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After his initiation, James would wake up amongst the pack in the following week, now sleeping within their grounds, awaiting any order from his new superiors which was essentially everyone in the group. Soon one female approached him, one who had always been intrigued by him since his initiation, and chirred: "Newcomer, I have a request for you." "Yes?" "I am expecting with a litter of eggs, but I am turning weak with hunger." As willing as he was to do the task, he was curious to ask: "Why not ask the other stronger ones?" "Because I am the lowest-ranked female...my litter will not be strong, but I need to survive." "Then I will find food for you, wait here." With his first assignment of the pack, he explained to one of the superiors his intentions and was allowed to forage. "Assisting any of our females is a noble cause, when we can strengthen our numbers with more young." "Superior...why do the others not assist her already?" "She is the weakest of our females. If necessary we must feed our stronger ones for stronger litters." "But that seems-" "That is only due to her lesser importance, but we would not completely forget her. Now do as you were ordered and feed her." And so he headed out into the forest, looking for anything to kill. James' senses had sharpened since his mental regression, tapping into the hidden repressed instincts of his ancestry. His eyes were much sharper, his sense of smell able to pinpoint in any direction, his sense of awareness so finely tuned that it would be quite a task to sneak up on him. Only his intelligence and perhaps his agility would suffer, no longer able to maneuver like a parkour runner in his mentally non-anthro state. But his stamina had increased with the determination of all wild animals, to hunt and fight until death.

After a while of hunting he managed to chase down and kill a sizeable looking creature, some sort of large prehistoric shrew, taking it back to the grounds and handing it to the pregnant female who gladly wolfed down on it. "Thank you! Mmmm...you are so generous." "I am beneath everyone here, even you. Whatever you say I am obliged to do." James made a small murr and looked down at the ground, toeclaws tapping the dirt as the female merely nuzzled up to him and licked his cheek. "Perhaps we are equal then?" "What?" He was surprised at her moves on him. "I have no mate...he disappeared, maybe even killed by the hairless. If you are willing to become mated with me..." "But you have eggs...and they're not mine." "But they need a father, and you could be one, nobody else will!" James was turning rather stressed "Why are you asking me!?" "Because you care!" "I...how can I care?! I was not even part of this pack until several moons ago! Why would I care about you?! Why would you ask ME to father children that are not even mine!??!" "...because I order you to...newcomer." With this sly logical trap, at least to a raptor anyway, James was trapped, and snarled with resignation as he snarled: "Very well...I will father your children." "Thank you." With a playful nibble that he tried to shake off, she went elsewhere to rest. "Also, you will not mount me until the eggs are hatched. I want my litter to be untouched." "And what do you expect me to do, since you have already decided I will rear them with you?" "You will teach them how to be a raptor. Now leave, I am weak and I must rest." Wordless to the reply, he merely walked off, feeling confused at being suddenly mated with a widowed pregnant raptoress. Yet his feral mind saw nothing else he could be beyond what he was asked to be. His confidence was broken, and he was now practically a slave for them. And yet he did not mind, for he had no higher purpose in life, as far as he could think. No dreams or aspirations. All having faded away like his memories. And yet, like all creatures of a certain level of intelligence must, he pondered on something more, something beyond this existence. His biggest mystery was what became of his own pack, if he even had one, and why he had awoken in the large building far away, wearing strange clothes next to the body of a dead raptor. With little else to do, he merely went to sleep after fetching more food for the female.

