Fowlhunter [GL]

Three Days Ago.

“This is a crazy plan. You can’t expect anyone to follow along with that.”

They were in the Beast Den. The Cockatrice had just laid down her instructions for a new quest. More specifically:

“I require a squad of Beasts to assist me in putting out a volcanic eruption,” she’d said. “I need a hundred Beasts, minimum, all of whom should be able to fly and maintain in the air for an extended period of time. If more Beasts than that could join, be it on mounts or otherwise, it would aid the front greatly.”

The dissent had come from the griffon, Neil, the same one that had, on Jemi’s first day back, accused her of saving an angel. Jemi looked towards him.

He had been a recruit for a while now, a Beast of very high sentience. He could transform into a nearly-perfect human form, but he chose to remain in his griffon form most of the time, his surly features sculpted into mottled green-yellow crestfeathers and a curving beak.

Jemi regarded him. “Just because you’re too chicken to join the cause, doesn’t mean that others won’t.”

“I’m not the only one,” Neil’s feathers bristled. “I’m not chicken for wanting to know what you’re leading us into before we throw ourselves into it. And why.”

“Look,” Jemi rebuffed, “there’s a reason why I’m leader and you’re not. This isn’t the first quest where you don’t get all the details until you join. If you’re not keen on joining, you don’t have to come. But once you join, you can’t back out. So. Anyone?”

A few hands, paws and talons went up. However, the reception was less enthusiastic than Jemi was used to. She frowned.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

All around the dinner table, some Beasts looked uncomfortable. Many avoided her gaze, murmuring inaudible words between themselves.

“Um…” a brave chipmunk chittered. “It’s just that… some scouts have seen you with, y’know. The Angel Commander.”

Oh.

“Are you serious?” she kept smiling, but she was just shy of gnashing her teeth together. “That’s what has all of you so uneasy?”

But, even as the words left her mouth, she realised that she couldn’t blame any of them. It had been weeks since the Cockatrice had accompanied the Beasts in battle. It had been even longer since the battle prior to the Battle of Fifth Peak, six months of absence while she had been discreetly preparing the Kraken. That was a long time for the lunar army to be without their leader, who had previously been in touch with the Beasts constantly. Left in the dark about Jemi’s plans, it was only natural that they’d start filling in the gaps, suspecting that she had something to hide.

Jemi was not deaf. For a long time coming, many imaginative, scandal-chasing individuals dared suggest that the Cockatrice and the Graveyard Commander had a… special relationship. There was no basis in it, mere gossip popular for its shock-value. But now, the last time they’d seen the Cockatrice, she was saving Ennanis from a Beasts’ arrow. When they’d later caught sight of her walking beside the angel, what else were they supposed to think?

“I’m not truly working with Commander Zoleil,” Jemi clarified. “It’s part of a mission from Queen Medusa herself.”

Neil scoffed. “We all know that Queen Medusa’s a bit of a loon.”

Violet eyes narrowed. “Don’t speak that way about the Queen.”

“What? I’m just saying it like it is,” Neil stated. “A thousand years of being stuck in a lake is enough to drive even a goddess insane. Nothing she says has any grounding in the reality we face today. She’s trapped in a time that doesn’t exist anymore. You shouldn’t have to listen to what Medusa says. Right in the now, she isn’t our leader. The Cockatrice is.”

Jemi, “......”

“Even if…” Neil continued, “one wonders if she is still fit to be a leader, these days.”

“Speak clearly, Beast, or don’t speak at all,” Jemi said darkly.

“We all see it,” the griffon rustled. “It’s been a while now, but your health has been catching up to you, hasn’t it? You haven’t been the same since you came back from Mount Casca. And your loyalties seem to have changed as well… after all, now you’re making excuses to work with the Graveyard Commander.”

Uneasy murmurs rolled through the den once more.

“I said the business with the Commander was part of a mission,” Jemi gritted her teeth. “You can confirm with the others who were with me: Ying, Asha, Lochlan.”

“What kind of mission would need you to work with the Graveyard Commander?” Neil snarled. “Sorry, Princess, if we find that a bit hard to believe. And, of course we could ask your friends’ testimony…” Eyes darted all around the den. “...But where are they right now?”

“They can’t come right now.”

“How convenient,” he remarked, beak clicking. “But it doesn’t matter. We all know your friends would take your side no matter what story you feed them.”

