[Gift] Trial 3: Your Treasure, Mine

It didn’t have to be this way.

They’d gotten along for long enough, stayed out of each other’s way when necessary and worked together when needs must. They could have stayed peaceable, could have made it to the end as a team rather than turning against each other at the last minute.

He’d tried to be reasonable, but Flamekeeper stomped closer to the half-built bower nest Igni had been working tirelessly on for days now. Long stalks of grass had been woven by beak and by foot, creating a structure with tall sides that curved to a peak over the nest. Bits of metal scavenged from the nearby ruins stuck out of the nest, gleaming as they caught Igni’s firelight: both to scare off predators and to attract a mate with an eye for the finer things in life.

He hadn’t expected to find something valuable in the half-sunk wetland ruins, nestled among the jagged metal stripped smooth by time and weather, and the algae that glowed soft blue under the full moon. He’d followed the path into a temple of sorts, and found an aquamarine gem. At least, he thought it was a gem. It was large enough to be an egg, and he’d handled it with as much care when he’d made his way to where his bower now stood.

Flamekeeper had gotten word of the gem, the egg, the treasure, and she had come, all that merciless ferocity now turned against him.

The plants on Igni’s shoulders rusted in the wind, golden pollen catching on the breeze as he flapped his wings. He may look like a bird, but he was a Jungle dragon as well, built for producing poisons, for outlasting an opponent by being quicker and more wily, and for all that Flamekeeper was bulkier than him — and more likely to destroy the gem rather than let him have it — Igni wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

Her antennae flicked forward, flamed ends burning through most of the pollen, though the smoke kicked up a fiercely unpleasant smell that caught in her nose. She sneezed and stomped, roared in frustration, and Igni flared his wings, standing firmly between her and his nest.

“You have so much time, so many options with which to begin your hoard — why must it come from mine?”

Flamekeeper snorted, tossed her head, dragged her claws through the wet ground. “What makes your thievery so much more noble?”

“It isn’t,” Igni said plainly. “But it is mine first.”

He barely registered the flick of her tails before she jumped into the air, aiming her heavy body towards him. Igni shot up, clawed forefeet digging into the fluff of the velvet scales on her chest, his own beak fastened under her jaw. They tumbled backwards, narrowly missing another shard of metal Igni had put up around the border of his broader home, sliding through the muck and grime.

Flamekeeper brought her wings forward, clawed fingers ripping through his feathers with a furious roar.

Her hind feet kicked into his midsection, claws scoring relentlessly, but Igni had more limbs than her, had the cleverness needed to pin her thighs to the ground with one set while his hindmost feet grabbed her ankles and anchored her to the mud.

Cleverness wouldn’t get him too far on its own — Flamekeeper fought like a wild thing, brute force searching for any point of weakness she could use to her advantage. One of her flame-tipped antennae scorched across one of his eyes, and Igni shut them both, bearing down as much as he could as the plants on his shoulders shuddered again, kicking up a new burst of pollen.

Flamekeeper’s jaws snapped as she writhed, but her frantic attempts to fight pulled the poison-laden air into her lungs. A cough wracked through her body, pulling her head free as he heard the stickiness start in her heaving lungs. It wouldn’t kill her — it might not even slow her down for very long — but it would make breathing more of a challenge, and might be enough to deter her from this wretched course of action.

She twisted her head and bit one of his wings, bearing her teeth down on his light bones. Igni hissed through his beak viciously, pecked at her eye until she let go of him, and he jumped off of her.

He had her attention, if nothing else. She didn’t even look at the bower this time, her fury fully focused on Igni as he crept backwards, feathers and fire flaring to make him seem bigger, more distracting.

If he happened to be backing towards where she had started scratching out a nest of her own — well. It was only fair.

When she realized he intended to encroach on her space, Flamekeeper moved like lightning. It wasn’t a fight Igni escaped unharmed — she had too many spikes and knew too well how to use every part of her body as an offensive weapon. But when he backed into her nest, he put her on the defensive, made her need to protect more than steal, and when she finally chased him off, heaving desperate, wet breaths that marked an oncoming case of pneumonia if she wasn’t careful, she didn’t follow him back.

Igni returned to the bower and curled up around his treasure, hoping the warmth of his flames would chase the wetlands’ freeze from under his feathers, and he could get back to work.