His dreams came back to him. The same visions of strange creatures that were somehow familiar to him. At first he tried to ignore it, but after a week straight of these dreams that felt like old friends to him, feeling as if he knew them better than he knew this pack he was in, he felt compelled to tell someone about them. Someone who could understand. After asking around the pack, one superior said: "The sleep-sight? All of us experience that, all creatures surely, why are you so concerned of them?" "Because they feel so real...I keep seeing the same faces, the same creatures, none of them like me, but they feel so familiar! I need to discover their secrets, I cannot focus!" "Hmmm...perhaps Eyeclaw may help you, but I would not take his words seriously and I would not advise going near him." "Eyeclaw?" "He sits behind the rock, hiding from the sun and the moon if he can. Nobody can understand him, but he is old and we dare not harm him, his growls are strange to us." With no other option, James went to behind the large rock sometime later, which was more or less three rocks somehow clasped together underground to jut out like the fingers of a giant human, if they were crooked to one side. Behind the rock, hidden in the shade, was an old raptor mumbling to himself. He was old indeed, his scales wrinkled and greyed in colour, teeth filed down as he laid on his side, as if he was dead. His growls were, as the other raptor had said, unusual. "Who comes near?!" "Ah...I-i am the newcomer of the pack." "Ah! Yes...you, I can smell them, all of them on you. You are indeed a strange one, even your claws are unusual." "Y-yes...they initiated me...I do not know where I came from." "Ahhh...yes I can smell them well. Perhaps you do not remember me being there? My scent is not upon you." "No?" "Not so...they have exiled me in name only. They fear me, fear my eye...my beautiful eye." "Your...eye?" Eyeclaw stood up to show his face, revealing himself out of the shade. One eye was literally gone, clawed out of his face to leave a sunken, empty blood-caked hole, which combined with the natural grin of a raptor's teeth, made him quite a frightening-looking beast. James backed away slightly, which Eyeclaw noticed as he made a chittering of mirth. "You fear me too?" "I...what happened to you?" "I did it myself...I only need one eye now." "What!? Why would you injure yourself so badly!?" "Because they are all blind fools! Blind with two eyes! But I, with a single eye, finely sharpened to a limit that two can never achieve, have seen beyond the trees." "What are you talking about!?" "I see everything! I have seen the days that will come. I have seen the days that have passed in more ways than this pack shall ever see."

With nothing more to say on the strange old raptor's ways, James merely walked forward and chirred softly: "They told me that you can help me with my visions?" "Visions!? Have you seen the stars the hairless can create!?!" "N-no...I mean in my sleep." "Ah...disregard what I have said, you are too young to understand. Tell me your visions." "I...I have dreamt, since as far as I can remember, of faces that are blurred yet familiar. I see creatures unfamiliar to me, yet they seem to know me. Their sounds are warm to me, yet none of them are like me. I feel...strange symbols that try to reach me but fail to make sense to me!" Eyeclaw said nothing, staring intensely at James. "That is all I can say....everything else was too odd to make out." "Intriguing," growled Eyeclaw. "Do you see any light?" "Sometimes...sometimes I cannot see very well, but other times it is so bright I am too blinded to even make out their faces." "Hmmm...none of the other pack speak of their visions, they are so weak-minded. Not like me, not like the visions I experience, so blinding they become that I shake with uncontrollable glory!" "Really!?" "Sometimes it happens to me, and when it does, my body shakes of its own will. My mouth salivates with the coming prospect of a new wondrous vision, and when it does, it is like a burst of colour and light piercing into my head from the inside so powerfully that It hurts!" He screeched to the sky somewhat joyfully as he continued. "Ohhhh it hurts so very badly, but it feels so wonderful when it stops. And I feel so enlightened afterwards. None of them suffer it...the blessing and the curse of the gifted, my dear youth." Eyeclaw walked slowly towards James and licked his face, the younger raptor whimpering slightly, feeling uncomfortable near this creepy senile old creature. "I...that sounds painful." "But the rewards are so worth it...my eye's gaze has expanded to such a far reach that I am the greatest hunter of this pack! And they know that, they fear that!" "So...why do you not hunt with them anymore?" "Because I have reached so far beyond the vision of our kind that I can no longer hunt what they can. I hunt for visions! I hunt the stars, even in my sleep!" "The stars themselves!?" "YES!" His single eye flared with an incredulous gaze, wide with excitement as he recounted. "They are such a rare and dangerous prey, none of our kind but ME could hunt them because when they are in my grasp, they make me screech with such agony when I catch them! My mind explodes with wondrous colour and light, and my body is so overtaken with glory that it can't control itself from shaking and twitching! So glorious...the path to greatness makes the pain become nothing to fear, my young newcomer." "And...what do you see in the visions?" James was fascinated now, gazing at the strange old raptor who murred rather oddly, the raptor's equivalent of giggling and mumbling. "Ohh...the hairless, the other creatures, stars created upon the land itself, stars that have summoned us to this land, this strange strange land that the hairless seem to rule over!" Eyeclaw whimpered as he gazed up at the sky, as if afraid of it before hiding back in the shade. "I remember the old land...I was once...mmm..." Soon he would say no more and went to sleep, murring to himself of strange little things, whereas James was no closer to finding out his own visions, if they even were that. Letting the old raptor sleep, he went back to the pack to await further orders from any who demanded him.

