oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
He has heard the call of the fae.
Of course he has—all of Beqanna has heard them at this point.
He has ignored them though.
He has been young and stubborn and too busy with his own life. But Wonder has answered, and he has heard her stories, and although her tale is stained with sorrow, he cannot stop the ache in his heart to have his own version of it—to strike out and find the faeries and do what he can to assist in this.
(It is a selfish desire though; there is nothing pure-hearted or kind about it.)
Still, self-centered as he may be, he still answers. He still unfurls dragon wings and lifts himself into the sky, flying from Tephra—across Sylva, Loess, and then cutting through the border of the forest and Hyaline until he is able to land on the Mountain. He is quiet; young but stern, his grey eyes somber as he studies the fae, showing little reaction to what they say and how the others around him respond.
He simply nods—despite the clenching of his stomach, the pounding of his heart.
When he turns from them, he sets his gaze back from where he came and there is something like a bite of disappointment in his belly to return to home so quickly after he had left. But he doesn’t refuse. He does what they ask, and the journey across the lands is quick, albeit tiring to his young bones. When he lands on the coast, he can practically sense the wolves in the corner of his consciousness. He feels them, and it drives him forward, the sense of potential parental oversight enough to spur him further into action.
Brigade dives eagerly into the waves and the tide that waits. He has never spent much time in the water—being much more inclined to the air—and he finds that he does not like it much. He does not like the way that it pulls at him. The way that it laps over his back and the way he drinks the water, inhaling it into his lungs. He feels the salt sticking to his impossibly red coat, his antlered head fighting to stay above water.
Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t even think about what lurks below.
He is young and brash and so focused on what lies ahead that the faeries’ warning slips from him entirely.
Until it is too late.
He feels the tentacles brush against a leg and he snorts wildly as the water around him begins to churn. Then another tentacle wraps around his ankle and he jumps forward in the water, something like panic beginning to settle like a stone in his chest. When the water grows violent and the beast emerges, his grey eyes are rimmed with white, the thin flesh of his nostrils flaring, the rest of the world falling away.
He has never seen a Kraken before. Has no name for it.
But he knows violence and this is it.
It is not much of a fight—the two year old colt against the ancient beast. It toys with him mostly, although it does not feel like play. He can feel the suction of it as he kicks out, as he bites, as he thrusts his youthful horns into its direction. Brigade scrapes at it and the Kraken lands blow after blow. It slips from his grasp and it wraps around him, pulling him down into churning water to release him—gasping for air.
Brigade is already exhausted from the flight to and from the mountain, the time already spent swimming. He is young. He is untried. He has everything going against him, but he refuses to give up. Refuses to give in. Instead, he continues fighting, baring his teeth at the beast as bits and pieces of it emerge.
Refuses to surrender even as it begins to pull him down, as the teeth of it emerge.
The reality that this could be the end does not escape him, but he refuses to be cowed by the bite and threat of death. Instead, it brings a strange clarity to him—clearing the fog from his mind. He reacts, remembering his strange wings. As he enters into the monster’s mouth, as the lips begin to close around him, they shift by his side. They turn from feather to black stone, the obsidian so common around his volcanic home turning jagged. They unfurl and he flares them out with as much force as he can muster.
The volcanic glass slices through the soft, fleshy mouth of the Kraken, and he hears its guttural cry as his wings pierce and tear. In the end, its cries meld with his own as it bites down in anguish and opens his mouth to eject him from it. In a blinding moment of pain, Brigade feels the tooth dig into his shoulder and then break off, the incisor lodging itself into his flesh, right near the joint of the very wing that saved him.
Brigade’s vision goes spotted and then blurry as he finds himself fighting the froth and foam of the surface. Slowly the Kraken begins to recede, the choppy waters beginning to settle again, and Brigade notices that the ocean is stained red and ink with a mixture of his and the Kraken’s blood.
He coughs and wheezes and fights to keep his head above water.
There is no small part of him that wants to go home.
There is a youthful part of him that fears what is to come, that desperately wants to be a child again curled next to his wolfish father and wild mother and their pack. He misses his sister.
He wants home.
But he is not a child anymore and he sets his jaw, biting his tongue to stop himself from crying out at the throbbing pain in his shoulder. His wings once again shift, turning beautiful. The rock slips away and in its place is something of the sea. It is gelatinous in material, soft and webbed and iridescent—the sheen of it so similar to Irisa that his heart aches. Determined to not let his family down, to not let her down, he turns once more to the coming shore and begins to beat his wings in the water, shooting forward faster.
When he reaches the shore, he stumbles up on it, blood draining and dripping onto the sand.
He says nothing—just closes his eyes and waits for the trembling to subside.
