Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
December 17th, Gregorian Calendar
General Sorven winced as the sound of her ragged breathing was magnified by the rebreather filter strapped over her nose and mouth.
Staring out over the Appalachian's starboard lookout railing, it was difficult not to break down into hyperventilation. Or tears.
The view seemed almost curated to elicit a sense of impending dread, loss, and sadness.
As the Light Carrier steamed up the western Indian coast, what was left of Mumbai was framed in the dull afterglow of a dying firestorm, wreathed in choking clouds of radioactive ash, and smoke.
The hulks of commercial super-container ships caught in the backblast littered the coastline, like the desiccated ribs of some ancient leviathan, left to petrify and fossilize.
The sightlines naturally drew the eye up to the orange glow of fire, and the snowlike soft precipitation of ash. The cloud was thick enough to require a rebreather, but not quite thick enough to hide the horror of an urban core savaged by atomic heat and pressure.
Mumbai was a total loss. If anyone had survived the seven MiRVs that hit within thirty miles of the city center, and Sorven reflected grimly that a few people almost certainly had...
...Then their only hope was the small SAR team of Gryphons that had been dispatched to comb the ruins two days before. Fourteen heavily armed, lightly armored volunteers carrying only Potion doses and spare rations by way of aid. Anyone they found would be too irradiated or otherwise injured for a standard trauma kit to make a whit's worth of difference.
Fourteen.
That was all the JRSF could spare, given the much greater value of Gryphons as forward force multipliers. Fourteen Gryphons. To search a city that had once hosted millions.
Whoever was left fighting to survive in that strange gray and red Hell? They weren't worth the Appalachain's time. Sorven squeezed her eyes shut, going over the math again in her head. Whether to reassure herself, or torture herself, she wasn't quite sure.
Triage.
It sounded so clinical, and so easy to dismiss as 'fair and necessary' when thinking about a well lit, fully powered, and properly staffed medical ward.
The word was an entirely different monster when considering how to distribute thin-stretched SAR efforts on a dying, irradiated, ash-encased planet that was losing ground at an alarming rate.
The Appalachian could save hundreds of thousands of lives acting as a mobile beachhead in Dwarka. If they lingered in Mumbai, the number of lives saved would not even balance out the number of lives lost elsewhere from the delay.
How many children's ashes were scattered across the pulped, roasted remains of the cityscape that she could see burning with her own eyes? How many dead were wafted on the hot breeze that she would, without the benefit of her mask, be breathing lungfuls of with every heartbeat?
James and Michael were alive. Less than two hundred meters away below-decks.
But how many like them were lost forever? Because their mother wasn't a JRSF General, who had pulled strings and bent rules to move them out of danger when things began to spiral?
Sorven hissed through grit teeth, clenched the rail in both hands, and fought back a bout of stress induced nausea. Think big picture Kara. Think big picture.
First? Win the war.
That was a foregone conclusion. EarthGov had already lost the spine, and main muscle of its forces in just a few short days.
The opening hours of the war alone had seen the surgical excision and execution of over ninety percent of EarthGov's Consular and Military Flag-level leadership.
But cleanup, if one could call it that, was going to be a long, arduous road. Weeks, maybe months, of clearing remaining cities one block at a time, ferreting out the enemy's countless bunkers and redoubts tucked into the less habited liminal spaces of the globe...
Just getting a new Equestria crossover point calibrated and setup in eastern Tennessee, with a protected mobile transfer camp, was going to take weeks.
And all the while the EarthGov's remaining forces were free to detonate dirty bombs and microwave weapons, poison Potion, mount raids against ships... Sell themselves as dearly as possible.
Some had accepted the offer of surrender extended to the run of the mill troops and lower level officers. But plenty were hell-bent to fight, and hell-bound for it. More or less literally, as far as Sorven was concerned. The Gryphons were surprisingly humane in their executionary methods. But *far* from kind.
The fear they were so carefully inducing, cultivating, and spreading in the EarthGov forces was, at least, having some of the desired effect. More low level soldiers would be surrendering each day than the one before, through Month's-end if the trend-line held.
