Her limbs felt heavy. They had been her home for years. Ter, at first, she had taken pity on a lonely rogue and shared the meager fuel she had managed to dig up. But Ackerus had been there when she had needed the support, any fight she started he would join her in. He always backed her play, even when he couldn't quite keep up or couldn't see the outcome being anything positive. She had just walked out on them. It was justified... it was, they didn't deserve having to deal with the substantial drain on resources she was. And deep down she knew, this was how it was supposed to be, she always ended up alone. It was just the way things had always been. But she didn't feel ready for it this time, she didn't want to take a territory and spend all day sleeping or defending it. It sounded tedious, and... lonely. She needed alone time, but not always. She needed to find a new pack. This was, however, easier said than done. She was, even among predacons, a beast. Most pack leaders were smaller than her and thus she was a massive threat to their status. She had no desire to lead a pack, far too much work, but none of the leaders would believe that.

There was only one pack that she had a chance with. She'd seen one of her sisters a few years ago, she'd hinted about a pack headed by their father. She had personally never met the creature, her mother spoke highly of him while she lived and told Alpha that she was practically a carbon copy of him, and remembering her mother Alpha was certain she got her abnormal size from him. If anyone would be willing to take her it would be him, or so she hoped. Her sister had said the pack in question lived on the highest mountain in the far north. It was no short trip, easily several days of travel, that is if she only ran. Lucky for her she was not ground bound, she was a flier. It was rare among beasts of her size, but it gave her a substantial advantage that she often forgot to use. There weren't many who could follow her into the air to fight, and she never ran.

She unfolded and raised her wings, tail sweeping, and charged off. She only needed a few strides of momentum for the air to take her up.

It was a full day of flying, she didn't set down, she didn't want to. She worried if she did she wouldn't start again, she'd give into ease of loneliness. She beat back the wind until she reached the edge of a staggering sea of white. The winds intensified here, she'd heard stories of preds crashing, losing their place in a burst of sudden and unexpected cold fronts. She couldn't lose her wings to a crash, she knew they never heal the same, her leg sure hadn't.

She landed heavily but no damage was dealt. She could see the mountains, she'd walk from there. She tried to go over what she'd say. What does one say or do to introduce themselves to a father they've never met? She shook her head, the wind was rippling through her ears in a way that made her audio receptors buzz, making it impossible to hear anything that wasn't a base roar. The wind tore scent away and ice kept it from sticking. It was like going in blind. She didn't like it but there wasn't a choice. She didn't have anywhere else to go, or anything else to lose. So out she wandered onto the ice coated planes.

It grew easier with time, she took to digging her claws in to fight the wind and keep from sliding around on the icier patches. The mountain was the backdrop of everything ahead, they hadn't seemed this far when she had just started out. She went back and forth in her mind on whether to stop. In the current conditions she wouldn't be able to detect an attack until it was upon her, but she was getting tired. She hadn't stopped in days, and if she didn't get her energy back and scrounge for some sort of fuel it wouldn't matter if she heard the attack coming a mile away, she wouldn't be able to fight back.

She glanced around, looking for any sort of cover from the wind. There were a few divots in the tundra, but there was a better option off to her right. It would take her off in a slightly different direction, but a few extra hours of travel wouldn't bother her. So she altered her course and got moving, finding it all a bit easier now that she had a much closer goal.

It looked like it too had once been a mountain that had been cracked down the center forming a massive valley. Alpha supposed it was possible if two hyper-preds had started something serious. She swatted the idea away. Hyper-preds were rare, besides there was nothing to even suggest there had been one around. Still as she started in she noticed tracks. She reached down to sniff them, useless in the wind. They didn't look all that fresh, but they weren't old enough for her to drop her guard.

She kept moving, the valley diverting more of the wind the deeper she got. She picked a spot about halfway through, digging into the side to make a spot just large enough to fit into. As she finished with the makeshift nest she looked up and actually focused on the wall for the first time. Glyphs! Alpha loved glyphs. A sort of hybrid of writing and picture drawing, each predacon had a slightly different style that they wrote in. Some relied more heavily on images, others used their talon scratches to signify some of the more common spelled words in the predacon dialect.

