“Lowly crawler won’t tell me what to do!” Zeew screeched back at the mother mossbear, pissed off at her demand for her to leave. The mighty eagle didn’t try to send down another attack, though. Either she managed to keep her temper in check, or she considered it pointless. “I demand the one who killed my kin!”
“You demand nothing. Leave!” bellowed mother mossbear so loud it made my ears ring.
“My right to kill, to avenge!”
“You come. Our woods!”
“One who killed not hand over…I Zeew turn this sea of trees back to grassland!”
“Dare, you dead!”
The eagle let out a singing laugh. “Try to touch me here, mud-wading weasel!”
I don’t know why I thought this beautiful creature wouldn’t stoop so low as to use the same insults as a northern eagle. After all, I was pretty sure it was the same kind as them. Zeew called the fallen beast her kin. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was far more different from them than just her looks. My instincts were telling me she was much more than a mere northern eagle as they made me hold her in awe.
Some rare variant? Lightfeather recognized the beast and called her Miros the moment she saw her. So, not so rare? Was she a mere variant? That notion didn’t sit well with my instincts. Zeew was more. But what? What, besides awe, could earn her my respect?
Then I remembered Squad Four and how envious they were of my class evolution. I immediately knew that was it. Zeew, or Miros, were some kind of evolution of northern eagles.
“Dare come down!” growled back the mother mossbear in their ongoing standoff. It sounded like some kind of bar squabble down here. Up there, behind a shield of leaves and branches, their presences clashed. Every now and then, I saw ripples in the air where they ground against each other.
“I am not weasel to crawl among worms!”
Yeah, Zeew surely came from the same roots as the northern eagles and shared the same view of creatures walking the earth. Her insults were not too far off from the ones I had heard before from her kin at my expense.
Of course, the words weren’t that important. I don’t think mossbears mind being compared to weasels or being looked down upon for wading in the mud. What was important was the meaning behind the words, the intent they carried. Well, the one that Zeew put in was an absolute disdain. I’ve never felt so much contempt for someone else in my life.
Anger and a desire for revenge, yes. Dungreen evoked these feelings in me. Just thinking about him made my blood boil, as well as did the mention of Fae. But even though they were both creatures I loathed and would hardly put Dungren on a par with humans, I didn’t feel such contempt for either of them as Zeew held for those to whom nature has not given wings.
Or, if I should be exact, she felt contempt for those who were unable to reach the sky and were condemned to a life of wading through the mud.
“When you dead, worms crawl all over you,” mother mossbear basically mocked her insult.
That didn’t go over well with mighty Miros up there. “Give up the one who killed my kin!” She paused and addressed the adult mossbear directly. “Dare me to fight, weasel!” Zeew followed up her challenge with a simple attack, an air blast sent into the woods outside this destroyed area and out of the reach of the mother mossbear’s defense.
It landed in the woods with a force that shook the ground beneath my feet, even at that distance. I didn’t need to be there and see the aftermath to know that the force behind that air blast was far greater than the ones the northern eagle was trying to dispose of me with.
“I guess negotiations aren’t going too well?” Deckard asked through the union rings, mindful of speaking up. More aware now that what he had heard was just shrieks and roars, I relayed to him the exchange between the two beasts.
“Not good,” he said after listening to me, and saw I didn’t follow his train of thought. “The fact that the beast, Zeew, is here means the other two are still alive.”
S***! I hadn’t thought of that. “Do you think the others are in trouble?”
“We all are, Little Beast,” he said as another warning attack landed in the woods nearby. Closer than before, it brought my thoughts to what could the mossbears possibly do if Zeew really decided to flatten Esulmor. “Would you be able to bring her down? Like the northern eagle?”
“Keep dreaming. I got lucky with that one. This bird may be arrogant, but she doesn’t seem that stupid to let me get close to her.”
While it was not surprising that he said that, I couldn’t help lowering my ears in dismay. “Would you be able to hurt her?”
He paused to consider. “Well, given the dead one, my standard kicks would do s*** to her. And risking burnout around that beast is out of the question.”
“Even so, isn’t there something that….”
“Are you so eager to get rid of me, Duster?”
Although there was no accusation or anger in his voice, his words struck me with guilt. Who was I to send him into battle with a beast I myself had not the slightest chance of defeating. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. And I don’t like that one, by the way. The nickname.”
“Then we’re on the same page….look, not every battle can be won. It’s important to know what is still doable and what is beyond your limits. That…,” he said, looking at Zeew, who was still arguing with the mother mossbear, trying to provoke the adult while destroying other parts of their woods. “…that beast would require more than the unit of soldiers we came with to take down.”
