Weaver takes Rhonen’s half-formed idea and turns it into words as she walks towards them, and Rhonen gives a jerky nod of the head. He follows them across the clearing to the seals, where two stand yet untouched. Weaver and the other girl take up guard on one, and the chestnut boy limps his way to the other, only half aware of Kreios behind him, distracting Conquest to give them time. But he is not fast enough – though he can feel the strange sensation of healing occurring in his battered body from the last piece of seal collected, he is not yet agile enough to catch the lamb as it deftly avoids Weaver and Titanya and darts instead for the farthest seal, closing the distance even as the copper-colored boy launches forward, a strangled cry of “No!” dragged from his throat.
The force of the seal exploding throws him backwards towards the others and he struggles to his feet beside the girls, dizzy and slightly nauseous. The ringing is loud enough that he can barely hear them yelling, even though he is standing right amongst the group now, and the words come as if from a long distance, or underwater. Still, the plan is clear enough. Find their pieces of seal, and then stop this newest thing from going anywhere. And that voice is clear as day, echoing in his bones and in his head, despite his hearing issues. ‘Famine,’ it’s a whisper, a lure, not the commanding yells of Conquest and War.
Conquest and War have fled into the trees, and Rhonen thinks they must be crazy to follow. But what choice do they have? They must fight, or their world will crumble into destruction. He follows the others into the woods, picking a middle ground between the direction taken by Weaver and the direction taken by warship. The world flickers around him, not helping the nausea at all, but he can feel where some of the wounds left by War have partially healed, leaving him to battle only the disorientation of hearing very little. Oh he is by no means whole – he is limping, battered and bruised, but none of his previous injuries seem serious enough now to kill him.
Pushing through the headache, the boy scouts the ground with his eyes, wishing that the worlds would stabilize, trying to see a piece of the seal. The sickly greenish-yellow flashes of light from ahead of them in the trees isn’t helping either, and it makes him uncomfortable, a clenching in his stomach that he identifies as nerves.
Gradually, the ringing fades and he starts to hear the eerie quiet of the forest, devoid of any normal forest-animal sounds. Instead the quiet is broken only the sounds of the remaining nine equines desperately trying to find the quarry, and the sounds of when they encounter enemy troops. But with his hearing comes another awareness – the faint sounds that indicate he’s being followed. Rhonen steps up his pace, but his pursuer matches the increase exactly. The boy steps on a piece of seal purely by accident, his hoof clinking against the cold, solid mass of it as he turns his head to try and spot whatever is behind him. But there is no mistaking the heavy feeling of responsibility that settles in his chest, and he turns back around to look down at his foot as the seal vanishes, absorbed into him to settle with the others.
The minions take advantage of him looking down and spring from the shadows; they have long, sinewy bodies that Rhonen thinks are rather like weasels, but of course they are too big, and have spikes coming out of their spines that certainly don’t belong, and teeth flashing in even this dim light that are much too sharp. Each of the pair of mongeese is about as long, nose to tail tip, as his leg. The first springs towards his haunches, the second launches at his face when he swings his hindquarters out of the way. The boy pins his ears, arching his neck and swinging his head, knocking the second creature from the air mid-leap. But this is followed by a squeal of pain and rage as the needle-sharp teeth of the first mongoose sink into the meatiest part of his haunch in the back. He kicks out – both back feet – and hits the creature where it hangs from his haunch, dragging its teeth out of his flesh and flinging it into a tree, where it collides with a sickening crunch and lays still. The second mongoose is hissing it’s rage (or, a part of his brain supplies, it’s grief) and it does not follow when Rhonen turns around and runs, not caring that blood flows freely from his haunches and his other injuries very much protest this rough treatment.
As he gets further and further into the trees, the nausea and sick-to-the-stomach feeling he had attributed to nerves begins to grow stronger, and as it forces him to slow from a gallop to a canter, a canter to a slow trot, he identifies it. True hunger, the kind which it seems none of the assembled horses have ever known. It gnaws at him, making him alternatively so tired he wants nothing more than to lay down and give up and so hungry that he would consider tearing into one of his friends or allies just to get some relief. A snatched bite of grass tastes like dirt in his mouth and he lets it fall away, pushing through the waves of hunger with little regard to the outside world.
If the mongoose found him now, it would find easy prey.
He stumbles into Conquest entirely on accident, knocking himself off balance and falling to his knees in the dirt. Rhonen thinks for a moment that he must have run into a tree in his confusion, until the point of contact is suddenly a searing pain, the boils springing up on his shoulder and jerking his gaze up to Conquest’s glowing yellow eyes, but Conquest believes that the boy is kneeling because he is conquered, cowed, not because he tripped. There is a cruel laugh, a caress of his muzzle down Rhonen’s spine (leaving the boils that feel like fire in its wake) and then Conquest has moved on to more exciting games.
The copper-colored boy takes several shaky breaths, lacking the will to continue on, so hungry he thinks his stomach must be eating itself, until their voices carry to him again on the air that flickers and trembles. They are snarling voices, fury, and he knows they must have found Famine and are trying to contain him. With a last deep breath he surges to his feet and trots forward, past the last of the trees and into the clearing. His eyes land first on Kreios, stationed over the nearly motionless green mare, and Rhonen finds himself wishing she, too, would be taken. She cannot even stand with them, surely it would be mercy not to force her to go on. The girl who had given herself to Conquest is there, and it seems she has finally come to her senses, standing against this abomination with them. Finally, he sees the black stallion, and the black-and-white girl, and Weaver. Relief at seeing them does not ease the desperate hunger, growing ever stronger with each step he takes, but it gives him the strength to press through it, to station himself once more amongst his friends.
“Not our home,” he says, stubbornness in every line of his battered face and body.
cliffnotes; yeah so he is almost on top of the seal when it explodes and it sends him flying back towards the girls. Then he is attacked by some crazy mutated mongeese, accidentally bumps into Conquest again, and then finds the rest of y'all. ; )
![[Image: U5duKtst_o.gif]](https://images.imgbox.com/2f/f9/U5duKtst_o.gif)
Aubri & Rhonen [twins]