Chimera Fields long intervals of horrible sanity

The raven, reduced to little more than a cracked and crumbling effigy, gritted his teeth as he forced his breathing into some semblance of normalcy; it continued to hitch despite his greatest efforts, and each inhalation was peppered with little hiccupping gasps. Lantern yellow eyes, swollen and red-rimmed, turned automatically to Rannoch as the grayscale five-month-old began to speak. “I-I gotta g-get outta here — like, out of the v-valley,” he said, and to Cypress’ battered mind it all sounded reasonable enough. “Sure, right, of course,” good old Logic hastily interjected, “get out of the valley — take some time to clear your head — I wanted to run away, too — ” and Cypress was nodding away like it all made perfect sense, because surely it was just a metaphor — Rannoch couldn’t possibly mean that in a literal sense, because —

— because that would mean —

— that would mean —

“Wait,” Cypress said dully, blinking in a glossy-eyed, vacuous way. “Wait — Rannoch, wait. Just — wait.” His bitter, blood-streaked tongue felt thick and swollen; a cold and unsettling feeling rooted his forepaws to the earth, but he was able to move his hindquarters. Rising to all fours, shifting to face his littermate as squarely as he could with his frozen forelegs, the wild-furred orphan drew a deep, shuddering breath. “You can’t leave,” he said very simply, his expression revealing only mild confusion — and a little humor, too. There was an expectant, anticipatory smile playing about the rightmost corner of Cypress’ mouth as he spoke; the left was caked with congealed blood. It was funny — wasn’t it? Somewhere along the line he must’ve started hearing things, because he simply couldn’t believe that Rannoch would willingly leave.

“You got me,” the unfamiliar voice said, “oh, man, you got me. I almost fell for it. I almost thought you were going to leave.”