***
The strike sounded far less horrific than he expected, far less horrific than it looked, and the world had slowed to a crawl around the nexus of their private tragedy. Florentine cartwheeled against the curve of Ruth's taloned fingers, shedding petals and feathers and a thin spray of rubies as she came unwillingly back to earth.That impact, it turned out, sounded exactly the way Raymond imagined.
She landed with a sickening crunch amidst a fluttering cloud of feathers. As she fought weakly to rise, red oozing across the pink flesh of her muzzle and blossoming through the matted mess of her broken wing, the tarrasque rumbled her triumph, reaching out again for the killing blow.
Raymond got there first. Eyes ablaze, he threw himself in the monster's path and screamed a challenge, tail blade flying of its own accord and raking the flesh at the base of one massive talon. The blow only just bit into her dense hide and dulled the killing edge of his weapon in a single stroke, but that was enough. She recoiled, keening unhappily as she curled the slashed hand against her chest. The haze of excitement and fixation drained from her half of the link, uncertainty welling up to take its place. Her spine drooped.
The red stallion heard a second thud behind him; he hesitated to turn his back upon the cowed titan lest she resume her deadly game, but need spurred him to action at last.
Flora had collapsed into a graceless, crumpled heap where she'd fallen, her breaths coming in ragged gasps that painted the brittle mountain grasses a little redder with every exhale. Ugly purple bruises forced their way to the surface of her traumatized skin in a dozen places. Her wing was a heap of leafy kindling wet with red sap, sticking out at odd angles from beneath her broken body. But the blood welling up beneath her like a slow-flooding fountain was from none of these places.
His heart pounded out a frantic tattoo in his ears, every beat a stroke of the clock counting down Florentine's life as it spilled from her like a cascade of rough garnets.
Breathe.
The flower maiden's hind leg was a hunk of bloody meat. Hidden - somehow - in the dark swath of red coating the limb was a deep, weeping gash that seemed almost to pulsate with the unconscious mare's heartbeats. Somewhere amidst the chaos, one of Ruth's talons had nicked her leg clean to the tibia, opening up the major artery there in a deceptive and insidious fashion.
Breathe.
I'm sorry.
Not now. Even his thoughts bristled as he stared at the Dusk Queen's broken body like an unblooded novice on the cusp of his first battle. Staunch the wound. There was little that Raymond could do for her here, but if he didn't get control of that gaping red maw then there would be nothing left of her to treat. He danced in place, gaze darting here and there for something that might even loosely resemble a strip of leather, until a silver glint caught his eye at her throat.
The dagger: it lay sheathed at her throat on its fine yet functional chain beautiful yet ugly in the destruction that its unpredictable power had wrought. "Damn you, Flora."
He ripped the trinket from around her neck and slid it over her grievously-injured leg instead, the chain quickly going dark and slick with blood as he pulled it to just above the ugly gash. Then, using the hilted dagger itself as a makeshift crank, he tightened the chain until its links nearly bit into her flesh themselves. The torrent slowed to a grisly trickle under the applied pressure and, met with a modicum of temporary success, Raymond left the unconscious mare's side with swift, robotic efficiency.
She was lucky they'd met in the mountains.
Woundwort flourished here, and though much of it had already begun to die off with winter perishingly close, an aggressive search yielded enough of it to suit his purpose provided he wasn't particularly picky - which he wasn't, because god. This he crushed into the blood-soaked soil around her, and with the black mess he produced a macabre if serviceable yarrow poultice which he slathered deep into the wound like a construction worker filling a hole with concrete.
At last he addressed the tarrasque, who at this point stood drooping in what passed for a corner when one is as massive as she.
Ruth.
She stirred. I'm sorry.
The red stallion's eyes flashed dangerously; she shrank from his quiet rage through their shared connection. Take us to Terrastella as fast as you can. There was a threat in his words he was not quite willing to give voice, for the thought alone unsettled him. How does one carve one's revenge out of the hide of so great a beast? How does one punish an errant creature so harshly, when its only sin is that of its very nature? But her transgression was writ in broad strokes in the blood painting the cliffside, and the tourniquet would not hold forever.
Like a seething cat he supervised Ruth's efforts to hoist the broken mare carefully in one taloned hand. Only when she rested limply in the tarrasque's palm, broken wing dangling like a half-discarded cloak from between her fingers, did Raymond climb aboard also. It took but a thought to point Ruth in the right direction.
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
@
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