Sorven could never bring herself to look them in their tired, sometimes burned, always dirty, exhausted, downcast faces.
Nor to watch any of the officer executions. They turned her stomach.
Many of the dead had been her colleagues for years.
She knew most of their names and faces.
And the names and faces of many of their families. Those who survived the Nukes, the fallout, the Barrier, the fighting... Starvation... Exposure... They would make it against all odds, only to find that a Dragon, or a Gryphon, had put a rail-round into the brain stem of their loved one's neck without so much as a hint of hesitation.
Whether or not their loved one had deserved that fate? Perhaps no one would ever know.
More were deserving than not, if their behavior was anything to go by, both on the battlefield, and after their capture. But there were doubtless a few good people going to the execution dock for the sins of their superiors, yet blameless themselves.
The General had been surprised to find that many of her Human colleagues were the ones watching the executions most closely, and with the most perverse enjoyment. Perhaps because Humanity had lost the most out of all the species and nations represented in the war.
The Gryphons seemed to take satisfaction in eliminating enemy officers, both for the sake of justice for the dead civilians, and the tactical benefit of wiping out the enemy's only experienced commanders.
But not pleasure.
Sorven shivered reflexively.
Her Human colleagues were taking *pleasure* at the deaths of the EarthGov officers, Councilors, and other sundry leaders.
Perhaps it made a perverse kind of sense...
*Their* population took the brunt of the Barrier Expansion. Humans had been the highest percent of Nuclear casualties by far. It was Human cities that were now laid in ruins, smoldering under a stony dead sky, or vanished entirely into the Barrier's hungry maw.
It was Humanity's world that was dying.
"Death."
Sorven jumped, and squeezed her hands even harder against the railing as Seyal's voice rang out. A single word that all too easily, and mournfully, and frighteningly encapsulated all that she could see before her, and all that was bearing down on her mind, and soul.
Sorven turned to see the Gryphon General shaking her head, eyes fixed piercingly on the firestorm to the east. As she stepped up to join Sorven at the railing, ash alighting in her feathers with all the delicacy and elegance of snowflakes, her voice filled the air with a dull, sad, resigned note.
"The very air of this world is now thick with the scent of it."
The Gryphoness wore no breathing aid. She did not need one. Sorven did not envy her the scent of scorched earth, bone, and duracrete.
Kara shook her head, and finally released her death grip on the lookout post's railing, pinching above the bridge of her nose in a futile attempt to relieve her stress headache. She made no effort to disguise the horror, and exhaustion, in her own voice.
"I can't do this for three more years, Seyal. No one should have to watch their planet die... But knowing that your own kind elected to commit mass self-inflicted suicide with its own weapons..? I envy my sons."
Neyla's promise had held true. Sponsorship for Gryphon Conversion for Kara, James, and Michael Sorven. Three golden vials of goo whenever requested, no conditions attached.
After what had happened with the Barrier, General Sorven had decided it was time. To her surprise, Michael had wanted to break with expectations. He was convinced he would turn out Pegasus if he took the Pony serum. And as far as Kara was concerned, he had done enough research, and soul searching to earn the right to that decision.
He had, thankfully, and amusingly, been right.
The General longed to join them with every fiber of her being. To take her own cup of golden liquid freedom, and finally be at peace.
But there was a war on, and a war at a critical juncture at that. For all the hopes, and wants, and pains, and exhaustion? Sorven felt that the days of adjustment were not ones she could afford. Not for at least another few weeks.
She let her frustrated longing escape as words. She felt Seyal would understand.
"At this point...? Why waste my time and energy on anyone or anything besides family? Why not just let the rest burn? And still I keep going... And I hate every minute of it. But I have to come to terms with at least three more years of it. Feathers and wings or no."
Sorven shook her head a second time, and looked down to stare at the simple traction pattern of wrought steel in the decking as Seyal snorted in reply.
"Three years?"
