FAMILIARITY | Multi-Return

[EXODUS--]

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* when i say this post is long i mean it, so sorry my muse ran away from me. no need to match. rest of the post is under the spoiler but is not necessary to read. also tw for brief descriptions of hunting under the spoiler

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cretaceous creatures come in packs.

and she never forgot the irony of the disaster of that beget their separation.

the feathered dromaeosaur slinks back to typhoon with all the dignity and grace of a beast that knew it to be apex there.

flight to the hunter beast is otherworldly. to feel air roll over the parched tongue and rush down the dry gizzard— to feel it under the bristles and against the skin with the weight of a former life that only existed in memories, few pleasures are as great as this. for creatures earthbound they now knew the power of air, to go where no meager beast had ever gone before, to know what the others of her species didn't. it was a victory all unto themselves.
the earth was all too limiting. but above the trees, beyond branches and gravity, in the vast space between green and blue, to fly was to rid the feet of dust and sing hymns to feathers and freedom and flight.

the chill damp of the freezing sea wind beat against endless black wings when lucifer rose on a rare thermal, leaving the grey hammering of the ocean behind, and the burning fire of instinct continued to roar through her mind. it drove her like a dark cloud scudding in a wild gale.

she since forgot what it felt like to fly.

the youth had flown long ago. eons ago. an eternity ago where the sky felt like her realm just as much as it had mother’s, and like the birds that preceded her kind, there was wind breezing through her quills as she perched atop an all powerful frame. once, she was an unlucky seed brought away by hapless winds. now exodus was to be a predator prowling through her realm once again.

the last the brute female had seen of the typhoon it was smoldering under the lava flood, habitat transformed from verdant green to soot and ash. blackened by fire, licked by flame and scourged into dead columns of charcoal. huts had fallen, embers still crackling in their underbellies till they were naught but brittle, sad remnants. a skeleton of things that might have been, baked gray, and swallowed by a pyroclastic flow.

the sea hissed from jagged stones, slammed them with foamy fists, spattered the beach with droplets arcing in delicate tendrils, beautiful in their disarray. like spittle, those painted the straying winds with wild abandon by the swiftness with which they flew upwards from tributaries and rivulets. but exodus ignored the shore’s tantrum, stuck out her neck (not a weakness in the presence of her pack) and so tenderly made contact with luci, muzzle to muzzle, from king-mother to child, and she was whole again.

utahraptor flexes her wrist idly, noting that the smell of sea is heady. so much had changed from the moment she took a wailing breath. so much, from the bones of the new trampling over the old, swept away by soon to be forgotten. but their pack will not be forgotten.
now she’d focus on this. the rosemary sand grounded her, and it was cool enough to handle. they had been flying by, free as birds, and now there’d be some semblance of routine to her life again. And her siblings, too.

their blood was her blood and exodus wanted to know them again.

lances of sunlight reflected off the planes of distant planes. the pinks and oranges of dawn gave way to soft blue, which in turn darkened smoothly to richness overhead. a shelf of low clouds marched along the northern horizon.

it had been so long. what is it to be like to told you were alone? exodus knew this well.

she lost track of time, lost sleep thinking about them. whereas, before any sleep was only lost to knowing there was too much of the world to explore to waste in slumber. always something to see, always a new drama unfolding – from the squabbling of the fire ants over a dead moth to the clouds and the sun fighting for control of the sky itself. marveling at a world she’d been allowed miraculously to live in a world of demons and deities and ghosts.

for the first time she had been without the ground beneath her feet, a ship without a captain. and yet the world kept spinning through the cruelty of days. stripped to her barest, the world felt bigger than before, and she, infected with something she couldn't grasp. her time alone meant bad behavior unchecked and forgotten rules and something that went beyond misery.

when her pack split, the entire sun soaked world ended. she thought she knew pain like she hadn't before.

now the yearling knows pain is this strip of land and that ramshackle building, that nest they used to sleep in, that jungle they'd race through, heart slamming. that alcove they used to hide in, that beach copse they used to visit (that sad burning hunk of rock where they one had lived).

for several months she knew this strange pain.

cut:

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.