Pacific Rim’s call from across the Bay yanks Fell from his thoughts. His head snaps up, and it only takes him a moment to register her tone before he bursts into motion. His feathered hooves dig into the cold black earth and kick clods of it behind him as he claws from a standstill and into a gallop. His first thought is that the huge Lagoon stallion from the flood has followed Rim and Uprising back to the Bay, intent on taking what he feels he may be owed – the mare and foal he saved from the raging waters.As he races toward the call of distress, Fell feels oddly responsible; he might have avoided this if he had turned around with Axefall in tow as soon as he had gotten the scarred blue roan and their child situated at home.

As soon as he sees the intruders, however, his guilt is vaporized in the inferno of outrage at the attacking horses. The fact that there seems to be a strike team instead of just one lone male does nothing but fuel his anger. He recognizes none of them, and doesn’t pause to consider their motivations for disrupting his mare and newborn as he comes barreling past Rim and into the fray.

He crashes into what he assumes is the leader. The stallion shoves Rim, causing her to stumble over Uprising, but before he can even right himself for a second strike Fell is on him. The Marwari stallion throws himself bodily against the leader, the chiseled corner of his shoulder jamming deep into the dense muscle of his enemy’s chest. As he makes impact, Fell’s head comes down like the swing of a hammer, and his jaws clamp to the leader’s crest.

There is a breathless moment where it is clear he has taken the intruding stallion by surprise. By the time he realizes what’s happening, Fell is throttling him like a dog with a rabbit, tossing the weight of him from side to side. Fell is not so huge or freakishly strong as to be able to actually pick up the other stallion – he can’t even lift hard enough to part one hoof from the ground – but he is strong and frenzied enough that he undoes the stallion’s balance in a terrible way, and his neck is wrenched horribly one way and then the other as Fell shakes him.

After what feels like an eternity of scrabbling hooves and snarling, angry breaths, the opposing stallion comes to his senses and quits resisting the upward tension and seasick undulating of Fell’s abuse. Instead, he drops his weight down, popping suddenly from Fell’s teeth and then standing up straight again. Fell knows that escape must have hurt, because he is left with a sizable chunk of bloodied mane in his jaws, along with a not insignificant amount of tattered flesh.

With their leader out of Fell’s frenzied grasp, the bewilderment seems finally to leave the other three intruders, and the fight begins in earnest. Fell spins, firing off kicks and bites and forehoof strikes to keep the other three at bay, but his focus never truly leaves the roan stallion. His cruelest and most damaging blows fall on that one; the ringleader, the instigator, the cornerstone. If he can just take him out, the others will surely flee.