Clouds swirled around Countess Akantha as she flew into the northern mountain ranges. Lightning flickered in the clouds, a defensive and offensive measure that she’d trained herself to instinctively maintain. Air rushed by as Mora’s Archduke Stage power drove her forwards. Normally, she wouldn’t be rushing this fast into the mountain ranges, not wanting to alarm or disrupt the careful balance that was maintained by the Cored and Fants of the ranges but time was of extreme import at the moment, not even considering the fact that she needed to return home to spend time with her family to mourn her son.
Despite being taken away from her family, by the orders of the queen, in order to complete a mission, Mora didn’t feel any anger towards the queen for the task. Based on what she knew, this was an extremely important, time-sensitive mission and the fact that the queen was willing to send Mora at all boded well for her future status after her demotion. Being completely honest, it could be because Mora had served in the military with the queen and Emyr, so they knew what she was like and of her work ethic, but she also knew that neither of them would entrust a mission to her if they weren’t confident that she wasn’t the best person to handle it.
From high above the normal clouds and standing comfortably among her own clouds, Mora spotted her destination and let her clouds dissipate, removing her support and letting herself fall. Mora angled her body downward, aiming towards the mountain peak where a massive nest was woven of fully grown trees. Just before she hit the ground and would have left a massive crater on the mountainside, clouds billowed out of Mora’s body and suspended her above the ground. As soon as she had stopped, floating a few centimetres above the ground, Mora cut the supply of cloud and dropped the few centimetres to the ground.
From inside the nest, the claws of the Steelwing Lianz gripped the edge of the trees and pulled itself out of the nest. Like a bat, the Steelwing Lianz had claws on its wings, similar to a bat, simply because of how large the bird was. Climbing of the side of the wall, the bird loomed above Mora as it perched on the side of its nest. With a small squawk, the bird jumped off the edge of its nest and flapped to slow its descent. As the massive bird landed, the ground shook lightly and stones jumped up from the ground around Mora. Riding the vibration easily, Mora kept her balance and looked the bird in the eye, not letting herself be intimidated by its bulk.
“Lady of the Skies.” Mora inclined her head to the bird in greeting.
“Thunderer.” The bird greeted in turn, bowing its own head by bending its wings. The bird’s voice was shakier than normal, as though it was barely constraining itself, and Mora could feel its magic itching to take control of the air around them and whip tornadoes around.
“I’ve been sent by my queen to help you deal with an issue, though I haven’t been given many details. If I may ask, what happened?”
“One of your kind took him from me. You took him from me. He was so young that he hadn’t even left the nest, but his life was stolen anyway.”
Mora frowned, a pit forming inside of her stomach, “Who was taken from you?” While she already had a very good idea of just who the bird was referring to, she needed to make sure of it.
“My son.” Wailed the bird, “Your kind took him away from me. It’s because of you that he’s gone.”
Mora’s eyes widened, feeling her own emotions welling up inside of her, the grief that she’d pushed down for the trip welling back up to the surface. In front of the woman, the bird collapsed to the ground, sobbing, and Mora couldn’t help but empathise with the bird’s experience as it began to shake and wail. It looked like, as Mora had thought, she was the best person for the job. It just wasn’t in a way that she’d expected when she was flying to reach the bird’s nest.
Mora tried to approach, but the Archduke Stage beast snapped its vicious beak at her. Mora dodged quickly and spun to get closer to the bird before wrapping her arms around its neck. “It’s alright, Lady of the Skies. You’re safe here. Let your grief out.”
Trying to claw Mora away from its neck, the beast writhed beneath Mora for a few minutes but, as the time ticked by, became more and more lethargic. Finally, the beast’s body stopped writhing around and simply began to shake in place. Shiny, metallic tears tracked from the bird’s eyes and dropped to the ground. Mora tried not to bemoan the loss of the valuable material; Steelwing Lianz tears were valuable materials in alchemy; and just stood there, holding the listless bird.
An indeterminate amount of time passed as the bird just grieved in Mora’s arms and, at some point, Mora felt her own suppressed emotions burst and she felt wet tears make tracks down her face, like animals making paths in fresh, morning snow. Mora’s own shoulders shook in time with the birds and, without even noticing, found herself crying into the bird’s neck, kneeling on the ground as the bird curled its neck around her body.
Mora felt hollow… no… drained as she pulled herself up from the ground. All of her emotions had been spent at once as she’d cried with the bird and now, she felt like a dishrag that had been wrung out and left to dry in the sun for a few hours. As Mora rose, the bird did too, and Mora could see that the creature looked about as weary as Mora felt.
“If I may ask, Thunderer. Who did you lose? Those were not the tears of one bearing a fading scar.”
