Robin

"The thirst for adventure runs through my veins...."

When Robin was young, he thought the entire world consisted of a single opulent palace.

To be fair to him, it was all he had ever known. He had been presented as an egg to the kingdom’s ruling family, and hatched in the presence of a wide-eyed human toddler. Because his kind had no concept of hierarchy, or even the idea of a thing having more than one name, he decided that this child was simply named The Boy, even though the servants called him Crown Prince James at least a dozen times in Robin’s presence.

Robin spent his hatchlinghood making mischief with his young master. They’d race through the palace hallways, zipping past humans dressed in plain white pelts and flowing rainbow furs. His fondest memory was of the time he helped The Boy balance a bucket of water on top of a doorway, then hiding and watching it crash down on the next human who opened the door. Robin didn’t understand why The Boy laughed so hard, especially since the human locked them inside their room the next day as punishment, but if The Boy was happy, so was he.

The palace had windows (as did all other palaces, he assumed), and although he could look out the window at any time and watch the dozens of ant-sized humans milling around on the ground below, Robin never actually acknowledged them as being part of his world. They were scenery, essentially, while the palace was the ‘real world’. And since the humans always gave him food, and water, and a nice warm spot to roost for the night, he never felt a very urgent need to find out more.

An unexpected coup, however, gave the rest of the palace that urgent need.

Those masked humans really had a lousy sense of timing.

One moment, Robin and The Boy were sitting in the big central banquet hall, enjoying a nice meal with almost a hundred other fancily-dressed humans. Robin didn’t know the occasion, but any holiday that gave him extra prime rib was worth celebrating.

The next moment, a thunderous boom shook the walls. The grand entrance doors burst open, and armed humans wearing full face masks charged in. They obviously weren’t invited, if the screaming humans were any indication.

The Boy snatched Robin up in his arms. The servants were ushering the two of them out of the hall and into the dingy corridors that they weren’t supposed to use. Behind them, the clashing of metal on metal and, more disturbingly, on flesh, faded away as they fled.

They rushed through dim storage rooms and smoky workshops. The Boy was crying, Robin saw, and it only occured to him much later in life that they never did see The Boy’s parents ever again. But at the time, only one thought was forefront on the young cockatrice’s mind:

He never got to eat his prime rib.

*

One thing was clear to him, though: They couldn’t ever go back to The Palace.

Robin and The Boy laid low with the servants for a few hours, eating tough dry chicken and waiting for the chaos to die down. Then, when all seemed quiet, one of the servants stepped forward and spoke to them. Robin had named her The Hunter, because as he’d been growing up, she’d always brought him freshly-killed game to eat. When he was teething and ate through two or three shoes, The Hunter knew at once what he needed, and brought him cow bones to chew on. She seemed like the perfect human to take them on a strange and dangerous mission outside of The Palace.

Because even Robin knew that they couldn’t stay here any longer. The Palace, which had once been his entire world, was too small to hide The Boy from the humans who wanted him dead. They would have to leave for the world beyond his world.

*

Apparently, the world beyond his world consisted of miles and miles of nothing.

Robin, The Boy, and The Hunter had been trekking across open grasslands for days, following the setting sun away from The Palace. Behind them, the shimmering spires of his old home vanished into the horizon. The Hunter set up camp for them each night, and went out each morning to hunt their next meal. Her main targets were the thick-furred, hooved animals that travelled in herds across the fields. When Robin asked The Boy just how big they were, the latter took the opportunity to teach the former about units of measurement. The creatures were six feet tall, or the length of one of Robin’s wings, but as he grew bigger this measurement was sure to change.

And Robin was growing, alright. From a little fry barely the size of a housecat, the cockatrice could now look The Boy in the eyes...assuming he bent his head down a little. He had shed all his greyish down, and aside from a few stray pin feathers, his adult plumage had already set in. His kind’s petrifying gaze would come in adulthood, but for now, Robin could turn a tiny corner of his food into stone if he really tried.

In the meantime, he flew.

The Hunter kept them moving whenever the sun was up, and as the heat baked the ground, warm thermals rose in shimmering haze from its surface. Flapping as hard as he could, Robin leapt into the air and used the thermals to shoot straight into the air, only to come spiralling back to earth like a fallen leaf. Getting airborne was one thing; staying there was a different problem.

The Boy joked about hitching a ride on Robin’s back. Robin didn’t think he was joking. So he nursed the goal that one day, he would get his boy into the air, where they could explore their new world together.

*

But the peaceful times were not to last https://docs.google.com/document/d/18VBoRmUJIP39HkjPNiQVi9Ccux6E87lzmocTJmfWuIU/edit

-https://surreptitiousseagull.deviantart.com/

• Likes	Dislikes
  1. Adventuring  2. Flying  3. Pranks  4. Making Jokes	1. Sweet things 2. obnoxious people 3. Running/Walking