The Human General looked up just in time to see her friend shake her own feathery head, ears pinned flat against her skull in an expression of morbid certainty that carried to her words with all the surety and inevitability of a funerary chant.
"Without sunlight, and with more than half of your Kelp farms gone? We do not have three *months* before fully half of this planet starves. Perhaps double that, if Equestria exports every scrap of food it can spare... But we both know that it can not be so."
Sorven exhaled slowly; A ragged, pained breath that threatened to spiral into a sob. She met Seyal's eyes, and clutched one fisted hand to the front of her rebreather, adjusting it ever so slightly as both a means to relieve an itch, and to relieve mental tension as she spoke.
"The war there is more important than either the war here, or the relief efforts. If they lose because they tried to carry us? Then we're all in Hell. Another few billion lives is the price we already signed to pay the moment we decided to fire Nuclear weapons."
Tears filled the corners of Sorven's eyes as she forced herself to look back at the ruins of Mumbai. Her voice somehow remained firm, and almost inflectionless as she continued to air her deepest held guilt, and frustrations.
"I try to tell myself it doesn't matter. That we already chose to kill these people fifteen years ago. Back when we elected to keep our old systems. Old status quo. Old leadership."
Sorven glanced back at Seyal, and sighed, before finally speaking the words she'd known as truth for years, but never dared to utter aloud. All she saw on the Gryphon's face was acceptance. Agreement. A sad empathy.
"We were given a gift; Years of time, and multiple technologies, and allies. To save the Human race. We knew the exact shape of the disaster. The timeline. The numbers. And we had *everything* we needed to save *everyone.* We had Conversion. Food imports. Magic. Equestrian volunteers and allies. We had cryostatics. We had the basis for superluminal flight. The military industrial strength and post-singularity systems needed to manufacture thousands, and *thousands* of starships..."
It was Seyal's turn to sigh, and to offer a wing over Sorven's back as physical comfort. The Human General clutched her head in her hands. Seven more words escaped her lips with all the emotional weight of an iron anvil.
"...But we didn't even *try.* Not really."
Sorven shook her head, and laid her head down on the railing, whispering into the ashfall.
"We didn't even try."
Earth Calendar: 2117
Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact)
Twelfth Month, Seventeenth Day, Celestial Calendar
Neyla
Fyrenn caught me staring at him. I was making no secret of my glances. He was making no secret of his bemusement. I laid down the parchment I'd been examining, and smiled, pressing closer into his side.
Where once we'd sat side by side relatively close, now I was all but on top of him, like a cat atop the arm of a sofa. I murmured into one red tufted ear as he laid down his own parchment. Wedding preparations, just like mine.
Interminable silly things like seating, floral arrangements, and meal courses... An unceasing stream of Equine nonsense that I wished dearly that we could dispense with. And all that *after* Celestia's own Royal Assistants had taken the more complex minutiae off our claws.
Insufferable.
"I am... Imagining. Thinking ahead to many, many more mornings like this."
He rolled to the side slightly, and I dropped into a position against his chest, curling up against the fur and feathers as he spread out around me like a big red blanket. My God... It was, I almost reflexively reminded myself for the millionth time, very good to have someone to hold you close on a cold, rainy morning.
The sun wasn't even up. But suddenly I was as warm as if I were laying under a noonday summer sun in a field of grass.
He laid his head against the side of mine, and his voice reverberated through my skull, clear and relatively loud, even though he spoke in a hushed murmur like my own. We didn't want to wake Alyra at such an early hour.
"That's what I keep reminding myself every time I start to hyperventilate. Thinking about the size of our guest-list..."
I shifted my head slightly so I could gaze into his eyes. His smile warmed me almost as much as his body heat as he continued speaking in a low, almost sultry tone that was very new and unusual coming from his beak. But not at all unwelcome.
"...I will have far, far more days and nights in peace and solitude with you than days where we have to bear the burden of social obligation."
I nodded, and tucked my head back contentedly under his, shifting slightly to get comfortable. He stretched out one wing to cover his whole right side, and me along with it, enveloping us both in a dim red warm canopy.
