#c:wulfric

Perhaps for the third time since he had sat down by the window, he pulled his dagger from the sheath at his thigh to busy his hands, running through the balance drills he’d learned from his blademaster as a youth. Easy as breathing.

Seax watched him flip the knife again and again, twirling it with the flat of the blade between his fingers, shifting his grip from forward to reverse. Then she said, “I know you’re eager to bloody your teeth, little wolf—” and in this she was wrong about him: he’d never been eager for blood, not really, just for anything to keep him moving— “but you’re going to drive me up the walls. Come here.”

He stilled the knife and pointed to the window, questioning.

“We don’t need to see him coming. If he shows, we’ll know.”

Wulfric supposed that was true. He shrugged, sheathing his dagger as he stood and crossed the short distance from the front of Eda’s home to her bed, which she separated from the rest of her place with a curtain Seax kept drawn back. At Seax’s invitation, he sat across the foot of the bed and kicked off his boots.

“She won’t mind us being in here?” he asked with some remnant of topsider modesty—or whatever it was Seax called it.

“I owe her a lot of favours, but still not enough that I’ll sleep on the fucking floor just to avoid her bed while I’ve got her good and cozy in my hideout.”

At that, Wulfric chuckled and stripped off his coat, boyishly satisfied when he managed to toss it over the back of Eda’s lone chair. Again Seax watched him, chin tucked in her palm, as he rolled up his sleeves. Without warning, she reached out to trace a finger over the thin band of black ink revealed just below his left elbow.

It wasn’t the first time an Ala Mhigan had touched his tattoos—he’d had enough lovers follow the lines on his skin to adjust from the feeling of wrongness to appreciating their touch, but Seax’s curiosity felt different. Sharp, like the rest of her; and he liked that about her, that rough loyalty that was conveniently devoid of affection. He simply hadn’t been prepared for it to come in contact with the still-raw Nhalmascan parts of him, even though she’d already bedded him more times than he could count.

“These are so strange,” she said, tilting her head as she studied the lines at the side of his neck. Her thumb brushed the pattern down the shell of his ear. “Are they from the glorious soldiering days? Battle marks?”

“What does it matter?”

Seax shrugged and dropped her hand to his lap. “Doesn’t,” she said, giving his thigh a squeeze. “Bloody touchy all the time.”

Unceremoniously, she shifted her weight to lean towards him and began to unlace his trousers. Wulfric raised his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“Passing the time,” Seax said simply, slipping a hand inside his trousers. “Why, you got a better idea?”

He shook his head. “Not one,” he said; his mind had very quickly emptied. “Carry on.”

“Good boy,” Seax said. She drew closer so that her mouth was close to his ear, but refused any reciprocal touch. “Hands to yourself. Remember: you’re done when I say.”

Wulfric bit back a reflexive aye, sir. With her, it was always better to say nothing.

/

(Marco had stuffed more coal into the stove than was reasonable in anticipation for his return; Wulfric saw the thoughtfulness in the gesture the moment he stepped inside the cellar, but didn’t comment on it. He never knew how to say the simplest things, these days.

“How was it?” Marco asked, sitting up in bed. The movement made Montblanc groan at his feet and huddle closer, laying his head on Marco’s lap with no acknowledgement of Wulfric’s entrance.

“Bad,” Wulfric replied wearily. He gestured to his half-soaked clothing, but said little more, not wanting his foul mood to infect Marco when he was so close to sleep. As he yanked off his boots, he said, “Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing to be said about Bernt’s incompetence that can’t wait until morning.”

Rather than watch Wulfric hop around on one leg while he peeled off his wet trousers, Marco leaned over the bed to toss him a dry pair. “Here. These’ll keep you warm while yours dry.”

“Thanks. Fucking freezing.”

Wulfric removed his shirt next and laid out his clothes to dry; for a moment he lingered in front of the stove, shivering as the heat warmed his bare chest and arms. He shook out the wet tips of his hair, too, fingers catching on the beads threaded into his braids.

“Hey, Wulf. Can I ask you something?” Marco asked carefully. He scratched Montblanc’s head with an idleness to his hands, just for something to do that wasn’t staring at the black lines under Wulfric’s shoulder blades.

“Of course you can.”

“Your tattoos. They mean something, don’t they?”

