Great hands ensnare him like quarry, they drag him into cavernous darkness, swallow him down this gullet of damnation—a morsel meant for sport.

The sensation of dying was not unfamiliar to him.

It had been a peculiar thing, the world falling away from him while his body stilled, eyes heavy with sleep and had it been only that? Falling asleep? He remembered the ache in his bones, the weight in his chest, the flickering of light that was left behind his eyes becoming the very thing that pained him with goodbyes. Things that had been, things that could have been, but either way everything became quiet.

But this was different.

Killdare could feel them dying.

One after the other, after the other, the demons extinguished around him, passing in remnants of blood, in cracks and splinters of bones. This was an uncomfortable sensation, more than that, it was as if invisible threads snapped around him, and each severed fiber left behind an even more disturbing realization. They sloughed against him in discomforting warmth, seeping between the crook of his ear, the bend of a muscle, the crevice of his eyes and all too soon the endless dark became light once more.

And there too was breath—

Killdare’s attention turned inward, where an unfamiliar arrangement of flesh and sinew found him. Light cast down upon him from above in wandering rays, while his disoriented mind made every attempt to make sense of where this was.

No, what this was.

This body, it could not be his own; the weight sat differently, and altogether it did not sit at all. Where once there had been fur, brilliant and pecan and brown, were scales, shining like tarnished copper beneath the flickering rays of ocean-swept sunlight. There was too a drastic change in his heaviness; the drafted build that had kept him company, had made it his home, had made him, him—was sculpted anew.

Water replaced air, yet he did not drown; his instinctual habit of adjusting his hindquarters sent him drifting. There was no ground for them to brace against, no familiar resistance beneath his hooves.

Seaglass eyes glide over the testimony of his form, a tail elongating where once his hind legs had stood their ground. Ripples of fins flutter as ochre veils with the sway of the current and to be sure, he’d never considered how many fins or frills were needed for swimming. Now he knows that it’s a lot more than one might think. Every strand of his midnight hair furled away, exchanged for veiny, gossamer frills that undulated with the current, drifting and expanding in strange rhythmic patterns. His thoughts tangle, curling around an attempt to regain his bearings. To make sense of, and peace with, this vessel now forged, to harness what control he might gain over it and learn just how he might survive this next scheme—all the while the ocean had been contriving a game all its own.

The others reached him shortly after.

They came from the current, the waves surely ushering them in, prowling forward with the same agile cunning of wolves. A figurehead announced itself first, pressing towards him without reservation, the others—and there were many—following close behind. Some bore curious conceptions of tusks, great teeth urgently protruding from a jaw quite unusual. Some had neither, but all were impressively radiating their mistrust of him. Even the sea announces its displeasure, ensnaring him with invisible ropes, and there is no hesitation on their behalf—these creatures command the sea.

Who are you? a small mare questions, her eyes as lightless as the pitch of her fins, the red details anointing her with the same feral fire that spurred her voice.

Outsider.

Judgement settled in the word, making its home in the curvature of syllables that christened him alien and outcast. He lets them, stealing his gaze but acknowledging their misgivings about him with a single turn of a dark ear. Killdare was prepared to answer, but their disputes left him no room for declarations.

They bicker like children; perhaps they are. A blue stallion permeating the collection with his air of boredom, drawling his words out to preface the potential urgency with tedium. A missing brother, outsider, back to your mother, outsider. Killdare lifts a brow, watching, waiting, garnering what little information he can because if he is to answer, then he will be ready.

Silence, the word snaps the confrontation into attention, and he’s almost certain that the male had an answer, but the water was too dark to tell. Shadowed into submission from above, and with it, screams goaded his movement.

In one great bite, a creature beyond his recognition swallowed half of their assembly whole, devouring the critics and forcing the taunts to transform into shrieks that held no leverage. Everything is a calculated reaction, his movements pressing his body between rocks, speeding between crooks of coral, weaving between reefs with a familiarity that he had not known himself capable of. Anything to gain distance between himself and what he could only name as—Titan. Creature. Beast.

’Outsider!’ her words tug him away from the urgency of escape, motioning for him to follow, and with her a clutch of survivors skirting away into a cave cut precariously amidst the coral.

’If you go with her, you will die!’ the blue shouts from afar, beckoning him to seek a narrow passage.

There are many things that Killdare had been, many things that he still was, down in the deepest recesses of his being. The places where the soul meets the body.

Once he was only a brother, a man seeking asylum with his sister from a world that had grown colder for her than he was willing to accept and though they went their separate ways, he took comfort in her safety. The certainty that her path was not chosen for her, but rather she made her own way, as did he.

Once he was a lord among a forest, pale eyes looking upward to a canopy of ravens, practicing the pace of his steps with the rhythm of a heart beneath the pine-strewn earth. There were scales here too, great dragon wings against his back; bronze in their bearing had been his armor. Just as he was charged to be.

Once he had been a king, crowned not in gold but in the heat of the earth, molten and reactive. The Chamber had laid its burdens upon his shoulders beneath the watchful eyes of ravens and the restless murmuring of pines. He had learned that sometimes the measure of a ruler was not what he could subdue, but what he was willing to endure for those who called his kingdom home.

Killdare let his gaze travel beyond the creature, searching the terrain for an advantage. Distance, elevation, obstruction—the others needed to move. There had been a time when he might have answered such a threat with magma, pulling it from the wellspring of the earth's core until it bent to his intention with undeniable triumph. He turned towards the group secluding itself within the cave not far off, his expression betraying little of his calculations.

"Go on, then," he said, the words carrying a familiar measure of impatience. "I'll catch up."

He didn't wait for them to bid their farewells; he didn’t wait to hear their arguments, or what’s more—their orders. He moved, and he moved quickly.

Not because he thought himself invincible, but because he didn’t like their odds. Killdare knows what it means to stand between danger and those who need to escape. His hooves struck against the seabed with force; each movement he made had to be used to garner attention and lead this monstrosity away. There was no warmth, no magma to summon; all he had was his voice, his movement and the thread of hope he held for his tail.

The beast answered his efforts with a violence that shook the world beneath him. Water surged, great teeth flashed, and the distance between himself and the terrible mouth diminished with alarming speed. He moved again, narrowly avoiding the destruction that followed, his heart beating an unfamiliar rhythm against the confines of his chest.

This was a suicide business, to have once commanded a kingdom only to be reduced to bait for an overgrown fish.

How much time he had bought with each dauntless movement, he could not say, but the margin between his survival and oblivion grew increasingly thin.

He stumbled.

Then he understood with a distinct unpleasantness.

There would be no victory here, not for him, and there was even less honor in dying for nothing.