I started writing this after reading a post about beesĀ @curlicuecalā made a while ago. Today I decided to finish it, and, a little miraculously, ended up following through.
She knows the animal as it enters.
It buzzes. She buzzes in response, but it means nothing. Her daughter, Lives-In-Peace-Near-Stone-Hives, knows of the buzzing, can know the thoughts within it, but she is not so clever.
She concentrates, so as to know it better. It flinches, shudders, as any mammal would, but it does not flee. To her, acts such as this is what set the beasts-who-know-fire apart from the other animals; proof that its kind knows of more than survival, or offspring, or survival of offspring. It is what makes them dangerous, and what makes them interesting
The animal attempts to use the limb-dancing language her sisters created so that they might communicate with the creaturesā ancestors. She is not well-versed in the language, and neither is it, but she can feel the outline of what it is saying. It needs her help, and it is desperate enough to ask for it.
She is intrigued. With a twist of effort, she ceases to know a strip of herself. The act is painful, but the meaning is clear to the creature: a path.
Abruptly, a desperate, primal fear grips her, but she recognizes the feeling, quells it. A temporary loss of control after the forceful reorganization. If the beasts can survive dozens of years depending on blood so near to their surface, she can very well bring this one to within a few feet of her heart.
She feels the prickling of the beastās passage on the edges of the channel she has created. Itās moving haphazardly; it wants to rush, but it is terrified of provoking her. She feels a vague sense of satisfaction that its kind still know to fear her after all this time.
It stops just in front of the dense knot of activity around her heart. She makes certain that she will not punish it for its trespass before reaching out, and knowing the beast once more. This close to her heart, her senses swarm more densely, her thoughts flick by in greater numbers, she is more. And she will know what message it is so desperate to convey.
The creatureās limbs dance, its movements slow and measured as it tries not panic. Your eggs are captured, it sweeps out. It isnāt making any sense; her eggs are housed right next to it, and they are quite safe. Our stone hives are endangered. Why would it come to her for help with this? Either of her daughters might rise to its aid, but though she no longer holds quite so much anger for its kind, she holds little love for them either.
The beast is shaking, a display of emotion. Droplets of water leak out of its eyes and slide down its cheeks. She is taken, your eggs are taken, our hives are taken. It is pleading, begging her to understand it, to know what it knows. And, suddenly, she does.
Not her eggs, her daughter. Not actual animal hives, but Lives-In-Peace-Near-Stone-Hives.
Rage grips her, and she embraces it, channels it into a fury which burns like lightning. She explodes into action, gathering resources for transport, splintering off a scout-self, filling the air with her intent to harm. The beasts-who-know-fire have forgotten the horrors of war against her kind. The horrors of a war not against other individual animals, fearful and disorganized, but a war against a living landscape, a single vast mind simultaneously composed of and directing a thousand thousand soldiers.
For the first time in decades, her heart stretches its wings. She takes a brief moment to ensure that the lesser-self she is leaving behind will not harm the messenger animal, and then the Great Dragon goes to war.
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