Home. Home. Home. The word rung through the beast’s skull like a hot iron pressed into his brain, urging him desperately to go back to the only place he knew of -- to leave this rot, this filthy place of Humans -- and that a reward waited if the Master was happy with the filth he brought home. The Master was always happy with what the torikos brought home. These things needed to be cleansed. He wasn’t very used to retrieval, and he hadn’t gone out Kidnapping many times before this, so he hoped, in his drunk-like stupor, that his sacrifice to them was enough.
The beast was airborne, massive steady-beating brown wings dead-set in an almost robotic fashion on returning home, never once bothering to take in his surroundings, to question the patter of frigid rain on his pelt that sailed off of his wings, or the tumbling of the massive grey things cruising the sky so slowly. This was his life, and everything he knew -- which wasn’t very much, as he was almost always hypnotized by the Master of the Valley: to Kidnap children out of their dreams if they were nightmares, to fly back to The Ruins, and to regurgitate them in the statue if he wanted to live. Rinse and repeat.
To him, there was nothing out of the ordinary. He couldn’t tell much anyway through the fog that clouded his mind and grasped so eagerly at any free-roaming thought. It was much like the fog clouding his vision. With this in mind, he didn’t notice when the heavens above tumbled and tossed and sent beams of white light down from their lair. He couldn’t notice how close they were, how dangerous this was.
Any semblance of thought seized as his vision went bright. Every nerve ending, every neuron in his brain fired at once and overwhelmed him at the same time that they fired. Pain seared through every path it could take and each and every molecule of fur bristled as far up as it could as he froze, filled with the white light of above, the white light of the angry, tumbling grey things.
When it ended, he was unconscious. The massive animal’s wings flew diagonally at a strange and dangerous angle as his entire body swung in a downward arc, arms and legs swinging as far back as the wind could push them as he swung down from the sky, drool escaping his lips and staining a few of his feathers a viscous, minty green. Spiraling with speed, he quickly hit the edge of one of The Ruin’s many crumbling walls, and his angle speedily shifted -- he was now upside down, stomach exposed to the above as his altitude descended rapidly. A monstrous, fatal boom rocked the ground as the toriko’s massive grey body collided with the soft earth below.
The Master’s soldiers noticed, nothing more than a set of dumb enchanted armor, and without care, they combined their efforts to drag him. Unable to stop them or awaken in his disparaging state, he could do nothing as they towed him deep within the Ruins over the course of many hours. There, some of them left and the rest placed a short, rusty chain around his neck that led into the floor. Having chained the beast, and having no will of their own to judge anything of his state, they concluded their job had been fulfilled and mechanically walked the distance to where they had been before.
When he awoke, it was not a state in which he was fully conscious. Choking and gasping, he weakly regurgitated the Human. Unable to do much else, his body screaming for him to stop, and his vision still blank, the toriko’s eyes closed once more.
