Prologue: The Last Days of Poisonmaw
Rain viscous with flameworks’ ash fell upon Poisonmaw, staining the redwood forest. The ink of opinical progress soaked into red bark, green leaves, and exposed mountainside, leaching them of color like they were fresh saltpeter.
The miasma clung to fur and feathers, denying the saberbeak pride flight. Gryphlets screamed for help, scrambling up trees with their small claws. The youngest, Hatzel, used the raw, aching sabers on her beak to pull herself up in hops.
Below, a weald monitor leapt after her, catching the downy tuft of Hatzel’s tail before the saberbeak pride leader barreled into the reptile. Lizard and gryphon wrestled in a puddle of black rainwater, and the gryphlet’s savior disappeared beneath the bitter floodwaters.
The fanged mouth of the lizard breached the surface, eliciting a gasp from Hatzel, but the light was gone from its eyes. The pride leader pulled himself from the water, tossing the monitor’s head at the base of the tree.
Ten more saberbeaks followed Hatzel’s squeaks for help through the mist, each carrying a gryphlet. The denfather wiped rain from his eyes, as red as everyone else’s. Four soaked saberlets clung to his body.
“We need to abandoning the hunting grounds.” Their leader spat black rain as he spoke. “We need to follow The Crawl south, to the weald. There’s still half the migration to go, and the monitors are starving. We won’t get a moment’s rest if we stay here.”
The denfather grabbed a soaked gryphlet in his beak, tossing her to one of the hunters to hold. “If we abandon our home, we’ll never get it back. You think the ash is bad when the winds shift, imagine what it’ll be like when the opinici move in.”
The lead hunter growled his agreement. “There’s no reason for the weald prides to take us in, let alone share their food.”
In the inky depths of the storm, a large parrot let out a skraark that was silenced halfway through. The hissing of monitors fighting over a meal was barely audible over the thunder.
“The weald will take us in.” The gryphon leader spoke with practiced confidence. “The monitors are migrating south, and if there’s one thing saberbeaks are good for, it’s killing lizards. They need us.”
Hatzel descended from her redwood perch, hopping down the last few feet. Her downy feathers, useless for flying, were soaked through and did nothing to cushion her fall. The roll of thunder hid the rumbling in her stomach.
While the adults argued and the other saberlets clung to them for warmth, Hatzel approached the decapitated lizard. Her stomach rumbled again, eclipsing the storm, and she opened her mouth to chew on the creature’s head. Her sabers punctured the skin but were too soft to get into the skull, but its blood filled her beak.
An even bigger sabered maw picked her up, the tip of his beak scruffing her neck, and the pride leader pulled her from her meal.
When he spoke, his voice was the whisper of the wind between leaves, audible only to her. “We kill them, Hatzel, but we never eat them. No matter how hungry, you must not eat a monitor.”
But its blood was already inside her.
Hatzel awoke from her fever atop the pride leader and looked out at the weald, The Crawl and Snowfeather Highlands far behind them. A soft mist of clean water came off the Summer Falls. Redwoods here were less dense than back home, and where light found purchase between the breaks in the canopy, rimu trees grew up, bright red olives adorning their pine-like leaves. She felt something in her mouth and bit down instinctively, her beak aching against the bone of a goliath bird.
“Hungry,” she squeaked, throat scratchy from drinking black rainwater, but the pride leader ignored her.
The goliaths of the Snowfeather Highlands were tough prey, sticking to the dense aneda forest and avoiding the open mountains where a gryphon might dive down and catch them unawares. Most days, the saberbeak pride would relish the challenge. Smaller gryphons may require an aerial ambush to take down large prey, but saberbeaks knew how to use the forest to their advantage.
These weren’t better days, however, and the coughing alone would give everyone away. Several groups had been forced to stay back and rest, each with a healthy hunter to watch over them while they slept so no monitors caught them unaware.
“These’re copperhawk lands,” the denfather coughed. “We don’t need the Copper Pride, we need medicine gryphons.”
The pride leader stood tall, not hunched over like the sick members of his pride. “We won’t reach the medicine caves without permission from the weald or taiga, and the taiga won’t give it to us.”
