30. The Hunt
“Okay, what is your problem, Safraxi? Tell me before you fuck up this plan.” The two were flying along lazily behind Audirei. The red fox was on the boat ahead of them. The handoff before had gone without a hitch. The guards in the town weren’t able to catch up with them at all, and for a while Safraxi had even circled back around to make sure they didn’t have a tail, but it seemed the trio was in the clear, maybe for now at least.
“Bold of you to assume it would be my fuck up. I’m the reason the plan is still rolling.” The dragon quipped back. She was still being berated by the fox hours and hours later. “We wouldn’t have had a boat without me!”
“Audirei had a second choice of boat! She was going to figure out who owned the second one and talk to them!” Tifse snapped. She couldn’t tell if Safraxi was just being dense or choosing not to listen on purpose. “We did not need to steal anything!”
Safraxi could only roll her eyes at the “Well this was her first choice, so it’s better, and that lord was being an asshole, so-”
“He was not being an asshole! My father’s being the asshole!” She flicked one of Safraxi’s sensitive back spines again, causing the dragon to shiver and lose a few dozen feet of altitude. “They’re having a trade feud, and me bringing up my father turned out not to help. He was just watching out for his own people, in case the eel came up the river! They needed some way to defend the town from it! How will they do that without their boat?”
“Well they won’t need to defend their people from the eel if we kill it first.” Safraxi growled and fought to get back up into the band of smooth air she had been riding. “And don’t do that while we’re flying!”
“You still didn’t listen to me!” Tifse sat back into the saddle and glared at the back of the dragon’s head. “I told you-”
“Exactly. You told me. It wasn’t a discussion.” She angled down slightly and skimmed the treetops of a tall domed hill along the side of the river. They were almost out of the mountains now, and just passing through the foothills.
“What? You boss me around all the time! I had a plan and I just wanted to try to see it through. You waiting until after I’d dropped my father’s name made things even worse for me, and then you have the gall to throw private memories that I didn’t want you to see back in my face!” She leaned down into the saddle to sulk. “Audirei and I were supposed to ride down the river together, but I had to ride with you to figure out what’s up with you.”
“I told you last night. I want to be better, I’ve been trying not to boss you around. You’ve been punished enough…” Safraxi’s mind drifted back to the dreams she’d watched a few nights before. “And I didn’t… I wasn’t trying to taunt you when I brought up you being locked in your room. I think your dad’s an asshole and I’d tear his head off if he tried to lock you up again. You needed to know I had your back with your family bullshit. I don’t know why you have any loyalty to him.”
“I-” Tifse buried her face in her hands. “He’s my dad, Safraxi.”
“So what?”
“What do you mean, ‘so what?’ I can’t just cut him out of my life. He raised me, I owe him.” What was Safraxi even going for here, she wondered. She was being a huge pain just a few hours ago.
“You don’t owe him shit. It’s not like you signed a contract when you were born.” Safraxi snorted. “I don’t owe Amjazel anything, even if she gave me her blood. You’re a person, not an investment.”
“But if I don’t have my family-” Tifse stared out at the lake as it crept over the horizon. “What do I have?”
“Like I said last night. All we have is each other.” Safraxi began to descend toward a beach at the river mouth. “You have me.”
Tifse didn’t respond directly, but just tried to reflect on the words. Was the dragon worried Audirei would steal her away or something? She had brought Tifse all the way out here, and claimed it was so she could be turned down romantically, but did Safraxi actually believe that?
Was she jealous? Or afraid of losing Tifse?
The trio met up again on the beach and discussed further options for a time. Audirei believed that if she could find a small secluded inlet, rocky shallows, or something akin to that, that she could figure out some kind of trap for the eel. “We want to get it in the shallows where it can’t maneuver or hide as well, and then tear it to pieces. It heals fast, you said, so we need to figure out how to stop that.”
“If we can drag it from the water maybe we can suffocate it?” Tifse proposed. “We have a lot of muscle with Safraxi.”
“We could try that… the boat had a harpoon tucked away that we could use.” Audirei nodded along. “Safraxi, do you think you could manage that?”
“It’s bigger than I am.” The dragon shrugged her wings, not making eye contact. “It would be a challenge.”