A month later, James felt the dreams turn less frequent, appearing at infrequent times so he began to ignore them better. He focused on his duties to the pack, hunting and patrolling, soon becoming mated to the least-ranked raptoress who soon introduced herself as Barren, due to being one of three in a litter who survived life in the barren plains. He kept her well fed with food, becoming an eventual replacement to her former mate, intrigued by the idea of one day mating with to have his own children grow up within the pack. She would demand more food as she grew more pregnant. to the point where her body had bloated like a sow, murring weakly as she neared the time of birthing. In the meantime, he would occasionally also visit Eyeclaw, becoming fascinated with the strange old raptor and his incredulous chirrs, that spoke of stranger things beyond this world. "So...when did you begin hunting for visions?" was James' first question. "One day, back in the old land, I felt a pain in my head. I thought nothing of it but it grew more and more as the days passed me by, and then they soon came. The strange and wonderful visions. They came at random times, but the first time I caught one, I felt my body shake with such a burning fire...it hurt me, scared me, terrified me with its violent pain. But I soon realised that I was beyond hunting for creatures of the land." "This...old land you keep talking of..." "Ah....you are younger than I suspected. You did not hear of the great change that brought us to this island?" "N-no, what happened?" "Something happened...strangely it happened many moons after my vision-hunting began. We encountered this island, in the middle of a grand lake that we had always known but had never seen before. And we knew it had never been there before. We found a way across, and so did other creatures, soon exploring. And what was when we found the hairless, intriguing creatures, delicious too before we had to be more careful with their fire and sticks. Then suddenly the island itself disappeared from our world and to this world here! The air itself tastes different than from before! Somehow...filthier." "Really!? This island...moved!?!" "We do not know how it happened, surely the hairless could not have done so...but a few of us, when we entered their lair within the shining caverns, found strange strange things in there. Things that terrified us, things that took a few of us away into strange stars that the hairless themselves have created, ridden with their stench! I could scarcely believe it! THEY CAN CREATE THE STARS THEMSELVES!" Eyeclaw rushed up to James and gazed directly into his eye, inches away, piercing with a frighteningly focused stare. "N-n-no...they couldn't..." "THEY CAN! And yet the leader refuses to realise that...the fool." "So what does he do?" "Continues to hunt them, what else!? Yet they are delicious warmbloods for certain, I cannot deny tha-AAAAAGH!" "Wh-what is it?!?" Eyeclaw suddenly spasmed with a painful shriek. "AH...a vision! I SEE ONE! Young hunter, y-y-y-you're about to witness a g-great moment!" "Bu-" "SILENCE! ...this one is mine."

Eyeclaw then began to act very erratically, running around chasing at an imaginary thing, snarling and screeching, ducking and weaving around the back of the trees but never straying too far from the rocks, like a child playing hear his home. His body twitched and shuddered in ways far too unnatural for a raptor. Soon he had a horrific-looking seizure that made him collapse on the floor, unable to even scream. His mouth drooling and juddering, body twitching maniacally, his eye showing absolute pain. "GHHH! NNNNGUH! UUURAAGHK!" "Eyeclaw!" "Sh-sh-shu...huuuuh..." James was frightened to see what looked to be a painful experience for Eyeclaw, lying there for minutes shaking in his own little vision of painful reward. His seizure soon ended as he gazed up at James, focusing better now but sounding weary. "Hhhhh...hhhh...that was...m-marvellous." "What happened!?" "I saw pure blue and red...clashing together in a violent mess...so violent I felt their pain, shuddering through me, a battle between the two most simple colours of our lives! The red within us...the blue above us...beautiful..." "W-wow..." "Now I must...rest...visions are...exhausting...hunt..." With the first experience of seeing Eyeclaw's "vision hunting" first-hand now complete, James went to leave, heading back to the grounds to check up on his mate, before the leader, Alpha, accosted him. "Were you speaking to Eyeclaw?" "Yes, leader, why?" "Why?" "I...I see visions in my sleep, and they disturbed me. They're not what others see, they're of-" "Do not speak of them to him anymore." "W-what?" "As your leader, I demand it." "But why?" "BECAUSE I SAY SO!"

