Page 15 of Ruby
At a loss for a solution, I draw myself to my full height against the tree’s feathers standing on end, talons fully extended and try to communicate my way out of this.
“Can hear coming closer. Leave alone,” I struggle to sing out, only realizing now how breathless my walking has made me.
I am first replied to in a language I cannot understand, and then in one that I can.
“Not hunters,” a female sings back, stumbling her way through the feminine harmonics of the song like it is an unfamiliar tongue, shocking me considering I had neither expected to be understood nor replied.
Relief washes over me like a wave and my feathers lay lower against my skin.
They are closer now and I can make out the rough shape of the two creatures headed in my general direction. The one I’ve been communicating with is clearly a female but she is not alone; the other individual is much larger so I’m back on my guard once more.
Almost immediately, I hear her language change to the same foreign one I heard before and I know I cannot trust her. She may not sound like the trespassers that took away my wings, but there is no way of knowing who she is or who she is with.
“Don’t believe. Please leave,” I sing back.
“Please believe. I am taken by hunter, make slave. Give me translator then left sky. Manticorid help me. Will help you, if let us.”‘
Her voice is small and hopeful, traveling to me with a sincerity that I almost don’t want to trust but cannot help it as my options are extremely limited.
Besides, I’m next to defenseless in my current state; if they wanted to harm me, going this far to gain my trust is pointless and given the events I have just lived through, who better than I to understand having your freedom taken away.
While I sympathize with her, I am envious of the hope in her song
“I feel pain for your molting. For taken freedom. My regrets,” I express back, hoping she can feel that I truly am sorry.
They rustle closer, out of reach of my claws but close enough that I can make out their body shapes much better and smell their diverse scents; the silent beast smells of muscle sinew and musky danger; he is a predator, not one of the kind who assaulted my home, but dangerous nonetheless.
While she smells clean, oddly sweet, I must still be careful.
“You from here?” she sings out to me again and I remember my aerie and the fact that I will never see it again, and my brothers.
I cannot help the sad warble in my throat. “No. Stolen from aerie. I was changed. Something stolen, not gained.”
“I am sad. What was taken?” I can feel the emotion in her song, the raw honesty that she expresses, so I sing back.
“Part of me. All of me.”
She hesitates before singing to me again, asking if she can approach me.
“You may.”
Her voice makes a switch and she is back to speaking the foreign language to her ally.
A part of me wonders how it must feel to be given the gift of knowing other languages by the same trespassers that took away my wings, but then I remember that nothing is a gift from creatures as spiteful as those. If she was taken as a slave, then it was more for them than it was for her. I wonder why she calls them “hunters.”
“We approach you,” she says and I let her know that I am waiting.
After all, there is nowhere else for me to go.
They come in through the bushes and although the light is fading, I can see them clearly. A bright orange-colored beast onall four legs and a much smaller creature with it that I assume must be the female communicating with me.
I can tell that he is protecting her, his body tense as they both look at me, wonder obvious in the female’s eyes.
The beast has its eyes stuck to me and I can tell it is as wary of me as I am of it. Probably more for the benefit of its companion than for itself; it is nearly as tall as I am with massive paws tipped with claws nearly as long as my talons and a long spear-tipped tail I can tell is venomous from the taste of the air; its body is crisscrossed with scars everywhere I look—old scars that tell me this beast is a warrior and in the state I am in it would make a very short song of dealing with me.
Conversely, the female is much smaller and frail looking, mostly covered in a sort of black-looking skin, I cannot immediately see any injuries on her but still cannot shake the sense that she is injured in some way. Her song tells me so.
Something in her is broken, my drums tell me, even if my eyes cannot see it.
