Stand Together

“I’ve been thinking,” Hael murmured. He was standing under the shade of an oak tree, whose dense canopy of leaves provided decent enough shelter from the late summer sun.

It also provided Amaryllis with a nutty, tannin-rich snack as she grazed delicately on the acorns that were ripening still on the branches. The tannins didn’t make it the most palatable food that she’d ever grazed on, but she was hungry, they were there for the taking, and there were a lot of them.

“What about?” Amaryllis asked between bites. Hael didn’t normally do much of the talking during their occasional visits together, and he sounded more serious than usual. This must have been something he’d been thinking about for a long while.

Hael was quiet again, his attention on the parasaurs and shunos wandering and grazing in the sparsely wooded forest. Most of them were trying to eat what they could before the winter winds came and made food scarce. Some of the younger males were sparring with one another, testing their hooves and swinging their heads to knock into one another in a show of strength, or bugling out long-winded calls that echoed through the trees.

Hael felt some of that energy as well, though he had little interest in sparring. He felt a different calling, one that he never would have expected. He sighed, lost in his own thoughts as he searched the outer edge of the herd for sign of anything suspicious.

“I think… I want to leave the herd,” he answered finally.

Amaryllis paused crunching on the acorns, not entirely certain that she’d heard Hael correctly. “What? Are you sure?”

The look on his face confirmed as much. It was just as shocking for her to hear as it had been for Hael to first come to the realisation that that was what he wanted to do with his future. “I’m sure,” he sighed again, his breath heavy with the weight of his decision.

His adventures with Amaryllis had always been fun, but it wasn’t what had driven him to choose to leave his herd and family behind. He felt restless. The herd felt too big and too constricting at the same time. He liked the occasional company, and he liked being helpful - but they never saw anything new, and he didn’t like the crowd that came with being in the herd. There was order, and there was structure, but it was… restrictive. He’d heard about an entirely new island, far beyond where the herd traveled, and he wanted to see it.

But he didn’t have to explain himself to Amaryllis. She’d always been kind, never expectant or berating him for being lost in thought. He felt her content rumbling in his bones, and he turned his bill towards her. Her eyes were just as bright, curious, and sweet as they always were.

“I was thinking about traveling, myself,” she said. It was of no news to Hael to hear that she was thinking about leaving. She’d always been the one to drag them off somewhere for the day. Neither her mother, nor her herd had ever tried to stop her or even seemed at all concerned that she wanted to wander for a while. He’d come to accept that it was just how shunos were, or how her herd was, at least.

“I want to see somewhere new and meet some new faces. I’ve heard that there’s a whole new place across the water that’s connected to Kela by some underwater cave, which just sounds silly if you think about it. There’s no way that there’s a cave that big and if there was another island, I think we would have been able to see it from the shore. I’ve heard there’s some new dinosaurs though, funny little creatures that can swim just as well as a fish - “

Amaryllis went on and on about what she’d heard about this new island (“Pera,” she’d heard it referred to as) and Hael listened patiently. He was glad to have her as a friend. She was already trying to make him feel better about his decision.

She would have happily continued to speak about the new island, but a tense word from Hael quieted her. Amaryllis craned her neck, bringing her head closer to Hael so she could whisper and still be heard. “What is it? Did you hear something?”

“I don't know,” Hael whispered. He scanned the woodland, but didn’t see anything out of place, didn’t hear anything aside from the sounds of grazing and chatter from the gathered herds. He just had a feeling. A few other lookouts seemed to have the same feeling, standing up to get a better look at their surroundings. Amaryllis straightened up, no longer interested in eating.

Various unsettled snorts, blows, and rumbles traveled across the herds as more and more herbivores were alerted to the potential danger. Even the youngest members of the herds were quiet, even if they weren’t sure why.

When nothing happened, Hael exhaled and dropped back down on all fours, relieved that it was just a feeling and that nothing had come from it. Still, maybe it was time that they moved on from here. He'd suggest it to the herd patriarch soon.

“Anyway,” he sighed, “you said some weird, tiny flying dinosaurs had been sighted around there?”

“Oh, yes! Some absolutely colossal ones as well, but I’m pretty sure they’re much larger than they’re supposed to be compared to the others - “

Before Amaryllis could dive into talking about the Twins, she was cut off by an explosion of events. A pair of tawny coloured carnotaurus erupted into view, one marked with dark stripes across her body and the other a dappled male with splashes of dull red across his face and jaw. They bellowed as they charged through the trees, igniting chaos in their wake.

The shunos could easily band together and ward them off with their powerful clubbed tails - the parasaurs would have a harder time. A few of the adults kicked and bucked at the carnotaurus pair when they got too close, but Maeve and Goose had little interest in harder targets. They had their eyes on the small, the weak, and the young whose wills were infirm and who scattered before them. Easy prey for young carnotaurus. They had their sights set on one of the para herd’s youngest members, who screamed pathetically as it tried to run away while its parents called for it to come to the safety of the protective circle that was being formed.

Driven by instinct, Hael charged towards the carnotaurus rather than away, braying and thrashing his head from side to side while Amaryllis called after him. A para’s horn might not be spiked like a shuno’s tail, but it would still hurt to get hit by. Seeing the large male’s aggressive approach was enough to cause the pair to pause and reconsider their choice of target.

They didn’t stop to think for long. Maeve roared while Goose charged at Hael, head tilted to angle his horns in a ready position so he could swing his head and smash against the para’s head, neck, or shoulder. Hael reared back on his hind legs, kicking with sharp hooves. He was large for a parasaur, even an adolescent, but it wasn’t enough of a display to put either of the carnotaurus off from their hunt.

Not, at least, until he had a friend join him. The aggressive roar that rumbled in Amaryllis’s chest was a sound that Hael had never heard from her even once in his life. Just as Goose was about to crash into Hael, Amaryllis shoved him away with a forceful push with her powerful neck.

Amaryllis’s mouth was open wide as she continued to roar in the hope of dissuading the carnotaurus from continuing their assault. Maeve rushed at them from the side - a fat shuno was an even more tantalizing prize than a young parasaur - but all that she caught was a heavy blow from Amaryllis’s clubbed tail. Maeve was fortunate that the spikes on Amaryllis’s club were more blunt than the typical shuno, and left her with a ragged puncture wound rather than the gaping tear typically associated with such a wound.

Maeve stumbled from the resulting impact, roaring, but it was just a display of anger now. Her and Goose’s hunt was spoiled, they’d lost the element of surprise. The herds had mobilised into defensive positions now, and all the easy targets had been given protection. The forest rang with a cacophonous chorus of bugles, trumpets, roars, and growls from the herbivores, bullying the carnotaurus pair into leaving. They all but slunk away into the deeper woodland, defeated.

“That was horribly mean of them,” Amaryllis snorted. She shook herself, trying to rid herself of the stress of the encounter. Even though she knew that it was impossible to avoid forever, she still never wanted to have to fight like that again. Concern coloured her tone as she turned her head down towards Hael. “Are you okay?”

Hael glanced down at his shoulder. He had caught the tip of Goose’s horn in his hide before Amaryllis had gotten to them, and it ached, but it wasn’t too bad. “Yeah, thanks to you.” He looked out across the herds, who were taking stock and all checking on one another now that the immediate threat had passed. The young parasaur that the carnos had been chasing was sitting between its mothers forelegs, trembling but alive and unharmed. “I think everyone else is, too.”

“Thanks to you,” Amaryllis praised him in kind, bumping his horn with her snout. Hael felt a swell of pride in his chest.

He still felt the call to travel, but… for now, he was still part of the herd, and he was glad to do his part in keeping them safe.