At first, Wulfric meant only to nod and leave it at that, knowing Marco wouldn’t push; instead he sat at the edge of the bed, folding his hands together, his thumb running back and forth across the line running down the center of his middle finger.

“They’re… my fate,” he said with something of a shrug, because he could think of no better word. “In Nhalmasque, we have seers; we seek them out before adolescence to hear a pronouncement on our fate, and then they draw our life lines on our bodies. We preserve them throughout our teenage years, and when we come of age, those we didn’t let fade get tattooed. I kept all of mine.”

Marco nodded, serious. “What did the seer say they were?”

“She didn’t. It’s up to us to give them meaning; some of them I’m still not even certain of.”

Wulfric could feel Marco’s eyes on his back, and the question he was too polite to ask.

“These I know,” Wulfric said, crossing an arm over his chest to tap a finger over his shoulder. “Avis and Gawain. I trust them with my back.”

“I get it,” Marco said, and Wulfric knew that he did—knew that he was thinking of Ashley and Élodie. If he was Nhalmascan, they might be lines on his back, too.

“Gav?” Wulfric shouted as he burst through the door. His boots crushed broken glass from the windows underfoot; there was smoke coming from the cellar. Panic set his lungs alight. “GAWAIN!”

A voice rose in answer; not Gawain’s, and not with words he could make out. Wulfric followed the cry outside, through the back door, along a trail of blood towards the shadows of the alley. He didn’t recognize her right away; not curled up onto herself like this, with half of her face mangled.

“He’s not here,” M’zahre said with a strange smile in her broken voice. Wulfric dropped to his knees beside her, but she pushed his hands away. “I told him to go home; he hasn’t slept in days. Rock-headed bastard was in with the Resistance to bring down the Mad King.”

“Fuck, M’zahre,” Wulfric said, his trembling hands still hovering over her bloody body. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

She shook her head as best she could. “That’s not gonna happen, boss. Go and keep your family safe. My man’s going to come for me.”

Wulfric didn’t know that that was true; neither did she. But still she said, “I’ll be fine! Go!”

He swallowed. “See you on the other side,” he said, finding her knee intact and giving it a squeeze before running off again.

He could have gotten lost and still known how to find the house by the crackling of magic that permeated the air, by the sharp smell of fire and smoke that had nothing to do with ceruleum: Avis was in the street with both hands raised high, holding a stormy barrier up against the sky. It covered half their neighbourhood—destructive force harnessed into protection. All her.

She could guard against magitek from above, but not the soldiers. That was Gawain, booming with anger, a bowgun in hand. And for a moment, Wulfric thought they might actually see this through, defend their home even while the whole world was falling apart around them.

He sprinted forward, breathless, knives in his hands. Then he heard something like a thunderclap, echoing loud in the dome of strange quiet granted by Avis’s magic—and he felt a burst of pain in his abdomen. He stumbled back and fell to his knees before he fully realized there were two bullets in his belly, and someone was shouting his name.

Avis’s voice cut through it all. “Frey, don’t—!” 

She’d married a woman almost as stubborn as she was. Freyja came into Wulfric’s view like pale starlight, her gentle hands on his burning body as she sank to the ground beside him and pulled him up against her.

“Get down!” Gawain shouted, and Freyja was bent over Wulfric as he loosed a volley of bolts into soldiers approaching from the mouth of the street. She cradled his head and held his hand, and it was wrong, he wasn’t supposed to—

“Frey?” Avis said breathlessly over her shoulder.

“He’s gravely wounded,” Freyja called back.

“I’m still breathing,” Wulfric said, fighting through the blinding pain thundering through him as he shifted to try and put himself between Freyja and danger. A stupid, reckless, tired smile worked its way onto his lips. “How many times are you gonna have to watch me die, hey, Highness?”

“You won’t die,” Freyja said. That was just for him, quiet and hard with fear.

“Sorry I made a mess of my rescue again.”

Freyja shook her head; the way she clutched his hand was more than just fear for the inevitable. “She’s tiring, Wulfric,” she said, her grave eyes darting over to Avis. “Saskia is inside. She’ll kill herself to protect her.”

Wulfric choked back a whimper as he moved again, stretching his legs out in front of him to try and sit up at the sound of heavy footsteps. When tried to hold an arm out in front of Freyja, she graciously took on the burden of much of his weight.

“I only see one way out of this. Through you,” Freyja said.

