Horribleness is a hardy and ubiquitous weed. Its needs are little but as common to the caves as the rock lining its many hollow spaces: darkness with plenty of time to develop into a significantly worsened form. Shade so readily available, palaces and crumbling ruins alike provide the proper environment for such an infestation to flourish. And none can forget the less noteworthy places also capable of hosting these insidious sprouts. Numerous dank spots lie within rooms and along the routes between them, awaiting the opportunity to birth and nourish another horror planted in their soil.
Clinging to the wet sloping wall that descended from Pisces just now was a perfect example of these facts, a silvery nodule that could've been mistaken for simple condensation if not for its opaque surface and size, small as a child's fist and larger than the average water droplet. Quite the unremarkable thing, other than its shine, but utterly normal for a chrysalis. After all, in order for any Gembound to claim their stone the prettiest, someone had to lose out to random chance and be stuck with either the ugly or mundane. For a long cycle it had resided here, a tiny growth below any passerby's notice.
Who knew if that'd change once a tapping began from inside its, up until present, unbroken shell.
Regardless of whether the sound met anyone's ears, the efforts of the stirring consciousness trapped in a prison of hematite remained persistent. Though the taps had started out slow, each second's passage hastened them until their assault upon stone attained a fevered rhythm. Progress was gradual, the repeated salvo showing no effect upon the hard exterior at first, but then slivers broke off and fell away from the glimmering surface. Another minute more, and those advanced to shards. A hole, no bigger than a pin would poke, formed. What insight it offered to the chrysalis' dweller was little, nothing more than shifting gray fuzz glimpsed beyond its edges.
The next action proved far more informative, another determined peck proving far more forceful than necessary to ensure entrance into the greater world now that an opening had been created. Chunks of stone shell flew every which direction as its entirety burst apart from this final thrust. Amongst the chaos, a puffball slid into view, though it was quite possible it would soon exit from sight. The ground as slippery as the walls, the Gembound's tumbling rapidly gained momentum, and a flurry of frantic twitters announced a harrowing journey down the tunnel's steep decline.
Neat as her interception of the newborn's descent had been, rarely was a sudden stop a pleasant experience. Not that the previous regular alternations between air and frigid earth had been much more comfortable—already the first pains this bird would ever know were the bruises peppering their tiny body. The final smack against the keeled scales of their rescuer's palm now turned out to be the next agony, the impact like bashing against a brick wall for someone of such diminutive stature. If Miriam expected an immediate response to her question, she'd be disappointed. For many seconds after her last enthusiastic syllable faded into silence, the bundle of underdeveloped feathers merely shivered: cold, dazed, and brain rather rattled from the entire ordeal.
The platform they rested on, Miriam's palm, wavered a tad. Much as the tatzelwurm could hold a statuesque pose with ease for lengthy periods of time when the situation demanded so, her ears were flattening against her skull and her nostrils subtly flaring. Jaw beginning to clench so an involuntary chattering of teeth could be silenced, she leaned farther inward. Warm breath gusted over damp feathers.
"Hu—hello? Ya—you haven't frozen over, have you, dear?" More so upset by the chill's effect on the steadiness of her voice than concerned by the lack of birdsong, the corners of the polite smile she held drooped into a mild frown. Eyes darted between her new possession and the ground, reconsidering past actions. Reevaluating whether that brief expenditure of energy had truly been worth the effort when she could've already slithered off to a nicer part of the caves.
Only once her hand started lowering did the tiny body deliberately shift about. A beaked head arose from where it'd been tucked within the mass of silvery fluff. The eyes set within it were quite the opposite of those gargantuan ones observing them in turn: dark, beady, and forbidding.
Miriam paused. "Oh, there you are." Relieved laughter bubbled up from her throat.
An innocuous comment, but the bird must've taken issue with it. The puffball gathered up air into its young lungs, expanding like a balloon, and a fresh sequence of tweets burst from them. These rang far more accusatory than the panicked ones of before. And if there was any doubt, their accompanying assault confirmed their ornery attitude. They pecked away at the fingers of the giant holding them, beak wielded as a dagger.