I closed my eyes, speaking softly, and feeling as though I could almost fall asleep in that moment of peace.
"I know we have much to rightly fear. But for now... Knowing that we will face it together?"
My next words seemed odd to me, so I paused to reflect... But on reflection, I felt that there was a dimension of reality to them that could not be easily dismissed. So I aired them.
"I strangely feel as if, in spite of all that we face, that we have already escaped the worst fate. You and I. Alyra. This larger family we are creating. Whatever happens now... At least we will not be alone in facing it."
I felt him nod slightly, bobbing both our heads a tiny bit in the process. The gesture was accompanied by a thrum from his chest, and then words that affirmed much of what I was feeling.
"I believe there is a lot of truth in that sentiment."
I opened my eyes, and twisted my head to stare at him once more as he continued, his head wreathed by the subtle red glow of the room's dim candle light, filtered through the pinions of his right wing.
"We both know what it's like to go it alone. To have your heart broken. To face insurmountable asks, and odds."
I smiled. I couldn't help it. He smiled back, and the smile reached from his beak, to his eyes and ears, and down to his words, reverberating through the cushion beneath us, and the shared spaces of our ribs pressed close.
The smell was Heavenly.
Like all creatures, we Gryphons have a general range of common scents. A particular palette of warm feathers and fur, for example. But like all creatures, we each have a unique smell.
Unlike Humans, our natural scents tend to be very pleasant, and attractive.
And I found his particular scent to be indescribably comforting.
I'd first noticed it when we'd been trapped under that building in Vancouver together. The memory of it had never dulled.
Fyrenn's next words brought me back to a focus on the present.
"Wherever we end up. However we end up. Doesn't matter to me anymore. Not as long as you, and Alyra, are there. As long as we can make a life together."
He snorted, and I pricked one ear upwards in curiosity. He shook his head, but elaborated aloud nonetheless.
"Sounds... Selfish. Feels a little selfish too. But truthfully? Much as I do honestly care about the lives and safety of others? Of this world?"
He reached his head forward and nuzzled my cheek, whispering the last of his thought into my left ear, as if at once confessing to a confidant, and sharing an intimate verse of courtship poetry.
"*You* and that little bundle of joy in the next room, are by *far* the main reason that I intend to see this through to the end. After the rest of the family is added to that ledger? Nations and species and kingdoms and sovereigns and systems don't count for shit."
It was my turn to snort. My smile morphed into a little smirk, and I batted playfully at one of his ears for just a moment, before my face, and words, both dipped into a more serious tone.
"I know you don't mean that. Not entirely."
He inclined his head, and sighed deeply. His breath was surprisingly hot, even for an adult male Gryphon. I was quickly coming to learn that when he was stressed, his body temperature would elevate, as if his brain running out ahead to worry about the future was creating excess processing heat, and dissipating it throughout his body.
His next words came only after a pause for consideration. I watched every shadow of emotion, and thought flicker across his eyes as he re-examined his thoughts, and reached his conclusions.
"Maybe. But given the choice? I will pick people over places, and systems. Any day. All day. If we have to burn down the old ways of doing things? Suits me just fine."
I nodded, and gestured with my head towards his wing, and in the direction of the door to his guest bedchamber, and the sleeping young Gryphoness within.
"There is no shame in wanting to leave her a better world than the one we were born into. A better one than we have now."
He reciprocated the nod, and adjusted his wing to hold me close, but expose our heads back to the fresh, cold, damp morning air of the room at large. His gaze wandered to the window, and the fog-shrouded spires of the castle beyond, as his voice dropped to an almost absent register.
"First, we have to make it through this war. And then comes the hard part."
Again I silently pressed him with a curious glance, as his eyes returned to probe mine. Again he paused to collect his thoughts before responding in a quiet, but deadly sure register that injected an icy current of urgency into my breast.
"Really changing the future. Actually learning the lessons of our history. Truly doing *better* this time."
