#zaegis

As the moon rose above the silent, snow-coated landscape, Ramoth knew that sleep wouldn't come for him tonight. His scar was aching again, as it often did on cold nights such as this; it was the middle of winter, and it seemed especially harsh this year. The snow had come earlier than usual, dusting trees before they had even dropped their leaves, and freezing the rivers and lakes so thoroughly that even he could stand on the icy surface without fear of falling into the water.

Just as the sky once again began letting the miniscule specks of white descend to the ground, a voice spoke.

"You should sleep, Ramoth." Ramoth turned to see Valkor sat beside him, on the opposite side to where Emrys, Caelignis and Eagon lay together in a heap.

"Believe me," Ramoth replied. "I'd love to."

"It's acting up again, isn't it?"

"It happens. I'll be fine."

A moment of silence passed between them, only broken, briefly, by a kaiju's shriek on the breeze. If Ramoth had to guess, he'd wager it was a gojira - one of the smaller kinds.

"How long has this war been going on for?"

"I stopped counting after the first decade." Ramoth shook his head. "There's more quiet nights these days, but every so often you still hear it."

"If you took a look at the Eyrie now, you'd think it was still in the early days of the fighting. It's almost desolate. I suppose that's the price of war."

"War has no price -" Ramoth watched a snowflake flutter by as he spoke, not quite wanting to meet Valkor's eye, "- war is the price. It's the consequence of hubris."

Shock passed over Valkor's eyes, before being replaced with confusion. "Hubris?"

"Do you know how the war started?"

"I..." Valkor hesitated. "No, not really - only whatever rumours came across the loudest."

"Rumours?" Ramoth faced Valkor fully.

"The most common one was that the gojira were taking too much from our territories, and so we needed to fight back in order to protect our own."

"That's not the reason for the war."

"No?" Valkor pressed. "Then, what was?"

Ramoth took a deep breath. "My mother, Zaegis."

Valkor said nothing, but urged Ramoth on with his silence. He continued:

"Believe it or not, my father was once capable of love. And he loved my mother. He even loved me and Ddraig, when she was alive. She was just as headstrong as him, and was every bit as powerful, too.

"One day, my mother took my brother and I out hunting - my father was already in the hunting grounds, so we expected to see him there. Instead, we only found gojira. A small group of them, perhaps three or four - the small kind, the ones that tend to dig more than they swim. It had started raining heavily, and we were forced to land. My mother hid us in an alcove in a cave, and by the time she turned around, the gojira had her cornered.

"She fought with everything. They tore at her from all angles, slashing and biting. She managed to kill one of them - tore out its throat and let it bleed - but the others kept attacking. She kept fighting. She tossed one against the wall so hard its spine snapped like a twig, and she ripped the head off of another. If there was a fourth, it fled.

"She had won, and we were safe, but it came at a terrible cost. Her blood filled the shallow water streams leading out of the cave, and every breath was weaker than the last. My father found us at dusk, after the rain had died down. My mother could barely raise her head, but she still greeted him as she always did. She beckoned us out of the alcove, and I still remember what she said to my father:

"Raise them to be stronger than us. She took her last breath then and there.

"Years passed, and like any other form of rot, my father's rage at the gojira grew and festered. It consumed him more with each passing day, until all that was left was Morsen. The heartless brute, who had only been kept at bay by my mother's love for my father, was king now. Morsen sees himself as unstoppable. He believes himself to be above the laws of this life. The day my brother was killed was the breaking point. He waged war."

Valkor was silent. Ramoth let the snow outside be the only sound for a moment before he finished:

"Morsen's hubris is believing that he could avenge my mother by purging the alpha species is the reason we're standing where we are today."

Another long silence came over them as the snow outside continued to fall in a thin veil, each flake illuminated against the moonlight.