Fire and snow: such is the answering shot the beach sends him, glimpsed at first as nothing more than movement. Caneo stills. The way the serpent goes when she scents prey — he stills. His long face snaps toward the swift-running thing at the right edge of his vision and his nostrils flare as if to suck in anything but salt, wet and raw. Caneo thinks the boy will smell of sand when he gets close enough — sand and heat and the red, red scent of the blood tree crowning the Throat. Something like a smile crawls up one side of the silver creature's face. "Oh, good!" he says, and his tail lashes like a living thing behind him.

He doesn't run to meet the boy. His narrow weight falls back onto his haunches instead, and the fine skin bulges with sinew as he stares, measuring, thinking. He must learn to think more, and quickly, if he wants to get better at this. Caneo sees: a body long and thin (but not like his), wings (but clamped), and springy, athletic muscle rippling beneath the two-colored coat. The boy won't hit as hard as the last one did, but everyone hits harder than Caneo does. He snorts, his forelimbs churning lightly at the sand, and then something happens.

Glinting plates slide up from the boy's leg to cover his chest, his flanks, his stomach, his every sensitive place. Is that armor? It shines like danger in the sun, and wincing, Caneo turns his body a little further to the right, saving at least one of his eyes the thrill of taking in this new opponent directly. Son of a bitch, Caneo thinks, and his next breath is a hiss, and the distance between them diminishes rapidly. There's but one good thing Caneo can think of, as his hind hooves dig into the sand and his own body hurtles forward at last: all that plating must be heavy. It ought to make the boy slow.

Caneo still smiles, just a little.

"Are you scared of me?" he asks just a stride before they meet. The laughter in his voice is mocking. And with the deft precision of one who has run many miles in sand, who knows the way it lies beneath his hooves intimately, he digs in and leaps toward Cera's left, away from the water, away from the battering ram of that armor-clad shoulder. The breath of the boy's movement catches in Caneo's mane; the edge of that wing just brushes his silver side as he glides nimbly past, avoiding the attack altogether and saving his eyes from staring directly into that stupid armor. He blinks rapidly as he throws his head down and his haunches up, leaving a parting gift in the form of a hard, sideways kick aimed at the boy's head or at that nearest wing, whatever happens to actually catch the cloven hooves. It isn't important what hits so long as it hurts.

just to watch them falling