ORIGIN

Ivory stood a little nervously, a little excitedly, staring out into the snow. Her breath came in frosty huffs, and her green-glowing eyes tried, and failed, to pierce the blizzard's curtain.

To her surprise, she'd found another Gembound here her size: Virgil, dark to her white, a bare inch shorter and a close shave of less than a hundred pounds heavier. She'd never expected to find another so large--Vargas had proven to be massive, but everyone else she'd ever met she towered over. Or at least outweighed. But Virgil had a similar build, a similar shape; there were differences, here and there, but Ivory found herself fascinated by it.

"Hey--I'm Ivory. You kinda look like me," she observed, and then added, "but I bet you feel warmer." Her fur was certainly thinner around her sides and legs, though the feathery tufts here and there would save her extremeties, at least, from frostbite. And she reflected, too, that her coloring would make her harder for an enemy to spot, though equally, harder for her allies to keep track of.

"If we stick together, I bet we could stop anything that tries to hurt us all," Ivory suggested.

Other than that, she mostly just looked around, awaiting ideas from the others, though curious about the depths of Hydra beyond. Her father'd never told her much about it.

Shida was there, then, greeting her, and Ivory plodded over. She gave her sister a warm, friendly nuzzle, and spoke rather happily. "Hi; I'm glad you made it. We stay together, yeah?" Shida was quicker than her--and, she thought, smarter too--but she was the big bulky bully of the pair of them. They could look out for each other--and maybe with Virgil alongside them, they'd come out of this okay.

Warrior had gained a rather thick and shaggy coat in the last couple weeks. He was nearly fully-grown, now: still a slender-limbed but strong little horse, but he'd found that he had to eat near-constantly to keep his warmth going. He'd taken to drawing energy from the earth itself, standing as if grazing with head low over rock and sand as nutrients flowed up through him. It was magic, he knew, and it was, at times, all that was keeping him alive; the plant life here was... lacking, at best.

And he'd seen no one else, lately. Part of that was visibility, but part of it was the cold, and sometimes he wondered if he were the last being left in Hydra. Oh, the sand worms were still there--and the vultures--but they didn't count, really; they couldn't speak. And both seemed to lie in a torpor, lethargy from the cold leaving them wholly motionless.

Though with the sand worms, that was really how they were all the time.

But now he was keeping watch on the strange bone-tunnel at the end of the salt flats. He trotted out there every couple days and kept it at the edge of his sensory magic, worriedly checking it over. Somehow, he feared that the bones of Canis, or whatever had dragged them there, might rise up and come here. Does this place cycle between hot and cold often? he wondered, and Is this how everything died? Granted, nights in Hydra could be bitterly cold, but not like this, and not all the time.

For now, there seemed to be no respite from it. At night he shivered, finding small crevices in the Crucible to futiley try to hold his heat in. But it was cold, achingly cold, all the time.

It was today, for the first time, that the now-shaggy desert horse actually sensed other living beings: a large group of them, in fact, lingering near the tunnel mouth. But they didn't look... dangerous, somehow. His magic saw blinking flashes of red just milling about, perhaps talking, and Warrior risked pushing through the snow until he could barely make out their shapes in the distance.

"Hello?" he called out, at last. "I am Warrior; where-... Who are you? Where did you come from?"

He hesitated, stopping a little under twenty yards away, still barely-visible in the blinding white. He looked them over. They were highly-varied, and none of them really struck him as deadly predators. Hargrave even looked pretty, in a way--elegant and lithe, chocolate-dark; Virgil and Ivory (who he could hardly see) both had the look of vanguards. Another looked like a smaller, long-legged version of Virgil, albeit with a blue crown wreathing its head, and another still seemed to glow with a soft blue light. There were others, too--large and small, brown and white, and he wondered what such an eclectic gathering was doing here.

He worried that it might be something important--something he had missed.

Imp, huddled securely in the warmth of Virgil's woolly fur, turned in disbelief to Kalama.

"WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU CALLING AN EMESIS?!" he shouted, his 'outrage' half-lost to his confusion (AND WHAT'S AN 'EMESIS'), and his words all-in-all half-lost to the snowstorm, anyway. "And I CAN'T OPEN MY EYES. I HAVEN'T GOT ANY FUCKIN' EYES. FUCK YOU," he added, for good measure, shuffling around to fully face the chicken's vague-voice-direction.

"I didn't hear Garnet here! Is that shitheap here this time!? That fucker tricked me and BETRAYED ME to the FUCKIN' BETRAYER HERSELF, the penis-face! And they tore my fuckin' eyes out! FUCK THEM. Sorry," Imp added down toward his ride, going from shouting fury to conversational politeness in half a second.

And back again.

"But fuck them! Garnet and Nemean and that fuckhead Vargas, too."

Imp paused.

"-Hey, anyone feel a little weird?"