Pravda’s mind envisions sporadic images of the hunt: the rush of foliage, too-fast, and the blur of animals as they leap frantically from Prigovora’s path. Everything is a blur of colour and sound, and the effect is nearly nauseating for the young stallion as he walks quietly through Eluetheria Plains. What he sees before him is quite a contrary image; the scenic beauty of a setting sun and grass that sways waist-high. He is walking through an ocean of bright green, where it dips and rises with the soft breeze. He has never seen anything so vast, aside from the sea—and he marvels at it, doing everything within his power to focus on this, in front of him. There had been pictures in the Biblioteka Svyashchennikov, but they did nothing to capture the largeness of it, how it was all encompassing—
Prigovora lunges at a fawn somewhere in the dense plain, bedded down, and Pravda feels a second rush of nausea at the violence. He flinches at the abrupt attack. He hadn’t even seen or sensed the creature was there! A mass of dozing does and fawns burst from the grass where they lay, stampeding in a blind panic from Prigovora. One doe leaves her child. Pravda feels it, martyred, in the jaws of his monster. Pravda heart swells, almost as though it were his own sentiment, his creature’s delight. This was nothing compared to their bond in Dobrodetel’Nyy—and it was sickening to nearly feel the crack of bone as Prigovora’s teeth slice, razor-like, through hot flesh. Stop showing me, Pravda pleaded, closing his eyes.
It was too late. He nearly retched.
Somehow, he didn’t. Pravda focuses on his breathing behind closed lids, in the darkness. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The raptor finishes feasting, rapidly, ripping off entire chunks of flesh and bone to swallow whole. From their bond, Pravda does not receive words in answer, only feelings, and the feelings are this:
A wendigo’s hunger. Prigovora is not satisfied. The creature feels the coolness of the night settling on the grassland, and the strength of his own limbs. He wants to hunt, to feast.
Pravda hates himself for it. Fine, he thinks. Go.
And the primordial beast is off, cutting a sharp line through the grass that disguises him. Pravda follows at an easy, mile-eating lope from some distance behind. He sees the images as they come:
Prigovora nears a small cluster of trees. He slows, gouging the earth beneath his claws, and drops to all four limbs. Quadrupedal, the raptor edges into the trees and dense undergrowth, nostrils flaring. There is something here, in the decaying leaves—the scent of rot cannot disguise the scent of flesh. The raptor blinks, and now everything Pravda sees is what the raptor sees--the grassland before him is replaced with the forest in front of Prigovora. Pravda stumbles so hard he falls to his knees, but recovers after a moment, shaking his head. For now, nothing is wrong. Prigovora is only hunting. Prigovora is only hungry.
The raptor blinks again, and every image between their bond now comes in the raptor's infrared. Pravda is nauseated all over again, but the archaic and reptilian method. His muzzle is held close to the earth, and the ground is muted purples and violets from the lingering heat of the sun, and above Pravda sees through Prigovora’s eyes—there is a small shape half-hidden under fallen leaves. The creature looks like another fawn—
Pravda attempts to sever the mental bond, focusing on rising from the earth. He is bleeding, but only slightly. He feels something sinking in his stomach; he feels it in Prigovora’s strange glee as the raptor moves, whisper quiet, through the long grass and brush. Every step is methodical, almost slithering, and the dark iridescence of his scales must be camouflage enough in the undergrowth and rapidly fading light. It is that pivotal point at sunset, where the celestial body has dipped just beneath the horizon. The shift is nearly instantaneous from light, to dark. Everything is suddenly twilight, subdued, and Pravda feels even more concern as he trots after his creature.
He sees another flash of Prigovora’s moment. The fawn in the underbrush is stirring. It lifts its head—
The silhouette, even seen through Prigovora’s strange, primordial infrared is not the small, delicate head of a fawn, but more robust. A foal. One wing shifts, and Pravda recognises the silhouette as a winged equine. Prigovora has feasted on such beasts before. The raptor's lips wrinkle back from his teeth and he salivates in long strands as he nears the colt, stalking quietly, so quietly—the colt looks toward him, and Prigovora freezes. But then the colt looks away, settling back down into his bed of leaves.
Pravda is galloping now. A full sprint toward the treeline he can now just see. No, no, no! he is thinking, but his creature has grown distant in this new world, has grown more wild—and Prigovora does not stop. His reptilian mouth only twists into what could be a smile, in a world more twisted. The raptor repositions, backtracking to flank the colt. The foal is resting within an alcove of a fallen tree and Prigovora tests the distant base. It holds his weight. Still so, so quiet. So still. He moves with the methodical, reptilian stillness of Time. He possesses a dinosaur’s patience. Slowly, Prigovora moves down the fallen log. He is a shadow against it, dark and large but somehow not so different from the other shadows in the ever fading light.
