ORIGIN

This alligator sucked at actually chasing and hunting, Kera decided. Blood seeped from everywhere she touched on the deer as it thrashed and howled. She clung onto its hide for dear life-- no pun intended --but she was soon completely thrown off the beast.

She hit the ground with a yelp of pain, landing on her injured leg, but she hadn't left the deer totally unharmed. It was limping and scrambling away now, bleeding out through the scratches and bites marking along its flank, but it was still getting away.

Without a word leaving her mouth, she scrambled to her paws and started limp-running after it again, muzzle wrinkled with a snarl as pain shot up her leg everytime she placed it down.

Dragon turned with startling agility, jaws swinging for the deer--and they snapped shut on nothing. The deer was bounding away into the marsh--bleeding, but he wasn't sure how badly; and he gave chase, his legs again flinging mud up and behind him as he went. He was limping, and he knew the deer would rapidly be gone into the swamp--unless he could stop it.

He focused, a gob of superheated goo retching up through his throat, and he aimed it in a spit for the fleeing animal. It caught, however, on a conical tooth at the top of his jaw, and while he expected to see a fiery light hurtling into the darkness, he saw only black--and then agonizing pain as the lava dropped into his lower jaw and started to sear through.

He roared, plunging his face downward and into the swamp's thicker mud, frantically filling his maw with cooler muck.

PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN--

He tasted blood and burning, and squeezed his dark eyes shut against the agony. He was well-used to burning his own maw, but damn it still hurt.

After a moment he lifted his head, wincing--only to find that both the deer and the wolf chasing it were long gone. More slowly, deliberately, he began to plod along behind them, trying to follow the scent of their blood over the coppery, burnt smell of his own blastmelted mouth.

Ignoring the roar of agony behind her-- not even thinking it was Dragon --Kera continued running and running. She didn't even pass a glance towards him, focused only on the wounded, limp-running deer in front of her.

She found herself catching up once more, or perhaps the deer had just completely ran out of fuel by now and was slowing down, but regardless she was close enough that it was bounding right alongside her. She half-turned, staring, spying her target, then lunged.

Where Dragon had failed, Kera had succeeded. She crashed into the deer unceremoniously and clamped her jaws tight around the strider's neck, biting and tearing and crunching until the blood was everywhere, on her fur, on the deer, on the mud, in her mouth, and the deer had finally stopped thrashing and lay still.

Blood pooled onto the ground under it while Kera stood hunched over it, gasping for breath with deer-blood dripping from her teeth. It was now that she realised Dragon wasn't near.

She lifted her head, looking around in the plunging darkness, and then sat next to her kill, waiting quietly for Dragon to re-emerge from the way they had come, licking blood from her white fur.

In fact, it took a few moments for the alligator to catch up, breath coming in heaving puffs. He slowed when he saw the faint-white in the near-pitch-blackness ahead, and when he smelled blood strong in the air.

"Is it down?" he asked--and then, after nudging it with his broad snout--"You are a good hunter. This is good!" He was cheerful, despite his new and painful wound, the hole near burned through his lower jaw and now packed with healing mud. He nudged the deer, gauging how large it was; it wasn't. It was fairly small, but still, it was something, and added to the pile it should be enough for Aquarian.

"Are you wounded?" He paused to turn and nudge the wolf with his broad snout, testingly, and then--somehow satisfied that she was not dying--he looked back to the deer. "Follow me. I will carry it; and then we will call for my father, and ask him of the Lights."

This proudly declared, the alligator slowly scooped the deer into his massive (if wounded) jaws, and began to carry it back toward the Heart of Cetus.

Kera's tail wagged a bit as she licked blood from her jaws. She was a good hunter, even if the deer had not only been tiny, but stumbled a lot. It may have been luck, but nobody had to know that. Kera had caught it and downed it herself.

She allowed Dragon to nudge at her. "It didn't hurt me," she said. "I just fell on my leg, I think, but it doesn't hurt too badly." Her tongue swept across her jowls again as she pushed herself up.

It had hurt far worse when Blackberry broke it, but that didn't entirely matter either. Had the goose downed a deer by itself? Kera thought not. Therefore, the pup was superior. And she had won.

Kera limped alongside Dragon, glancing him over for a moment. "I heard you shouting," she said, coming to this conclusion after a moment of reflection. "Did you get hurt?"

She wondered, quietly, what Dragon's father would be like, what he looked like and how he would act-- would he be proud of the food, and the deer? What would he know of the lights? Would it be useful? What did he know of Nemean?

She wondered what Nemean-- or Zevruu, if that were its real name --had to do with the lights and why it wanted them gone. Perhaps it was just full of black hatred, like birds? Perhaps Nemean was a bird.

It would explain a lot.

Dragon eyed Kera sidelong as she tried to speak to him as he was carrying a deer in his jaws. With a sigh he paused, and dropped it. He spoke, his words only slightly distorted by the wound.

"Yes. I am Dragon. I use fire, and sometimes, little one, fire burns." He paused, then added--"I fought a great dragon, once--by the sides of many others. Nemean arrived, at the end. This leg--" and he nodded back to his damaged right hind--"and the old scars along my back, they are the dragon's doing. Flames harm even I."

He paused, thinking. "The dragon harmed many, killed many, and the Betrayer claimed it was all her doing. Her plans, her machination. Our father warns us never to let her know we know of her, or speak of her. That she is deadly. She is a small thing, a bright thing, a thing with wings and fur and she is the enemy."

Dragon lifted the deer in his jaws again, and once more stood, limp-dragging himself through the swamp. Eventually, he saw the glow of the mushrooms around the pile of rotted carcasses in the distance. He added the deer to it, carefully nudging it into place at the top, and sighed, settling back.