Oh, seriously? There were, like, a hundred of them. That wasn’t enough? “Didn’t that Shadowbreaker defeat the adult mossbear, himself?”
“Yeah, he beat it but paid for it with his life. I know what you’re thinking. The beast was level 393 and the man level 249, so beating this bird shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the whole unit, right?”
“Kind of.” That was exactly what I was thinking.
“The problem is that as the level and power difference grows, it gets harder and harder to do any damage to those beasts and monsters. They may not have the classes and skills that we do, but their constitution and toughness grows naturally with their levels.”
Still, shouldn’t Zeew only be twice as strong as Deckard, more or less?
“And that growth is not proportional to the levels,” he added, seeing where my thoughts were going. “Think of it like skills, the more levels the bigger the bonuses and more of them. You get many times more for each level of skill in its three hundred than you did at the time you chose the skill.”
“But it also takes me a lot longer to get the level.”
“Sure. Does it matter how long it took the beast to get to her level, though? I don’t give a s*** if that Zeew was born yesterday or hundreds of years ago. What matters is that she’s here, and she’s that strong.”
True. There was no denying there was something to that. When I was fighting for my life, or running to save my own hide, it hardly mattered how old the one going after my tail was. It made no difference how many years they spent training. What mattered was how well they used the time.
“Damn it! How did you get me to sing to your tune…?” Deckard swore at the fact that I had drawn his attention, as well as mine, to something other than the ongoing showdown between the beasts and stopped short. He fixed his eyes on Zeew, who was staring at him in return.
“You let humans in your lair?! Disgusting!!” Her anger for killing her kind didn’t go away, it was still there. Some of it shifted to resentment for Deckard, though. Well, if I was not wrong, she held a disgust for humans in general.
“Esu benevolent. You dare to slander?”
“By letting humans in his lair, he tarnished his pride…himself. Your Esu pathetic!”
From what I saw, the mother mossbear was not easily fazed. She handled the verbal attacks on her, the mossbear in general, and their woods with grace. The slander of Esu did not go well with her, though. In a flash, moss shoot shot up to the sky, cutting through the barrier of leaves and branches.
Well, calling that a moss shoot was already a stretch in the case of the sprouts used by young mossbearers to restrain my feet. This shoot of hers was more of a tree that shot upwards at a speed I had trouble following. Yet without much effort, Zeew gracefully avoided it.
I don’t know if it was the way she shifted from her spot or if her eyes just now fell on me, but I got the most intense vibes on the back of my neck I’ve ever gotten when she turned her gaze in my direction.
“So it was true!” Zeew shrieked, outraged to the core by what she saw. “There is flightless chick.”
“Esu’s pup!” mossbear’s mother argued strongly in my defense.
Zeew answered her with a melodious sing-song as she laughed. “Then Esu more blind than mud-worm. That chick no more useful than weasel.”
So I was a weasel for her too, huh? I should totally find out more about weasels on Eleaden. They seemed like interesting creatures.
Again, the insult of Esu did not bode well with the mother mossbear. She roared, expressing her ire, but the moss shoots she sent up missed their target just like before. And when she tried to chase the eagles across the sky with them, Zeew made the shoots look slow and clumsy.
It couldn’t have been clearer that as long as this magnificent beast was in the sky, it would be difficult for anyone to touch her. The same was true the other way around, though. Here among the trees, the mossbears ruled.
Perhaps that was why Zeew threatened to destroy the woods as such.
Anyway, now that her focus was on me, I had other things to worry about than the reason for her desire to destroy Esulmor.
“Humans disgusting! They pervert our kind, your kind, their kind. Look next to you, flightless chick. Pathetic!”
What I felt from her words was indeed a strong loathing for humans. The thing that took me by surprise was that she didn’t consider me one, though. To her, I was one of them, a beast. Perhaps an eagle even.
I couldn’t help looking at my wings with the thought on my mind: Was it possible? Did my wings trace their origins to the northern eagles? If so, if she saw me as a beast, one of them, then why did Zeew feel even more spite for me than she did for Deckard?
“Esu, benevolent!” mother mossbear roared back. “Gave pup chance prove herself.”
“Needless. Put chick out of her misery, now!” Zeew bellowed, this time sending her attacks straight into the barrier of leaves and branches, showing how determined she was to get rid of me. The air blasts, as before, did not pass through the defenses put up by the mother mossbear, but Zeew’s words threw me off.
There was a hint of pity in her anger. And not only that. It was a strange mix of emotions; sympathy, compassion, empathy, futility, but also the need to put me out of my misery. What misery? From her intentions and anger, it wasn’t hard to tell that she wasn’t so much bothered by my Human/Beast status but rather that my wings didn’t allow me to fly.