Hatzel clung tighter. She’d never seen a gryphon that wasn’t a saberbeak. Her brief life had been lizards, rain, and saberbeaks. Grooming, eating, and playing.
The pride leader felt her moving around and reached a paw back to pull her off of him. “Take a breath and hold it.”
Hatzel, like all saberbeak gryphlets, obeyed without thought. If an adult told her to do something and she didn’t, she could be eaten by a lizard. Though in this case, he dunked her under the water coming off the Summer Falls, shaking her a little beneath the surface, and pulled her back up.
The black ash of flameworks rain came off her and drifted downstream.
“Wait, that’s my shadow!” she shouted, trying to squirm out of the pride leader’s grip to catch it.
He laughed, seeming to surprise himself as much as her. “No, no. That was an opinicus’s shadow that got stuck to you. Let me get you to the grass. Look here, in the sunlight. Your shadow’s still there.”
Hatzel lifted up a small paw, and her shadow did the same. Her tail swished back and forth, and her shadow was similarly playful. She reached down and put her paw against her shadow’s face to comfort it, but the pride leader picked her up and began to lick her dry.
“Urmph,” she protested, earning a laugh for her displeasure. “Don’t want to lose my shadow.”
His paw lingered on her hot forehead. “Is this a problem you often have, Little Paw? I always thought our shadows to be brave, sticking by us even in our worst moments.”
“Your shadow may be brave, mine’s not,” little Hatzel protested.
He began to dry himself. “That so?”
“It’s afraid of the dark.” She spoke it as fact. “When I explore caves, it doesn’t come with me.”
His laughter came again. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right!” She didn’t appreciate his tone and felt a need to prove she was as capable as the adults were. Her shadow may be a coward, but Hatzel was not. “I’m two seasons old now. I’m not dumb like I was last season.”
The look he gave her had a sadness in it she didn’t understand. “When we say a season, we mean a full cycle of all seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter.”
“That’s dumb. If they’re seasons, that should count as four. I thought I would be flying by now.” She evaluated the new information. “Hold up, you’re saying I have to wait eight little seasons for my adult feathers? I can’t wait that long to fly!”
He shook his head. “No, no. Not at all! Come, fly with me. Let us go see the copperhawks.”
The pride leader tossed her onto his back and leapt into the air. She clung tight and let the weald air peel the last moisture from her fur. The cool of the water and sky felt good on her warm head. She looked out for any copperhawks, but exhaustion came over her, and she began to drift off. She didn’t even wake as she started to fall and he moved her into his paws.
“They’re gone.” The denfather’s words awoke Hatzel.
She reached for the pride leader’s neck, but he’d set her down in some moss. Her head ached, and her paws burned like they were made of wildfire.
Through swollen eyes she looked around. The Copper Pride’s home wasn’t all that different from her own. Redwoods were everywhere along the mountains, though the vegetation was thicker this low. Back home, the saberbeaks had cleared out a lot of smaller plants to keep monitors from hiding in them. Judging by the blood stains and drag marks leading out of the burrows, the copperhawks should have done the same.
Her pride leader came out of the main burrow, shaking his head. “There aren’t any survivors.”
“I don’t like it,” the denfather said. “We should go to the medicine caves now. It’s not safe on the ground.”
All around him, the hunters drooped. The short flight from the Summer Falls had taken its toll. Hatzel could relate. Despite her brain telling her this area was dangerous, she couldn’t stay awake any longer. She drifted off to sleep, and when she awoke, again, her pride was missing several members, and the pride leader was carrying her again.
Hatzel awoke with a cough at the entrance of a deep cavern. A dozen gryphons hacked back in response while others, perhaps three times their number, were too weak to even do that much.
Her head pounded, and she lowered it again. Someone had soaked moss in aneda and placed it by her beak. The bitter smell and taste coated her tongue, hiding the inky taste of flameworks ash.
She loved trees, but aneda were the worst. They smelled of medicine, and their resin clung to her fur. For all of her short life, she’d been warned not to climb too high in Poisonmaw. To turn back if she saw aneda. Now her head was afloat in their perfume.
