Blightcrest the Eternal King pushed through the last screen of saplings and stepped into the clearing with the duskleaper hanging from his beak.

  Blood and crushed fern hung in the air, sharp on his tongue. The carcass still twitched in little death throes, nerves firing along a spine that no longer mattered. Its pelt shone a clean gray, good muscle under thin spring fat. A respectable offering.

  The clearing did not smell of his Ward.

  He paused, one claw raised. Breath steamed from his nares. Emily’s scattered footprints was baked dry by sun and wind. Her scent clung to the leather and wool, but the living edge of it had faded.

  He dropped the duskleaper. It hit the ground with a wet thud. Flies rose from the shadowed grass, then settled again when he loomed over them.

  Of course she had wandered. Of course.

  He flared his wings, shook blood from the primaries and snapped his beak on the empty air.

  “Step away for the shortest of errands,” his feathered seemed to say, neck ruff standing on end. “Arrive bearing choice prey. Ward: missing.”

  He had been gone for no time at all. A brief, efficient excursion. There had been the first duskleaper—young, inattentive, snapped by the spine behind a log. A second that bolted, led to a warren, three more in panicked succession. Then the sharp tang of vole under snowmelt leaf-mold, a rewarding pounce, fur in his throat, the pleasure of cracking delicate bones. A fox that made the mistake of baring teeth instead of bowing. A flock of groundfowl he trampled for amusement more than hunger.

  He had eaten until his crop sat warm and heavy. Then he had remembered.

  His Ward does not hunt.

  Well, she “foraged.” Berries, roots, strange green things that curdled the air with their bitterness over fire. She required proper meat. She could not efficiently strip a carcass with those flat human teeth, so he had left this duskleaper mostly whole, only a few choice organs missing.

  An act of great thoughtfulness.

  He clicked his beak once in satisfaction at that, then narrowed one amber eye at the empty space where Emily ought to stand, hands on hips, making rude remarks about “disappearing for snacks” and “counting macros.”

  No Emily. Only trampled grass, her salty-metal scent baked thin.

  Blightcrest stepped round the footprints, talons tearing shallow furrows. He lowered his head to the earth. Beneath the musk of boar and old smoke he caught the clearer thread of her: iron, sweat, the faint bite of that oil she favored for cleaning her mail.

  Not quite the way he remembered her.

  His Ward had been brighter, once. Louder in gesture. Even under plate she had moved with a quick, irreverent lightness. Now, the impressions in the soil showed shorter strides, more weight on the right leg. Stagger marks. She had gone from here wounded.

  He thought of the last raid, or what his mind held as the last raid. Heat that rolled like a stormfront. The stone under his claws slick with melted resin and dragon spit. Party members screaming as the wyvern rose above them, scales casting everything in poisoned emerald light.

  The boss had not followed the pattern.

  It should have banked left, unleashed its breath along the outer ring, left the center safe. It had not. Fire had filled the world instead. His Ward had stood her ground for two heartbeats too long, shield up, the edges of her cloak catching like dry tinder.

  He still tasted the scorched wool. The air had turned to knives in his lungs as he hurled himself through the flame front, wings half-molten, hook of his beak closing on the back of her cuirass. He dragged her from the blast radius, away from char and liquefied stone and the stink of cooked comrades.

  He had reached her in time. In some sense.

  Yet she had lain oddly still afterwards. Her laughter muted. Her touch on his neck-plumes slower, as if he had turned to glass.

  Since then his memories came in snatches. Names slipped. Distances stretched or folded. Minutes buckled into days. Whole stretches of hunt went missing, while other details stood knife-crisp. The exact flake pattern on the wyvern’s blackened talon. The sound Emily made when she first burned—half curse, half breath ripped from her.

  Trauma, clearly. His noble brain had endured too much.

  He ruffled until his whole frame shivered, flung the thought aside, and bent to Emily’s trail.

  Her footprints led out of the clearing, deeper into the trees. Heavy at first, then lighter as if she had forced herself upright. Here, a smear of darker rust on a stone; her blood, dried. There, the gouge where something big and stupid had charged and met her. He tasted the weak pork reek of grumbleboar, and over it the same unbroken tang of her armor.

  He lowered his beak near a scuff of metal on bark. No burn. No sweet, throat-coating memory of dragonfire. The plates still carried that old scorched scent from the raid, baked in, but no new damage lay over it.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  If armor that had laughed in the face of wyvern breath still wrapped his Ward, then the forest offered her nothing she could not handle.

  He lifted his head, somewhat consoled. His Ward ran toward danger often. She also tended to emerge again, singed and complaining and still alive. This pattern had, so far, held.

  She should have informed him, of course. A short series of sounds to the effect of “I will move in this direction; remain,” would have sufficed. Humans lacked proper plume signalling; he could afford to give her grace.

  He stalked back to the duskleaper and picked it up, holding it almost daintily in his beak. Meat for the Ward, once he caught up. Praise, once she apologised. A reminder that a king did not appreciate being abandoned without notice.

  His claws rasped on stone as he left the clearing, feathers slicked tight, eyes bright with irritation and an almost fond resolve.

  Blightcrest followed the reek of plant sugar with mounting unease.

  Emily’s trail cut a staggering line through the undergrowth, footprints deep then shallow, right side dragging. Blood scent thinned as he went. In its place grew something rank and sweet, like overripe barkfruit left in a latrine.

  He pushed through a screen of hazel and found her.

  She sat slumped against an oak, helmet off, hair plastered to her skull with sweat and dirt. Her armor still held, though it had a few new dents. Across her lap lay a cracked glowgourd, its fibrous shell split, pale flesh scooped out with filthy fingers. The juice smeared her mouth and chin in sticky tracks.

