can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars,
I could really use a wish right now;
She can feel the way her lungs begin to sting, and the way the air burns her throat as she gasps for it. Her muscles her aching, and her legs are beginning to tremble as they scream at her to stop. But without even glancing back she knows the monsters are closing in, and already all she can dare to hope is that when they kill her, it is fast.
Ripley’s jaw finds her back leg, and it’s enough to make her stumble, and when the teeth are sunk into her thigh, she is powerless to fight as she is ripped to the ground. The screams that are torn from her throat are swallowed by the trees and shadows, and she knows they are useless; there is no one around to hear her. Somewhere in the back of her mind she has already accepted that this was where she was going to die – completely alone, with nothing left of her to ever be found. Her parents will never know what became of her, and this, more so than the teeth being sunk into her muscles and the acid that drips and burns her skin, is what causes the tears to spill down her cheeks.
She has no way of knowing that somewhere in the forest, something else is running towards her. She has no way of knowing that Casimira, curious of where her old sister was going, had followed her.
The young white girl trips through the underbrush and bramble, having lost sight of her sister some time ago. As usual, she had snuck off without Cassian, which secretly, she always found to be a little bit hilarious. He always got so upset when she did something fun without him, but he was also never paying attention. In her opinion, it served him right.
Casimira was still too young to fully understand why there seemed to be an invisible wedge between her and her older sister. She didn’t understand that she associated herself and her twin brother with being the reason their mother didn’t always get along with Evenstar’s father. And delving even further than that, Casimira could never begin to understand the illusion of a perfect family that her sister had been living with. She herself has never met her father; her mother rarely spoke of him, and she found it difficult to miss something she had never had. It confused her why Evenstar seemed to care so much, but she also desperately wanted her to like her. To actually like her, and not fake like her the way she usually did.
When she hears a scream, she almost doesn’t recognize the voice. The sheer pain and fear that it carried with it sunk inside the marrow of her bones, and she knows for certain that her heart stopped.
For a moment, she almost turns back. She was not meant to be heroic or brave, and she is so certain that it couldn’t possibly be her sister making that sound. But the sound comes again, and this time, there is a note of familiarity to it. It’s not something she can pinpoint, but it makes her blood run cold.
When she rushes through the forest and follows the trail of broken branches and destroyed brush, she begins to shift without realizing it. It was typically an awkward and ungraceful process, but this time she does not notice when her sleek coat morphs into hardened scales, or when the dragon wings erupt from her behind her shoulders. In another two strides, her equine form is entirely replaced for that of a white dragon.
She hardly has time to register what she sees when she comes upon the trio. All she sees is a flash of green buried between two large, strange looking creatures, and all she hears is her sister’s desperate cries. For a moment, she almost opens her mouth to unleash the flames that form in her throat, but somehow she manages to think it through. There are too many trees, and she knows she lacks control in her dragon form to not accidentally burn Evenstar. But she is larger than them – not by much, since she is not full grown, but it is enough.
She goes for the bigger one first, colliding her larger form directly into her in hopes of knocking her away. With a snake of her reptilian head she snakes around, trying to be mindful of her sister’s delicate equine form as she reaches over her to snap at the smaller beast. Back and forth she goes, snapping and lunging, letting her powerful tail swing as she turns from one to the other. Her hope is that they will decide this prey is not worth it; that trying to take on a dragon that was hellbent on protecting what was hers was a waste of energy. She has been so good at controlling the monster that clawed inside of her whenever she shifted into her dragon form, but already she knows without question that she will lose herself without hesitation if it meant saving her sister.
I'm praying that this stairway leads somewhere like Heaven's door,
and when you get there don't look down
Okay well enjoy that scattered and rambly post, featuring dragon Casimira. Who in this timeline has not yet been blown up by Starsin.
@[Ripley and Nostromo]