“Oh,” Jemi wanted to laugh. “Really.”

Neil spread his wing-arms. “You are an animal whisperer, after all. Who knows what kind of bewitching power you have over those that are half-creature.”

Jemi’s special ability, an ability unique to only her… it wasn’t a skill known to Lunaki or Soleki. No one knew what it was really, for the woman told no one about the specifics. All that others knew is that she seemed to have the ability to talk to animals, even those that weren’t Beasts, and have them do things for her.

“So, you think I’m the one feeding stories,” Jemi nodded along. Her violet gaze hardened. “As if that isn’t exactly what you’ve been doing.”

“I tell them the truth,” Neil countered. “You’ve always had different motivations for the lunar army than the rest of us. You could never understand the Beasts, because you’re a human, in the end. Your claws are sharp, but your heart is pulp. You want to steal the sun because you serve the Queen. We want to steal the sun because we want to be free of the Queen’s shackles.”

Jemi stared out over the dining table of creatures. Many of them avoided her gaze. Well, maybe she’d believed they’d have more faith in her.

“Neither you nor the Queen have ever really cared about the Beasts, after all,” he finished.

Just then, his words were cut off by an icy crackling. The muttering of the animals in the room ground to a halt as cold silver light reflected off the crockery on the dining table, the lit braziers along the walls, drowning out their warmth.

In the air, a shimmering lance had extended across the table, aimed straight at the griffon.

The Cockatrice let it hang in the air for a while, before finally extinguishing her Lunaki. The lance disappeared in a burst of sparkles.

Neil, who had been holding his breath, smirked. “Knew you didn’t have the balls to-”

As he spoke, as the sparkles floated down around the den, the Cockatrice crossed the room. Her black ballgown trailed behind her, rooster’s feathers struck high in the air.

Then—

CRACK!

She’d slammed her boot in the bench beside where he sat, its obsidian heel puncturing through the oak, stoppering at the sole.

“Do you, by any chance, think that I’m a leader that’s all talk, Neil? Do you think, that just because I walk on two legs and have a brain larger than the size of a pea,” the masked woman leaned on her knee, leering by the griffon’s ear, “that I’m less of an animal than you are?”

Her gloved hands removed her black birdmask, tossing it to the floor.

Her eyes were wide, their usual violet colour faded, the left now humming as Lunaki resonated off the Beast’s transformed figure. The Death-darting Eye, that once lived within Queen Medusa’s own skull.

“You saw me when I was sixteen. So you know that the fact that I don’t rule by fear is a choice,” she hissed, bringing her face closer to his. “Creatures like you make it a very difficult one, but I continue to choose it. What you call a soft heart, I call endurance.”

“I have been a part of this den since before you were even hatched,” the Cockatrice continued. “While you were still a pet parrot leading a comfortable life in a cage, I was in the sunprisons of Casca. While you were chomping on nibbles, wondering what it would be like to fly in the sky, I was in the forest, hunting game so that my denmates and I would not starve to death.”

She pointed behind them. “There’s a minotaur among us that once made an ill-advised threat against the wife of the head honcho of a massive Wataronese gang. Two large underworld syndicates and a whole kingdom’s worth of bounty hunters were after him. I had to burn down a quarter of a Jadestone and end at least five bloodlines just to get the scent off his trail. Now he lives a life without constantly worrying about being strung up by his entrails.”

She gestured again. “Another time, there was a widespread drought throughout all of the undercloud. Humans could barely grow food for themselves as it was, much less sell to buyers. Uncle Bern’s soup became more and more water, less and less cabbage. Aunt Lizaris’ hatchlings were ill from malnutrition, as well as many of the other Beasts. Food was guarded more tightly than gold, and stealing a sack of rice was essentially murder. Do you know who it was that went from door-to-door, taking away sack after sack of rice, bucket after bucket of water? Not a single one of us in the den died from that drought, not even a pup, chick, or larva.”

“Dozens of nights,” she went on, “who was it that, on tearful requests, snuck up the foothills of Mount Casca in daylight with swathes of angels soaring overhead, to retrieve the bodies of our fallen comrades so that they may be given proper funerals?”

She released Neil’s collar—not roughly. The griffon shook out his feathers, grunting.

“If one sighting of me beside an angel is enough to make you question my loyalties, then you don’t know the first thing about how this den works.”

Her gaze returned to the den before her. She snapped her heel out of the benchtop and stomped on the floorboards.