It would be cool to be able to do that, for sure. And one day, it may be an option for me. However, why I deserved to die because of my inability to take to the air in the eyes of the mighty Miros was beyond me.
Well, I gathered my thoughts and did the only thing I could to get rid of my doubts. I asked.
“Zeew, why did you venture all the way here? For me? Why must I die?”
“S***! Not again, Little Beast,” Deckard’s sigh rang out in my mind. He bemoaned my blatant lack of common sense in speaking to powerful beasts without fear.
That couldn’t be further from the truth, though. My guts were clenched with jitters, and my heart filled with dread. I knew I was speaking to a creature beyond my understanding and reach. Yet I ignored his remark carrying a warning of caution here. I needed to know why I deserved to die so badly in her eyes and find out if what I suspected might be true.
When Zeew spread her wings and looked down at me, she gave me the impression of a proud parent. Her look also sent shivers down my spine.
“The impudence to talk to me!” she bellowed, and even mother mossbear growled warningly at me. I was walking on the edge here. “Like true eagle. But you are not!!”
Yeah, she compared me to her kind, the proud, arrogant, and insolent rulers of the skies. In the same breath, she added I was not one of them. What the hell, right? Not the straightforward answer I was after, so I pondered daring to ask another question.
“Why am I not one of you?”
Zeew made a sound that I would chalk up to a smirk, but then she sang the sweetest note I’ve ever heard. Despite the sheer volume that resonated in my bones, it was a treat to my ears.
“Eh, Little Beast? Your wings…” Deckard said, as shocked as I was. My wings, or to be more precise, the feathers on them, responded to Zeew’s singing. Their tips and edges glowed with blue light, turning violet in parts. And it wasn’t just the feathers on my wings, but the fluffy ones on my elbows and ankles, too.
“What the f…!” I didn’t finish my swear as I noticed that the feathers of an already dead northern eagle reacted likewise. The beast was dead, wasn’t it? The doubt wasn’t just in my mind as some of the mossbears that were still able to walk poked the corpse, ensuring that this intruder in their woods was just moss food now.
Zeew couldn’t have made it any clearer, though. My wings had their origins in northern eagles. Their blood coursed through my veins as much as the mossbear’s. No doubt about that.
As her singing ended, the wonder of my feathers ceased.
“Now chick, fly up to me. Get your feet off mud below you!” she challenged me with a shriek, knowing full well I’m not capable of it. There was no need for me to make an attempt and embarrass myself with my inability.
“I can’t fly.”
“Then mercy for you is to die.” Zeew screeched, and if it hadn’t been for mother mossbear shielding others, the full weight of her presence would surely have fallen on me. This way, I only felt the weight in her words. It finally dawned on me where her loathing for me was coming from.
Though she regarded me more of a beast than a human, even though in some roundabout way she might have taken me for one of their own as Esu did, to her and her kin, I was an undeveloped chick, a cripple unable to fly. Only suffering awaited such eagles in their lives, reliant on the help of others. How were they to get food? How were they to traverse the peaks of the snow-covered mountains they called home? From her words, I understood that they considered taking the life of such a chick as mercy from a cruel life where it would never be able to grow into the proud eagles they were.
A hard-to-swallow notion, for me at least. Sure, a man born with crooked legs or arms was doomed to a harder life than others, but they could still find a place among humans. The eagles completely denied their young ones this chance.
Healers? I thought of the healers. Didn’t they have someone among them with such a gift, able to mend these chicks’ wings? Ah, perhaps they were limited by the same kind of issues that Lord Wigram described. Even he was unable to shape a new limb, leaving it up to the body to sculpt up the lost part.
Or simply, the northern eagles may not have had the healing ability that the mossbear and humans had and relied solely on their own regeneration. They might as well just see such a chick as unworthy of the effort.
Whatever the case was, in her eyes, I was someone better off dead.
“Why kill me if I want to live?” I yelped back at Zeew.
“Crawling in the mud with those worms, not path befitting us,” she objected harshly, showing the full might of the Miros for all to see as she spread her tail feathers. The sight of her took my breath away. Sadly, I didn’t find her understanding in my desire to walk the ground
“It’s how I was born,” I said once I found my voice.
“Then you not hatched one of us!”
“I guess not.” I couldn’t keep the regret from seeping into my words. For all their contempt, their efforts to kill me, her rejection hit hard. It shouldn’t! Until a few hours ago, I had no idea about the existence of northern eagles. Yet it made me feel like I’d lost something important and close to my heart.