Mora smiled lightly, though more out of politeness than any actual emotions, “My son. Just a few days ago. He got himself involved in something he shouldn’t have been a part of and was killed by a Demon King.”
“I… see. I am sorry for your loss.”
“And I am sorry for yours, Lady of the Skies.”
“It is truly a harsh world we live in, isn’t it? That we would see our children die before us.”
Mora nodded, “It’s the greatest pain I’ve ever felt. I hope to never face it again.”
Nodding, the bird spoke up, “But that’s the nature of the world, is it not? We are strong now, but we cannot always be around to protect our children. This is not my first time losing a child and I fear it won’t be my last.”
Mora nodded, her mouth pulled into a grim line and her brows furrowed, “With the nature of my position and my strength, I too fear that this will not be the last time I have to mourn one of my children. If I may ask, when did you have to go through this before?”
“You may. It is not something that I remember very well. I was still early in my life, and I think, though I cannot be certain, that I was at the first stage of power. You are likely aware that this is still a time when even us magical beasts, who are born with more awareness and intelligence than other beasts, are still very much subject to our base instincts and haven’t yet reached true cognizance.” Mora nodded and the bird continued, “I met up with another steelwing and, as such things go, I laid my first clutch with his children.”
“A… rival of his – not a steelwing but an enemy he’d made – attacked our nest while I was foraging for food. They did not kill my mate; he was too strong for them to kill easily, but too weak to kill them for attacking our home; and our children were killed in the battle. With nothing left to tie me to my mate, I left. I thought I’d learnt my lesson. I killed or settled all of my grudges before laying this clutch. I left my mate to raise these chicks alone. But one of my chicks was killed anyway, far before he even had a chance to live. What’s worse is that I thought I’d felt pain before. Now that I am truly cognizant, though… everything feels so much more real. I’m far more aware of everything that I’m feeling. And this pain is far worse than I remember.”
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Mora felt the bird sob again, but no tears came from the bird’s eyes. Mora hugged the neck of the steelwing lianz in an attempt to comfort the creature. The Lady of the Skies pushed herself upwards, though, standing tall and looking down to Mora, “You should return to your own family soon. I am sure that they need you in their grief, as my children need me.”
Mora nodded, “Let me see if I can help you first. My queen sent me here for a reason beyond giving each other someone to share our grief with.”
Nodding, the massive beast climbed into her nest but hesitated on the edge of it, “Please wait here for a moment. I need to move my children from the nest so they don’t see you. What happened to their sibling… at least what I can make out from what they tell me… I don’t think they’ll be ready to see another human for years to come.”
“What happened?” Mora asked, her curiosity piqued.
Hesitating for a few moments, the bird just shook its head and disappeared into the nest, leaving Mora to stand outside as she waited for the creature to finish whatever it needed to do with its children. A big gust of wind spilled over the nest and Mora shielded herself from the cold gust by emitting a wave of cloud, perfectly timed and with enough strength that it just stopped the wind and let the cloud just sit practically still. Mora saw the mother rising into the air with her two chicks in her claws and Mora stepped closer to the nest, just in case the chicks could see her. While she didn’t know what had happened, if the Lady of the Skies thought it might be harmful to her chicks to even just see Mora, then the countess wasn’t going to risk doing harming the baby birds.
When she was sure that the steelwing lianz had gone, Mora jumped up to the edge of the nest and sat down, meditating and using her altitude to absorb some ‘clouds’. While there were no actual clouds nearby, with most of the day’s cloud cover being significantly below Mora’s current altitude, Mora’s ancestors had realised that clouds were just made from water in the air and the countess had reached a Stage where she could just absorb that water straight from the air before compressing it into clouds inside of her Bloodline. It wasn’t nearly as efficient as just absorbing clouds and Mora couldn’t just walk around, constantly absorbing the water – that would come at the sixth or seventh Stages if she could ever reach them, but it allowed Mora to top herself off slightly. During the time in which the Fant was away, Mora effectively added a few drops of water to the massive lake that was her Bloodline.
Unfortunately, the amount of time that Mora had was too slow to scour her Bloodline for impurities, despite the fact that there were some relatively obvious ones the she could have easily obfuscated with her clouds to make go away, and the bird flew back. Massive gusts of wind buffeted Mora with each flap of the steelwing’s wings and she found herself being pushed off the edge of the nest; while she was far stronger and heavier than her frame implied, much of her physical strength came from the implicit magical enhancement that her Bloodline afforded her, so the blasts of air were still more than capable of pushing the countess around.