Alpha was good at glyphs, she had been reading them all her life and loved to add her own to cave walls or cliff faces when she had the chance. She always found she could pick up another pred's story from the way they wrote or what they wrote. It wasn't a skill that all chose to develop, and it was interesting to see what others thought was important enough to take the time to scribe.

These glyphs seemed old, but it could have been the exposure making it look twice its age. She began to interpret them:

"Long ago there were two, and together they were strong, but they were lonely. They wanted one to teach and to play..."

She stopped for a second. The images looked sort of familiar, the way they were drawn. Two predacons, both that looked rather basic with just four limbs a long neck and a tail. The words they felt like she had heard them somewhere else. Nevertheless she kept reading.

"They found their third one day, fallen into the mud, he was cold and small but full of fire. He joined them, it was difficult at first, but he followed them and tried hard. They were happy." It ended there. Just a short story about two preds adopting a younger one. Her ears flattened. She noticed another etching, this one had no images, it was just a name...

Her eyes softened and her joints felt weak. "Apollo." She leaned her head down, gently touching the top of her head to the word. "I'm sorry-"

"Like the story?"

Her eyes shot open, pupils thin as hair, already shaking with rage. She whipped around to face the voice, all her teeth on display in a bloodthirsty snarl.

A predacon remarkably close to her in size, plating that contrasted with the snow in its dark almost mud color. His purple optics locked with her from his place on the cliff a little ways up. "I'm not done with the ending," He bounded down to a lower ledge, then all the way to the ground. "I'm thinking of calling it the ballad of Apollo."

Alpha was practically glowing with rage, "You keep his name out of your mouth, bastard."

"Awe, that's hurtful. Don't you want the story to have a proper name and a good ending? How should I put it? I did after all write the rest of it so elegantly. 'And they all died horribly' work for you?" He growled, sneering at her.

She didn't have enough control left to answer. She plunged forward into him with a roar, tucking her chin into her neck hoping to impale him on her horns. He let her plow into him, he was certain he couldn't stop that, but he shoved her head to the side, shoving the deadly horns away from him and exposing the side of her neck. Before he could take a piece out of it though she thrashed her head to the side, clobbering him with it, leaving a deant she could be proud of.

Alpha raised her for limbs, deciding to go for quantity over quality of attacks. She hooked one set of claws into his chest but he caught the other arm and bit down hard. She stopped the slashing and planted her free forelimb, turning on it and slamming her hindquarters into his side, winding him and getting him to let go in favor of putting some distance between them.

"This isn't how I remember our last fight. There was a lot more energon." He taunted.

"I can fix that."

This time they both charged, and it started what Alpha had come to think of as a gore off. Each of them slashing, bashing and biting away at each other with only one goal in mind. Get the other to bleed out first. Both of them were mountain preds by descent, meaning they were bigger, stronger, and far more durable than most other variants. They had to be given the environments that had sharpened their kind. They had thick armor and heavy teeth. Claws cleaved heavy streams of energon. Tails crushed plating into contorted shapes and broke internal structure. Teeth tore through everything and the subsequent tearing away was powerful enough to rend any armor.

Each had their own advantages, her competitor had a large tail full of barbed spines and claws to match her own. Alpha had jaws that could crush through virtually anything and more power in her last few tail spines than most had in their whole body. Still the longer the fight went on the more severe the damage got, but there was one last variant. Alpha was a mountain pred of the north, and there was nowhere rougher than the northern mountains. That meant there was no one tougher than the preds that ruled it.

He got a grip on one of her folded wings and began to thrash in an attempt to pull it off. Alpha gritted her teeth and tried something new. She swiveled, shifted forward, then kicked out with both back legs straight into his side. It sent him flying into the cliffside hard enough to crack it. He didn't get up quickly, he was shaking as he tried to get his legs under himself.