“I’m no use to anyone like this, Frey,” Wulfric replied quietly, the taste of failure thick and bitter on his tongue. All these years, all the fighting—all for this.

“If you had the strength to fight again, could you do it?”

“Planning on pulling those bullets out of me with your bare hands, Princess?”

“The queen’s magic,” Freyja said, and a wave of dizziness washed over Wulfric. “The Glaive’s magic. I could give it to you.”

Wulfric looked into her face, wide-eyed. The ground shook beneath them.

“What?”

“Could you do it?” Freyja repeated, more firmly this time.

“Yes,” Wulfric said breathlessly, unthinking as something surged through him—pushing against the white-hot chill of pain. Anticipation set his heart to racing.

Freyja’s hand tightened around his in what he next understood as an apology as it moved to his abdomen, pressing against his wounds. Wulfric bit back a scream; she touched her brow to his, her breath soft against the jagged scar on his cheek. And when she spoke, they were not Queen Eivor’s words, nor Freyja Emery’s—they were those of Celes Altius, the Oracle, his queen. 

“Blessed Stars of life and light—” she began in a soft voice, an achingly familiar prayer that gave way to the firmness of one who knew how to commune with the gods themselves— “I, Celes, daughter of the last queen of Nhalmasque, beg of you a knight. Deliver us my champion, Wulfric of Clan Greyhunt.”

When she poured the magic into him, Wulfric did scream. His vision sparked, black and sylleblossom blue; his whole body burned in an instant as power rent his veins and took up every space, every last hollow inside him. For a moment, he thought he had died once more as he felt the touch of the Stars themselves, unfathomable and ancient. Already once they had denied him, when Ysbrand’s corpse had been weighing his own broken body down, and now—

You again.

There was only complete and utter clarity in their wake.

He raised his hand and threw a burst of lightning down the street, stopping the advancing magitek weapon in its tracks—and he sprang to his feet as though he were thirty years old again, as though he hadn’t had two bullets inside him moments ago, breathing through the exhilaration.

“Wulf,” Gawain said.

“I’m fine,” Wulfric called back. He helped Freyja to her feet, holding her hands tightly in his—there were no words to say what he felt towards her in the moment—as he guided her towards Avis. “Let go of the barrier and get your wife inside,” he said to her.

Avis looked at him with dark eyes, unwilling to lower her guard at first—but she trusted him more than he ever thought he might deserve from her, and she was exhausted. Her hands shook as she dropped her arms and surrendered. The noise of chaos was deafening in the absence of her barrier, closer than ever.

“I’ve got the neighbourhood,” he said. “All of you inside. Gav, make sure she saves her strength—last resorts only. And keep that crossbow close.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Gawain said.

“I know,” Wulfric replied with a smile. He glanced over his shoulder at the mouth of the street again; the magitek weapon was still crackling with electricity, but it wouldn’t stay down for long, and neither would more soldiers be far behind. When looked back to Gawain, he knew this was a farewell; Gawain knew it, too.

“Come back to us, brother.”

“Wait for me.” Wulfric pulled his hood over his head and secured his mask over his nose, giving a single nod. “For hearth and home.”

With one last look at his family, he took up his dagger, and then he threw it down the street—and his body followed, leaving only sparks of magic in his wake.

For the first time in over two decades, Wulfric was whole.

/

The battle had already taken him halfway across the city when he first stumbled at the end of a warp—as though he were fighting Ysbrand again, Ysbrand who understood his mind and his instincts and would swat his daggers away to sabotage his jumps. But his blade had gone down his chosen path; it was his body that half-resisted the jump. Wulfric ducked under the swipe of a gunblade, threw his dagger to strike into the imperial’s neck, and it felt as though the jump had taken strips of his skin away.

Blood slicked his hands, almost cold against the white-hot sparks of magic crackling beneath his flesh. And he knew, intimately, that it was not Freyja’s gift failing him. 

When he threw his dagger to jump to a rooftop, nausea gripped his belly like a bad memory; he came up short of the roof thinking not now, not now, threw again, and then he was freefalling as his body refused to answer, just for an instant—long enough for his heart to thrum with panic before he was barreling across the roof. He scrambled to his feet with the weight of his years on his shoulders and saw the size of the pursuit below.

