Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Site Write Entry #13: The Animal Companion

Prompt: May 19, 2012 - Your character's favorite animal companion at any point in their life.
. . . . . Soft purple glows gone red with warning. Klaxon sirens. A bone-deep shudder and worringly enduring rumble. Heat. Fire. Debris. Crash. 
. . . . . Diyos had been in the stables portion of the Menagerie where riding animals were kept, feeding his elekk a favored treat - a handful of glowcaps - when sabotage brought the Exodar down. A great deal of luck and a small amount of foresight had saved him severe injury by diving into a nearby empty stall which protected him from the worst as the vessel plowed into the deep earth of this strange silvery-blue island. Bruised and cut but lacking serious wounding, Diyos crawled out from under the partially collapsed stall and plucked a piece of Nagrand hay from his unleashed curls. When he looked up, the shock froze him in place, staring slack-jawed at the devastation.
. . . . . The damage was so great that the vessel had splintered. Not two stalls over from him, the vessel had been sheared clean off, leaving the rest of the Menagerie only O'ros knew where. But three stalls over had been... Diyos gasped, limping out of the wreckage and looking around wildly. "Djemiiliak!" he yelled, "Djemiiliak!" There had been no one else in the section of the stables he'd been idling in; he was looking for his beloved elekk. "Green-Beast-Lumbers-With-Grace!" he called again - roughly the translation of the lengthy Draenei name for the creature.
. . . . . Some several hundred yards from the twisted wreckage the anchorite had crawled out of, he found another section of the Menagerie. The grass around the debris was starting to look a strange shade of red, seeping slowly into the silvery-blue grass of the island. A long, limp greenish-grey appendage stuck out from under a collapsed piece of lithoforming. Frantic with concern, Diyos worked to haul the chunks of fallen stone and crystal off. What he uncovered drew a unrestrained cry of grief from his lips. His stalwart companion of the last ten years, an elekk he'd stabled and tended - with aid of a beastmaster, of course - from a calf, was lying motionless on a large slab of lithoformed wall. Blood - the odd reddish color common to Draenor's creatures - pooled around Djemiiliak's head where a metal bar had pierced into the skull. His elekk was dead.
. . . . . The elekk's ribs moved up and down. He was breathing! Diyos knew this was a vast misuse of his Light-given healing talent, small though his abilities were, and to waste his energy on a creature and not a fellow exile during this crisis was a horrendous sin... But this land was so large he knew only that there was visible shore to his right and land without measure to his left; he needed an elekk to begin the search for his twin brother, Athos, as well as his parents and his elder brother. Clearly, the Exodar was scattered all over if the pieces the Menagerie had become were any indication.
. . . . . At least, that was his official reasoning.
. . . . . Dredging up every speck of talent in repairing wounds he could muster, his prayers to the Light fervent and heartfelt, Diyos laid one hand on the elekk's pierced skull to steady it - and with the other, pulled the metal bar out. A rush of Light and talent left him through the gates of energy in his palms, voluntarily offered to accelerate the elekk's healing process vastly beyond nature's own time frame.
. . . . . Occupied as he was with the healing, Diyos did not notice the strange, brave creature creeping up on the wreckage. No larger than an exiled one's teacup with a tail like a bottle brush and reddish-brown fur, the creature sneaked curiously up on four almost hand-like paws. It sat back on its haunches after sniffing the long, greenish-brown, meaty thing on the ground - and, bravely, did not so much as flinch when the meaty thing sniffed back.
. . . . . The demands of healing so severe a wound so quickly caused Diyos to fall to his knees at Djemiiliak's head. He closed his eyes and rested, utterly exhausted. The furred creature squeaked. In a surprisingly good imitation, so did the elekk. Diyos opened his eyes to see his elekk patting some tiny furred thing with a long bushy tail with his trunk. The furred thing offered the elekk a tiny, rounded, hard brown object, which the elekk immediately picked up with the end of his trunk and put in his mouth. Crunch! The elekk squeaked in pleasure.  
 . . . . What in the Twisting Nether had just happened to his elekk?

-----

. . . . . It was late evening after his first meeting with his new employers, the Modan Company at South Gate Outpost. Diyos rolled his broad shoulders to work out stiffness in them and trudged across the snow, his hooves kicking up little flurries. Where had Jim gotten off t-... Oh. Again?
. . . . . "Dammit, Jim! Get out of that tree!"
. . . . . His greenish-grey elekk trumpeted something between an elekk's noise of dismay and a squirrel's angry chatter. With a forewarning avalanche of snow and several broken branches, thump! the elekk fell out of the tree it had climbed. Diyos allowed himself a much put-upon sigh and braced a shoulder against the beast's side, pushing until Jim managed to right himself in the snow. The elekk's trunk snaked around and patted his hip repeatedly. "Fine," Diyos grumbled, pulling out a handful of acorns from his pocket. "Just this treat, and then we go." Jim squeaked with pleasure and enjoyed his nuts.

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