Shadow Gryphon

Okay, I finally decided to go ahead and post the next chapter of this fic. I'll post chapter 3 after a while, depending on the amount of reviews that I get.

'Thoughts'
"Speech"
/mind link thingy/

Enjoy chapter 2!

----------------------------Chapter 2-------------------------
A persistent tickle, right under his nose, intruded upon his sound sleep. He was too comfortable to get up, and he wasn’t going to let one minor thing disturb him. Un-uh. No way. Not in a million ye-

…Too late.

“Achooo!”

Yugi sneezed, face scrunching up in reflex and his body twitched. It got that thing away from his nose, but it also served to wake him up.

‘Darn it.’ He whined, wanting to go back to sleep but failing to do so. He never had been the kind to sleep in all day.

He opened his amethyst colored eyes to stare at his surroundings in confusion. The room was dimly lit and roughly circular in shape with walls made of wood. There were a few pieces of furniture that rested out of the way, these being a dresser, a cabinet, a life-sized mirror, and a basin filled with clear water. They were all simple in design, with a few patterns carved into the framework.

The most extravagant piece of furniture was the bed he was laying on. The mattress had to have been made with the softest downy feathers and it had about three layers of quilts, each one was a different thickness and had a feather design stitched into it with black and gold thread.

‘No wonder I didn’t want to get up.’ Yugi thought as he sat up, letting the soft covers pool around his waist. He noticed that he was still wearing the same clothes as yesterday, which he was thankful for, since it gave him a sense of reality. The white gauze that was wrapped around various places on his body told him that someone had treated his wounds.

‘Who did this?’ Yugi asked no one in particular. ‘The last thing I remember is being caught by Namik…so, how did I get here? Please say that I didn’t get sold already!’ He frantically looked around, searching for any sign of chains, rope, or barred exits. Upon seeing none, he returned to his previous thoughts.

‘So, if I didn’t get sold…then what happened?’

Determined to figure out the answer, he ventured off the soft bed. Small, bare feet settled on a small plush rug. A pleasant feeling coursed through his feet, which were used to rough surfaces. That feeling didn’t last very long as his left ankle smarted when he put pressure on it. A small gasp of pain escaped his mouth as he quickly lifted it off the ground.

‘Perhaps I should take it easy on that foot.’ It didn’t hurt enough to bring tears to his eyes, but it still stung.

He had made it a few meters away from the bed when his foot brushed against something fuzzy. Curiosity brewing, Yugi picked up the object he had stepped on and couldn’t help the confusion that followed.

It was a black feather.

‘Why would a feather be in here? It doesn’t seem to be the size of an owl or falcon’s feather, it’s much too large, and an eagle’s is shaped differently…wait a minute...’

The feather was a deep ebony, with red tints here and there and a gold outlining. Its texture was soft and smooth, but with it was also sturdy.

Flashes of a giant creature covered in such feathers bombarded his mind. Huge black wings set in a threatening yet protective stance attached to the muscular body; a long, smooth tail and a powerful beak.

“The gryphon.”

He remembered now, what had happened after he had been tied. A gryphon had shown up out of nowhere and had protected him! And a black gryphon at that!

Dark colored gryphons were notorious for their short tempers and extensive violence, not to mention that a majority of them hated humans.

‘And they’re a lot rarer than any other color.’

As he pondered why the gryphon feather was here, he wandered around the confines of the room. He subconsciously noted that the temperature was rather low, not enough to drive him back to the bed, but enough for him to obtain goose-bumps.

‘I wonder if there’s a way out.’ He wondered silently as he searched for a door or a ladder. During his search he had set the feather down on the dresser so that he wouldn’t lose it.

After a few minutes of searching, which felt like hours, he found a spot where there was a fresh stream of cool air rolling across the floor, and after investigating it he found that it came from a certain place on the wall by the dresser.

Now he felt incredibly silly for not noticing the doublewide door, painted in a feathery design like the quilts, earlier. It was so big that it could’ve allowed two horses to pass through with plenty of space, and there was a smaller door, just the size for a human, set at the bottom right corner of said giant door. A doorknob had been replaced with a slot that a person could put their hand in and worked the same way as a doorknob, but was less noticeable. (Shamise comment: Kinda like the handles on most screen doors, only this one turns clockwise instead of side-to-side. It’s like hiding the doorknob inside the door so people don’t run into it.)

He approached the door quickly and slid his hand in the door-slot, giving is a twist to the right he heard an audible click. The door opened noiselessly, the hinges must have been oiled recently, and he peered into the dark tunnel that lay before him. A blast of cold air rushed past Yugi, making him want nothing more than to crawl back up into those warm covers.

