A Single Strand || #Wattys2018

Chapter One

Now...

The planet below The Frigate is beautiful.

It's almost entirely covered in water. Given, some bits of land are scattered here and there, but the blueness of the planet is enough to stun anyone who might be passing by. 

Of course, it doesn't stun the one attempting to pilot the currently burning Frigate to safety.

Aboard the small vessel, its frantic pilot darts around the cockpit, trying in vain to get her ship working again. Her feline paws desperately work the control panel, her anxiety causing her to involuntarily extend her sharp claws. She tucks her tufted tail close to her muscular legs in hopes that it won't accidentally catch fire. She flattens her bat ears against her spiraling ram's horns and runs a paw through the crest of feathers running down her head and shoulders. Sheer panic reflects in her eyes, brown splashed with patches of green. She keeps her batlike wings pressed against her back, knowing that flapping them in her state will only fan the flames trapping her in the cockpit and make her situation even worse.

"Come on, Hyrna!" she shouts at herself for no apparent reason. "Think. Get yourself under control. Make a distress call."

Fumbling with the controls even more, she attempts to make a distress call. Her shaky claws type in what she prays is the right code to contact the ships waiting for her on Juxta II. When she hears the reassuring bleep of the code going through, she shouts over the microphone, trying to be heard above the crackling of the flames and the crumbling ship.

"Code black! Code black!" she cries out. "This is Hyrna Mal'vai, pilot of the starship The Frigate. I dunno why, but my ship's going down. I'll attempt a ditching on this planet below me. It's huge, and it's blue. I don't know its name. If you read me, send help immediately. Hyrna Mal'vai, signing off."

Punching in the off code, Hyrna stands at the ship's helm and attempts to wrench the craft towards the blue planet. The Frigate makes an awful screeching sound as she wrestles with the controls, but eventually, she manages to somehow turn the ship on a different path, one that will have her landing near one of the few spots of land on the whole blue orb.

Hyrna sends The Frigate plunging down towards the islands. She feels bits of the ship coming apart as she breaks the atmosphere. For a moment, she fears that the fires will devour her before she can make it.

But then, with a loud BOOM, she manages to break the atmosphere. The fires around her don't dissipate, but at least there's water below her now. 

Jerking back on the ship's steering column, Hyrna levels her dying craft with the island closest to her, a place dominated by cliffs and dense foliage. She steers towards the clearest area of cliff she can see and braces herself for one hell of a crash.

Clenching her teeth and closing her eyes, Hyrna whispers her last prayers as The Frigate slams into the rock.

+ + + + +

When Hyrna comes to, the first thing she notices is a throbbing pain in her head. 

The next thing she realizes, while rubbing her aching forehead, is that somehow, she has survived what should've been a deadly crash. She thanks anyone who might be listening for her unexpected luck.

Hyrna rises to her feet. Her muscles burn, but aside from the horrendous migraine and some nasty bruises, she is relatively unharmed. Apart from her ship, nothing feels broken, not even her horns or her wings. (She checks both, just to be safe.) 

The flames still burn, but not as brightly as they did during the descent. Hyrna crawls out of what used to be the front window to examine her situation.

The Frigate, obviously, is a total wreck. The ship has been ripped to pieces, like a toy owned by a rather destructive Nemarin cub. All around her, debris has been scattered in a great radius of smoking embers.

The cliff itself is made entirely of bleached gray stone. Nothing grows from the cracks in the rock. To Hyrna's left, the cliff shoots down into the azure ocean below. To her right, it slopes off into the rest of the island, which the virtual jungle of twisted trees and tall grasses has already overtaken. Aside from a few more islands creating a gradually diminishing chain, all Hyrna can see is an endless expanse of blue.

She immediately gets a very bad feeling. 

As a Nemarin, she prefers the towering forests of Juxta II, not water. Her thick fur easily gets weighed down with freshwater alone, so she can't imagine what saltwater might do to her. 

But water is the only thing for thousands of miles, at least. If she wants to survive, she'll have to get her fur wet eventually. 

Unwilling to face the gravity of her situation, Hyrna climbs back into her destroyed ship and attempts to salvage anything that might still be good. Some items, mainly her food provisions, have stayed somewhat untouched by the fire, but nothing has gotten away unharmed. Everything has suffered from the crash in one way or another. 

Hyrna gathers what she can from the mangled vessel. In the end, all she can show for her efforts are some packs of dried foods and a single medkit. That's it.

She drops the remaining supplies away from her ship. Then, she lays on her side and just lets her tears flow. She knows she looks like a cub separated from her mother, but she doesn't care. No one can see her, so it doesn't matter. 

Her eyes feel drier than the stone on which she lays by the time she's done crying. Her migraine has only gotten worse. 

Oh well. At least the sun is setting. The light won't hurt her eyes. 

Then, she realizes another problem, and her headache gets worse. She has no place to rest for the night. 

Hyrna gets to her paws and starts off down the cliff. She reasons that the jungle foliage is likely much softer than the hard ground. 

When she enters this more wild section of island, she instantly starts to feel a sense of recognition. It's not Juxta II, but it's forest. She's lived in them so long, she knows them like the spirals on her horns or the blood vessels in her wings. 

She runs her paws over the leaves of the taller trees. They feel velvety beneath her touch. She notices little yellow eyes watching her, so she beats her wings a few times to let them know that she sees them. Reaching up as far as she can, Hyrna plucks some of the larger leaves, the size of a mother's nest, and brings them into her arms. She reasons that they aren't poisonous, especially since she can see what look like birds nesting in the tops of these trees.

Hyrna carries the leaves back up to the cliff. She tries to place them in some kind of nest like formation, but gives up and decides to simply weave them into a nest, just like how her father taught her. It takes a while, but she manages to create a crude, yet somewhat comfortable, nest, much better than the hard rock. 

Hyrna curls up in a ball of fur and feathers in the makeshift nest. As the cold night air sweeps over her, she cocoons herself in her wings. Despite her predicament, she lets the crashing of the waves against the cliff and the gentle song of the creatures on the island with her lull her to sleep.