to say it all again in another way, or do you understand now?"
"You shouldn't be pushing him in the first place," Lily growled. "That's not up to you." Nothing good would come of pushing an alpha to take a mate. Especially not one who had avoided doing so up until now.
"If he were any other light wing I would agree and claw the others for wasting my time whining about proper mates," Quartz growled back at her. "But we need an alpha."
"You don't seem to," Lily retorted. "You run this entire war on your own."
"The rest of them need an alpha, then. Do you see me bothering with the others, listening to them complaining and then sending them on their way?" Quartz opened his wings and snarled, though the gesture was not directed at her. "No, I can do one thing and I can do it well. Until they get around to replacing me because I made one hard decision too many. No one can be allowed to be irreplaceable. Not me, and not him."
How was she meant to argue with that? "If he picks a mate today and dies tomorrow, you still won't have a new alpha."
"Which is why he should have been made to choose a mate long ago," Quartz said. "We have given him time. A lot of it. He was not forced to choose, and in exchange he would choose before we got around to forcing him to once more. He has not held up his end of the deal."
"It's still wrong," she sighed. Perhaps they thought it necessary, perhaps they would make it happen, but nobody else in the pack was treated this way. Not in this pack. Quartz wouldn't understand where she was coming from, because he didn't know.
In truth, she had two completely separate reasons to object to this. On the one paw, Rose was a person and deserved the same choice everyone was entitled to. The same one Lily wanted for herself, which was to say 'no' and be left alone, no further questions. On the other paw, she feared what might happen if Rose's advisors prodded Rose toward the very behaviors and thoughts that she feared he might already be having. If they gave him a convenient excuse…
Only the former could be argued.
"Wrong but necessary." At least Quartz agreed with her on that.
"How would they force him to pick a mate?" she asked, after a moment. "He's the alpha."
"That is how," Quartz answered. "The alpha must have one of their blood to succeed them. If he cannot or will not hold to that, now that we are done allowing him to get away with it? The pack as a whole will not know it, but he will only be left as the alpha until we come to a time of stability long enough to weather a change in the roots of the alpha. He will be made to leave. Permanently."
So they would tell him that his time was up, and then exile him to put in someone else. A controlled change, with all of the downsides of losing an alpha without a successor. The only thing that made such a change better than actually losing their alpha was being able to control when it happened, and Rose not dying to make it happen.
"So that's it then," she asked, somewhat bitterly. "Will he be forced to take a mate next cycle, then? The one after that?"
"We are not heartless, fledgling," Quartz griped. "And the others are not so unambitious as that. He will be told soon, but even if he meekly agrees to the first light wing we put forward, it will take many cycles for the others to come to an agreement on who to propose. Obviously he cannot choose someone on his own, so we must give him a few specific choices and let him make his decision then. There will be plenty of time for negotiation and petty grudges and fighting for advantage, which I will be ignoring. You do not want him, and that is that as far as I am concerned."
How hypocritical of him, to care so much for her choice, but not for his own alpha's choice. Though if she were to say that, he would probably say that he would support any choice his alpha made, so long as he finally chose someone.
"What about you?" Lily demanded. "Should the pack decide that you need to take a mate in case you die?" Or, another mate? She didn't actually know–
"Never tell my Dam that, she will bark your ears off about my decisions and I cannot have my replacement deafened," Quartz said with a rumble. "It is not my roots that the pack needs to continue. Just my knowledge and the right way of thinking, with as much experience as possible."
"I'm not that." She chose to voice her doubt now, because if she held it in and everything fell apart later she would only have herself to blame for not speaking up.
It had happened before.
"No," Quartz agreed. "But you will be. You already have the right attitude, and that is the only thing I cannot teach. I know, because I did try."
"What attitude?" Lily pressed. "What makes me different?" She wasn't brisk and uncompromising. She didn't bark at everyone who mildly inconvenienced her. She didn't dedicate every waking moment to her duties. She didn't have the same unshakeable strength. He sometimes called her a fledgling because he didn't see her as an equal, as an adult. The one fight they were both in, he was forced to save her life. What, in all of those differences, did he see that made him willing to tolerate her? She had done nothing to distinguish herself from the many other light wings he knew.
Quartz looked her in the eye and lowered his head slightly so that their eyes were level. "You kill unwillingly, without hesitation."
Unwilling and without hesitation? Lily let that contradiction roll around in her thoughts for a long moment, trying to make sense of it. He might have chosen his words poorly, but that did not match with his current silence as he waited to see how she responded.
He had only seen her kill once. The crawler, many cycles ago. That entire fight… There was no time to hesitate, only time to make decisions and live with the consequences. She didn't want to do any of what had happened there, in so far as she wished the entire affair had never come about in the first place.
In a sense, he was entirely correct in saying that she was unwilling but acted without hesitation. The contradiction was not a contradiction at all if she separated motive and action. Discontent with the situation and what needed to be done, but decisive in acting according to the world as it was, not as she wished it would be.
If he was looking for something as nuanced as that, it was no wonder she was his only student. Even if other light wings could behave that way, how would he ever know? Most light wings were not drawn into life-or-death struggles directly under his eye. He could not be everywhere.
"Is that it?" she asked, her voice low.
"I will not sing your praises until you feel reassured," Quartz said gruffly. "You are still weak and inexperienced. There is much for you to learn about everything under stone and crystal, even the things that those hatched here take for granted. You are not hardened to the vicious realities of this war."
All of which was true.
Quartz's ears raised. His expression softened, just a little. "You are nowhere near ready to replace me, but there is a path from now to that future cycle, and the path is open. Nothing blocks your way. You already have the most important part. So long as you commit to flying that path, you will make it to the end."
The end, where she replaced Quartz in continuing this ceaseless, seemingly unending war? Deep under the ground, fighting for a pack that was better than her old one but not without problems of its own? Dedicating her time, her very life, to this struggle like he had?
Maybe some of her inner turmoil showed, or maybe Quartz's thoughts were following the same general flight path, because he let out a weary sigh. "If you are willing. No decision need be made now, or anytime soon. The path to succeeding me and the path to only being one of my most useful intermediates is the same for a long while yet. Linara served well, and she was never going to be the next advisor of War. I… should have chosen others to replace her, even if they weren't quite right to replace me. But it was not necessary for a long time."
It was now. Lily couldn't be the only one acting as his proxy, not forever. Regardless of her eventual choice, the one that as of now she had no idea how to make. But this discussion was no longer about that, and it would cheapen his admission to change the subject.
"I'll think about it." She recalled his original warning. "It would be helpful to not have some torrid drama with the alpha in the meantime," she said dryly. "I'll be sure to warn Sola, too." She would need the warning. That thing with Rose sleeping by her was already troubling. Lily only hoped that they could both get out of this without too much trouble.
"Sola does not have the right mindset," Quartz said abruptly. His ears drooped. "But she was much better than I gave her credit for, at one time. Be careful with your words. You cannot kill and drag them back once you let them loose."
No, one could not. And one could not put words in someone's ear after the fact, or change their minds, or convince them not to do something… It was all one and the same, a failing of time. Every moment came once and only once.
Lily was thankful for the blank walls and darkness of the dismal little cave around them. She would have felt terribly out of place waiting for the last few scouts in a cheery, bright place. Between the danger of the ultimatum soon to be delivered to Rose, and the new weight of possibility Quartz had chosen to give her…
She had a lot to think about, and none of it was good.