Dark eyes made it difficult to read comprehension. Pupils nearly blended into their surrounding irises, telltale dilation or contraction was concealed from all but the most attentive. Although she might’ve possessed the capability, Miriam lacked the patience for such careful observation, and so while looking upon the bird with a gaze that threatened to dangerously narrow, nothing really registered besides her captive’s continued stunned pose. The subtle turn of gears escaped notice, the fresh hatchling processing the undesirable situation they were now stuck in. Breaths slowed into calmer, less shaky inhales until at last they could have been an unmoving statuette resting in her palm.
Then they shuffled in place, feet barely noticeable beneath the rotund bulk of their fluff except for the tippy-tap of their little toes upon scales. They tensed up, relaxed their shoulders a fraction, and cast their eyes downward.
A barely audible noise rose to Miriam’s ears. These flicked in recognition of the disturbance, low and too brief to even begin assigning a word to it. Her head tilted the slightest, and she curled claws in closer to the bird’s body. Their sharp tips didn’t poke a single underdeveloped feather out of place, only hovered close by as a potential prod for response.
"Pardon?" Despite this, her query remained chipper and bright. "You’ll have to speak up a bit more, dear. Large ears don’t always catch small sounds."
Another noise, identical to the first. The bird had lifted their beak, and if the forceful attitude coating the monosyllable they delivered didn’t make clear their opinion of the current line of questioning, the glare leveled at the tatzelwurm crystallized it.
Say yes if he understood her? How about—
"Nah."
Miriam's palm shook the slightest as the chill temperatures took their toll, and despite the clear spite present in his statement, the baby bird had no choice but to dig in tiny talons to maintain his less than ideal perching spot. He huffed, no doubt still very displeased by his current circumstances. But then his captor's casual diagnosis struck him like a sudden bolt, tipping the world sideways. Had his feathers not been as damp, they would've ruffled instantly from the shock.
"Nah, nah, nah." Like a skipping record, he chirped away incessant denial at the insinuated brain damage. With each repetition, the pitch jumped higher, increasingly distressed and shrill. "Nah. Nah!"
She was calling him an idiot, wasn't she? A mush-brained, useless for anything, waste of space. And not only that, she was lavishing pity on him too! That lousy collection of scales didn't know who she was dealing with. Why he should—he ought to—
Well, being so fresh out of the chrysalis, he didn't have a plethora of ideas, but surely something sufficiently punishing would come to mind if he thought hard enough. Meanwhile, the bigger issue was convincing this broad of his not to be underestimated intellect. Abandoning the attempt at doing this through hammering negatives, so far ineffective, judging by how Miriam raised her unoccupied hand to her mouth and smothered the inevitable giggles resulting from the spectacle, other words in his limited vocabulary were moved onto. He loosed a series of frustrated tweets beforehand—not yet introduced to the wonders of vulgar language, they were the best means of expression he had to work with.
"No," the bird relented to proper speech over the lazy execution he vastly preferred. "Yes, understand. No confused. No sorting out!"
He pecked at one of the claws surrounding him and returned an expectant glance to the tatzelwurm as if to confirm her own comprehension.
While he'd broken his silence at last with actual words, the bird clearly had no interest in striking up a rapport with Miriam. Implying a lack of brain cells, whether maliciously or not, obviously didn't tend to lead to warm feelings on the recipient's part. He might've absorbed the concept of names like any other child would new information, but not a single noise that could be construed as a proper answer slipped from his beak. Instead he continued using his beady eyes to burn holes into his captor. Young and small, it was the worst he could do in his present situation.
She held back a sigh of exasperation. This outcome had not been unexpected, of course, her decision to provoke a calculated one. Nevertheless, feline curiosity insisted that she probe for useful behavior at least a second or two longer. If nothing else from this Gembound amused her so, she'd have no problem returning him to the frigid and frozen tunnel he'd blindly tumbled his way into. Nature could assert her will in Miriam's stead if that was his ignorant little desire; doubtless she'd exhibit far more cruelty than the tatzelwurm could ever dream of embodying.
"All right," she allowed, feigned cheer unshakable in the face of such anger, "That's fine. You can figure one out later. How about magic then? Is there a certain sort of power you feel in your grasp? An invisible something you think is under your control?"
Smoldering coal-black eyes dialed back their intensity as he processed this next batch of questions. An inarticulate grunt of confusion followed before the bird cleared his throat, awkward in his nasally request for clarification. "Eh, power?"
With the way she'd purred it, the term seemed mighty important, but damned if he had a clue what she meant by all that other nonsense she spewed afterward.