‘I wonder what’s down there?’ The tunnel did seem to travel downward before veering off to the left. Yugi knew that he should probably wait for whoever lived here to show up, but if that someone thought that he was a slave then he wanted to escape.

He stepped forward and through the threshold, curiosity overwhelming his other protests. What was it they said? ‘Curiosity killed the cat?’

‘It’s a good thing I’m not a cat then.’

It took all of his courage to keep going further into the tunnel. His bare feet padded quietly on the stone ground as the door to the room disappeared behind a bend. Yugi kept his hand on the left wall, not wanting to veer off even slightly, so that he could retrace his steps if he decided to go back.

‘It sure is cold,’ Yugi half complained. ‘And this tunnel doesn’t seem to actually go anywhere.’ Any sense of direction he had earlier had been lost at the tenth turn and his feet were staring to hurt. On top of that the tunnel was beginning to incline and it was making his legs cramp.

And to make matters worse, Yugi’s mind was toying with him. He would hear sounds that weren’t there and he kept feeling something brush against his legs.

‘A-are those shadows moving?!’ His skin prickled as his eyes darted form corner to corner, feet walking a little bit faster. He could swear that someone was staring at him; as a matter of fact, he could almost see two red eyes that seemed to keep getting closer with every passing second.

Yugi knew that he wasn’t just being paranoid now. He spared another glance over his shoulder and instantly regretted it as he collided with a wall shrouded in shadows. He went careening down to the floor and in an attempt to prevent his fall he tried to backpedal. That didn’t work so well since the moment he put all his weight on his left foot hot needles drove into it, effectively sending him the rest of the way to the ground.

Tears sprung from his eyes at the sudden pain and he couldn’t help but whimper. His shoulder leaned against the wall and his hands gripped this ankle in a feeble attempt to lessen the pain.

Quiet clicks and hisses found their way into Yugi’s ears, alerting him to the reason for his fall. He closed his eyes tightly, saying that it was just his imagination that they sounded concerned, it wasn’t worried about him, it wanted to eat him.

Right?

Heat radiated off the creature before him and the smell of some kind of spice bombarded his nose. The sharp click of claws on stone told him that the creature was approaching, and he curled into a tighter ball in hopes that it would leave him alone.

A few more clicks came, this time in an almost questioning tone, and something sharp settled around his ear. He shivered in fear as the thing nibbled softly, not breaking the skin, but still as terrifying to him as if it did.

Yugi didn’t move, frozen in place as the sharp thing moved from his ear to his hair, nibbling in a type of caress that he dimly recognized. The creature cooed quietly in an attempt to calm him down, though it only confused him more.

A strange sensation brushed across his mind, a feeling of ‘not alone’. It formed into emotions that swirled around Yugi in an intimate caress, wrapping him in a strange sense of protectiveness, worry, and a single word.

/Aibou?/

The word rang sharp and clear in Yugi’s head, a soft baritone that held half a purr. A gasp shuddered through his lips and his eyes flew open. He jerked his head back simultaneously, subconsciously glad that the creature wasn’t gripping his hair at the time, since that would’ve hurt.

A rather large, sharp, black beak was hovering just a few inches from the tip of his nose. Yugi’s eyes crossed in an instinctual attempt to focus and he did the first thing that made sense.

He screamed.

Long and loud.

Yugi mentally swore that he had just broken the sound barrier. The creature before him gave a startled screech and stumbled back a few inches. The thing in his head radiated confusion and, since Yugi could feel this emotion as clearly as his own, it sent him further into his panic.

The creature overcame its shock quickly and reproached Yugi. He felt the presence in his mind tilt, and his scream was silenced as effectively as if someone had covered his mouth with his or her hand.

A sudden compulsion to reopen his closed eyes forced Yugi to gaze once again at he creature before him. The giant head was lowered to Yugi’s eye level and, without meaning to, he looked straight into the creature’s eyes.

He fell into pools of crimson, a mixture of the sunset and the fire on a cold winter’s night. Something enfolded him, wrapped and cradled him in an emotion that drove away all his panic and fears of death. Darkness surrounded him, but it was the kind of darkness that one took refuge in on the hot summer day.

Soft caring words, spoken in that baritone voice, flowed gently and possessively through his mind.

/Yugi. My Aibou. I’ve found you, my Hikari./

Yugi’s panic induced haze had lifted and he could finally tell what the creature was. Shiny, black feathers blended almost perfectly in the shadows of the tunnel, outlined in gold and streaked with crimson. The muscular body was perfectly relaxed as it stood before him, crimson eyes sharp and intelligent.

It was the gryphon.

“Yami.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To be continued?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------