Windfall flittered over the treetops, scanning the landscape for signs of civilization. Or at the very least, a manageable route out of the sprawling forest he and River Song had gotten themselves lost in.
Despite being bookish and out of shape, Windfall was actually a decently fast flier who really should have joined in on more Foderleverans games when he was younger. Getting from one end of the glade to the other without being pinned down was certainly something he felt he could’ve managed. However, speed was only half of the sport. Windfall was never too keen on the accompanying courier aspect.
Tossing seeds into the other teams goal was how points were scored in Foderleverans, and every member of both teams carried cargo corresponding to their formation position. Strikers carried buttercup seeds, the lightest loads available and whose delivery netted the fewest points. Sweepers carried mid-value cargo: either mustard pips or peppercorn, depending on whether their team was home or away. And the Swampers, the two brawniest Breezies on the entire field, each carried a mammoth sunflower bud so heavy that most recreational players in that position had to trek instead of fly. The name ‘Swamper’ came both from the terrain they braved and from the dogpile tactics usually required to bring a Breezie like that down.
Leon Perennial, better known as “The Flower Tiger,” was the most famous Swamper in history for his awe-inspiring ability to actually get airborne with his load as he drove down the field towards the goal. A young Windfall actually once got to see the aging Leon in action during the latter’s waning years of relevance. Granted, this was after those scandalous accusations came out that Leon’s unmatched strength and endurance came from him secretly juicing with Parasprite hormones, so not many Breezies in the stands were cheering for him during that game. Windfall certainly cheered though, because Leon was the best. Period. How he had achieved the top spot didn’t matter, only that his resulting performance was overwhelming.
Seeing the disgraced Flower Tiger ignore the boos to keep on competing and winning the same way he always had taught larval Windfall a valuable lesson: That there was absolutely no point in playing a role unless you were determined to be the greatest at it. To Tartarus with the hit you took to your body or reputation.
That was the true reason Windfall had never become a Foderleverans player: The Flower Tiger already definitely conquered that particular field. Windfall instead devoted himself to his poetry passion, scouring every text in the village library for techniques that his predecessors had shrank away from. That was what led him to eventually explore Abyssal Cuneiform.
A sudden stiff breeze buffeted Windfall along the treetops. He pumped his gossamer wings defiantly and fought to right himself.
Now that Windfall had let a full night go by to digest being förbannad, he’d begun to feel a bit like a Flower Tiger himself. That is, just like old Leon, Windfall was a visionary shunned by the small-minded masses for daring to believe his limits were made to be shattered. And to those who thought Parasprite juicing or sacrilegious sonnets were shocking displays of un-Breezie-ness, just wait until Windfall got his feelers on Grogar’s Bewitching Bell.
Windfall beat his wings harder.
Just wait.
The gust was proving too much to handle, so landing to let it pass was his only option. Lighting down on a particularly high treetop to catch his breath, Windfall draped his wings below his perch so he had a full 360 degree view of the horizon. This forest seemed to stretch dauntingly and endlessly onward in all directions, even more than the swamp had yesterday. Or maybe the biomes were actually average sized and Windfall’s sense of scale was way off. The world outside of his village’s glade was far larger than he could have ever imagined, after all. How was he going to find the Bewitching Bell if he couldn’t first find a pony settlement where he could rest safely before asking around for leads?
Windfall shook his head to clear his cluttered thoughts. He would not allow any moments of self doubt on this journey, especially not so early on. After all, Windfall had accomplished plenty in the past twelve hours that he could be proud of. First he’d found and memorized the Book of the Bell. Then he recruited River Song, that sad-faced, dust-covered pony with the shaggy mane. Sure she wasn’t much of a talker, but she had enthusiastically nodded with big, enraptured eyes as Windfall filibustered about his plans. Clearly River Song was a visionary in her own right, with an unspoken but solid idea of what to do once she too was empowered with infernal magic. This excited Windfall. The two of them were kindred spirits, he was sure, sick to death of being tossed around by fate and determined to seize the reins together.
Windfall sneezed, something he’d been doing all morning. River Song’s aforementioned dustiness had actually been polluting his pollination pockets somewhat. That nub on her forehead especially had been covered with thick, orangish-brown chalk when he’d landed on it. Chalk that seemed to cling to whatever touched it. Were all ponies so contagiously dirty? Windfall doubted it, but didn’t know enough about any species other than his own to be sure.
