Crow's Flight

The final battle narrative was demonstrably false. It was heavily dramatized, created to appeal to masses of adventure-seeking readers and excitable children. In truth, every battle seems like the final one. Every clash of swords feels like the one to break you, every parried thrust feels like the last one you could ever take, and either your faith in your cause forces you to push past the aching muscles and despair, or it doesn’t. Or it’s too weak, and you crumble like paper in the palm of your hand.

Achilles picked at the thick, iron cuff welded around his skin. It wouldn’t budge, of course, same as the last million times he’d tried to move it. But he couldn’t shake the habit, and it was something to keep him sane.

Because, no matter how many fights he won, how many others he took down with that sword chained to his wrist, he was still a bird in a cage.

Before the gilded entrance to the Colosseum arena, Achilles flexed his wings wide. He let the massive, inky black flight feathers brush against the sides of either wall and thought idly that his wingspan had grown once again. It made sense, of course, as his wings-- large as they were-- had yet to catch up to his height. Or so he was told, by one of the many men that oversaw the gladiators. He didn’t have anything to compare himself to, lest he start staring at birds and sprouting a beak, and so he took those words as the truth.

He kept his gaze glued on the gold engraving along the edges of the double door, as he’d been trained to. The moment that thick wood creaked open was the moment he was no longer Achilles, no longer the boy with the wings and sharp teeth. He was fire and steel and a whirl of wings and death. Until then, though, he was free to take in every tiny detail and divet in the dark whorls of the wood and engraving in the gleaming metal.

A harsh breath whistled out between his lips as he ground his teeth, waiting for the grey light and rain to stream in. His uncuffed hand reached up to brush against the warm silver of the pendant against his collarbone. It was, in all honesty, an uncharacteristic trait of a gladiator, to have and hold onto such a dainty piece of jewelry, but he never could force himself to get rid of it. Ten years later, it was the only piece of a broken homeland he still had.

His hand dropped at the telltale creak of wood.

The announcer’s voice drifted to him alongside the pelting rain and cool, bright light. He blinked back against the assault on his senses and clenched his fist around the hilt of the sword in his palm. It vibrated with the alarm that his fight was about to start.

“Alright, folks! For the first fight of the new year, we have a newcomer, an ocelot hybrid from the desert cliffs of Southern Arcasia!” The weak cheers of the few in the crowd echoed in Achilles’s ears as he waited for his own que to stride out. The doors banged against the walls as they finished opening, and the sound grated on his senses, but he didn’t move.

Many of the trainers within the Colosseum walls spoke often and consistently that you could not train instinct out of hybrids, no matter how much you tried. Regardless of their animal counterparts, they were still human. They, however, made it quite clear to all of the fighters that it was in their best interest to ignore their animalistic traits as well as possible.

Achilles was good at that. He was good at ignoring the holographs of his opponent that shone brightly in the cool, crisp air of the rainy morning, fifteen feet tall and placed strategically around the arena to show the audience the ocelot hybrid up close. His crow instincts pushed him to examine every gleaming, shiny thing glittering around the arena, things he’d seen a million times but forced himself to ignore.

“Woah there, everyone! Not to worry… unless you’re Kitty, over here, because the other Gladiator coming out tonight is…” Achilles drew in a breath and savored a last-second of peace. “The Angel of Death himself!”

He strode out onto the field with quick, long strides and numb feet, to the screams and hollers of an excited crowd. He didn’t even need to glance over to see how they looked, hoards of wealthy and upperclass strung together with cybertech eyes, faces, and grins. Sometimes, even cyberware wings, horns, and other animalistic features. For a society that relies so much on kidnapping hybrids, they sure do like to mimic them.

Achilles didn’t need cybertech to win.

The massive holograms of himself showed images of him in the throes of battle, roaring with a swinging blade, a war cry painted gruesomely across his face. He’d seen the image plenty of times, both in the arena and screened onto the towering skyscrapers that framed the Colosseum. Dead in the middle of Ediom, the gleaming city. He could faintly hear the buzz of soaring vehicles outside, civilians traveling wherever they needed to go via the flightpaths.

The crowd screamed somehow louder as he reached his starting point in the arena, pulling his wings up wide and pointing his massive sword straight up in the air, throat working to produce his signature cries. The violent caws tore from his mouth, echoing over the sound of the arena, and be bared his teeth.

Then, he took in his opponent.