“So?” the Cockatrice demanded. “Who’s with me?”

The initial hesitation and conflicted looks had melted away. Benches screeched as Beasts stood up, one after the other. Easily over a hundred.

At the head of the table, even Aunt Lizaris had stood up, flexing her claws.

“What?” the large woman scoffed. “Don’t think that all I’m good for is being a mother hen. I was also born a fighter. I have no wings, but I can ride a mount to the skies, if need be.” She smiled at Jemi. “I will never forget what you have done with me, for us, and this den, Jemi. I will always have your back. Whatever you need us to do, we’ll do it.”

The Beasts cheered. More still stood up, after seeing Lizaris volunteer herself.

Neil remained steadfastly seated, his beak scowling.

~~~

The Beasts had first gathered in the skies of Wataron. They’d flown high up above to avoid the attention of undercloud sky-watchers, and angel flight formations. The air was thick with stormclouds, the bristling smell of electricity arcing through the air.

“Should we come back another day?” asked the flying Beast that Jemi was riding on, a harpy named Cassia, gurgling nervously at the dark clouds on all sides of them.

“No, we don’t have time to spare. Also, this is exactly what we we need, remember?” Jemi reassured her.

Cassia gulped as her beastial eyes took in the brewing storm ahead of them, flashing lightning and thunder that clapped through the air every half-minute. Her neckfeathers bristled with static. “But this much of it?…”

Jemi elected not to tell her that she was afraid these storms wouldn’t be enough.

“I transferred you all that much Lunaki earlier for a reason. Come on,” she managed a smile, “harpies are supposed to be creatures of the storm.”

A pegasus swooped past, the beat of his wings spraying water at them. “Hey, cockatrices are supposed to fly!”

Jemi stuck out her tongue at him. “And horses aren’t, Jordan. You know what they’re supposed to do? Shut up and neigh.”

Jordan swooped closer by them. Tossing his mane back, he brayed loudly into the air. “That good enough? Yeowch!—” he whinnied as Cassia swiped him in the face, handful of sharp talons. “What was that for?”

“Your breath stinks,” Cassia retracted her claw. But in the exchange, the mood had considerably lightened. Riding the heightened morale, Jemi gave the signal for them to fly:

Cockadoodle-dooooooooooooooo—!

A rooster called for its flock, in the middle of the stormy sky.

On their princess’ command, the Beasts throttled straight for the dead centre of the cumulonimbus. Then, just as they were about to plunge into the anvil of a cloud, they banked hard right. They began to circle the storm counter-clockwise, speeding up gradually. Hundreds of pairs of wings whipped the wind slowly but surely into a full-blown cyclone, gathering the stormclouds into its funnel, the vacuum it created sucking even more neighbouring clouds within.

Jemi pressed herself low against Cassia’s back, making herself as streamlined as possible as the revolutionary gale tore past her face and clothes at thousands of kilometres per hour. It was frigid as anything else, but sweat beaded her forehead. Her gaze was laser-focused, even as the world spun and spun around them. Indeed, as Neil the griffon had put it, it was a crazy plan. They’d had no time to even rehearse it. And the last time anything like this had been tried, well…

Once in her early days, Queen Medusa had tried to use the Beasts to move a storm over Mount Casca to try and block out the sun. However, the clouds had all evaporated to a crisp, and the Beasts’ wings had melted beyond function, dooming them to fall to the forest floor seven peaks down.

Beasts were not like angels or gods. They were mortal. They had all died.

Jemi gritted her teeth. That would not happen now. On the evening of Jemi’s request, Queen Medusa had promised her that she would have sufficient power to stop the volcanic eruption. Prior, she had distributed the Lunaki she’d received evenly to the Beasts, which would provide them with the extra stamina and strength they needed.

Jemi had also called in extra animals from the area. Not Beasts, just local birds and insects. They joined the team in swarms, less coordinated than the Beasts, but their wingpower bolstered the force.

And they weren’t tackling the sun; they were just tackling a volcano. How hard could it be?

“It will be okay,” Jemi thought fervently to herself, despite the hare-fast pace of her heart drumming in her ribcage. The others could be scared, but the Cockatrice could not afford to be paralysed by fear. “It will work out.”

By her side, Cassia and Jordan threw their wings into the fight. Thus, for three days and three nights straight, they flew, dragging the staggering volume of the storm west for Kanch.

~~~