exo was not civilized. the wild beast knows that, with every piece of her entangling code, with every scrap of energy she scrounged up, with every bit of her vessels that sang for blood. she has not had time to develop, to come to terms with anything. she was thrown into the world alone like a squalling infant, lashing out with tiny fists because all she knew so far was pain and the disquieting lack of family.

being civilized didn't help. all she needed to know was how to hunt, and how to feel for the scents of blood and prey and fear and rushing over her nose.

she was born a skilled hand at tricks like these, and cutting up another’s skin was as easy as stepping into a pair of shoes.
she was weeks old when she gained the title of killers.

all venandi had to. they weren't given the option of weaning off mother’s milk after months or days; lucifer kept them fed in the early days in place of a natural dam, but even as he had the instinct to kill was strong. hunting was inevitability. their bodies had perfected it and it came for them all sooner or later, kicked in their dna with a bloody scream and a shout.

and so too did exo adhere to this rule, as avian-beast as she was a child, following her genetic coding as best as she could (clumsily) like the ridges of an astronaut's shoes on the moon. she had nothing that day, and everything to lose. it was a change the terrible child, both ancient and new could feel poking clumsily around her teeth.

to the utahraptor there is a softness in the scent of blood reds and pomegranates shades that peeks from the crook of one's neck when she tucks her timid teeth into salmon pink and bites down. it is a comfort, that red port wine stain of an ebbing life. it was also a privilege.

on her own she was free of the hierarchy yet still very much caged within herself. as a yearling whose life depended on social order, it was something that exodus was drawn toward, innate. still deadly but addled with the softness of youth, it was her soul that gave her drive in those absent days without her siblings, not her talent.

for so long, for too long they’d been pathetically licking up the ashes of bitter burnt memories and it coated her tongue and made her feel dusty and dull. in her time spent in solitary she still remembered brother and sister well, still retained their names. names they stole from the breeze and the burble of the creek and the flit of the sea bird's wing, evidence of their existence. proof to their own primal minds that they lived.

there were eras when life trundled. but recovery is slow-- it’s not rebirth, but learning. this is how you step. this is how you run. this is how you feed. this is how your teeth should tear into the ribcage just right to get at the still-beating heart. this is the sound of frustration. this is hunger. this is a rodent scurrying under mulch and lichen. this is the lullaby of a young marten. this is how solid ground feels beneath your toes as you sprint along the riverbank.

back then she knew the woods too, how to thread between the brush to elude the awareness of prey, where the lines of her territory ran against another feral one’s. she learned to command her trilling war cry into something brass-sharp. now knew how to inflate her throat just the right of air and funnel it into a leveled two line whistle. then learned how to press that sound into four lines. then shape it into five, then five into more.

these were the things she had learned but never been taught.

but without her siblings, it gave exodus so little joy.

she has many names- dracohors, saurischia, eusaurischia, theropoda, neotheropoda, averostra, tetanurae, orionides, avetheropoda, coelurosauria, pennaraptora, paraves and many more.
but not to her. she is just marrowtone, the vivid. perhaps a relic of a time long past. and to the outsiders, exodus. she categorizes instead- self and not self. self and food. self and the world. no longer pack and the world. she simply was.

back in that wilderness the creature had come to know only herself. her plumage, protofeathers and extended quills-- the earthen color jutting on her flanks and tail and the cutting line of a solid stripe burning black up her throat and eyes.

the utahraptor would have felt so proud of herself too. she should have been nothing more than content, on the humid, dragon-fly laden hours where she had a bone to gnaw and dawnlight to warm her and the flies had not yet started biting.

she thought she’d feel even more content in the silence between footfalls, her and prey sailing untethered. removed from the earth, but not the moment. lungs burning, legs so flooded with adrenaline.

the only sound prey could hear to know of her approach was the droning almost-thunder of her steady heartbeat, too low for average ears to decipher. in time, she’d learn to slow it. for now, what they got was her. red-cheeked with blood, grimacing, and before their bodies even knew it, before their nerves and veins knew it, what they had was her. passionately sawing their heads clean off with serrated teeth, one clawed grip filled with a fistful of leg, or the claw-moon shape of this dromaeosaur's sickle talon glittering, switchblade-like, as good and as lethal as any dagger, planted firmly somewhere in their abdomen. they’d probably scream or yelp if they could draw in a breath, if that young thing didn’t have her weight on them. she’d lean into gushing blood with a desperation only reserved for starving in a grisly display, ground her teeth and let the red sizzle on her skin.

the hours spent without them were filled with learning and surviving. surviving outside the boundaries of her previous known world. this is what it meant to live. and her world had been cruel reality, but a reality nonetheless.

and it was weeks before she learned the birds knew the laces of the trees better than she ever did, better than any spider ever knew its own web. it was weeks still before she learned to let them come to her, as slow and as careful and as silent as time. she knew it as beneficial- they'd come to pick any parasites and insects from her bristles, and if she was feeling ravenous they were food. she found preening easier when it had been rifled through beforehand by the little nuisances.

when the dinosaur saw lucifer's shape, big to blot out the sun, he was both shadow and light, and exodus wondered if he was too good to be real, and too good to be true.

but he was real. and he'd come to take her back.

in the end, Lucifer found her sitting on her tail, idling by the open lands, maw open and a bird picking her teeth frantic, lured in to clean the remnants of a previous meal out of her needle-edged gums. then she snapped her jaw shut and closed down as a feather tumbled from pretty pink tongue, and ate that too.

there was a time exodus was free. she remembered that. she walked alone and bathed bare bellied. she ran to catch the young hares that she chased, that cut themselves on rocks, and she skewered them and ate them all hot and bleeding. she knew how to hold prey. she knew how to remain seated in treetops to await morning. she cut a living for herself without others. alone, the barbarian did the only thing she knew how, what her instincts told her to-- carved her own territory. claimed a stretch of land all to herself. she did not know the difference between a mile or a yard, but she knew that it was hers and thought she finally knew what it meant to be independent, to taste it.

there are stirrings in the vista. with a hiss and a song wind strokes the leaves and wags the palm trees here. the air was good. back where waves and wind beat salt and stone, exodus had been gone for so long the island barely felt like home anymore. she’d forgotten the scents, the push and pull of the amiable tides and the shape of the rocks battered by ocean.

nothing looked the same.

exodus so dearly missed the preenings, the lazy honks and murmurs, the snorts, the presence of her ilk tied so deeply into her blood as they were. the utahraptor now knows there'll be all the time in the world to catch up. now that she’s seen him again. him. her primal mind still marveled, her teeth itched. in the good way- in the grooming way and not the hunting way. she couldn't wait to run her snout through his feathers again. it was still a wonder to her.

for now she turns to him with concern as his sleek form slides down from mother’s back like a cold dread. the savage little hunter's tumultuous hell-fire eyes boiled, flickered. the dinosaur eyed his would-be scars with some measure of discontent.

and virgo, the alluring queen that commanded immense grace, every movement planned, crafted of gold, was not herself.

exodus knew that there were things that changed. that much she could gather. the moment exodus tumbled from the blue shell of an egg she knew certain things had been promised to her. the world would become her kingdom. the world was their kingdom. in time.