In The Quiet - Printable Version

The half-blind fledgling, stone-shielded eyes wide and near-unseeing, quietly edged through the dark of the tunnel and into Polaris. She'd seen a procession of creatures: spiked, strange, twisted. They had not seen her. They were not real: or rather, they were not there, in the sense of time, in the sense of past and present. She had seen, instead, a shadow: an echo of what once had been.

But Hecate was a newly-hatched, and she did not know this. Scraggly, confused, a little alone, she followed the direction they'd gone. She could see the vague, glowing shape of the Spire: huge, alien to her. It was enormous and monolithic, and she was both drawn to it--curious as to what iti was, as she could not see it well from here--and wary of it. But where had the strangers gone-? Alarm trickled through her; she shouldn't have lost them, not so quickly. What had she been doing, last she'd seen them-?

Seeing, she told herself--with the magic. At once she paused, hunkering down, her curved talons clinging tight to the stone below. Half-grown feathers fluffed out as she crouched, and she concentrated.

"Where did you go?" she whispered, her green eyes flaring brightly in the shadows. She stared toward the Spire, unseeing, lost only in her magic, now.

Tyr had nearly missed the brown, antlered bird marching on through Polaris if it weren't for himself being in the middle of a rather introspective aerial pacing session, dark eyes studying the ground below as he soared low over it. The tower of magic, the Spire, loomed over too close for comfort, setting his feathers to quivering as he made a mental map of in his cave of origin. Of course, a moving irregularity caught his nearsighted eyes enough to cause him to swoop closer and study over it.

His first thought was of the fluffiness it had. It invoked a sense of youth in Tyr (granted, he was definitely young himself), mirrored only by a sense of uniqueness. From his perspective, he had no sight of a gem as he soared about them, head tilting left and right to get better angles. Was this like the others that had no sense of language? Could this one speak? It seemed to carry itself with more purpose than the mindless beasts of the caves, and that spiked the young birds interest enough to glide down and approach.

His wings were quick to tuck themselves behind his back. He halted for the briefest moment before hopping forward, able to see much more at this distance and definitely enough to be within talking distance. With a minuscule greeting bob of his head, Tyr turned his head to glance to the Spire before looking back to the owl-like individual. The Spire was certainly a source of a lot of the smaller bird's ministrations, and yet, now that he thought of it, he'd never dared to get close enough to actually do something about his thoughts for it.

Perhaps this being had been brave enough to approach the thick field of magic and step closer to it than he had.

Clearing his throat, Tyr raised his head and splayed a wing in front of him, his wrist against his gem as he bowed properly. "Hello there!" He began, eyes gleaming with curiosity and voice high and nasal. "You seem to be particularly..." Ah, how should he put it. He wasn't particularly interested in a budding friendship, more curious to swirl about in their mind and extract any knowledge he could find useful for himself. Were they concentrating? Well, better get this over quick, then. "Studious." There, that was the right word.

Shuffling in place, he returned his wing back to his back and turned to face the Spire. "I hope I'm not bothering, but maybe you wouldn't mind some company?" That is, if this creature wasn't as brainless as some of the others Tyr interacted with. They certainly didn't carry themselves that way, at least. In any case, perhaps he could learn something from this odd amalgamation of parts overlaid on owl; his mind mulled over the possibilities as he eyed the crown atop their head.

The emerald-tinted Spire Hecate saw bubbled out as her vision washed in: the Spire she saw in her vision was an oily, thick black, shimmering with purple and green iridescence as if light filtered around it. The procession had come to gather near it, grumbling among themselves in a wave of sound that almost sounded like arguing. Other groups had filtered in from different directions, an ancient chattering filling their mouths. Suddenly, the murmurs trickled out with whispers left hanging on breaths as the group grew quiet. "You have failed for the last time," boomed a voice, quaking the room like rolling thunder that one felt in their bones. "Produce the results or die." A pulsating grip released from the Spire, a hunger for energy, a need—each of the strange and alien creatures cried out, clutching the areas of their bodies their stones might be, falling to their knees in an unbearable pain.

The sound began to fade from Hecate's vision. Before the vision itself completely evaporated, there was a large, beast-like creature stepping out from behind the Spire, its gaseous green eyes seemingly locked onto her. Its mouth moved, but she could not hear it. Whatever it might have said would leave her with a cold feeling: the primal grip of true fear. It was as if her body knew to be afraid, to cower and to yield. Something deeper than primal instinct commanded her to be fearful, the very magic inside of her recoiling from the vision, leaving Hecate to feel ill.

Hecate remained quiet, lost in her trance, as Tyr approached.

She watched the strangers as they wandered to the Spire, unaware it was nothing but a vision, a memory; she thought she was seeing truly, seeing past her haze of green color. But the strangers spoke--or rather, one spoke; a booming voice that seemed to roil through her. She quailed back, and when the monster stepped from behind the Spire, she flattened herself to the ground in fear. She opened her black beak to cry out, but nothing came forth--and suddenly she lost sight of it, the green tint returning to her sight.

"...mind some company?" There was another voice, talking to her--a calmer voice, a kinder one.

Hecate blinked.

Her heart was racing, she realized--her breathing coming in short and frightened pants. But she rallied, as best a child could: she lifted her large head, peering and blinking again around her. There. It was another bird, young, like herself: blue, and much smaller. And pretty, she decided. She couldn't quite make out the blue; it was "blue" as she knew it, a sort of brilliant aqua, tainted by her gemstone's interference. But she could see his shape, and his slight movement.

She looked back, for a moment, to the Spire--likely looking rather lost. The group of creatures there was gone. The color of the Spire had changed, and the creature behind it was no longer there. The young hybrid was but a child, with no frame of reference for the world--let alone for disappearing and reappearing entities within it, and places suddenly changing color. For all she knew, it might change back; they might reappear. Hell, she herself might be phasing in and out of some sort of other reality.

"...Hello," she tried, her voice melodic and soft as she turned to Tyr again. "Did you--see them?" Speech, even, was new to her; and she trembled just a little as she blinked back toward the Spire. "Where did they go? Do you know--why the colors... changed?"

No answer came. She turned, and--puzzled by the sudden silence, and all that she had seen--wandered off.