Achilles wasn’t surprised that he was an ocelot hybrid, what with his sleek, rippling muscle, slim and strong. A long, cream colored tail swished nervously behind him, sprinkled with a faint dusting of a sandy color and a series of dark lines and stripes. The man himself was lean, tall, and imposing, his eyes dark and piercing, even from a distance. His hair was a dirty blond, lighter on top, and messy enough to fall a bit over his forehead. New, then, as the Colosseum always cropped their fighters’ hair. That, and he’d never seen him before.

His sword trembled in his hand, a detail only noticeably to Achilles due to his sharp crow vision, but his grip was correct and stable enough to tell him that he did, indeed, have some experience with sword fighting.

“Now, will both contestants take ten steps forward!”

They both followed the command, and Achilles took the moment to watch the other man’s walk, a graceful, loping stride that had him speeding up to keep pace. Those ten steps put them maybe fifteen feet from one another, close enough to see his high, sloping cheekbones and slightly upturned eyes, a dusting of freckles over his nose, and almost close enough to notice his thick, kohl-rimmed lashes.

“Achilles,” the ocelot said, and he stopped. His voice was soft as velvet, gravely in the smoothest way possible, and it raised the hair at the back of his neck.

He was confident that not a single soul in the Colosseum knew his name. Absolutely sure, in fact, and so the whispered word had him frozen in his tracks.

“Achilles, something big is about to happen,” he warned, his expression drawn together and pleading. “I can’t explain now, but-“

The warning was, theoretically, just in time, though he hadn’t even processed the words when the announcer’s horn screamed above them, signaling the start of their match. On instinct and habit alone, Achilles sank into a fighting position, eyes trained on his opponent for any sign of movement.

There was none.

“They’re going to break the net,” he said, and his tone was more urgent this time, eyes darting every which way. “They’re going to break the net, and we need to get out of here. But I can’t without you,” he begged.

The net. The reason he was still there, still in chains. A massive, chain link fence, easily half a foot thick, and covering the entire top of the arena. Try as he had, repeatedly, there was no way for him to get out of it. A slither of cold, burrowing fear sank down into his chest, and he strained to listen.

“What?” His voice was rocky and low, and grated on even his own ears. “What?” he implored.

He didn’t get an explanation, though, before thunder roared down at them. They both crouched down, looking up to see the cause, and Achilles's breath caught in his throat as he saw a single link of the blanket of steel flop down from the side.

Then another.

And then, it was a wave. The thunder was nothing of the sort, instead created by the banging and scraping of the millions of pieces of metal that rained down over them. The screams of the crowd around them were almost overwhelming as the ocelot dove for him, and it was all Achilles could do to flip them over, landing him on top. He poised one hand on his neck, the other holding the sword right over his abdomen, threatening to spill blood should the man underneath him make a move he didn’t like. He curled his wings over them as the steel reached their level, making him cry out from between his clenched teeth.

The man’s long, cool fingers wrapped around his bicep, and he tightened his grip on his throat. “Please,” he choked out, and Achilles watched him. “This is our only chance. Please.”

Achilles had spent most of his life trusting his instincts. Above all, an animal wanted to live, and that undercurrent of thought that pushed him forward did everything it could to keep him alive. And it had, for the past ten years. Split-second decisions made based on a gut feeling were the only way he was still moving, still shuddering on, and he wasn’t about to go back on them now.

It was easy enough, once the debris had finally stabilized around them, to grab him and run.

Everything was still, silent, a moment of peace after the sky fell. The audience had evacuated, of course, and there was a pause before the guards of the Colosseum came to get them. That was the second he let his wings stretch wide, the drift of cool air smoothing his feathers.

The second a yell pierced the air, though, he moved. He scooped an arm under the man’s knees, another around his back, and flapped his wings as hard as he could. Once, twice, until he felt his feet leave the ground. Those thin, toned arms twined themselves around his neck, and he jerked back a bit. The ocelot’s fingers searched for purchase on his back, at the nape of his neck, for some sort of his support as men in dark suits flooded the arena around them, and Achilles pushed his wings harder, beat them faster, to get them up, up, up.

His fingers grasped the chain to the heart-shaped locket around his throat, and he bared his teeth at the slender man in his arms as they breached the tallest walls of the Colosseum.

The first taste of wind, rain, and free air was novocain, numbing his shock-filled lungs, and, for a second, he forgot about the man in his arms as it ran through his feathers, down his back, through his hair.

Freedom.