For a Glacial Tomorrow

3 | The Peregrine

Peregrine was used to the chase.

He liked hunting big things, things that could fight back. He stared from the little stuffy crook he called 'safe' into the snowy world. This location was unfamiliar, but it had every creature roaming about. A hungry pack of yellow lizards, their striped antennae vibrating with the furious nods of their heads, gyrated around him, trying to decipher how to climb walls for a desperate snack. Peregrine gawked at the shinies he'd stolen from the funky female scavenger's subjects, all rounded and smooth, varying in pale shades of red to purple. His toll payment was going to be covered for cycles!

A clanging noise cut off the insistent hissing of the pack below, like metal being slammed against more metal. That is what it was. Three miros birds, with long black beaks and golden eyes, stormed out of the fog, their jagged mouths scooping up the now terrified lizards and crunching all their bones in one bite. Only one of the four was left, goggling in trauma after seeing their whole pack being eaten alive. Peregrine took out an explosive spear and leaped down after the stunned beast, plunging into its back before rolling away to escape the explosion that would coat him in soot.

He shook the black ash off, wondering what else lived here. His mind told him one thing differently: Get back to Drainage System. He pulled out the first blue fruit from his pocket, which he was supposed to have. It was wrinkled, and the glossy cobalt blue color was faded; even tiny specks of gray showed its age. Peregrine furrowed his brow, wishing he'd just murdered the mean scavenger lady like all the guards. The Haven was definitely unsafe if they had food like this lying around.

The memory of the pole plant plagued him as he found the karma gate to enter Drainage System, watching the water cascade down and trigger the boiler on the other side. He would be sharing his home with that hungry thing, and it made his eye twitch in anger. But something shifted inside him, and he felt a feeling enslave his limbs that he'd never felt before:

Friendship.

Snow swirled into the white-encrusted hall where the Drainage System used to thrive, now overcome with wilted weeds and clusters of ice down every path. Peregrine didn't like ice; it scared him because whenever he looked into it, he saw some distorted version of himself, with distorted, splotchy fur, worn clothes, and a face that only showed hatred toward the world. He stopped before a fragment and glowered at the person he saw.

There was no way that indignant face was his own, right? "Not." He growled at the ice. "Not Peregrine look! Peregrine powerful! Ice out!" He wasn't sure how to call the ice a faker since his vocabulary was built on snippets of rarely remembered conversations. The weirdest word he remembered was 'excavation'. He turned away, wanting to break the ice's bones, but he didn't know where the bones were.

And he didn't know that ice didn't have bones, either.

After a disgruntled trek through the slate tunnels, he scrambled into the ancient shelter, and his eyes widened.

Drawings.

Hundreds of drawings, no, maybe thousands, were scribbled over the walls that weren't there before. One showed what he could perceive as two blobs pummeling a tall thing with a cloak, a slugcat-like shape reaching up toward the water's surface, and a pole plant strangling a creature...there were too many to count. But almost all of them were of one symbol: a circle with a diagonal line through the middle and two smaller circles on the right and left sides.

Eighth karma.

Peregrine wasn't much of a critical thinker or a thinker at all, except when it came to survival tactics. So he didn't question the sketches and sat on the water-surrounded platform, taking out the fruit. As soon as he pulled them out, like a dog who smelled delicious food, the pole plant appeared from the darkness, grabbing one of the two fresh ones. Peregrine stopped it, screaming: "MINE!" The pole plant dropped the fruit, and its red frills stretched out with disappointment.