I could see he had more thoughts within him, so I stayed silent, fixing him with an expression that said 'go on.' And not as a question. A mate always has the right to know what the other in the pair is thinking. At least, that is what our culture believes.
True to himself, and our bond, he shared openly, just as soon as he could summon the right words to give form to his feeling.
"I think... That coming here? From another world... Another kind... Another way of doing things..."
His gaze wandered to the middle distance again, and a brief silence ensued. I searched for his front claws with my own, and on finding them, enfolded them in my own. He smiled, an almost sad smile, and the gesture seemed to help him crystallize the rest of his thoughts at last.
"...Being a Convert has changed my viewpoint forever. I feel like one of those first mathematicians who realized that the world was a sphere, by studying the dynamics of shadows... Suddenly blindingly enlightened to a now-obvious truth that rings hollow and strange to the ears of the uninitiated. Because they lack the basic perspective to even separate the shadows from reality."
As was becoming a habit for us both, his eyes returned to seek out my own. I offered him the warmest smile I could build up from the warmth, and love that he was sharing with me, and did my best to let that sentiment well up in my voice as well.
"Your world taught me much as well. And for all the sorrow, and suffering? I still believe in the power of the Human spirit."
I gestured with one claw towards the doorway to the bedroom.
"Our greatest duty now is to nurture it here in a way that will cultivate the good, and stifle the bad."
He exhaled; Half a grim snort, half a sad chuckle.
"Sometimes the... The gravity of that idea frightens me. More than the war. More than the Nightmare even."
I could feel the depth of his sentiment. An unbearably heavy weight that had somehow become normative to him through years of bearing it silently. I squeezed his claws in mine, and fixed his eyes with my own in a way intended to drill my next words into him with an inescapable surety.
Trying as hard as I could to have faith for us both.
"We have already made an excellent start."
He nodded slowly, never breaking visual contact, not so much as blinking. I forged ahead quickly, seizing on the invitation, and opportunity, to help shore up his emotional state.
"Not to belittle the task, of course; But in truth, all we must do is take that which binds our family of many kinds, and share it. Not, I know, necessarily an *easy* task. But not necessarily a *complicated* one either..."
At last he smiled again, and so did I. I felt him search out my tail with his own, and after an awkward moment of batting at eachother like house cats, we managed to entwine them. Only then did I finish my thought.
"...And it is a future which I think we are well cut out for. One which we can throw ourselves into with passion, and joy."
For a moment I thought that would be the end of it. But I could see the weight settle right back on his shoulders. As if storm clouds had parted for a brief moment to let the sun's rays through, but reformed just as quickly.
"We have to make it to the threshold first."
This would be no simple case of a few affirming words, and all made well by the saying of them.
I shifted my ears slightly in a gesture meant to say 'tell me everything.' That seemed to give him some impetus to continue. If only a little.
"And if we do... I hope there will be enough survivors to share that victory with us."
He sighed again, a deep, sad sound, and laid his head against the side of mine, closing his eyes as words flowed more freely. Though not the ones I wanted to hear.
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to match the weather with the mood... I..."
I didn't want to hear him apologize for feeling a pain that made sense. I wanted to hear him articulate that pain so we could face it. Together. I held still, and silent, waiting, and hoping.
True to his growth over the last year, he at last aired the thing that was truly torturing him.
"It is hard. Very hard. Not to imagine."
I knew what he meant instantly. I said so, aloud, before I even realized I was speaking.
"You see it. When you close your eyes."
He nodded slowly, clenching his eyes shut further, as if trying to shut out the horrors he could unfortunately so easily conjure with vivid imagination, depth of learning, and cynical disposition.
"I have studied war. For a long time. It has been my career, my calling, and sometimes my only consort and consolation on very cold, dark nights of self-recrimination and regret."
He opened his eyes again, and I could see dampness at the corners where he was fighting back tears. His voice was hollow, and ashen.
"I know exactly what nuclear war looks like. As much as anyone can who has not seen it with their own eyes. More than most, even most soldiers. I have studied it. Simulated it. Written on it. Read, and forgotten more than most have ever learned in the first place on the topic."
