Leave them behind.
No time, NO TIME!
Four men with a decent angle fired off between leaves and branches while the rest moved forward. Daniel’s beating wings knocking two aside to watch them splosh into the lake, yet another is bounced through a tree branch and hits nothing, and in the far back one of the rifles lands true with a hard stab. She can feel it, the colorful frilled needle jabbing into her neck just below the chin.
“Go Daniel, RUN!”
Angel’s voice cuts through the gale, but already Daniel has turned and started to soar. From forty feet to sixty feet, higher and higher despite the needles and pains.
Looking back she’d see Angel lost her fight, and Keth was surrounded by armed men on all sides. The boy’s arms held up in surrender while Angel had to be subdued.
Still more tried firing shots, multiple pistols ringing out with a tiny ‘flit’ sound. A miss, one gun jams, another dart almost reaches before hiting the apex of it’s arc, and once more a final annoying shot rings into her stomach just beneath the belly button. It stings.
It hurts to flap, it hurts to move, these were very large splinters jabbed all over and every moment she spent in range was another needle spiking through her fur.
She moves faster now, gaining distance instead of height on this cold dead air. The lakeside mists and bright sun providing nothing in the way of a thermal and making her fight for every flap. She was eighty feet away. Then over a hundred. A hundred and twenty before she saw more shots being fired, the needles all but invisible but the white splashes when they hit the waves in her wake were all too telling.
She heard a flit, there was a whooshing sound like an insect zipping past her ear. She saw the silver and green bur, then in the waters several hundred feet ahead a telltale splash of white. Those rifles certainly had range, even if it was harder to hit a moving target at this distance.
The sphinx was low and desperate, finding that forcing herself to move faster just increased the pain on her neck and wing. But none of these were life threatening, as deadly and annoying as a particularly vicious splinter. But a splinter between your fingers? A splinter under your wing? That joint where the wing connects to the torso was like an armpit, and about as sensitive even despite the feathers.
A hundred and fifty feet, then two hundred, further and further she soared trying to build distance. Another flit, but this time she felt it smack sidelong into the back of her skull, the needle not moving fast enough to penetrate and the dart falling pat her neck mid-flight.
Her body was going numb, mostly the hands and parts of her thighs. She found she couldn’t move her fingers. No, she could. The paws flexed and the claws would curl, but it was slow and awkward and numb. Might have taken a while but whatever was in those darts were getting to her.
The lioness’s flight drops, it’s so much harder to flap and now she just wants to rest the ache. Land is too far away. Her wings spread and woman glides, swooping low and fast over the waves. Her eyes close for a moment, only to open in panic of what could happen if she falls unconscious above water this deep.
Her gliding slows, her height plummets, and she’s quick to discover cold dead air isn’t the best to sail into without applying power.
CRUNCH!
Where did that? Oh. A boat.
Her paws, her chest, no most of her body crashes sidelong into a small fishing vessel only twice her own size. The metal railing bends, the deck splinters under her weight, the entire ship looks as if it might capsize trying to support her.
“S-sorry. Sorry!” Daniel mumbles while clawing forward into a more balanced position, her hind legs bracing into the ruined deck while curling up for a leap.
Warily she notices a surprised looking fisherman who’d been asleep by the wheel. Not asleep anymore.
A leap!
A flap and a flutter, swimming through the air with her wings as feircly as she’d claws at the water with her paws. Up and forward, up and forward, feathered limbs moving forward and back as well as up and down to act as a rowing oar through the air. If those men on the beach were still firing then Daniel didn’t notice, she simply kept powering on.
Over deep waters that shifted from blue to black, across the center of a shimmering lake. Higher and higher until she could see well over any ships still on the surface. Looking forward she saw vast, open expanses of woodland. Trees and rocks and steep hills, most of the area flat and inviting but no major clearings in obvious view. To the far left she saw the beginnings of a river, bright and glittering but much too shallow to have a color.
Looking behind her she saw the road, the most apparent feature being a wide congestion on either lane. Someone or something had moved in to block traffic from both sides, preventing cars from going in or out of the resort. And given how close the resort was to the actual road, this stopped travelers who might otherwise have simply passed by.
A glance over her shoulder …
The needle hurt, her neck stinging in two places, but trying to twist the other way didn’t help.
It was too difficult to see how the group were doing. Too far away to make out individual faces, and most of the cars or people were beneath the shade of leaves and branches. Trees offering concealment where they had failed to offer cover.
Couldn’t go back. That much was certain, she wasn’t dropping dead and these darts weren’t making her too numb to move or too sleepy to operate it, but that just has to have been a factor of size. Whatever they’d been planning to hit, it was either much smaller or far less durable than multi-ton sphinx who could both fly and swim. They were surprised to see Daniel, so that might as well confirm she wasn’t the intended target.
But then why gather up every civilian they see? Was that the actual goal, and a massive lioness simply got in the way, distracted them too greatly to ignore?
Pain. Wings burning, that much too sharp pain from far too annoying slivers of metal. She didn’t know where she wanted to land, but she couldn’t stay in the air. Not with those needles biting at every movement, not with this lethargy seeping all too slowly from her lower extremities. She had to drop and land and rest, while hoping no one chases her and hoping she recovers before too long. Just a matter of where to touch down.
Written by Arbon on 24 March 2017
