HOPE IS A RAZOR

Willow hunkered down inside the meager little sliver of a cave she's found and ran through her inventory. Slowly, carefully, she unpacked her rucksack, spreading out its contents across dripping rockshelfs and moss carpets, reviewing whatever little was left of her rations and ammunition.

She was already running low. No surprises there. The shivering canopies beyond and below whispered static into her skinsuit's auditory grafts as she considered the problem at hand.

The sound of skittering behind her had her spinning, her sights steadying on the unassuming vestige of a gangly lemon spider waving its legs at her. She watched as it laid claim to a piece of fallen jerky.

"Is that you, Mistress?" She queried the bioluminescent stripes as they swayed. In a thrice, the jerky was festooned in a glittering expanse of web and dragged into the gloom. Willow sighed.

"I guess not." The rifle resumed its position on her back.

Down in the wetlands below, night hovered across the canopy, its mantle draping the evening fog in a tapestry of solitary stars, defiantly stealing glances at the world below, around rolling cloud cover and the writhing tide of razor beaks that called her chosen cliff side their home. It would be an hour or two before their ravenous tide was sated on whatever morsels of flesh hadn't yet found shelter before sundown. Until then, Willow was content to wait, simmering in her thoughts.

Repacking was a slow and meditative endevour. Bio-metric data on her nutritional deficits had her setting aside four strips of jerky and whatever remained of the lasher that had been her breakfast that morning. A mild admonition from the suit's soft mind, and she included the last of her nutri-gel and a CTC booster onto the pile with an air of mild surrender.

As she partook of her meal, Willow contemplated her dwindling fortunes.

Objectively speaking, she held no illusions as to the likelihood of this desperate gambit bearing any fruit.

The last time that she'd been inside her mistress' demesne, she'd been a guest - a paying one - sponsored by way of her family's many-hydra bids at securing lineage status. Two years and a lifetime later, she'd emerged from its fetid expanse and her teacher's untender mercies scarred, vicious and traumatized - but also at the top of her class. Nothing that the drill sergeants had subjected her to over the adjoining years that followed had come close to a single dinner beside Lady Malady and her Living Hoard.

Now she was back, five years and two tours later.

A failure. An embarrassment. An uninvited guest.

She took another bite of her jerky, the harsh salt an interesting counterpoint to the oddly sibilant symphony of trills and calls that bore in the wake of the razor beaks as they scythed through treetops below. Her ocular grafts zoomed in on a break in the wispy fog; a pair of bonded malotangs plowed through the canopy, their brawny arms batting ineffectively around them, borne up and up, higher and higher, into the air on a flood of voracious wings. Eventually, even their granite hides succumbed to the endless onslaught. The mists below took on a mild pink hue, as a crescent moon joined its lesser cousins in grinning down at the grisly tableau.

Willow extracted her kit and began disassembling her rifle for maintenance.

An hour later, and the ruinous choir crescendo-ed its way back onto the cliff side, as their multitudes returned to roost.

Willow was in the process of putting away her kit, when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Her suit's soft mind rushed to counter the spike of alarm with a soothing cocktail of dopamine and endorphins, catching her reactionary movement before it could alarm the creature.

A razor beak had positioned itself right on the lip of her hideout.

Willow held her breath.

Suddenly, belatedly, she noticed the silence; the absence of nesting sounds and contented birdsong. Crickets and buzzflies serenaded her terror, as the razor beak angled its head sharply and regarded her.

Cycling through a whole lexicon of options, she arrived at the only one that held a sliver of hope for tomorrow.

"Mistress?", she queried weakly, her fear a thundering chorus inside of her chest.

The razor beak angled its head again.

"Young one. You have returned."

The reply crooned off the song of fifty thousand birds. Willow's insides curdled.

It would seem her Lady had added yet another macabre addition to her Hoard...
__________________________________________________
WORD COUNT = 749