The sick around were unlike she’d imagined. Gryphons with long, feathered tails clustered together near the entrance to the cavern. Where the sunlight came in, the brown feathers of a sleeping copperhawk shone. Beautiful gryphons akin to songbirds in blue, white, and black slept nearby. Wherever she looked, everyone was different, but none looked like her.
She pushed herself, not quite able to stand, and stretched her neck to look around until she saw another saberbeak.
Her pride leader spoke to a gryphon with a fluffy mane of feathers that scraped on the cavern floor. The stranger’s eyes were light, the pupil barely visible, and her tail ended in a tuft much bushier than a saberbeak’s.
“We’ll do what we can,” the greymane’s voice was honey on bark, “but there are no promises to give. Only one gryphlet has recovered, and another might just barely make it, but we’ve found no treatment.”
The pain of trying to stand set off spasms, and Hatzel’s body twitched with pain. She screamed and blacked out.
Hatzel awoke in a smaller cave, her head on a fresh bed of aneda-soaked moss. Her body, however, floated in a pool of frigid water. Her headache appeared to be gone until a nearby parrotface skraarked to let the medicine gryphons know she was awake.
“Urmph,” she mumbled, closing her eyes again. Though she could tell the water was cold, even moreso than the snowmelt-fueled Summer Falls, it felt good against her body. There was pain, but she didn’t feel like she’d swallowed a forest fire anymore.
When she finally opened her eyes again, she wasn’t greeted with the sight of the loud parrotface. Instead, a taiga gryphlet stood in front of her.
His eyes were the prettiest, bluest things she’d ever seen. The water reflected in them, sparkling like a mountain river. His tail, long and fluffy, twitched playfully behind him, and his ears were forward, at attention.
“I told them you’d survive, but they didn’t believe me. You seem like a fighter.” He pushed some sort of sparkling blue berry towards her, and she opened her beak. “Wait, don’t eat it! It’s a bead of blue topaz. My denmother bought it off an opinicus when I got sick. She put it under my nest and told me it’d keep me alive. Stupid, right? But I put it under your nest, and now you’re alive. So maybe we’re not the stupid ones.”
Hatzel had no idea what he was rambling on about, just that she was starving, and it looked a lot like a magical starberry to her. Surely, if it had healed her a little under her mossy headrest, it could do even more inside her tummy where the fires hid.
She rallied her brain to the cause, asking it to really think through the implications of eating a magical berry, then begrudgingly closed her beak. The moss had been piled high enough that, with it under her chin, her sabers just barely touched the floor.
A dozen paw steps echoed from the nearby hallway. Hatzel’s head ached too much for her to turn and greet the newcomers, but she could hear them whispering amongst themselves.
“Should we tell her?” a feathermane asked.
“I can’t believe she’s alive,” another mumbled. “I just thought she was taking longer to die, and the other little ones seemed happier with her around.”
Hatzel’s ears automatically turned back to listen, and the greymane she’d seen talking to her pride leader hushed the others.
“I heard ’em say your name’s Hatzel.” The fluffy white taiga gryphlet lowered himself into the water and began to push her onto a bed of dry moss. “You can call me Vosk. Welcome to the survivor’s den.”
Hatzel was a full head taller than any other saberbeak she’d known. The sabers on her beaks, once too soft to puncture the head of a weald monitor, could now cleave it in two. After years of being too weak to walk, of fevers and shivering and having Vosk feed her pieces of goliath meat until she recovered, she had become a full member of her pride.
Not that there was a saberbeak pride anymore.
The old Copper Pride’s winter burrows, home of the copperhawks, were splashed red with the blood of gryphons and reptiles.
But only outside. Large boulders blocked the gryphlets in the burrows from being attacked. Each year, the monitor migration became a little smaller. The weald gryphons had felt safe, up until this last one.
At least the gryphlets are safe inside.
At her feet, the saberbeak pride leader coughed. “It’s an easy shift. They’ll go from saying the last saberbeaks to just the last saberbeak.”
Tears fell from Hatzel’s eyes, but she didn’t interrupt him. The monitor plague, as they now called it, had claimed most of her pride. The others had died trying to protect a small strip of hunting grounds up north, the first to get attacked when the migrations started. It had been three seasons since the last saberbeak death. Her pride leader had been there at the beginning, and she’d thought he’d always be here.