Perhaps there was a symbolism to it all. Some sort of ritualistic expression of their mutual quest-driven bond between Breezie and whatever pony subspecies River Song happened to be. Most likely there wasn’t anything to it of course, but Windfall couldn’t help but indulge his poetic fancies. The old verses he quilled may have been taken away and destroyed, but already there were new, unwritten ones stirring within him.
Emboldened, Windfall pumped his wings and elevated himself high above the trees, searching for a better vantage point to look for towns. He rose higher into the sky than he ever had before, possibly higher than any Breezie had voluntarily gone before, and when the tips of his antennae lightly brushed the underside of a passing cloud, he flipped around and planted his limbs in the ephemeral puff.
There he paused upside-down and suspended, like a butterfly beneath a branch. Windfall’s heart was hammering and he had to swallow the bile that was involuntarily rising in his throat. His people were still very much prey animals, bullwhipped and browbeaten by the same agoraphobia and flighty instincts that had kept their ancestors alive hundreds of generations ago. But Windfall refused to bow to the bothersome, obsolete alarms. He wasn’t prey anymore. He’d left that part of himself behind when he flitted out of that cave yesterday. This Breezie had become a hunter. A predator. His spot would soon be at the top of the food chain, not the bottom.
Deep focusing his eyes, Windfall scanned the land below with renewed vigor. Then he let out a barely audible squeak of excitement when at last he found what he was looking for: A town. The cluster of thatched-roof houses weren’t much to look at, especially next to the gaudy purple castle that no doubt belonged to their ruler, but aesthetics hardly mattered right now. All that mattered was that the settlement was close. Right outside of the forest, actually.
It was going to be a good day. Windfall could tell.
Windfall let go of the cloud and drifted leisurely down, eager to report to River Song so they could get moving. No doubt she was still right where she’d been when he left: sound asleep under that willow. Windfall found the forest canopy far more difficult to enter from above than it had been to exit from below, but after using the lift from his wings and the grip from all four of his tarsi, he managed to fold back a rather large leaf so he could peer in.
A surprised robin peered out.
Then the bird nipped at Windfall’s right forewing, ripping nearly a third of it off at the midsection and leaving another third in gruesome tatters. The sound of crinkling membrane being swallowed was eclipsed by Windfall’s panicked screech of fear and pain.
”Aaaaugh!”
The robin cocked its head at the soft, high pitched noise emitted by the prey that had just stumbled across its path. Then it nipped again, this time managing to tear off a tuft of orange hair and one antenna with it.
”Aaaauuugh!!”
Sense of balance immediately and utterly ruined by the traumatic loss of his precious feeler, Windfall pitched forward through the hole in the canopy and freefell down to the forest floor, spiraling like a dead and withered leaf the whole way. The robin swooped down to nip a third time, but broke off to circle indignantly as Windfall gave a great stomach emptying heave, trailing spittle-coated streamers of the previous day’s undigested nectar behind him as he plummeted.
The shredded remains of Windfall’s ravaged forewing buckled underneath him as he landed on his side, but that ripple of fresh agony was enough to shock him back to most of his senses. A million nanoscopic needles jabbed through the exposed nerve endings in the blunted stump of what used to be Windfall’s left antenna, but through that haze of unfiltered extrasensory feedback, the Breezie’s bulging bleary eyeballs caught sight of potential safe haven under the cap of a nearby mushroom. Every fanciful meandering of the previous few minutes were gone from Windfall’s mind, smothered by primal panic and blistering pain. There was only room for gut responses now. Get to cover. Get out of the open. His head too flooded with vertigo to even attempt to stand, Windfall desperately writhed on his belly towards the mushroom, dragging the ruined remains of his wing behind him.
The pursuant robin landed on the ground nearby then hopped quizzically closer to observe its prey thrashing feebly around in the dirt. Windfall finally got under the mushroom and wrapped his tiny limbs around its stalk, managing to drag his soggy self to sitting position. The robin meanwhile continued hopping, plumage ruffled in frustration as it made laps around Windfall’s meager shelter, seemingly searching for a good angle to tear another piece off of the traumatized insect, but finding no approach it deemed suitable.
The stalk was clammy and cold, but it still took all of Windfall’s willpower to pry a forelimb away and wipe some residual vomit off his chin. His forelimb snapped back immediately afterwards, hugging the stalk like it was the stuffed spidersilk Ursa that used to keep him calm as a larva.
