Get Out Alive

“We give you shelter, we give you food, we give you protection - and this is how you repay us?” Talos lowed. “Thievery?”

His silhouette was sharp and jagged in the doorway, false moonlight glinting off his helm and almost seeming to make his pale feathers glow. Short bone spikes on the wrap around his tail made the slow swing of his hammer especially threatening.

If Deerlegs were any sort of healthy, she would have made her annoyance clear - flattening her crests, a harsh glare, scathing words, a toss of her head. As it was, she was exhausted to the point that standing up drained her, and Talos was standing in the way to their freedom. She settled with as hard a look as she could muster, though it had less bite than she would have preferred.

Embargo could have sighed, their bundle of pilfered goods hanging from his jaws. Of course they couldn’t make it out of the armoury - treasury? - without being noticed.

“You locked us up,” Deerlegs murmured, her voice a quiet snarl. “When we were wounded you almost refused to treat us, and then-”

Embargo cleared his throat to interrupt her near-delirious tirade, the sound muffled slightly by the fabric held fast in his teeth. They probably shouldn’t tell the knight that they’d escaped from the bloody banquet.

Deerlegs turned her furious visage towards Embargo, just briefly. What did it matter? They had already been caught stealing from Atlantis, and they both looked like they’d been dragged backwards through a pit full of gnashing teeth. It would be easy for anyone to put the pieces together - they had escaped, and they were to be hunted down and exterminated before they could spread word of the Queen’s intent to invade the surface.

Even if Talos hadn’t noticed how rough they looked, his sense of smell told him as much. All courtiers knew of the events of the evening, and all knights not present at the banquet had been told to finish off any topsiders that managed to escape, once those loyal to the Queen had gone to pledge their services to her.

These two both reeked of blood, the scent heavy in the air with as long as they had spent in the treasury already. It would be his honour to take their lives, in the name of the Queen.

He bellowed, a sound that echoed into the building and rattling armour pieces against one another. Like Sagittarius, he was summoning reinforcements. They had no time left to linger; their hiding place had been revealed to all those near enough to hear Talos’s summons.

Embargo waited just long enough for Deerlegs to start to run ahead of him, the quills along his back and tail raised defensively. They wouldn’t do anything against the euoplo’s hammer when it fell, it was just instinct.

Deerlegs’s gait was awkward, every other step a heavy limp. She was running as fast as she could through the building to get to the stairs, but running over tile was its own challenge even without being wounded and fatigued. She tried to take a corner too quickly, expecting her claws to grip into rough earth when instead they glanced across the smooth surface of the tile floor. She slid and hit the wall with a heavy grunt, winded and dazed from the impact which sent a jolt of pain along her tail and up her spine.

Embargo struggled less with the tile floor. This was yet another familiar situation to him. Run, and keep running, while Death bit at your heels with hot breath. He nudged her to move, urging her onwards before she had a chance to fully recover. She didn’t need to understand where they were going, they just couldn't stop. If they stopped they were dead all over again.

Bioluminescence was a gift for helping to guide them through the dark halls, but a curse as well as it gave Talos a beacon to follow down the median. His footsteps crashed through the halls, in hot pursuit behind the pachys as they raced towards the stairway that would lead them to safety.

If only it were that easy.

Going down stairs was trickier than climbing them. Deerlegs half-stumbled, half-fell down the stairway until finally she reached the lower level again. She tasted blood where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek when she hit the ground particularly hard, but she didn’t have time to think about it or catch her breath when Embargo was again helping her to her feet to drive her ever onwards.

There was another sound from the far exit where they’d first come into the treasury - more footsteps, rapidly approaching. They carried the speed of a pachy, but less heavy. Another oviraptor. Embargo’s temper flared this time, worse to see a familiar, striped face come into view from the darkness. Mischief, the same oviraptor who had fed them while they were incarcerated, the same oviraptor who had assured them she wasn’t there to do them harm - now come to intercept them on their way to freedom.

With the stairway being an effective barrier between them and Talos, who raged on the floor above them, it was just Mischief in their way, and they’d dealt with an oviraptor already.

Mischief raced towards them, only to hesitate when she realised that she knew the fugitives she had been tasked with hunting down. While she wasn’t particularly fond of any of the topsiders, it was still a surprise to see the pachys here. They were a little rough around the edges, but had they really done something so wrong as to have their deaths ordered? She’d expected the two of them to at least consider joining the efforts to mend the dome when they heard about what was going on in Atlantis. That they were all going to die if they couldn't preserve their home or make a new home for themselves on the surface. Maybe it was foolish to believe that topsiders would be so kind. After all, when they had everything they ever wanted, why should they share it?

Deerlegs took the moment of hesitation and shouldered roughly past Mischief, knocking the oviraptor off balance as she rushed past. Mischief croaked, but the sound was abruptly cut off when Embargo hit her head-on with his dome and the breath was driven from her lungs.

While Mischief hit the ground with a rough crash, Deerlegs and Embargo escaped through the loading bay with their lives and stolen goods.