Bad Weather

Despite being known for clear skies and sunny days, summer had been nothing but tumultuous weather. In the same day it could be blustering, then stagnant and hot, then thundering rain, all of which were problematic for Fainel and her thick coat of feathers. She’d been so excited to get away from the constant spring showers, but that had hardly changed, and when it did, it was replaced with something worse. Lately, she’d become nocturnal to deal with it. At the very least, it helped with the heat.

This meant that she was suddenly on a completely different schedule than the rest of her pack. She loved them, of course, but she was the only one that had her mother’s feathers, and at times it felt like a rift was opening up between them. Her bond with her sister had only grown more troubled with time, especially now that she seemed to tease her every other sentence for being too much of a baby to stand the heat and rainfall.

So she’d taking to spending her nights on her own, wandering the fringes of their territory. Her packmates usually went hunting without her now, so she could rely on their kills to keep her fed. Without an empty stomach to drive her on, her lonely mind was free to wander.

It was on one such night, a dark one where the moon was only a sliver in the sky, that she felt something odd under her feet. Her mind had wandered so much that she hadn’t paid any attention to where she was going. She lifted her foot and inspected the ground. She’d stepped on some kind of stone slab, inscribed with those strange human runes she could never wrap her head around. She’d never seen a slab like this one, though. Where on earth had she ended up?

“You lost, sweetheart?”

Fainel yelped and whipped around. On a hill above her was another cryo, blending in almost perfectly into the darkness except for a pair of piercing blue eyes and a white skull of a face.

“You look like you’re a long way from home.”

“I’m sorry, I just-” Fainel shifted her feet nervously. She was rambling, which wasn’t going to help anything. “I- I’ll go now. I’m sorry for intruding.” She began heading back the way she came. Footsteps sounded behind her.

“I think I should escort you back,” said the cryo, drawing closer to her. “Make sure you don’t get any more lost than you already are.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t fully comfortable to have a mysterious stranger tailing her, but it was her own foolishness that got her into this situation to begin with. It was only fair.

The other cryo was soon walking at her side. Fainel looked over at him and realized with a start that he, too, had feathers. Long feathers, just like hers!

“What are you staring at?”

“Sorry.” She mentally kicked herself for apologizing for the third time in two minutes. “I just don’t see crested cryos very often where I’m from. I’m the only one in my pack.”

He looked at her from his skull face, like he wasn’t sure why she was still talking. “…You live with who, then? Not your family?”

“I do live with family, but not my mom, and she’s where I got the feathers from. Not even my twin sister has them. I’m the only one in the family with any feathers at all! The heat and rain this summer makes it so difficult, but they never understand what I mean when I complain about it. My sister tells me to take a mud bath or go swimming if I’m too hot, but then I’ll have to spent the rest of the day cleaning myself off. All the water just runs off of her like a duck…”

“Maybe she’d like our graveyard, then. On humid days the air is so thick you can hardly see in front of your own snout. You never know what’s lurking around.”

“Like a spacey, lost cryo?”

“I was thinking more like an anteo missing half of its skin.”

Fainel laughed at the abruptly gorey image. “…You’re serious?”

He smirked.

“You’re a braver cryo than me. I’d be running for the mountains if I ever saw that!”

“I’m sure there has to be scary things where your pack is, too. Other than your sister.”

“We don’t have any half-dead anteos. But we had a herd of wild horses pass through once. I was just a hatchling then, and their hooves were so loud when they galloped! I wouldn’t come out of the nest until my dad told me they were all gone. And only if he did it, because one of the others said it just to get me to move, and when I saw the herd was still there, I couldn’t stop crying…” She laughed again, more subdued now. “Like I said, you’re braver than me.”

“Because of something that happened when you were a hatchling? Are you still scared of horses?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re no coward.” He started to slow down, which made Fainel think he was reconsidering that assessment. “There’s the border.”

Fainel blinked and looked around; indeed, they’d made it out of the graveyard. The open air in front of her lacked the lingering cryo scent of his territory (how had she not noticed it before?).

“Thank you for walking me back. You didn’t have to do that.”

“No problem.”

For some reason, Fainel’s feet no longer felt like moving. So she kept talking instead. “It’s Fainel, by the way.”

“Cujo.”

“It was nice to meet you, Cujo.”

Cujo gave her a wordless nod in response as she forced herself to start walking again. But she’d only made it a few steps before the empty space at her side felt cavernous and wrong. She looked back. Cujo was still standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot like he couldn’t decide to stay or go.

“You know, Cujo, there’s still a ways to walk before we end up in my own territory.”

Cujo let out a small but noticeable sigh of relief. In a flash, he was at her side again, their flanks just barely brushing. “Why not? You’re more interesting than anything going on back there.”

Fainel’s mind ran wild, trying to picture the most tangential and roundabout path she could use to drag out her journey home. And she wondered if Cujo would pick up on what she was doing. Because she really wanted to get to know her fellow crested better.