White Mountain Sun

Here at the Beginning of the End

He is unsuspecting.

He stands, sunning himself, watching the land spread before him, the emerald grass and sapphire skies above as blue as his round scales. His largest claws quietly tap the rough stone beneath him, a song that ticks down to his demise. And he closes his slit yellow eyes, sighing, believing that he is safe. That he is king. That none may befell him so long as he stands proud.

He does not know of what lurks in the shadows behind him.

He is blissfully ignorant, although arrogance fills the void, and as such, he holds his head high.

He is prey.

I am predator.

We meet again.

...

"BLOODY HELL, RIVER! Don't do that!"

He shot me a glare nearly as sharp as sickle claws in my throat as he was recovering from the shock, black-and-blue hide trembling. "Gah. Why are you always sneaking up on me like that? Don't you ever want to try that on Skyfall or Foxtrot?" His bright eyes were annoyed, but I wasn't worried. He'd get over it. He always did.

With a high-pitched chirrup, I nudged his shoulder with my green-blue one, feather against scale. "I'm not nearly that bad, Nighty. And you should expect that by now─I'm a hunter. And you're always posing up here, like a haughty wannabe leader. You're just begging to be slammed down."

Nightwind huffed and turned his body away from me, though he let his twist back to look me in the eye. "Hunter? What's there to hunt, River? Rocks and birds?"

Nighty was always like that─play-fighting with me and letting our pretend battles slip over into conversation, sharing our deepest desires and dreams and then poking fun at them. He never meant his insults, and I never meant mine. We were siblings, packmates, friends, after all, and we were young. We hadn't seen what the real world was like yet. What else was to be expected of us?

At the mention of birds, I glanced to the clouds above us, partially because I rolled my eyes, partially because I've always liked watching them soar above us on some unknown journey. They scream a lot. "First of all, there's you. Second of all, maybe the humans will give us a live animal next time. Wouldn't that be great? I could flex my claws!" To demonstrate, I showed him one of my hands, poking him with a claw. He glared again.

"The only place you'll be getting a live animal is outside the gates. And that will never happen." He sounded so certain of that fact. He was sure that we would spend the rest of our lives behind these walls, waiting for something that would never come. Trapped infinity.

I was silent for a moment; I still don't know why. For some reason, it was taking everything in me to force my next words out, and even then, my voice cracked. "Then I'll get out. I won't be a slave."

"The humans will stop you. You saw what happened to Bluebird." He looked at me with yellow eyes, trying to seem as though he was an all-knowing, ethereal forgotten god, but we both knew he was making this up as he went along.

"Bluebird didn't know what she was doing," I retorted. "I will."

I wouldn't have said that if she was with us, though; try to hide it as I might, Bluebird scared me. She was larger and stronger and scarred and angry, with a magnificent crest of blue feathers─the reason for her name─covering the back of her head, so if someone tried to kill her with a bite to the back of the skull, she would simply drown them in fuzz. Crooked yellow fangs protruded from her jaw when her mouth snapped shut, her slit pupils focusing on her next victim. The last time we had spoken to her, she'd threatened to break down the border separating us and retaliate in a way that would "make us very sad for a very long time" and "make sure neither of us could walk right".

We didn't talk to Bluebird a lot.

In fact, we hardly ever spoke to the Adults. They were big, with thick hides of tough scales and feathers mixed together in ways that didn't make sense at times, with pointed teeth and forked tongues, with snarls and smirks and growls and curses. Scars littered their arms, their backs, their tails, even their snouts, and scars past hinted in their voices as they spoke. They lived inside the gates like the rest of us, but they weren't like us at all.

Many things were inside the gates, from the strange long-necked creatures we'd only ever glimpsed in passing to the warm and confusing Inside. The Inside was the only thing most of us knew when we first broke into the world. We think that the humans call it a "building". It was blinding white-and-brown, runs alongside our pens, and was as tall as the trees I've seen growing outside the gates. When the air turned cold and the wind began to bite, we were called to come live on the bottom part of the Inside, where the ground was straw and it smelled of sterilization and molting. Where we lived was just one of the many rooms inside, separated from the rest of the Inside, but we were content.

The upper half of the Inside was called the Balcony. Most of it was built normally, but the part facing us was open-air with a fence protecting the humans from falling in with us. We could look up and see the bizarre two-legged creatures strolling past, and sometimes, they'd drop treats for us to snap up. Every day, they made a bit of a show doing that, for the many clapping humans beyond the clear wall that fenced us off from exploring the rest of the land inside the gates. Such strange creatures, humans.

How could Nighty say such awful things about them, even as a joke? The humans were our friends! I mean, sure, they'd stopped Bluebird from breaking the clear wall on her side going on a murderous rampage, but they had to make sure she didn't hurt herself. And yes, they would sometimes stick us with needles, or let very young human children press their sticky faces against the clear wall, or parade the very youngest of us around on harnesses (I certainly had memories of that confusing time), but they were just trying to help! The humans had their reasons to keep us here, didn't they?

A selfish reason.

But that's ridiculous.

...is it, though?

Head shooting up abruptly, I forced my mind into a blank white state, though of course that didn't last long. Pity.

Stop acting like a bird flying into a windshield! Pay attention to something else.

And again, I yanked my eyes from the ground to look up at the balcony above us. Two humans, one of which I didn't recognize, were making their merry way arcoss the Balcony without a care in the world.

By chance, one of them looked back─pale all over and with narrowed green eyes, green eyes that met mine, green like grass and trees and emeralds and flowers' leaves and everything that she had and I didn't.

Time stopped.

And I snapped.

Fierce and fiery as a flare from the sun, I forced anger from every inch of me into my gaze─my message─and sent it to the human.

I HATE YOU!

I didn't know why that thought was there.

I didn't care.

She was a human.

She was free to walk past the gates.

I was not. I was trapped. And she had the key.

And, I promised, I would do anything─even, especially, sink my teeth into her throat, watch her squirm and fall limp beneath me─to have just what she did.

The treasure.

The gold.

The freedom.

A/N: It's not my best, but it'll do. Shall fix later.