Zaxarie

Sung was getting tired. They’d carted more than a few mutants away from the Fall, wrangling with other riders until they’d gotten an aircraft zooming low overhead, loud and interesting. The zuger’s steps started getting heavier, slowing in small but noticeable increments. Her zippy dancing across the wasteland was becoming sluggish, and her sides heaved for air longer and longer between sprints. Vista patted Sung’s shoulder sympathetically. “Soon,” she promised, not actually knowing how much longer it would take. Anyone could find the computer, anytime now. But that also meant that it could take much, much longer. All the calculations and approximations in the world were guesses at best — educated, yes, but guesses nonetheless. Sung huffed, her huge ears pricking forward. Vista leaned up in her saddle, shielding her eyes with her forepaw and looking out over the wasteland. A dark shadow limped its way across the crater, waves of heat rising from the earth and distorting the image

When it came to doling out jobs, Vista eagerly volunteered to dive. Something about the total meltdown of the Hive awoke something in her, an almost-feral eagerness to throw herself into danger, a desire to chase the unparalleled rush of adrenaline, the extreme high of life-or-death where nothing else mattered but moving, doing, until she was all instinct and energy. Perhaps, that worked against her. It made her wild, dangerously unpredictable in a place where reliability would be key. She would need to stay pinned to the same position, assisting the companion team of deep divers and working to stabilize key areas instead of haring off, chasing a sense of adventure. It wasn’t exactly a surprise when she was assigned elsewhere. She was small, even for an Undyre. She was inexperienced and relatively untried. What experience she did have largely overlapped with the riders: she knew how to handle a mount, she knew how to be a distraction, and she knew when to get the hell out of the way

[CW: Peril, eye trauma, mutant death.] Somewhere in the middle of everything — the lights, the noise, the chaos — something lodges itself in Hedy’s brain, an undeniable truth that once known, cannot be forgotten. Vista is not afraid of death. The first inkling comes when some of the Ankuri try to shepherd them past the blast doors, into saferooms, to begin evacuation procedure. They’re far from the only mainlanders still out here — the sounds of fighting echo down the mostly empty, destroyed halls of Level 1. But Vista had looked at the promise of safety, of grouping in larger numbers, and had scampered away from the alarms and the radios telling them what to do. The second comes around the time they first see one of the mutants. She stops moving, not freezing in place the way one might when terrified, but looking fascinated, enthralled by the sight of something so alien and grotesque. A slow smile started to split across her lips, her ears perking forward, and Hedy had narrowly

Vista found Hedy staring at the depth of the Hive. Travel through the desert had been harder on him. For all that Vista had a heavy fin strung across her back and was not made for traipsing around so far away from water, she had shorter, finer fur. Hedy’s fur was thick and heavy. The heat clung to him even when the day faded, and the few times they’d been close, he’d been burning like a furnace and miserable. But he’d kept going, stony-faced and determined. Right now, his eyes were empty. Yes, he was looking down, and they moved, but it didn’t seem as though they saw anything. Vista deliberately let her bead drag against the floor, the soft sound of metal scraping letting him know that he wasn’t alone. Hedy blinked a few times, then glanced over at her. In one hand, he desperately clutched his map with his ID number on it until it wrinkled and creased. He chewed his bottom lip and went back to staring at the distant elevators as they went up and down, ferrying curios from one floor

Jack knew this place. Even overgrown: the flowers choked with weeds, the trees with dead limbs untrimmed and dragging the ground, the ivy that covered everything like a carpet except for the pond which was green with algae — Jack recognized the palace gardens. The sky was empty, devoid of sun, moon, or stars. No clouds, no breeze, just an aching sense of emptiness that stretched on and on to a dark, muddied horizon without any of the landmarks Jack could recognize. It wasn’t dead, but it certainly wasn’t alive. It was an untouched memory, not forgotten, not gone, but left alone to rot until even the glass swans on the pond had broken, one missing a wing, one missing half of its face as it stared at them, through them, no more conscious than Jack’s body was itself. Jack thought to clean it up or restore the swans at the very least — this was their mindscape, it must be — but they’d hardly taken a step when the ivy that had been steadily crawling over their boots suddenly fastened

Lia found the hut perched precariously on the edge a floating island. It was, quite literally, perched — long legs sprawled akimbo from the bottom of the quaint cottage, at the ends of which were birdlike feet which curled around the angle of the cliff. The cottage itself was even and level, but it was precariously suspended above a rolling sea of clouds and a fathomless plummet to the bottom. Near the hut were a handful of dragons, some romping happily through the heath while others ranged out to the nearby other islands, to long-abandoned, crumbling structures that might have once been homes before whatever magical cataclysm put these bits of land in the sky. Eulalia was charmed by the scene and, truthfully, a tad lonely. She loved her dragons dearly and other people too, but it had been too long since she last saw another rider. She circled above until the front door of the hut opened and a head poked outside. A woman with ruddy hair waved a careless hand, beckoning Lia in. With

Keshet was in a mood. She had been for months now, though it had taken Jack until quite recently to realize it was new. The nest had been the final piece of the puzzle: her ever-accumulating pile of soft, warm, and decidedly stolen things that she fussed over at all hours and protected as if she already had eggs in it. Keshet’s temperament tended to change as swift and sudden as the wind, but it had never before swung towards ‘broody.’ “I’m not broody,” she said and nipped at them where they were currently lying in the nest, a book in hand. Sometimes, that helped settle her, having them near. “I’m not even carrying eggs yet.” “You could.” Jack had done their research as much as any rider could. What literature there was, they’d devoured. The libraries on Ere d’la Mer, the haphazard collection of books that fell out of the Chronoscape that had been taken in by the Naki, even searching for other riders to ask what they were supposed to do — Jack had been busy, when allowed, when they