I’d seen little but my mother’s breast feathers and the color blue for two weeks. The only sounds had been the waters of the ocean and the flapping of my mother’s wings. The only thing holding me from falling into the water was the cloth that wrapped around my tiny frame and mother’s clawed front feet.
I was hungry, almost too hungry to chirp for food, but mother had nothing to give; she hadn’t had anything for days. So instead, I pressed my head into my mother’s breast and closed my eyes as another bright summer noon shined down on us. My eyes burned from the salty air, and my feet were aching tremendously from staying cramped in the same position for the last two weeks. I felt so heavy, like I was weighing her down and at any moment, my mother’s wings would fail and we’d both tumble into the sea’s waiting embrace. But it didn’t happen that way; the sea stayed away and my mother kept pushing on. And soon, for the first time since my mother had scooped me up and taken me so far away from home, I saw a shadow fall upon us.
Three golden, flying figures circled us in the sky and herded us forward. I couldn’t see where we were headed since my body was facing in towards my mother’s wide chest and her front feet were clenched around me in a way that restricted most movement. But far to the left in my peripheral vision, I saw a great statue of a pony, though to a chick as small as me, it looked like a monster; I trembled, I closed my eyes, and I waited for mother to guide me away to safety….
“OW! WHAT THE FUCK!?”
Gilda scrambled out of her bed of hay, twigs and feathers and swiped blindly at the air with her talons. A rather large bird squawked and flapped out of her range, landing on the cold floor of the cave next to the gaping exit. Gilda hissed at the bird,
“ FUCK YOU! Fucking pick at me again, bird, and see what fucking happens!”
She looked down at her right leg; surely enough, there was a trail of blood dripping out from where the bird had been picking away at her in her sleep. She looked back up at the bird that still stood before her and glared her golden, predatory eyes into the dull black, beady eyes on the bird.
“ Don’t wanna run, hey? Looks like I’ll be eating chicken tonight… or whatever the fuck you are!”
She crouched in preparation for a lunge forward, but before she could, a male Griffon wandered by her cave entrance. Gilda watched him pass by, not minding the bird as it flapped out of her home. With one heavy stroke of her wings, she propelled forward and out into the night air; the male Griffon had not gotten far and she caught up with him as he walked along the gravel trail on the side of Smoky Mountain.
“ Hey Cullen! What’s up?”
The male Griffon stopped at a cliff and looked out at the night.
“ Can’t sleep; I can hear those damn ponies from all the way out here.” He said with his back to her, watching a bright spot on the horizon that flickered with flashing spotlights and fireworks. Gilda landed at his side and joined his gaze on the dancing colors on the distant horizon.
“ Huh,” Gilda uttered, “ I can’t hear’em. They just play boring dweeb music and talk about fancy stuff all night; it’s not even a real party if you ask me.”
“ I wasn’t asking you.” Cullen snapped; Gilda snorted and inched further away from him.
“ What’s your problem? Honestly dude, every time the Gala rolls around, you get all pissy on me.” She grumbled, crossing her front legs and facing the night sky – though, other than the Gala, there wasn’t much to see from their view other than the black silhouettes of trees in White Tail Woods and the empty, winding train tracks.
Cullen sighed, but kept his eyes forward.
“ Sorry….”
Gilda merely grunted and continued watching the black landscape.
“ I hate them – the ponies, I mean.”
Gilda shrugged, “ I know that; you tell me every time you see the Gala over there.”
“ Why do they get to sit over there and drink fancy wine and eat fancy food while we’re penned up on this stupid mountain?”
Gilda scoffed, “ We aren’t penned up here, Cullen. We can leave whenever we want; the princesses gave us a whole mountain for free so that we could do Griffon stuff.”
“ This is Griffon stuff?” Cullen asked rhetorically, gesturing to the mountain on which they sat.
” Sitting on a fucking mountain far away from our homeland, surrounded by ponies that gorge themselves on sweets and couldn’t give a shit about our kind?”
Gilda chuckled, “ What’s wrong with sweets? “
The male Griffon huffed and rose to his feet, “ You just don’t care, do you? You don’t hate the ponies, and you don’t love us Griffons. All you do is stuff your face, play your stupid rock music and fly around like you still have a FUCKING CHANCE at joining the Thunderstrucks, or the Lighting Bolts, or-“
“ WONDERBOLTS!” Gilda shouted, glaring at Cullen, “ And if you insult Rock’n’Roll in my presence again, I’ll bash your beak in!”
Cullen growled and bore his teeth at her; Gilda did the same,
“ The Wonderbolts are the princesses’ lackeys! They’re a fucking joke! And you know they won’t ever accept you, Gilda. They don’t even let you into the academy!”
“They WILL! If I keep showing up every year, they’ll have no choice but to let me in!” Gilda snapped back.
“Keep telling yourself that.” Cullen replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“I bet they’ll even make you Captain.”
“Whatever,” Gilda huffed and turned back to the horizon, watching the dancing lights of the capital city so far away.
“At least I’m not laying around on this stupid mountain and getting old like the others.”
“Oh, you will.” Cullen sneered.
“You’ll grow old and die on this mountain, just like all the others; just like me.”
Gilda flapped her wings and lifted into the air, hovering in the night sky above Cullen.
“Ugh, you’re such a downer. I’m gonna hit the hay; you can stay here be a fucking dweeb.”
Cullen sulked alone as the one young, eligible Griffon in Equestria left him to brood in his hatred for the ponies, as she did every other year before. As he watched the bright lights far away, he contemplated the distance from there to home. Just how far is it, and how long would it take by flight to reach the Griffon mainland? All the young Griffon truly knew of the Griffon lands was that they were east of Equestria. His mother was born on Smoky Mountain and his father had died before his birth, leaving him without any ties to that mysterious world beyond the sea. Cullen knew the story of Gilda’s mother very well, and had even heard it from her many times before she’d passed on. But still, the old Griffon had never told him much of his culture, and Gilda knew next to nothing about it, other than they painted themselves to represent their tribe, as her mother had always done to her and she continued to do to herself, proudly sporting the grayish purple around her eyes as a reminder that she truly was a native Griffonian,
Griffonia: the land of the tribes. Gilda’s mother once mentioned that her tribe were nomads in a country of nomads, and yet they had a king – or something equivalent to one. They were the Northerners, the wild ones, the painted warriors and skilled hunters that soared through Cullen’s dreams. He imagined hulking males adorned in dragon bones and lithe females with dazzling tribal colors all over their bodies; he imagined them being graceful and kind, unlike Gilda, yet still far more capable flyers. The Griffons of his dreams were perfect, natural, uncorrupted by the sinful pleasures of the inferior ponies that knew nothing of dragons and warfare.
Perhaps one day, the young Cullen would meet a perfect Griffon.