Windfall had read enough medical texts to know his injuries were causing him to go into neurogenic shock. The fact his arthropodic race was even capable of such a mammalian response mechanism had actually fascinated the Canterlot School of Biology for decades, but understandably not much research had been done due to nopony knowing any ethical way to induce trauma in another sapient-
The robin gave a few thunderous test pecks on the mushroom’s cap, jolting Windfall out of his drifting delirium. He had to do something. He had to seize initiative before any more of him was torn off and eaten. But what could he do? Fight or flight were the only options, and Windfall was equipped for neither. Even with two antennae, Breezies weren’t exactly built for brawling, and with a wing as lacerated as his, Windfall was as grounded as a… as a...
As a Swamper.
A pulse of steely defiance surged from the depths of Windfall’s soul. He didn’t have the might of Grogar (not yet at least), but he did have the imaginary resolve of the Foderleverans player he never ended up becoming. Such sudden strength was of course just mortal terror mixed with hysteria, and maybe somewhere in his tiny overclocked brain Windfall was aware of that, but this wasn’t the type of encounter a former poet who’d just been crippled for life was going to survive. Only a demigod among Breezies could win a fight with a bird.
And fortunately for Windfall, a demigod was exactly whom he was channeling right now.
“Come at the Flower Tiger again and see what happens to you!” Windfall dared uproariously in his native tongue. He staggered out from under the mushroom, sweating bullets and somehow still standing despite swaying worse than that time he’d knocked back too many Honey Hops at a Summer Sun Celebration. Still perched, the robin stared blankly down at its snarling prey.
“You rapacious, knemidocoptes-infested, feathered vermin…”
The robin pecked without warning.
“I am NOT DYING BY YOUR BEAK!!”
An all-consuming, boiling heat surged within Windfall’s injured body as he dodged the robin’s jab, seized some neck feathers in his feeble grip, and affixed himself tenaciously to the bird’s front. The robin’s response was to puff up its plumage and give a full body shake. Windfall clung tight and avoided being dislodged, but fear was starting to catch back up to him. What in Tartarus was he doing??
The robin flapped in frustration before belly flopping onto the forest floor, bending Windfall’s ruined wing at a horrible angle and causing him to yelp as he let go. Sprawled on his back and helpless, Windfall could see his failed attempt at grappling did nothing to the robin other than rub some of that thick orange dust off his own body and onto his better’s chest.
Windfall sneezed. Disgraceful. This aspiring Bell weidler was about to be pecked apart by a mindless animal, and all he’d managed to do to his attacker was deliver a smudge of dirt that wasn’t even originally his.
The robin chirped, then nipped right as Windfall sneezed again. Raw magic sparks shot from the stump of a ruined antenna, made contact with a smear of Kirin antler dust, and with a booming burst of burnt sienna, the robin was gone.
Spent teleportation powder drifted lazily down onto Windfall like ashes from a fire. He continued to lay where he was, staring fisheyed and dumbfounded at the unmoving lattice of branches above him. Then with a vivacity that was almost too much for his mutilated state, he sprang up and pumped his forelimb in the air, battered but victorious.
Breezie idioms weren’t exactly built for taunting, but historical Foderleverans players had produced a few long standing insults worth invoking right now.
“Skol! Go curl your mate’s feelers, stamenbrain! You don’t have the coxas to pin a Swamper!”
Windfall tossed back his head and laughed quite mightily for someone his size. Then he glanced around and noticed, to his utter joy, that he was airborne and hovering. Even down half a wing and a whole antenna, there was enough of him left to keep flying after all. And as long as he could move, the Bewitching Bell was within reach. All the same though, Windfall considered as he flapped forward, he wasn’t too keen on having any more body parts torn off of him. Things like pain and debilitation wouldn’t matter after he became a god, but they certainly would on the journey there.
Compelled by curiosity, Windfall flexed his amputated antenna and confirmed he could indeed shoot sparks from the stump on command. He glanced down at his forelimbs to see they still had a little bit of that lifesaving magic powder in their pollen pockets. Windfall didn’t exactly know what this dust was, but he knew how to apply and detonate it now. That was something. He reckoned there was enough left to fend off any other beasties that picked a fight with him while he made way back to River Song.
And when he did get back to her, he was definitely going to restock.