“Well, maybe if you can keep tension on the rope long enough you could distract it while Tifse and I lay into it with our swords, if we weaken it long enough that it stops struggling it would be easier for you to reel in.” Audirei climbed onto a rock to glance up and down the right and left shorelines, a hand over her head to block the intensity of the sun from her vision. “Let’s try the northern shore along Eskany first. It’s rockier, and might have better places to try and set up a trap. How about Tifse and I find the right spot, and Safraxi can try to catch some bait. A mountain goat or deer or something should do. Live is better if you can bring it in that way. Eels like to swallow their prey whole, and if it can fight back it’ll buy us time.”
“Uh- I’ll try. Never actually hunted big game before.” Safraxi gave a large stretch and glanced up toward the mountains. “Is that all that’s in there?”
“Course not, but a goat is probably the most harmless thing you’ll find. Just watch out for the giant hawks. They usually just eat goats too, but they’re territorial this time of year. Most of them have eaglets.” Tifse explained.
“Right. And Tifse will help me find you both once you find the right spot. And what happens if you get attacked while I’m away?” She tried to remind Tifse that she was the one that did all the fighting with the eel before with an imprint of the memory.
Audirei shrugged as if Safraxi were just being paranoid. “The two of us will be fine. Just keep us in sight during your hunt if you’re so worried. This is going to be risky no matter what.”
“Fine… don’t get eaten, Pipsqueak.” She nudged her snout against Tifse. The fox was trying hard to bury her thoughts from Safraxi again. She couldn’t tell if Tifse was still annoyed with her for earlier. “I’m serious.”
“I know. Like Audirei said, we’ll be fine. We’ve both gone through the academy together. Just find us some bait, Icebrains.” With that she turned around and onto the boat, Audirei following close behind.
A pit was forming in her stomach as Safraxi watched them both sail off together. Maybe she really had pushed too far earlier? “Shut up, Safraxi, worrying isn’t going to get you anywhere.” She quickly unfurled her wings and pushed off the ground. At least she felt lighter without Tifse on her back. That would help quite a bit with her hunt.
Catching a goat was hard, as it turned out. She wasn’t the most capable flier, and the steep cliffs, tall trees, and strong winds made it difficult to find openings where she could nab one. If she wanted one alive it would have to be a clean scoop. Her claws were sharper than even her dagger, and plenty capable of tearing through the goat without even meaning to. At one point she almost had one, but instead just accidentally knocked it off the side of the cliff.
She couldn’t even find the body for a quick snack. It fell down into the deep void of thick trees in the shadow of the mountain below, becoming lost to the world of light. “Nice going, Safraxi, you can’t even find it again after killing it…”
Meanwhile, Audirei and Tifse found themselves sitting in awkward silence for most of their time sailing. Audirei gave her occasional instructions for adjusting the sail or tightening some rope or another, but otherwise it was silent. Only the sound of wind and waves, and the boat pushing through them were there to distract her.
Tifse didn’t feel ready to profess her feelings. They were in the middle of something important. People’s lives were at stake. Her reputation and maybe even her father’s were at stake. It was possible one or any of them could die, and distractions and drama wouldn’t help at all. She just wasn’t quite able to convince herself that the danger was her actual reason for not talking to Audirei.
Eventually the red fox spotted a shalow inlet she thought might work. The area was almost all rock, without any sand in sight. A shallow bowl, with water about two feet deep at the center and about two hundred feet wide, had formed out of hundreds of boulders stacking themselves around the base of one of the taller mountains in the area, likely the aftermath of some old rock slide. A small entrance on the southern side was barely large enough to fit the eel, should it decide it wanted in. The walls on most sides of the bowl were at least three feet thick, and the stones were sharp enough that the eel would tear itself to ribbons if it tried to go over the sides.
“We need a way to block the entrance once we get it inside.” Audirei brought the boat to a stop and anchored it on a shore a bit further up, made more out of pebbles and hand sized stones. “Maybe shifting a rock, or a log or…”
“The boat?” Tifse ventured. “We could move it into place with rope if it goes for the goat, and tip it over so it’s stuck in place.”
“True, it could probably smash through if it really wanted, though. We need to make sure it can’t get out.” She hopped out from the boat and began examining some of the boulders around the edge to see if they could be rolled or shifted to block things.
“Safraxi, could you… freeze the entrance closed after it comes in? You froze some of the water before, when you sprayed it.” Tifse shared her vision overlooking the scene. “The gap is small, if you get close I bet you could trap it.”