And Pravda is running harder than he has ever before. Stop! he is screaming through their bond, and he feels the raptor’s cold laughter. He is reminded of the cellar, so many years ago. He is reminded of the way Prigovora’s breath once brushed Pravda's own cheek, and it was full of sweltering, wet heat. It smelled of meat, always of meat, and the sharp, stinging copper of blood. He is reminded of how it feels to be so close—and Prigovora laughs through their bond again. Pravda can feel his excitement, his joy. Such easy prey is this! And what’s more—it angers his master!
Pravda is in the treeline now; he does not slow, but tears through the branches and brush with the savagery of a man possessed, a man devoted. Prigovora is stretching one long limb from the tree, reaching toward the foal—a claw, so very delicate, traces the jugular vein. Wake up the gentle touch seems to say. It mimics a mother, and Prigovora knows it. A long string of saliva drops from Prigovora’s open jaws and he begins to shift. One large foreleg is planted on the earth beside the foal, and then the other. A final, slinking motion places all of Prigovora’s body above the colt with a finality like death.
Prigovora’s jaws are gaping in an ugly smile, made uglier still by the remnant blood of his last kill. The raptor hisses, long and loud, and with bright red eyes dares the foal to run.
But Pravda is breaking through the trees, reaching the scene—and his voice is loud, when he screams, “Stop!” And Prigovora’s head jerks upright, but he does not move from the foal. There is something resentful in the raptor’s eyes, something challenging. You left me—! but those primordial eyes do not say that, they do not acknowledge betrayal, do they? Pravda does not know, but the resentment that stretches their bond seems too much like salt in a wound. “We do not harm the innocent, Prigovora.” Pravda’s voice is stern, and hard, and desperate.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour
He sleeps and does not think that the space beside him grows cold. He does not feel how the warm press of his sister’s ivory skin against his is so very gone and how his own skin now grows cold. Leonidas did not even stir when her limbs disentangle from his. All the small boy did was sigh and sleep on as his sister stirred and rose and left him.
The boy's sleep is deep and warm. Exhaustion is as bottomless as a the sea, it pulls him in to the tide of sleep and holds him down deep. Here in the depths of slumber, all is black and warm. It is nothingness. An oblivion in which he finds rest. It is nice not to be awake, for to be awake is to remember. To be awake, to be any higher than the deepest pit of sleep is to swim in the shallows and let his mind wander with its worry and its questions.
In sleep, Leo’s mind builds dreams for him: dreams that feel more terrible than reality, dreams that remind him over and over how his parents disappeared, dreams that threaten him with all he still has left to lose and just how they will be taken from him too. His dreams are endless and cyclical. In dreams he cries and begs and feels the warmth of his mother and father and follows them, protected. In dreams he watches them leave, over and over and over.
But when he wakes, the boy realizes that all is actually better within his dreams. In reality his parents are still not there, he still fears more loss – of his sister, he still cries when he is awake. Reality, that his family are truly gone, is the sting of a scorpion’s tail and it is enough to paralyse the child with its ferocity.
Yet when he sleeps and does not dream… oh! That is bliss.
…Except for the monsters that prowl and the beasts that seek to slake their thirst and satiate their hunger. Leo has dreamed his horrible dreams, but nothing of the beast that comes for him is as harmless as his dreams.
The log that he sleeps upon shifts, Leo rouses, remembers his loss, aches, and lets himself slip swiftly back into that deep nothingness. Oblivion seizes him fast, it keeps the boy numb and does not warn him of creeping monsters who test the log beside him.
But then there is the touch. It reaches for the boy in his sleep and scoops him from its depths like a divine, rescuing hand. It is a touch that cradles the sleeping boy. It a soft caress along his throat, brushing the silk of his baby hair to and fro. It is an idle stroke, so similar to his mother's touch. In his stark recognition, in his desperate longing (and weighted down by drowsy sleep), the boy does not pause to think that there is nothing here that smells like his dam or sire. The breathing he hears is not like his parents’. In fact, the air crackles with unease and not with a mother’s warmth. But he is an orphan boy and hope for his parents' return still surges white and bright within him. He clings to it like he clings to the grip that pulls him up from his sleep.
He does not need that stirring nudge to implore him to wakefulness, for he is already there. He rises, rises from sleep with hope blooming brighter than a flower within his breast, he gasps and opens his eyes and looks up with golden, joyous hope and the word, ’Mama?’ tumbles as a plea from his lips. But that word, that hope falls away like a stone. Leonidas feels it crash within him and shatter like glass. He is cut from the inside. He is raw with terror beneath the creature that looms above him, with death laughing out across its razor teeth. That look is not the soft of a mother's gaze, his sun framed silhouette is nothing like hers. Oh it smells of fetid blood and rancid death and it rears back, set to strike.