More imperials on him meant they weren’t in the streets after the more vulnerable, but he wasn’t going to get out of this; not with exhaustion sinking into his limbs, with his body’s growing resistance to the one thing that made it alive. He conjured fire and launched it down at the bulk of the imperials, and it singed his fingers.

Wulfric ran across the rooftop to lead them farther away in their chase of him, feeling the blinding white of their searchlights on his back; he warped back down into the street and, soon after, felt a trickle of blood from his nose. His breathing was starting to burn in his lungs.

He had to duck behind a mass of rubble as gunfire cracked through the air, panting as his flesh remembered the so recent puncture of their bullets—and then it stopped, and he heard their comms screeching awake.

“All units cease fire. Ala Mhigo is fallen.”

Wulfric wanted to laugh, wild and frantic with the grief of what he already knew but couldn’t face.

“Repeat, all units cease fire. First cohort, report to the royal palace to await the orders of Gaius van Baelsar, viceroy to the imperial province of Gyr Abania. Second cohort, begin patrol and restore order in the streets. All remaining insurgents are to be summarily executed.”

You are out of time, Deathseeker.

I know.

Wulfric closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the rubble, drained of everything he had left. All that remained to him was surrender—but he wouldn’t surrender to Garlemald. Not in life, and not in death.

He dragged himself back to his feet and, with the last of his strength, slashed his dagger in an upwards arc through the air, cloaking himself from the imperials’ eyes. He didn’t have to look down at himself to know that it was more a shivering mirage than a proper cloak, but that didn’t matter; all that did, now, was that he could make his way out of the city before they caught him.

He could have gone home—back to Avis and Freyja’s and Gawain’s, to see them all one last time, but he didn’t want Saskia’s last memory of him to be the broken, disfigured shadow he was now. Better it be whatever she remembered now, the uncle she had known when he could bring himself to be with his family.

And Gawain would find his body when he didn’t return. He would know where to look.

The sun was beginning to rise from behind the smoking wreck of the city; it lightened the sky across the lochs, grey-blue and without stars. Wulfric let go of the last of the cloaking magic clinging to him as the rise of the hill came into view, or maybe it wore away—he didn’t know. He only knew how weary he was, how badly he wanted to breathe without the taste of blood in his mouth.

Somehow, he managed to climb the hill with the very dregs of his strength, stumbling the last few steps to the lone tree—the one whose roots had known Marco’s ashes.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Hope you don’t mind that I rest the old bones here a bit.” 

He settled down with difficulty on the ground, in the cradle of two roots, and pressed his back to its trunk. A breeze rose from the waters: a westerly, pushing away the smoke and bringing salt up to his lips. His eyes fluttered closed, if only for a moment; when he opened them, the sky was awash with pinks and oranges.

“I’m glad Ashley picked you a nice view,” he said, blinking away tears he hadn’t shed for Marco in a long time. He pressed his lips together; it pulled stiffly at the pinched skin of his scar. “I hope him and his are all right.”

It was what it was. Wulfric didn’t have enough left in him to wallow in what was lost, in his failures; he simply closed his eyes and decided, for once, to feel peace for having come to the moment he had waited for since he was eighteen years old.

CODA

“Come on, old man.”

The girl was patting his cheek and tugging at his arms, her struggle against his weight evident. Dead weight, and her a scarecrow, not yet twenty.

He wasn’t dead yet, because he said, “Neesa?”

“Yyyup. Gonna help me help you, or what?” When he didn’t move or answer, she groaned out an exasperated breath. “Look, Auntie would kill me if she knew I was out here for you, so let’s crack on.”

Everything hurt, but with Neesa’s help, Wulfric managed to get himself to stand. She wrapped a skinny arm around his shoulders and stroked his hair, supporting him against her own weight.

“There. Let’s get you home, Gramp.”

Wulfric looked back at the tree one last time as though expecting to see his body still nestled among the roots, slowly rotting away atop the hill; but there was nothing but grass, disturbed by his and Neesa’s footsteps.

“I don’t…” Wulfric said weakly, trailing off for lack of an actual answer. “Sir, this is not a good time. I put in my leave request in due form; you should have gotten it.”

“You had your friends submit your request,” Ysbrand corrected.

“I did the paperwork,” Wulfric said. 

Normally, there would have been great irony in that; the fact that he had done paperwork of his own free will should have been enough to show how bloody desperate he had been for that leave. Getting the paperwork to Ysbrand’s desk had been a step that was simply beyond him to take at that moment.