He exhaled a very long, slow, ragged breath from deep in his lungs, as if trying to expel his burden that way. When that failed, he shook his head, and the stream of his consciousness made words was once more unblocked.
"I keep doing the math. In my head. As I fall asleep. Over and over."
I knew exactly what he meant by that too. I had seen the same numbers across the back of my mind's eye. Unlike him, I had been able to accept them, and begin to move on; Sorrowful, but resolved. But Earth was not my world. It was his. And I did not begrudge him the pain its destruction was causing.
I'm not sure I could have loved him at all if he was the sort who could simply dismiss that much suffering of those who were, in some ways, still his own kind.
After a long pause, he finally spoke aloud the sad, terrible truth. The truth we all knew.
"We can win *this* war... Or we can save, at most, two thirds of whoever is left..."
His eyes finally locked with mine again, and I saw small tears in the corners that had finally escaped the vice grip of his self control.
"...But not both."
I nodded slowly. An affirmation meant to comfort him by helping him to accept the cold, dark reality of what he had said. To reach for a catharsis of understanding, and acceptance of facts. He inhaled almost as deeply as he had previously exhaled, and started to speak once more.
"More than half a billion people died this week. Another billion will be dead in thirty days. Radiation. Thirst. Exposure. Collateral damage. War casualties."
I did not break eye contact all the while as he went on. I wanted him to understand that no matter what framing others might try to put 'round the situation for their own sake, or their own agenda, that I saw and accepted the truth he was speaking, and the deep, deep pain that undergirded it in his heart.
"Another two billion in just a hundred more days after that. Mostly starvation and radiation by that point. And just like that..."
He blinked, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment. I could almost see the same horrid things he was seeing against the field of my own vision. Bodies stacked in gray ash filled streets, left to rot, and then vanish when the Barrier came... Unburied. Because there were too few left, and too sickly, and frightened, to even bother with the dead.
He whispered, as if he didn't even have the energy to speak outright.
"Just like that... Half of them are gone. Half of the remaining Human lives on Earth."
I could see his exhaustion, and grief, morph into frustration and hopelessness. His ears fell flat, and his head drooped. Though he found the energy to rise above a whisper again, his tone was that of someone defeated.
"And we can't do a damn thing about it. Because if we send them any aid? Any bodies, any food, any materials?"
It was my turn to sigh. I felt his intractable need to do something, anything, to ease the suffering of his homeworld... But we both knew that the math was absolute. And he said as much aloud, as much for his own sake as any other reason.
"...Anything we share... That's one less card in the deck for us. Fighting a war that we are already more than half-likely to lose. A war that we *can not* under any circumstances lose. We are sitting on the best and only realistically available stockpile of food, water, and medical aid in either world... And we have to hoard it. Every last scrap of it. While the better part of half of the last survivors of the Human race starve, freeze, and die. In an irradiated crater. Choking on ash."
Silence fell for several minutes. Somewhere in the middle of the grim stillness, I shifted position, pulling out from beneath his right wing, and extending my left wing to cover him the way he had been covering me.
After a few moments of holding him close, I squeezed his claws again, speaking only when his eyes came up to meet my own.
"All true enough. And I mourn with you for those lost. And those inevitably soon to be lost. But we are warriors. Guardians. We chose this path. We have proven ourselves worthy of this mantle. And with this mantle of responsibility come hard choices."
He nodded slowly, and I cocked my head slightly to keep our eyes aligned as his head dipped. My voice was firm, but as loving as I could make it without compromising that steel edge.
"At least in this instance? We have the relative luxury of knowing beyond *any* shade of doubt that we are making the *right* choice. And we are not making it alone. Our King and Queen, Celestia, Luna... They have seen the same cruel arithmetic. And opted to cast the die this way with us."
I leaned forward and we rested our foreheads against each other. When it seemed as if he might speak again, I interjected before he could finish drawing the breath.