“Yeah, sure, if you’re alright with me showing your hot date that your dragon is a freak.” She swooped down and tried again, this time to grab at a wolf and missing again as she failed to slow herself enough. She was desperate for anything at this point. “Fuck!”
“I… I’ll do the talking. Getting the eel taken care of is the most important part.” She followed Audirei off the boat, legs shaky after riding for so long. Sailing was very different from riding dragonback or on larger boats like the one she’d arrived in Fellrock on. The one she and Audirei had met each other on… She sighed. Things felt so different all of a sudden with the red fox, she wasn’t sure why. Was it her coldmark again? “Audi, we’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah? Let’s hear it.” The red fox didn’t stop to listen as she continued her inspection of the area.
“Safraxi doesn’t breath fire.” Tifse started. Voicing her dragon’s… peculiarity… out loud, was turning out harder than she expected. She knew Safraxi was still self conscious about it, but why was she so nervous about talking about it too? “She breathes… ice. She can probably freeze the entrance closed after the eel is in.”
Audirei stopped what she was doing for a moment and turned to face Tifse. “I had a feeling that Safraxi was actually Arxet. That white patch does look like if his coldmark got a lot fatter. Plus when he grabbed you during the meet and greet back at the academy you did call out Arxet’s name.”
“N-no! That’s- that’s-” Shit. That was supposed to be secret. Audirei was persona non grata from the ministry, she’d been expelled. This was the last person Tiamat would want to know.
“Look, it’s clearly supposed to be secret. I’m not telling anyone, not like I need to piss off the ministry further. I had a feeling as soon as you told me his fake name. You told me about how you stole that sapphire from him, and the fake name means sapphire in his native language, doesn’t it?” She took a few careful steps over and patted the shorter fox on the shoulder. “I don’t know how he’s a dragon, I’m probably not supposed to know. All that I do know is that we’ve got a plan now. We just have to wait on her to get us the bait.”
“Uh- right…” Tifse nodded and looked at her feet. “I’m- I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about the coldmark, I-”
“When we met I was complaining about that coldmarked deckhand, yeah. I remember.” Audirei pulled Tifse in for a gentle hug. The desert fox’s cheeks were burning hard at the touch. “I… shouldn’t have said that stuff about him. He got me mad after he splashed chum on my boots and refused to apologize. I probably shouldn’t have even brought the mark up. I’ve… been thinking about that a lot, since I found out you had one too. I’m sorry you felt hurt by that.”
“Yeah…” Tifse whimpered. Audirei had even insinuated that the worker’s lack of care was because of his coldmark. Tifse didn’t want the red fox to think the same of her. “I just… was going so far from home, and I just wanted to make a friend, and-”
“I know. I’m sorry you felt like you had to hide from me.” She broke off the hug and tossled the fur atop Tifse’s head. “I’m glad you and ‘Safraxi’-” She said the new name almost mockingly, “-have each other, though. Even if you two clearly have some drama going on you seem happy with him, overall. You’re not as angry as the last time I saw you.”
“It’s… complicated.” Tifse’s anxiety about talking about her crush was shifting slightly into a strange pit of dread in her stomach. “It started rough between us, but I think she’s been changing too. Much more than me.” She sighed. This wasn’t the time to get into all the confusing personality changes she’d been seeing in Safraxi daily. Audirei didn’t need to know all of that. It was best kept private. “She cares, I think, in her own way. Even if she is kind of prickly. But, I should say, her name really is-”
“Got it!” The moment was interrupted as Safraxi shared her senses with Tifse. A screaming flailing goat was grasped in her claws, and it only had a few massive puncture wounds in its sides from her claws digging in through its ribs and stomach. “We’d better be fast, this thing’s losing blood quick!”
The prior conversation with Audirei was suddenly blown away in the wind as Safraxi confirmed her catch. “I’ll show you where to put it when you get back!” Tifse scrambled across the rocks toward the back of the rocky formation. “Audirei, she’s got one!”
“Got it!” The red fox ran to keep up. “We don’t know how long we’ll have once its blood hits the water. I’ll get the harpoon ready, you get on lookout and show Arxet where to put it when he gets back.”
Safraxi executed a dive successfully this time, slowing enough to drop the angry and confused goat into the water before quickly changing back and taking the provided rope to wrestle the angry wild animal down and tie it to one of the boulders it was standing atop. “Sorry about this, little guy. If you survive I’ll let you go, otherwise I’ll still eat you so you don’t go to waste like your other buddy.”
