Chapter 4 - The Pact

After Dusk's encounter with the creature that fell from the sky, he is saved by his father, along with several of the other elders in the colony. He returns to his nest to his waiting mother, Mistral. She talks to Dusk and Sylph about using the thermals to fly, and tells them not to do it again. Afterwards, an assembly of the colony is called by Dusk's father to discuss what had just happened. During the assembly, a secret that the elders had been keeping was told to the whole colony, after one of the elders, Nova, broke her vow of secrecy. The Pact, was an alliance that was made between the beasts (which seems to refer to anything that is not a dinosaur), which was aimed at completely eliminating the saurians from the world. The saurians were predators to the beasts, and as a result, the beasts lived in fear. Eventually, the beasts all decided to form an alliance against the saurians.

Although they could not physically attack the saurians, which were many times their size, they targeted the eggs of the saurians, hoping to wipe out the next generation of saurians. This all happened at the right time, as it was when the dinosaurs were on the edge of extinction, and when other animals began to flourish. This seems to refer to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs millions of years ago. Dusk's colony though, was different, in that the elders felt that The Pact was wrong, and so they decided to colonize on an island away from the mainland.

A saurian

This chapter is interesting, in that it reveals secrets which were previously not known to the members of Dusk's colony. The Pact reminds me of the Holocaust, in that there was a hatred towards a group, and through that fear and hatred, the beasts formed an alliance to destroy all saurian eggs, even the ones which were not meat eaters. Amidst all of that hatred though, there were some people who felt it was wrong, just like Dusk's father, and avoided participating in such acts.