Alpha gave herself a second to gather her strength, getting ready for the final blow. She watched him prop himself up against the cliff, "Time to end this." She growled.

His eyes widened, it was actually happening, she was going to kill him. No. Not here! He flung himself onto his feet and ran. His feet tried to fall out from under him, but he moved with speed he shouldn't have been able to call with the energon loss.

"Oh no no no. Get back here!" She wasn't going to let him just run away from this!

They left the valley, and he almost slid out in the ice. Alpha was a bit more careful with how she placed her paws and fell back a bit.

He suddenly stopped and swung around to face her, Alpha slid to a stop. This was it. She wouldn't let him see another day! "You can't outrun me Landslide. Stand your ground, let's end this."

"I don't think so." he rumbled, with what felt like an out of place grin. His mouth dropped open and a wave of blue flame rushed towards her.

Alpha bowed her head attempting to keep the flames out of her eyes. It was working, but Landslide's fire wasn't nothing. She could feel it chewing away at the top layer of her armor. She could try to make her way forward, it was a substantial amount of pressure, but she could make it if she tried hard enough. There was that, or she could just wait him out. No way he had energy enough to keep this up for too long. And in a few minutes she was proven right.

She raised her head as the fire died down, smoke rising off her plating. It had been hella hot but not enough to make it through her plating or to fuse anything important.

"That all you got?" She sneered.

He began to backup, the fear starting to become visible in his eyes. He was out of tricks.

She took her first step forward and froze. Somewhere beneath her something cracked, and they both seemed to realize what it meant at the same time. She tensed up, preparing to run, she got two strides away before it all gave out. The ground crumbled like sand, a whole opening up like a gaping mouth. As she went down she sunk her claws into the wall, slowing the fall. She still hit the ground pretty hard. It took a second to get her brain back together. She unfolded her wings as she stood, but they hit the walls before they were even halfway to full size. Fine, she'd climb then.

Landslide didn't dare get any closer. As much as he wanted to gloat, he wasn't going to risk losing this chance. Instead he reared up and crashed down, and reared and crashed, and reared and crashed. Over and over and over again. The ground began to crack again, and he grinned, perfect.

Something hit her back. What was that? Alpha looked up, realizing she had been intensely focused on where she was putting her claws. Her eyes widened, oh no. A barrage of ice chunks came raining down, some as large as her. When they connected they did almost as much damage as the fight. It put her on the ground with a substantial crash but they kept coming as the hole collapsed in on itself.

Alpha came to completely pinned. She couldn't move her head or legs, she could just barely shift her tail, but she had to try something. She thrashed dislodging one or two pieces at best. It wasn't helping, and it was burning off energy which she was rapidly running out of due to the oozing energon. She took a deep breath and stopped, stopped feeling, thrashing, fighting, and thought. Then it came to her, fire. She could melt her way out.

Her chest started to heat up then the cavern lit up blindingly white as the flames poured from her mouth. They melted the ice on contact, the water trickling down into the cracks. More and more melted, she started to gain her range of motion back.

-

She shifted her head, pushing some of the melting ice back creating a sort of tunnel around her neck and body. However the more she melted the more dripped down, beginning to fill the tunnel she had just started creating. She tried to ignore it and just keep melting, but as the water rose it eventually reached and began to fill her mouth. Usually that wouldn't have mattered, she would have vaporized the liquid on contact, but the massive drop in energon reserves lowered the heat. The fire fizzled as the water rose over her head.

Alpha tried to keep moving, tried to prevent the water from freezing. But she felt it starting at the bottom. It got cold, it got slow, then it froze altogether. It didn't happen all at once, which made it much worse. She couldn't do anything to stop it once her fire burned out, but she couldn't stop herself from trying, she couldn't just lay there and let herself die.

She put every ounce of strength she had left into her lashing. It wouldn't matter how exhausted or torn up she got if she didn't walk away. But slowly the cold closed in, everything turned to frozen black stone, and her eyes shut for the last time.