  She raised a dripping handful and stuffed it between her teeth.

  Blightcrest stopped so hard his talons carved furrows. The duskleaper swung from his beak, limp and dignified.

  Ward.

  It left his throat as a sharp croak and a click that shook his skull. She jerked, hand flying to her sword hilt, eyes wild.

  “Beakly?”

  Her voice scraped raw. She scanned the trees, saw him, locked on. Her shoulders sagged, then snapped back up again, rigid.

  He stepped forward, feathers sleek, beak high. He dropped the duskleaper beside her with care. It landed heavy, an honest gift.

  She flinched at the thud. Her gaze slid from his face to the carcass and back. The muscle in her jaw jumped.

  “Two days,” she rasped.

  His nape ruff rose. He tilted his head, one golden eye on her, the other on the offensive glowgourd. Its scent crawled into his nares. Swamp lantern-nut. Emergency food for children and lost lambs. She had torn into it like a starving badger.

  “Do you have any clue how long you’ve been gone?”

  She shoved the half-emptied gourd away with her boot. It rolled, phosphorescence pulsing faint under the daylight, and came to rest against his talon. Pulp clung to the steel rim of her vambrace.

  He considered the angle of the sun, the dampness in the leaf litter, the stiffness in his crop. He had left in light. He had hunted through a nap, a pleasant chase, a brief territorial dispute. He had returned in light.

  A short hunt. His chest rumbled.

  Her laugh came out broken and too loud.

  “I counted. Forty-eight hours, Beakly. No water sources. Poison mushrooms. One suicidal boar. I thought you were dead. Or I was.”

  Blightcrest flared his wings, outrage prickling along each pinion. Leaves hissed under the gust.

  Accused. Of abandonment. Him.

  He, who had flown through dragonfire with his feathers alight. He, who had dragged this stubborn, brilliant, fragile creature from ten thousand bad decisions and three world bosses.

  “You left me for dead.”

  She pushed herself upright using the tree, armor ringing dully where it knocked bark. The motion cost her; sweat beaded fresh at her temples. Still, she stood in front of him, chin lifted, eyes hot.

  “You can’t vanish like that. Not when I can’t even cast basic heals.”

  He clicked his beak, sharp enough to startle a crow from the canopy. Her words slapped at half-healed parts of him. Time again. Always time.

  In the crystalline valley where he had chased frost-stags across three ridges and come back to a campsite stomped flat and a healer screaming in party chat. Outside the frost troll dungeon, where he had left to briefly strip the carcasses of some wolves, to Emily's outraged claims that "I can't leave the instance without a mount, goddammit!" and "It's been a day, the party has disbanded!"

  He understood distance. Territory. The clean arc of a migration route. Time, though, slipped. Minutes smeared into hunts. Hunts stacked into heartbeats. He blinked and seasons shed behind him like molted down.

  Humans pinned their lives to little ticks of sun and shadow and then panicked when those ticks misbehaved.

  He drew himself taller, shadow falling over her and the shameful glowgourd. Resentment flicked through him, then cooled into something older. Possession. Pity.

  His Ward trembled on her feet, exhausted and defiant and covered in plant slime.

  He chose dignity.

  Slow, deliberate, he reached down, grasped the duskleaper by its hindlegs, and dragged it closer until it lay against her boots. He released it and stepped back, head lowered, wings half-folded in a courtly dip.

  An apology, then. In the currencies that mattered.

  Emily’s nostrils flared. Fresh blood still slicked the wounds where his beak had entered. Steam ghosted up from the warm carcass into the cool air. Her stomach growled loud enough to make her wince.

  “That supposed to make it okay?”

  She nudged the rabbit-thing with her toe, but her gaze lingered on the thick muscle at its haunches.

  He bobbed his head once, emphatic. The answer shone obvious. Meat. Shelter. Continued protection. What more could a soft-skinned biped demand?

  “You vanish for two days and come back with a… bunny.”

  Her lips twitched, caught between snarl and hysterical laugh.

  “Of course you do.”

  Blightcrest eyed the glowgourd where it leaked pale strands onto the leaf mold. He made a low disdainful trill deep in his crop.

  Glowgourd. Ward. You fell to eating lantern nuts.

  He stepped sideways, talons grinding, body angling to herd her attention from the plant to the prey.

  Not everyone stalked well. Their teeth lacked proper edges. Their fingers lacked talons. Their depth perception faltered in rain. One could not blame domesticates for clinging to whatever fell from trees.

  Still.

  He watched her draw her dagger, hands clumsy on the hilt. She knelt by the duskleaper, resting for a moment with her forehead on its fur, then started to work at the hide.

  “Fine. Truce. But you pull that disappearing act again and we’re having roast Beakly for dinner.”

  The mangled insult of a name grated along his spine.

  Blightcrest.

  The title carried the rasp of wind over bone ridges, the crack of frost on an old cairn. Ancestral. Precise. Wasted on tongues that flapped meatily in their mouths.

  He had demonstrated the proper scream often enough. From rookery crags. Over stunned raid groups. Into the faces of presumptuous rogues and hunters. Emily always laughed and repeated some approximation that came out as “Beakly,” all blunt beak and no crest at all.

  He watched her now, bent over the kill he had brought, armor scorched, hair tangled, muttering under her breath while she struggled to open the hide.

  Superior specimen, among humans. Quick. Tenacious. Still could not taste the shape of his name.

  He huffed, lowered himself carefully to his belly beside her, and extended one talon to pin the carcass in place so her dull little blade could work.

  Limitations everywhere. It fell to kings to compensate.