Ysbrand, at the very least, saw the irony without Wulfric having to point it out himself. “You can see, then, why I would be concerned. My most unmanageable Glaive meekly submitting a request for leave out of the blue isn’t something I see every day.”

“Thought you’d be glad to get rid of me,” Wulfric said flatly. Ysbrand smirked in his place. “I needed time after that last assignment. That’s all there is to it.”

It wasn’t unusual, either; most Glaives took time after long assignments, because the queen wanted them functional, not ragged. But Wulfric didn’t get ragged; he didn’t use most of the leave he was granted. That was why Ysbrand knew him best: he was always underfoot.

Though he had been given no invitation, and Wulfric largely would have preferred he left, Ysbrand took a seat on the settee across from Wulfric’s unmade bed—at least, he sat on the very edge of it, like a man who didn’t intend to stay long.

“You’re not well, Wulfric,” he said, looking at Wulfric with grave keen eyes that made him nauseous.

He tried to keep it together. He really did. “I’m fine,” he said insistently. “I need a few days’ rest, and then I’ll be back on duty and you’ll be threatening me with court-martials like I never left.”

“First you’d have to sleep,” Ysbrand pointed out.

“Been watching at my window, have you?” Wulfric said tauntingly, because he wasn’t well, but he wasn’t dead yet. And, in an echo of that day Ysbrand first gave him the name of Deathseeker: “Do you do this to all the Glaives, sir?”

“You know I don’t.”

He did know. Ysbrand didn’t need to watch at his window to know he wasn’t sleeping; there were the obvious parts, like the circles underneath his eyes and the ash of his complexion, but Ysbrand knew because he spent no time making any other Glaive into a weapon like he did with him. Not Avis, young as she was, because she had enough power to bring down a storm even without the queen’s blessing; not Gawain, too blunt an instrument to be what Ysbrand was making Wulfric; not even Reiver, that little brown-nosing shite, ever transparent in his ambitions to be the captain’s second.

Wulfric didn’t care to be his second; that was too much responsibility. He just wanted to fight, and be something to someone. But sometimes even that was too much.

“Listen,” Ysbrand said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees so that his hard gaze was even more difficult to ignore, catching Wulfric like a fish on a hook. “I know what this last assignment took out of you. I know it’s unbearable to you, Garlemald. The Empire. But I’ll put the choice to you as many times as it takes.”

“Don’t,” said Wulfric; he knew where this was going.

“You can lie down and let yourself die or you can fight so that what happened to Nhalmasque doesn’t happen here,” Ysbrand said, unrelenting. “Knowing what your sister did for you—”

Wulfric’s whole heart seized. “Don’t you dare—”

“—I think the choice she would want you to make is clear.”

“Get out,” Wulfric snapped, his fingers tight around the hilt of his dagger—her dagger. Then, even more sharply, “Sir.”

Ysbrand stood, and Wulfric was in too much of a storm to see the smug, satisfied look on his face. “Get your shit together, Greyhunt,” he said, and flicked at the flat of Wulfric’s blade with a dainty ding of nail against metal.

“All right, hero,” Reiver said with a snort. “Sure you will.”

Fear fluttered through Wulfric’s body almost at once, but he didn’t back down. Why would he? It was only a few warps. And facing down an angry, sharp-taloned, quintessentially Ala Mhigan killing machine.

“Wulf,” said Gawain. “Don’t be daft.”

“It’s fine,” Wulfric said, peeling off his uniform jacket to roll up his shirt sleeves. “They’re trained not to kill Mhigans, aren’t they?”

“No, they aren’t,” said Ashwin. And Reiver, at the same time: “Well, you’re not.”

Wulfric flashed Reiver his most insouciant grin. Avis grimaced at him as he handed her his jacket, holding it by the collar between thumb and forefinger.

“What’re you taking that off for?” she asked. “Hoping that griffin rider of yours will come ‘round right as you’re taming his beast, muscles rippling?”

The Glaives booed and flicked sand at him, as they had when first finding out he had slept around with the enemy.

“You know what, Avis? Bite me.”

“I’ll make sure to get in line behind the griffin, then.”