The water in the inlet was already becoming stained red. The smell was really making Safraxi hungry. Maybe now that she could hunt she would go find another one for herself later?
“Hey, can you get in the air and watch the water further out? I can only see so much from this tree.” Tifse prodded her. The little fox had wriggled her way up some old dried out and dead tree hanging over the lake, but the extra ten feet didn’t offer much vantage, relatively speaking.
“If you’re asking instead of ordering, sure.” She changed back to her dragon form and tried to take flight from the water. It was awkward, and slow, but she could manage now. The water’s suction just made the actual pushing off from the ground more difficult. “I’ll see if I can’t keep an eye out for water that looks… hot? It made the water around us almost boiling last night.” She squinted off at the sun, now nearing the horizon for the day again.
“Good idea. Audirei mentioned earlier that it probably prefers to hunt when it’s darker, so once the sun is down we’ll be relying on you to see where it is.” Tifse put up a light spell, but it still wasn’t quite enough to see further than the base of the tree. The sun was beginning to hit the top of the mountains, and throw them all into shade on the ground.
“I’m starting to feel more and more as if we haven’t thought this through.” Safraxi began to shift her route into lazy figure eights over the lake, centered on the goat. “Not like we can do much about it now.”
“Dammit, Tifse, tell Arxet to keep a close eye out. I think the goat is slipping loose.” Audirei set down the harpoon on the rocks and started wading out into the shallows toward the struggling and bleating goat.
“I heard through her. Why is she calling me Arxet though?” Safraxi circled back and watched the areas around their little trap, tucked between the lakeside mountains, slightly annoyed now. She could still see fairly well as the shadow of the mountain began to stretch out over Lake Sulis. And there was… a wake. “Tifse, something’s moving out there, I just see a wake moving behind it. It’s got to be big!” She angled back toward the inlet. She could see all the way out and away from the shoreline that Audirei was wading out toward the goat. The animal was almost free, the rope was being worn down on the sharp rocks around it as it struggled.
“Audirei! Get out! It’s coming!” Tifse slid down the tree, nearly falling off the last branch and rolling down into the water.
“H-hold on, the goat’s more help if it’s still in here. It’s-” The animal turned and slammed its horns straight up into her chin, and she was out like a candle dunked in the shallows. She splashed down face up into the water, and the goat finally slipped its rope and ran for dry land again. Tifse couldn’t even see the other fox anymore as she’d sunk down into the water, weighed down by her armor and weapon. “Safraxi she’s drowning!” The desert fox rushed into the water and tried to pull the other fox free. In the dark water and the many different uneven boulders she was struggling to find Audirei, every time she thought she had found her crush it turned out to be a clump of moss or some other detritus.
“The eel is almost to you!” Safraxi shot down into the water, slamming so hard onto the rocks below that her joints and bones ached, but kept on all fours. “Get out of the water, I’ll pull her out!”
Tifse hesitated for a moment, but nodded and ran for the harpoon on the stony beach. Safraxi waded around in the huge bowl, trying to locate the red fox. She was starting to hate her more and more, especially after hearing her use the wrong name, but Tifse cared about her, so she had to suck up her bullshit for at least a little longer and make sure she didn't die before her rider could admit her feelings. Even with her excellent night vision, though, she was struggling with the murky waters. And the water around her was heating up.
“It’s coming in!” Tifse yelled from the beach and began angling for a better angle to throw the harpoon. Safraxi whirled in time for the eel to come crashing into her little shallow, jaws agape. It surged forward, splashing scalding hot water everywhere it went. The steam filled up the air, obscuring Tifse’s vision from the outside. She had to push through and share Safraxi’s sharper senses, closer to the monster, for a better idea of where it was.
The eel struck at Safraxi’s front, but she slashed with her claws and shoved it away from her. All of the cuts and gashes she had carved into it the prior night had healed over, but one thing hadn’t. All of the flesh where she had sprayed it with her cold breath was still black and swollen, like a waterlogged cadaver’s meat had been grafted onto the beast. “It’s vulnerable to ice!” Safraxi attempted to open her jaws and blast it, but the eel shot back under the waves and avoided the worst of it. The tide had risen more than they had expected as the night was beginning to fall. Iit had more clearance inside the shallow little circle than they had anticipated. Safraxi left multiple ice floats, but didn’t manage to hit the eel.
