Salvation

The way that Duck found June was not altogether dissimilar to when he discovered Osa, though he was much less ready to adopt a hatchling then. Arguably, he wasn’t ready at all. He was a bachelor, a wanderer. He didn’t want to stay in any one place for too long, and he certainly didn’t want this responsibility. How could a hatchling keep up with him?

Especially because Osa was small, and weak, and sickly when he found her. She was entirely alone. The scent of death was on her, clinging to her disheveled, wet, and dirty hatchling feathers.

What had happened to her? Why was she alone? Her siblings, her clutch-mates, had become ill as well, and they had either gone separate ways from her or they had… gone altogether.

Where was her mother? She had no memory of a father, she wasn’t even familiar with the concept.

She was hungry. She had been hungry for days, only managing to hang onto life this long because she had been extremely fortunate - if her situation could be called “fortunate.”

Before Duck found her, before he reluctantly and begrudgingly decided that he would look after her and see her well again, the sun rose and fell many times. The moon took its place every night, waning from the full moon that she had hatched under and waxing again after it had disappeared entirely. She and her clutch-mates had been well fed on the yolk of their eggs the first week of their life, then fed even better by the rich and succulent meals that their mother brought back to the nest.

But the food… stopped coming one day. The insistent high-pitched grunts and chirps that she and her siblings made to call for food became increasingly frequent as they grew hungrier. They begged for attention from their caregiver, the one who had been an almost constant presence in their life since they had hatched, but none would come. The one who had been feeding them was gone, and too soon for them to know how to tend to themselves.

Was it fortune or cruelty that the one who had slain or drove their mother away had not found them as well?

Their grunts, their pleas, became more desperate just as much as they became quieter and more infrequent. They were becoming too weak to ask for food from an unforgiving world that would give them nothing, so some of them slept when they were not begging for relief from the growling, snarling hunger in their bellies. Some of them, the weakest, did not wake up. Some of them started to smell foul, and small and wriggling things grew from their flesh.

It was not that, but the thing that came afterwards that urged Osa to abandon what had once been a place of safety, and had then become a grave.

The scents of sickness, death, and decay, of a waiting and ready meal, drew a great and terrifying thing to the nest. A creature that could have been a suchomimus, if it were not obvious that it was something else entirely. It was short and blunt of snout and bore many extra claws at the end of four short legs; its tail whipped and flailed as it tore over the edge of the reeds, moss, and other plants that had been piled into a comfortable mound. It raided the nest, snapping at her and her siblings and swallowing those that it caught whole. It was clad in tough, scaly skin - their own tiny claws and teeth were powerless against the beast as it preyed upon them.

Osa ran. Her legs were small and she was thin, and not very fast, but while the monster was distracted with what was left of her dwindling family, she ran.

Until she couldn’t run, because the ground turned into a thick slop that she struggled to walk across, and then it became water.

She’d never swum, yet the movements came naturally to her. She was too small to make it very far, very fast, and too tired. Her feathers didn’t repel water but soaked it up, clinging to her too-thin frame. The water, combined with her fatigue and the mud that had clumped into her feathers and stuck to her small limbs, drained her of what little remaining energy she had. She had to find her way to shore - or to at the very least, perch on a lily pad. It was a cruel blessing that her hunger had made her so little and light, in that moment, or she would have drowned.

She rested a while, her tiny ribs heaving as she caught her breath. She was so small, only having hatched within the month and her growth stunted by lack of nutrition. Yet, she already knew exhaustion, sickness, death, fear, pain, hunger. The worst kind of hunger imaginable. The kind that made her feel ill to the point that she wasn’t even sure that she wanted to eat anymore. These feelings, these horrible sensations, ingrained themselves into her mind, rooted themselves so deep in her subconscious that she would never fully be rid of them. They would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Her… very short life, if she did not soon find salvation.

She grunted weakly, quietly. Asking for food that never came, asking for her clutch-mates who she had left behind, asking for her mother who had disappeared and the warmth and safety of the nest that she had hatched in and subsequently abandoned.

She was starving. With feathers soaked with water, her skeleton was visible, casting sharp shadows among the sharp points and deep curves where there should have been muscle and fat.

She was alone, with no voice but her own to call out for help. Her voice was still small, and didn’t carry very far. There was no mother, no guardian around to hear it.

She was cold. The surface of a lily pad offered no insulation from the ambient air temperature or the cooler temperature of the water below, and the water and mud that clung to her cooled her further and didn’t allow sunlight to warm her. She had no more clutch-mates to curl up against. She shivered constantly.

All of these things together were just… so much. She was so tired. She felt like she could sleep for a very long time, like the first of her clutch-mates that closed their eyes and never woke up.

But she heard a sound, and saw a familiar silhouette. A suchomimus, but that was all she could identify through her blurry vision. Her mother? Had she heard Osa’s grunts and finally come back? The nest was gone, but she, at least, remained.

Osa raised her head, wobbling slightly as she did, and grunted again. She tried to be louder, to get its attention. Please come feed her. Come give her warmth and care. She didn’t want to feel like this anymore, she wanted to be alive and full of energy like she was after she had first opened her eyes to the brightness of the world.

It wasn’t her mother that finally came into focus. She didn’t recognise the vibrant yellows and greens on the stranger’s head. She was so relieved that she didn’t care. It never even crossed her mind that he might try to eat her, like the scaled creature that raided the nest.

This was another suchomimus, and he would take care of her. He would get her fish, or meat, or anything else that she could eat and she wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

She was saved.