"Are you ready?" he asked, glancing back at Kera.

Fire burns. This would probably be a lesson Kera would have to remember some day, but not now. She eyes over Dragon and his scars, briefly, speaking before he picked up the deer again. "Is it dead?" she asked. "Was it full of black evil, and did it deserve to die?"

Her question was promptly half-answered, but it remained lingering for a moment. Just because Nemean got it to do so might not mean it was purely innocent. Her eyes drifted away, and then snapped back to Dragon. She had to know. "Is Nemean a bird?"

"All birds are full of hatred and evil," the pup explained grimly. "Negative and aggressive. One tried to kill me, and another betrayed me and stole from me. No bird can be trusted." Her fur stood on end, bristled along her spine, but she moved alongside Dragon in silence as he picked up the deer and continued moving.

She was thoughtful. She wondered of Nemean and birds, of dragons and light and darkness. She watched as Dragon topped off the pile with the expertly-caught deer and slowly sat back on her haunches.

"Does Nemean deserve to die?" she asked. "If she is an enemy, she should be killed as soon as possible before she hurts others, before she kills more, before she ruins the lights again. Before she betrays more people."

She stared off at the pile, for a moment. She wondered if Aquarian truly had anything he could tell her about the lights and what to do with them. She sighed, and shook her fur out until it sat flat against her skin again.

"I'm ready."

"It did not die," Dragon responded. "She led it out, but why, I do not know."

At the sudden outpouring of complete and utter... racism? Speciesm? from the wolf, Dragon peered at her. He huffed, quietly, and was about to argue before he remembered that the owl, his prophet, had vanished without a trace when she was meant to be helping him. Still, his daughter-crow--she had been loyal. Helpful. "They are not all bad, birds; I have known good ones. I knew a crow, a small-black-thing, who could make light as you do, and who brought messages from my father to I, when I was recovering from my battles elsewhere."

All of this said, Dragon leaned back, nudging the pile here and there.

It was a few feet tall of putrefied carcasses, some wholly rotten and oozing, some fresher. The base was a stinking tangle of bones and hides in long-rotted meat, crawling with maggots. The higher the pile went, which was only a few feet, the fresher the fish and spiders and rats and deer and birds were, until--at the top--were the freshest of kills, the deer and the black cave rat among them.

It will have to do.

Dragon turned, hauling himself away from the pile to a safe distance to one side. He glanced over, briefly, to Kera. "Move far from the glow, and from the meat, or he may swallow you up, as well, on accident. He is very large."

And then, Dragon turned, facing out over the lightless black Heart of Cetus. He was loathe to call upon fire again already, with his mouth as burnt as it was, but it was how he normally called for Aquarian to rise from the depths, and so--biting back his pain--he gave it a shot.

It was, unfortunately, a complete and utter failure again--not in any small part due to the mud still packing his jaw. The flame coiled around it and up into his face, searing him, blasting his UPPER jaw, so that now both sides were badly burned.

He tumbled into the swamp water--luckily right beside the offering pile--with a bellowed roar of pain.

That had not gone as planned.

For a few moments he merely drifted in the black water, agonized, but glad at least that he had not managed to burn himself alive completely.

This--this was not how he wanted his father to find him.

Kera picked herself up to back off away from the pile, thoughts lingering on Nemean and the dragon. "Maybe its trying to mess up the dragon further, making it loyal to her, so she can command it to kill more," she suggested out loud, settling back down a good distance from the pile.

She watched the alligator for a moment. "Maybe not all," she said. "But I think it's common for them to be full of hatred." She seemed quite unaware that she herself were full of hatred for many things, such as birds and rats. It's not likely something she would admit were she aware of it either.

She watched dragon-- fail, again --and recoil into the water. She blinked, pacing over towards where the black, log-like creature lay in the water. Fire burns. "Will you die?" she asked. "Do you need help?"

Dragon huffed softly, blowing bubbles up through the water, agony still coursing through him. It was, in fact, several minutes--his maw hanging open in the water--before he emerged. In that time he gathered a magic around him, magic of a different sort, magic to slowly speed the mending process and chase away some of the agonized damage that had been done to him. Burns this bad would take time to heal, but he knew, at least, how to speed the process.

He was a very resilient creature. Plus, he reflected, it was probably good that--as a fire-breathing creature--he lived in a swamp. Of water.

The alligator at length crawled back into the mud of the shore.

"I will not die. I will recover. It is painful, but that is the nature of fire," he grumbled, trying to dismiss it as something that happened all the time.

It was not.

His words were coming a bit distorted, but that, too, was just how things were. He turned, grimacing, and faced out toward the swamp. At the top of his volume, he began his rumbling, hissing, purring alligator roars, a roar that echoied in bass thrums through the swamp, again and again.

Interspersed with this, he called out.

"FATHER! THE LIGHTS HAVE GONE OUT! WE SEEK YOUR WISDOM!"

Truth be told, he had no idea how this would go. Mostly, he was confident that Aquarian would be satisfied with the offering; he himself ate rancid, rotted meat all the time, and it didn't occur to him that another might not like it so much. But the Children of Rot had long since left this cave, and though Dragon often added meat to the offering pile--in fact, it was all he'd been doing for many cycles--he still wasn't sure that it was actually Aquarian, and not the cave rats, eating it.

He wasn't even sure that the sea serpent creature would respond. The last time there had been major events in the cave, Aquarian had--though Dragon would never admit it--simply hid beneath the waters until the danger had passed.

That, he supposed, was one way to survive.