Alpha roared at James with a sudden burst of rage, making James whimper and shuffle backwards slightly. "Y-yes...my leader." "Good. Now attend to your mate, she will be birthing soon, and I wish to ensure her litter survive to swell our numbers." Nodding humbly, he trotted away to Barren who merely gazed sleepily up at him. "What did the leader want with you?" "He was just...making me remember my place." "Did you do something wrong?" "I was just speaking to Eyeclaw an-" "You...you talked to him!?" "Yes. What's wrong with him?" "I...I wish we knew, but he is beyond us, he is mad with a broken mind." "But he is in pain, from whatever is causing his madness, he cannot have been like that all his life!" "Newcomer, you know nothing of the history of this pack, so I advise you to keep your wandering mind to yourself." "What!?" "We have a history here that you do not share, and things have happened that you are not privy to. So I advise you to keep away." "...I do not have to take orders from a female." A sense of insult started to well up within him. Infuriated at being disrespected by a female, he turned away not wanting to cause any fights, but Barren tried to get up to attack him, halted by the fact that she was too weak to do so. "How DARE you disrespect me!? You are below even the hatchlings in this pack!" "You cannot even attack me, weak as you are and fat with eggs! Why must everyone fear him, so aged and insane, who suffers agony every few moons!?" "Because we know nothing of his madness," said one of the superior raptors nearby, "and we know not how to rid him of it." "What?" "We know not what causes his pain." "Do you not believe his visions?" "A few of us do, but he frightens those who try to speak, and the leader himself does not wish anyone but himself to speak to Eyeclaw, and overrules him in claiming that his growls are nothing but the ramblings of a mind now dulled with age." "...why the leader himself only?" "We respect the leader's wishes, for whatever reason he has." With that mystery left in the air, James could do nothing but tend to his mate, who he relented with and apologised to by keeping her fed until she slept before him, sleeping beside her. But his mind was unable to not worry about the mystery of Eyeclaw. Was the leader perhaps a believer of that mad old raptor, and did not want others to know? Or was there something deeper?

James would have little time to ponder on Eyeclaw however, as he had to avoid meeting him as openly, as well as even not able to see him at all for Barren was about to give birth. The birth itself was not too strenuous, a healthy clutch of six eggs, but it had taken a lot out of her and she had to recover her strength, meaning more fetching food for her while she nuzzled against her eggs in a small nesting pit she had dug for herself, with James' assistance. Despite her rather bossy nature, she did like the newcomer, finding something about James that was unusual. His eyes, those pure emerald eyes, seemed to speak of something to her. "Are they all safe?" asked the female. "They seem to be." James nudged each of them softly to test their firmness, and it seemed they would be fine until they would hatch, murring as he nuzzled Barren. "Thank you, Oddscar." She used the name for James that the tribe had finally decided to give him after spending enough time among them, noting his unusual purple markings. "I hope your children will be good and healthy." "Oh they will, I know my mate was strong, so surely they will be too." "Was he a warrior?" "Indeed...I cannot imagine what happened to him, he was so swift and strong, one of our best." Barren murred sadly before James nuzzled her to cheer her up. "Do not worry. I will be strong for you, I will give the children a father." "Thank you...and I shall mate with you one day..." She playfully nibbled him in appreciation, as he nibbled back tenderly in turn. All he could do now was ponder on the mystery around Eyeclaw and whether it was just fear that made them keep away from the old one, or if there had been something else in the history of the tribe that caused such. There was no other reason he could think of than that of just plain fear of the unknown, which he admitted to having some of himself. And yet he wasn't as afraid as them. If anything, he was intrigued. When he had time to be more discreet in his visits, he would do so to the lonely old raptor. However, during one attempt in the dead of night when the tribe was distracted with each other, his visit to Eyeclaw was interrupted by something. Alpha was already there, conversing with him.