Safraxi kept shooting more and more ice around her, closing off every possible route for the eel that she could, but her lingering fear still gnawed at her: she might just be closing in Audirei worse, wherever she’d fallen under the rocks.
The eel also seemed to recognize the danger the unconscious woman faced, and seemed intent to make itself the most pressing threat. Safraxi noticed it pause in one direction and strike. It was swallowing something down! “Tifse, get it with the harpoon now!” She leapt atop it, digging her claws in tight to try and hold it in place for the fox to strike it. The eel was jerking its face forwards over and over, blood gushing from its jaws as its hooked teeth kept its prey from floating back out.
Tifse threw the harpoon with every ounce of strength her rider bond afforded her. She couldn’t see anything in the dark and the steam, and all she had to go off of was her dragon’s senses, and her knowledge of what parts of the shallows had already been covered in ice. She stuck the harpoon into the slimy beast’s tail, and it let out a horrific shriek as it flailed in the water. Ice shattered and melted. Safraxi was thrown free from its back, now burned up most of her front. The eel smashed straight through the blockage she had created and attempted to flee into open water.
Safraxi shot out after it, taking wing again and attempting to blast it from above, but the water held her down for her takeoff. The eel had too much of a lead. Tifse was fighting with it on the beach, but even with the rough pulley that Audirei had constructed out of two trees and their rope, she couldn’t match it. With the eel under the water, too, Safraxi couldn’t get it with her ice breath, even as it surfaced to thrash with the harpoon, it had an uncanny timing at delving back into the dark depths again as soon as the spray of pure cold washed over the water.
“I’ve got an idea, but it’s stupid.” Safraxi made several hard flaps upwards, putting herself into an intentional stall. “You’re probably going to have to save my ass whether it fails or succeeds, I am not a good swimmer.”
“Fine! Fine, what’s the-” Tifse dropped the rope and ran for the water, but Safraxi didn’t have time to explain.
The dragon had shifted back to her anthronoid form, though Tifse couldn’t see which from all the way at shore. Safraxi couldn’t tell and couldn’t care who she was right now. Someone her rider cared about was in danger, and it was time to do what Amjazel told her she did best: creating an advantage from a bad situation. She just needed to create the bad situation first.
As she plummeted toward the water below, roughly on top of the eel, she yanked her dagger from her belt and slammed it down into one of the gaps in her armor along her shoulder, before yanking it back out moments before she hit the waves. Blood spurted from the wound quickly as she fought to stay above water. Her armor weighed half as much as she did, and she was in pain and disoriented from the force of the water hitting her.
She was perfect bait.
The eel couldn’t resist such a tantalizingly easy meal, and it surged up from the dark abyss to clamp its jaws down over the drowning dragon. Safraxi was already halfway down its gullet the moment it had shot up from the water, and she got as deep a breath of air as she could manage before it plunged back down. She couldn’t see in this type of darkness, under the waves and in the core of a deadly beast.
She didn’t need to see to spray the inside of its head with freezing cold, though.
She let out all the air she’d saved up in her one last gasp for fresh night air, forcing as much cold magic into it as she could. The inside of the monster’s mouth froze solid in an instant, and before it could sink any further down she changed back to her full size. As she rapidly expanded in the cramped and frozen interior she felt unbearable pressure on her wings and joints, it felt as if she were going to be crushed completely, but suddenly the dam burst, and she exploded out of the interior of the monster, sending frozen shards in every direction. She quickly whirled around and grabbed the trunk of its neck in her jaws and HAULED as hard as she could for the surface. There was precious cargo inside, and Tifse would kill her if it were damaged.
Tifse seemed to recognize what her plan was and got back on the rope, pulling as hard as she could to bring the corpse in before it could sink, or worse. Safraxi tossed the colossal corpse up onto the rocks and began tearing into it, trying to find in its guts where that stupid fox was tucked away. Finally, she spotted a tuft of white fur among the gore and dug her head in face first. She clamped her jaws down on a bit of clothing and pulled with all her might until Audirei was free. Once that was done, she dropped the fox down onto the wet stones and collapsed.
Tifse was running over to tend to the drowned fox. Safraxi could hear the gross sputtering up of fluids, and the deep breaths behind her as Audirei finally woke up.
“Hah, Aquixi’s such a shit monster hunter, eh? We’re way cooler.” She groaned and rolled over to let off one last blast of cold at the regenerating neck stump of the eel. With that, it finally laid dead, no longer a threat to anyone.