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*Hemlocke* · Jun 11 2024, 02:18 PM

It awakens again.

And again, it is alone. It is without— no guiding hand beckoning or dismissing, calling it to the frontline for another grueling test amid cracked salt flats and sweltering heat or bidding it retreat to make the next generation. Again, Hemlocke crawls from its garnet shell, purposeless and seeking nothing of the former existence it'd beheld before or after the Trials.

There'd been no desert rose alongside it, this time; and therefore, no will to truly think of old times with any degree of companionable fondness, anymore. Clearly, he's left for greener pastures.

Wicking the amniotic fluid from its leathery wings, Hemlocke takes off in the opposite direction, and finds itself marveling at how utterly changed it all is, now.

And here it now sits, tail curled about webbed foot-paws as it stares— stares down at the glimmering opal it'd found glinting mid the sands. Its surface is polished-smooth, with a hollow cavity on one side; and Hemlocke knows that it couldn't have belonged to the new brood that haunts this Cave, now. Sand and anguish has worn on it for thousands of cycles and has left it in a state of disrepair.

Yet, Hemlocke finds itself blinking those ruby-red eyes of its and lowering its bright beak to the fire opal's surface— breathing a life into it.

Perhaps, there's redemption on the bird-beast's mind; a second lease on life. Just to spare this stone the burden of being wholly forgotten as so many other failed, unremarkable designs had. Perhaps, sparing it the burden of being permanently marked as unworthy because it'd been compared against a far more efficient design, something far more ruthless, or just had been unlucky. The Trials were never entirely fair.

Or, maybe Hemlocke is just feeling venomous in its loneliness and unwillingness to move on from the past, nurturing its first careless spark of rebelliousness. It isn't as if Hydra is of any import, anymore.

It leaves the forming chrysalis half-buried in the sand near Hydra's entrance, fluttering up to a shelf of rock to watch and wait.

Exit Hemlocke