The
creature lay curled up and shaking. It didn’t understand why breathing was so
much of a challenge, each shuddering breath sending waves of discomfort through
its body. It had the vague notion that its difficulty breathing was somehow
related to the tightness in its chest. There was also a strange numb throbbing
coming from its right side. But the creature ignored that. For the time being
its attention was solely focused on why it couldn’t see anything. It could feel
itself beginning to panic as time ticked by without its vision returning. Without
its vision the creature was as good as dead. Worse, it would be completely
vulnerable while it slowly waited to die. The creature wasn’t sure where it was
and couldn’t even count on stable ground while it feebly blundered around. A
quick death would have been preferable to this. The creature tried howling
mournfully, but the tightness in its chest prevented it from doing so. Instead
it had to content itself with hissing against the fresh wave of pain and numb
throbbing that swept through its body. It then growled at how unsatisfying that
was.
Then
slowly tiny dots of light began to appear all around it, gradually growing into
thin beams of light and kept growing into larger beams until it was bright
enough for the creature to see that it was under a pile of loose boulders. It
breathed a sigh of relief to find that it could still see. At the same time it
noticed that the tightness on its chest had eased significantly. It could now
breath freely, although this caused the pain in its body to intensify.
Still
shaking, the creature uncurled as much as the cramped space and its pain would
allow. Despite the waves of pain making the creature want to growl constantly,
it breathed another sigh of relief, partly because it was just so glad that it
could still see and partly because it had been so uncomfortable curled up like
that under the boulders. It looked through the dim light and saw a gap between
the boulders just large enough for it to squeeze through. Although the creature
didn’t know what it would do after that. It stared out at the blue sky beyond
the boulders trying to piece together the events that caused it to end up under
a pile of boulders on what appeared to be the side of a cliff. The creature
assumed that it was on the side of a cliff since it couldn’t see anything but
sky.
The
creature looked around at the boulders covering it and figured that it had been
flying along the cliff when a sudden rock fall had caught it by surprise. The
falling boulders had trapped it as they had plummeted downwards. The creature
supposed that it was lucky that it had landed on a ledge instead of tumbling
all the way to the ground. The creature tried pulling itself towards the gap in
the boulders and hissed as a fresh wave of pain and numb throbbing overwhelmed it.
It was at that point that it remembered just how far it had fallen before
landing on the ledge. It looked up before gingerly trying to push itself onto
its legs. The pain was too much for it and it collapsed back to the ground
panting and deeply troubled; its right side felt weird. Wrong even. The
creature tried to remember what had happened when it had been struck by the
rock fall. But try as it might, it could only recall a blurred jumble of
boulders and the ground getting closer and closer with alarming speed. Then
nothing until it regained consciousness in the darkness under the boulders. Or
maybe it never lost consciousness when it landed. Maybe the moment when it
“woke” was the moment it had finally stopped falling.
Its
right side throbbed its weird, numb throb again causing the creature to hiss
and curl up in pain once again. However this time it was also aware of the
strange, tingling sensation just above its right shoulder blade, right where …
Refusing
to accept the possibility, the creature pushed itself up into a crouch,
gritting its teeth against the intense pain the sudden movement caused. The
wrongness of its right side felt even more pronounced now that the creature was
no longer lying on the ground. Its right felt wrongly light. The creature
swayed slightly, a little unbalanced.
The
creature was still reeling at its sudden imbalance and what that meant for it
when its hand suddenly brushed against something bony and leathery on the
ground near where it had been lying moments earlier. Not wanting to face the
horrible truth, the creature picked up this strange object, which was larger
and heavier than it had expected. It glanced down at the object it held and
howled in despair.
It
unfurled its wings as much as possible in the enclosed cramp space of the
boulders. It felt the imbalance even more now that only its left wing was
spread out while its right wing remained unmoving and useless in its hands. The
creature’s left wing drooped to the ground as it continued to stare at the wing
it held. It appeared as though it had been sheared clean off by one of the
boulders when it had landed. The bone didn’t appear to be damaged too much,
although the actual injury on its back where the wing had once been might be a
completely different story.
