The breakfast table was full save a single seat in the corner. Lucienne picked at her toast, shrivelling appetite a direct result of the dull morning mood that plagued the room. Luka sat to her left with his plate untouched, expression plain and eyes fixed on the door ahead.
"So...what time's training gonna start?" Dmitri broke through the silence, crunching away at his bowl of cereal. Jeremiah turned to him with a look of amusement, handing him a napkin as he provided a vague response.
"As soon as we're all done with breakfast, I guess."
"We? Uh," Abigail reached for another uraro cookie. "If you haven't noticed, we're missing someone."
Vaughn felt sick at the thought of him being stuck in a room filled with bitter tension. For some strange reason, the entire class was in the mood for a sour edge and he, in turn, was left very dissatisfied. Naturally, the vulture would think himself the one and only predator entitled to a permanently bitter mind unless a higher power in the form of an author willed differently.
Coincidentally, the higher power had also gleefully assigned him to a villa that would test his patience and result in a terrible sleep cycle, manifested in the form of dark circles under his eyes. He wasn't entirely correct. As far as the higher power remembered, Vaughn had dark circles under his eyes since his infantile stages.
"Yeah. Tori's not here."
Eyes turned promptly towards the most suitable person to question. "Where is Iolani?" Jing brought it upon herself to ask carefully, since Luka did not seem very inclined to answer the question.
"I'll go wake him up," was the longest thing anyone in the room had ever heard Luka say. Dmitri had his eyes wide open—as though a shot of caffeine had somehow been pumped into his veins.
"Woah, uh. Okay...tell him to hurry up, alright? We haven't got all day," the falcon called over his shoulder and one could not help but think Dmitri naïve for assuming the simplicity of the situation—that the sparrow had merely overslept. Oversimplification was a mistake thought uncommonly made but in reality, plagued the minds of many human beings.
Vaughn however, was the kind to do the very opposite. Complicating matters and thinking beyond the appearance of a person or the surface of every situation was his forte. It explained the far-fetched idea in his head: a dead Iolani Tori foaming at his mouth from the possible poison in his dinner last night. Either that or reduced to an unrecognizable pile of flesh from Kirill's violent tendencies. Or perhaps stabbed by a sword dipped in poison just like Hamlet was...
Overcomplication, on the other hand, was another mistake that plagued the minds of many human beings as well.
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The eagle arrived at Io's doorstep in a matter of seconds, having shifted to close the distance by flight. He rang the bell and waited with a heart that was abnormally loud, having either exhausted himself from the dead sprint or...well, the logical other. Luka did not want to admit that he was, by this point, extremely concerned for Io's safety but he understood perfectly well that it was a lie. He never knew anxiety felt so much like having flown a mile at record speed.
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Flight School: Predator
Fantasy[Second book of the Flight Series] "More than anything, the sky was red. It wasn't dark, no. Just red." Iolani Tori learns about the part of him that isn't human; and sees the line between animal and himself thin to something less than a thread. If...