Leonidas scrambles, his magic stirring in his bones. Quick, quick, quick! It implores him, faster, faster. But the boy does not move. He stays and stares up at the beast and asks with wild terror in his chest, "Are you death?”
Stop! The shout comes as the beast readies itself to strike and Leo – a boy with the future running in his veins, who can move faster than light – simply does not move and instead lies, looking up at the beast, his eyes wide with askance. He wonders if in death he might find his parents again, or maybe that life was just so strange and wrong without them – was it even worth it? Yet Aster is a divine rod into his heart. Her memory shocks her brother into action and as his saviour comes, not in gold or earth like his mother, but in the form of a strange stallion, Leonidas is standing and looking around for where his sister should have been.
Her place is cold where she should be laying. His skin is cold where her body touched his. And upon the monster’s muzzle is fresh blood that gleams like a grim smile. It mocks him and rage surges within the boy.
We are not alone, his sister said. Her voice is angelic in his ears, it is a rallying cry that drives fury into his veins. The boy stands upon spindle limbs and lowers his skull like a lion. Small ears fall to the curve of his skull and his nape twists and snakes in grief and desperate fury. It is a boy’s challenge to a monster. It is an orphan’s challenge to the world that has seen fit to deal him foul card after foul card. He moves beside his saviour, the stallion's words lost and screams at the monster. But that scream breaks into a strangled cry and then the sob of an orphan boy so utterly lost.
The raptor knows what he embodies. He is death. Pravda feels the primitive, cruel glee through their bond. Prigovora is a creature that delights in terror; that takes optimises it, manipulates it, becomes it.
But Pravda’s command is just enough to still the beast. It is just enough to draw Prigovora back from the precipice upon which he hunts; to make him pause, and reconsider. Yes. The raptor does not strike, and the child comes scrambling to rest in Pravda’s shadow. Relief floods him, cool and strange and dizzying. His legs almost buckle from the way it rushes over him, as consuming as a wave.
He cannot allow himself that privilege, though, as Prigovora remains staged and staring. The creatures eyes no longer rest on the child; instead they lock with Pravda’s own and he feels the same old rush of terror that he has lived besides his entire life. Priest Muzhestvo may as well be there, and Pravda may as well be a child, for all that gaze wrenches from him. Prigovora sharpens at the child’s desperate cry, and with the swiftness of a diving falcon the raptor closes the distance between them. Prigovora opens his gaping jaws and shrieks, a cry belonging to eons and eons past. Blood and phlegm and spittle fly from his razor teeth but, just as swiftly, the raptor withdraws to the shadows and is gone.
Pravda can feel his amusement through their bond. It is a game. It has always been a game, to the beast, to the bringer of justice and pain. Pravda feels himself shaking, but there is no time for that; he must console the child and so he turns, his eyes bright, to look at the young, winged boy who has shifted even closer to Pravda. After a long, strangled moment after the boy’s sob has cut off, Pravda speaks. “I know that was terrifying…” he admits. “But you’re safe now. He won’t bother you again, everything will be fine. I promise.” The child cannot know it, but Pravda’s word is as binding as a blood oath.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour
The boy’s heart is a wild thing within his breast. It flutters frantic upon his breastbone and surges through his arteries. Above him a monster towers. It opens its jaw with myriad teeth that point toward him like daggers. There is something avian in that gaze. Something that turns its gaze as sharp as the nick of a needle. Between it strings saliva, thick as rope, shiny as a cobweb. It is dark this saliva, dark with blood. The boy looks up, with his sun drenched eyes, into that gaping maw and the darkness that stretches like an abyss beyond the tongue. Was that Aster’s blood upon its teeth, upon its tongue? Still she has not come, not when he screamed, not when his grief is as high as a stormsurge.
The creature screams and it is answer to the cry of a grief-stricken boy. Leonidas turns his head against the blood and spittle and meat that flies out from the monster’s mouth. The contants spray across the earth of his skin, the gold of his hair. Sunbeams fall through the umbra as if to search out the boy who cried out. It does not find him, not when he is low, low beneath the towering shadow of a dinosaur.
But then the beast is gone and all Leonidas can do is tremble as a leaf caught in a frigid wind. His bones rattle with fear and relief and sickness and ire. Oh he is a tangle of so many things but he is… alive! The stallion comes to him, the man who saved a sleeping colt from the jaws of death. Leo staggers back, his spindle limbs awkward over the now broken trunk in which he lay.
He listens as the man speaks, he listens to the words and tries to make sense of.. why. “He is yours?” The boy asks with eyes wide. Leonidas wonders what kind of horse bonds with a monster such as that - what did it say of him? The boy takes back another step, suddenly survival seems brighter and the open forest beckons to a frightened boy. “Why are you bonded with a monster?” The child asks, his voice light, trembling upon every note. “Are you dangerous too?”