Mora stood up, angling herself into the wind of the bird’s landing, and waited for the steelwing to invite her into the nest. When the bird looked up and indicated for her to come down, she jumped onto a tree trunk, woven into the nest’s floor, and looked around properly. Wood, bent and fractured, surrounded her on all sides and she couldn’t see anything out of place with the walls that would indicate someone had entered and exited through the sides of the nest. Mora then turned her attention to the floor, where a few specks of crimson – dried and in grooves of the wood as they were – caught her attention.
Mora walked over to the flecks of blood and crouched down, “I know you said that you lost a child, but what happened here?”
Moving slowly over to Mora, more ambling than walking, the steelwing lianz folded itself down, nestling into the bottom of the nest and looking remarkably bird-like. “I don’t know for certain. I wasn’t around to see it happen, or the human who did this would be dead. From what I could gather, though, the chicks were sleeping and heard a noise. They woke up to find their brother, half consumed and still being eaten by a human, nearly gone. The human was inside the corpse of their brother, tearing pieces of the body and shoving them into its mouth.”
Mora’s eyes widened, “Do they know how old the human was or what they were wearing?”
The bird shook its head, “No. I can barely understand their chirps as it is. Not only do they not have true consciousness, like we do, but they are also babies. Trying to get them to talk is what I assume trying to interrogate a human baby would be like.”
Mora nodded; she’d already assumed as much. “That’s unfortunate, but I think I know what happened regardless.” Mora paused, gathering her thoughts, “What do you know about the human powers of the world? Even just the ones around this area?”
“I do not know much. It has largely been irrelevant to me because, so long as I leave you humans alone, you tend to leave me alone. What little I do know is that I am in the territory that you belong to, the one that is ruled by the queen that sent you here. I also know there is a power just to the east, but I do not know much else.”
Mora nodded, “That’s fine. Just to the north, above the power to the east, is a place we call the savage lands. The people there are… barbaric. They are, as the name of their lands, implies, savages. Their powers allow them to kill and consume beasts to gain the beasts’ powers and, in the future, they can gain powers that the beast could have unlocked. I think that there was a savage in Arikar, undergoing the initiation tradition of the savages; killing a beast to gain its powers. I believe that, once he saw you and witnessed your power, he desired it for himself. Instead of attempting, and almost definitely failing, to kill you, he killed your child as it would give him the same powers as killing you.”
Mora heard the bird sob slightly and pushed herself to hold her own emotions in, “Is there any way to get justice for my child?”
Mora sighed, “I’m sorry, but not yet. Perhaps not for a few years, unless you try to take vengeance into your own hands. There’s no way that we can track down the exact savage it is without employing extensive resources given the amount of land and number of savages we’d have to cover and forcefully investigate. Due to the strength of some of the savages, as well, we’d have to send someone at my strength or higher and the search could take years to complete, by which point the savage may very well be dead. And that’s not to mention the fact that we couldn’t afford to send one of our strongest people away for that long.
“I’m sorry, I truly am. I know how it feels to want vengeance on you son’s killer. It burns at my heart and claws at the inside of my chest like a rabid beast, but… I know I need to let it go. I’ve got revenge before for friends that died in battle, and all it does is leave you empty.” Mora stared into space, remembering the friends she’d lost and the times they’d spent together. A small tap from the bird brought her back to the present and she shook her head to clear away the memories.
Giving the bird a wan smile, Mora nodded at her, “I can see what I can find but I can’t guarantee anything. The savage will have probably travelled halfway back home by now and, if they’re out of Arikar like I suspect, I can’t do anything.”
“I’d appreciate any effort you can give.” With that, Mora stood up and scented the air, her enhanced nose picking up the scent of the beast blood that lingered just above the floor. Mora traced it across the nest and up the wall, where she presumed the assailant had climbed out of the nest, but lost any sort of trail once she dropped down to the other side.
“I’m sorry, but the trail ends here. I don’t know what happened, considering the complete lack of any trail, but I’m guessing that there was some sort of wind or storm around here that wiped out any traces I might have been able to follow.”
The bird sighed, “That was my fault. When I returned to find my…” The bird’s voice hitched, “To find my child gone… I lost it.”
Mora gave the bird a pat on her leg, “I understand. You lashed out. I would have, too.” Mora stood back and looked the bird in the eyes with a tight smile, “I have to go now. I’ll come back in a couple of weeks, though, to give you some company. It was… good to meet you, Lady of the Skies, though I wish it were under better circumstances.” The bird gave Mora a nod and clouds billowed out from Mora’s body, solidifying and pushing her into the sky. Swirling around, the cloud rubbed against itself and lightning began to flicker inside the cloud as Mora pushed herself to return home, a horrible feeling rising in her stomach.