Gawain smacked her on the arm. Wulfric stepped closer to the tower, slipping his dagger from its sheath; for good luck, he pressed his lips to the flat of the blade, his eyes trained on the contre-jour silhouette of the griffin against the sky.

No time to think, or to dread, or to find a less stupid solution. He threw his dagger and began the chain of warps to take him up to the top.

He heard, distantly, through the rush of wind in his ears and the thrill of magic surging through him: “Right, ten gil on him losing a finger. Who’s with me?”

Wulfric let his comrades’ voices fade away, slipping only into his body; into that brief moment between warps where he fell and didn’t fall. His heart didn’t start racing until his feet were on the tower and the griffin was in front of him—the closest he’d ever come to one of them, and if he hadn’t understood their power then, he did now.

When it screeched at him, Wulfric damn near fell back on his arse.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said gently, sheathing his dagger that he might hold his empty hands out. Not in reach of its beak—he wasn’t that stupid—but to at least display some absence of threat. “It’s all right.”

The griffin’s eyes were wild with fury; it beat its wings again, raising a great gale that stung Wulfric’s skin, and shrieked as it tugged on its bindings. Gawain was right: its left hind leg was caught in the grille at the center of the tower, the talons twisted between the bars. It looked painful as all hells.

“I’d be raging, too,” Wulfric said. He tried to step closer, only for the griffin to snap its beak at him, very nearly catching the edge of his shirt.

And then it swiped a talon at him, and he did fall back on his arse in his haste to avoid it. His heart was in his throat; on his back, he was vulnerable, even with the griffin unable to pounce on him. But it could have, and that put the fear of the sunless sea in him.

“Look,” he said breathlessly as he scrambled to his feet, pressing a hand to his chest. “I’m not even Ala Mhigan by birth.”

The griffin made a sound that he could only call a snarl. This time, instead of blindly throwing himself right at a raging beast, Wulfric stepped slowly to the side in the hopes of eventually placing himself in reach of the grille. But for now, he kept himself firmly in the griffin’s field of vision.

“D’you know what our emblem is, back where I come from? A flower. A pretty blue flower.” The griffin snapped at him again. “Not some vicious, sword-wielding fucking bird born out of a dragon-god, or whatever the story is, fucking superstitious Ala Mhigans—”

He sighed to stop himself, dropping his hands; the griffin stilled, flapping its wings in a gesture almost like a shrug.

“My home’s gone, you know?” Wulfric said softly. “The Empire came, and it just…” Grief was thicker in his throat than fear as he closed his eyes, just for a moment. If this is how I should die, let me die now. And still he opened them. “It wasn’t the Empire then, just Garlemald, but it became. With us.”

One step forward. Two. The griffin watched, dark-eyed. “And that’s why I’m here. I love Ala Mhigo, you know? I want to fight for it. I want to fight for you. So just—help me. Let me help you.”

He reached a hand out again, in reach of the beak, but the griffin still only stared. His fingertips touched its feathers, soft and bone-white. “Like it saved me, yeah?”

A screech pierced his ears; he felt that cutting gale on his skin again, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t lost any of his extremities. His hand was pressed wholly against the griffin’s flank now, and he felt the rush of fear wash down his limbs.

“That’s a good boy. We’re all just friends here,” he whispered, babbling through his trepidation. “Just all good Mhigan mates.”

Finally he reached the griffin’s hind leg, his palm flat against the griffin’s feathers to feel its breath and the shifting of muscles underneath his hand, and he could see where the razor-sharp talons had caught in the grille.

“I’m gonna get you out of there now. So don’t eviscerate me when you’re free, all right?”

Wulfric got to work, crouching down by the grille. The single talon was larger than both of his hands put together; he was keenly aware of how vulnerable he was in this state, and it made him itch for his daggers—but that was how the griffin felt, too, wasn’t it? 

There was blood on his hands as he slowly worked the talon back through the grille. That poor beast was hurt, afraid, and furious with it. He could understand that well enough.

The moment it was freed, the griffin loosed a triumphant shriek and leapt up into the sky, wings open wide. Wulfric fell back on his arse again; he heard his comrades below for the first time since his first jump, exclaiming and whistling up at him.

He let himself collapse atop the training tower, his back flat against the grille, his breath and limbs shaking with residual fear and triumph. And a laugh bubbled up from his lungs, breathless, as he shielded his eyes from the sun to watch the griffin fly over Ala Mhigo.