"Three billion people, and all their children, and ours... Will one day have a chance at a bright future. If we win this war. Untold billions who will endure a fate worse than death. Worse than non-existence in the first place. If we fail."
I pulled my head back, and our eyes met again.
"So we do *whatever* we must. No sacrifice is too great. The alternatives can not even be considered. We *can not fail.*"
As his head dipped once more, I released one of his claws from one of my own, reaching up and placing one talon firmly under his chin to keep his eyes and beak level with mine.
"Hold your head high, and shoulders proud, my mate. You and I will stand in the breach between light, and dark. And together, we are going to make such an account of ourselves that no one will soon forget it."
As I withdrew my claw, his expression changed at last from dour sorrow, to something more akin to the bemused forlorn happiness of before. An improvement, at least. He held the expression long enough that, finally, my curiosity got the better of me.
"What?"
I could see him blush, and he finally averted his eyes briefly as he answered.
"I am... Trying to suss out how the hell I ever made it through all those years of blood, and shattered bones, and muck, and tears... Without you."
I leaned forward again and nibbled at his cheek, whispering in his left ear as I did so.
"You are strong."
He chuckled, and shook his head, running his free claw gently down my left cheek, and caressing the side of my head as he spoke softly.
"I feel like I pale in comparison to you. If any of us are to be thought of as legends someday... I hope it will be you first, and foremost. Aside from being a much prettier face to look at..."
He pressed his head into the crook of my neck, and sighed, before finishing his flattery.
"...I don't think I know *anyone* stronger than you. Or wiser."
It was my turn to stare down at him, rubbing his neck with my free claw as we mulled in silence. And after a few moments, he found himself irresistibly curious as well. He cheekily matched my own tone, and used the same word in query.
"What?"
I smirked, and touched the front of my beak gently to the front of his.
"I am thanking the Creator for the ten thousandth time that you are *mine.* "
My smirk morphed into a predatory grin. He chuckled; At last! A sound of amusement, and joy, not tempered by sadness, or stress. He rolled over onto his back and spread his wings slightly to both relieve pressure on them, and cushion his head.
I scooted over and laid on top of him forelegs folded on his chest so I could rest my own head inches from his own. He smiled, and raised one eye crest.
"You are... *Very* alluring when you get possessive."
I rolled onto my side, and he folded his forelegs around me. I closed my eyes, nestled my head in the crook of his neck, and murmured aloud.
"And *you* are very alluring when you wax philosophical and poetic about me."
A long moment of happy, peaceful silence passed. Our heartbeats and breaths fell into synchronization. The silence was broken first only by the accelerating rustle of rain on the tower's roof, and then by the pesky insistence of Fyrenn's words.
I sometimes hated his Human soldierly habits. Most of all his almost-enslavement to the clock.
"It is going to be a very busy day."
I reached out with my right claw and pinched his beak shut. He raised both eye crests, and I shifted to bring my head close enough to his for a long, slow kiss.
As he made to speak again, blushing furiously, I laid one talon on his beak, and shifted slightly to find a comfortable position on his chest again, shaking my head as I whispered.
"Then we had best make the most of this moment of peace."
For a half second it looked as if he would object. Then he wisely acquiesced, rolling over to his right side. I rolled with him, and turned to press my back to his chest, letting him fold me up entirely in his wings; His right wing acting as a cushion for me, and left enveloping me all around, both forelegs clutched to my chest, our claws all wrapped up together, my back paws resting against the tops of his, my head in the crook of his neck, and both tails tightly entwined still.
We both closed our eyes, and dozed, the sound of pre-dawn rain, matched heartbeats, and soft breaths washing away all else. Stress, fear, and petty concerns melted away into simple warmth, and the joy of contact.
Humans might have called it 'big and little spoon.'
I didn't give a damn what they called it.
To me, it was not just the joy of the moment, free of all else. It was the hope of many, many moments like it to come. Many nights drifting off together, and mornings waking up in each other's wings and forelegs.
To me, that was simply paradise.