His heart pounds as he races through the thick trees, the stink of pine and sticky sap stinging his nose. The enormous wings at either side of him seem to catch on every rough section of trunk and low hanging branch that he passes, and he imagines a trail of white and golden feathers swirling behind him like dirty snow flurries. He chances exactly one glance back to check on them, but his goldenrod eyes are drawn immediately to the snarling face of the dark brown bear lumbering behind him.
He is very disappointed to find that she seems just as angry now as she had been moments before when he accidentally stuck his nose inside her den. Benji hadn’t realized that the odd cave was her home though, or that those strange sounds had been a pair of cubs playing together. Okay, and maybe he shouldn’t have stayed to watch them once he DID realize, but they were like harmless little murder machines rolling around together playing and there was something undeniably adorable about it. At least until a louder snarl had found him from the shadows and sent him retreating backwards with a slowness that might’ve implied he thought it would make him hard to spot.
That was not the case.
He does wonder why she is so determined to chase him though when he is so clearly retreating - and isn’t it not a good idea to leave the cubs unattended? But bad mom bear chases, and so he runs along a familiar path, knowing it leads to an open meadow where he can gain more distance from her. Except that his sense of direction is possibly worse than his common sense, and when the trees thin and disappear, it is to reveal a dead-end ledge with a very steep drop.
His legs lock and brace, and he slides to a clumsy stop as he whirls around to face the bear again, who is somehow STILL chasing him. “Who is watching your kids?!” He half-shouts in exasperation at the angry bear who very much does not answer him, of course. She just thunders closer all teeth and claws and bad attitude, forcing Benji back until one hoof slips on the loose dirt at the edge of the cliff. He tears his gaze from her reluctantly, perhaps even more reluctant at the distance to the ground below. His wings lift, but as always they feel made of stone instead of feather, and the lowest feathers don’t even lift off the dirt.
But they’re wings, right? And that is definitely an angry bear - a stinky one, too, now that she’s close enough to smell. So he turns and leaps, throwing those gold and white wings wide open. Kind of. A little open. Or just kind of a haphazard desperate flapping as he half falls, half glides into the tangle of forest below. He plummets, and by the time he lands his wings are half-wrapped around him and he most resembles a tossed, feathery stone.
Treetops bend beneath him, and the thickest branches full of green leaves are enough to slow his fall, but the thinnest limbs whip across his skin and open narrow slashes edged with welts along the sleek black. He lands with a crash, one wing pinned beneath him and the other stretched out above him where the bone caught and wedged between two large branches. All the air is forced from his lungs as he deflates with a strangled groan, splaying sideways in the wild undergrowth all knotted beneath the trees.
harbinger
the current is strong, my arms are weak
but you are the branch within my reach