Nearby, the body of a copperhawk with a long, feathered tail stopped breathing. He’d leapt to the pride leader’s aid, but copperhawks were small things, and it only took two bites for a lethal dose of monitor venom.
Hatzel had been protecting the burrow entrance. She’d been ordered not to leave it for any reason. A single weald monitor was dangerous, but their mismatched pride of survivors had learned the hard way that when the adult gryphons’ attention was on the giant weald monitors, their mountain and arboreal kin would take advantage of the situation to attack the nests.
“It’s up to you now,” the pride leader continued. “You’re young, but so’s everyone else. The damned lizards got us all, in the end.”
Hatzel wanted to tell him she couldn’t lead, she didn’t want to lead, but her throat has closed up from grief.
His voice shallowed, becoming the wind between the leaves again. “They want a survivor, but they need someone legendary. That’s you, Hatz. A living legend. I’ve spoken to the parrotfaces. Since we saved them from the monitors, they promised to back your claim when something happened to me. We don’t have much land here, but at least the copperhawks and magpies can live where they grew up. That’s more than I can give you.”
“I don’t understand how we can have a pride with so many different species,” she finally managed.
The pride leader’s cough bordered on a death rattle. “We’re all one species: gryphon. Your pride is everyone who was kind to you, and everyone you were kind to. Pride’s not in your plumage, it’s in your beak and claws. You see someone you’d fight to help, someone you’d blood your beak and claws to save, and that gryphon is your pride.”
There was so much more Hatzel needed to know, so much more the pride leader needed to say, but the monitor venom robbed them of their goodbye.
Heavy flakes of snow hung in the air, warning Hatzel of the impending blizzard and offering her a chance to flee before it arrived. The local frost chickens, ever harbingers of the oncoming storm, had all taken shelter in their nests.
Even though ice crusted her nares, she could smell the bitter aneda of the forest. Her body ached from it, remembering her youth spent in the medicine caves, face-down in the moss while the plague whittled her pride down to nothing.
She didn’t expect Vosk to show himself, but she’d gotten used to travelling here at the start of every mating season, just in case. They’d come up here for years, full of hope at the thought of plagueborne gryphlets who could survive a future outbreak.
Every season ended with an empty nest, and she remained the last saberbeak.
Even though he lived atop the distant Snowfall Mountain, Vosk was someone she would bloody her beak and claws for. That meant he was part of her pride, and so she came even as he seemed less and less interested in her. She was just about to return home when she caught sight of a gryphon coming down from the frozen peaks.
Not a taiga gryphon, though. Vosk, she didn’t spot until he’d almost landed. But next to him was a brown thing, a copperhawk she didn’t recognize—and she knew every copperhawk in the weald. The stranger shivered in the cold, clearly built for the redwood weald and not the frozen mountains.
“His name’s Zeph.” Vosk didn’t offer her a sparkling stone. He didn’t speak about his dead daughter, and Hatzel didn’t broach the subject.
“He’s already fledged. Why’d you wait so long to bring him here?” Hatzel’s heart went out to Vosk, as it always did, but there was an anger she couldn’t keep out of her voice.
Vosk shrugged, and even through his voluminous coat, she could see he hadn’t been eating. “Wanted him to stay with his mother as long as he could, I guess. When she saw his copper plumage, she begged me to wait and see. Rarely, the winter coat comes in thick despite not being white. Not this time, though.”
Hatzel didn’t know what to say.
“You gonna take him?” Vosk sounded indifferent, as though he’d leave this fledgling to die if she didn’t want him.
She looked at Zeph for the first time. Even exhausted and terrified, his eyes sparkled the way Vosk’s once had in the medicine gryphon caves. Their pools of blue had not yet iced over. Growing up in the mountains, he likely hadn’t seen another gryphon who wasn’t a taiga gryphon, which meant he’d never seen anyone who looked like him. He was probably just as scared as she’d been when she arrived at the weald.
He shook his head. Droplets of snow melted by his body heat refroze in the air. Despite his shivering, he groomed a long, feathered copper tail.
“Of course,” she said at last. In her heart, she could feel that she’d bloody her beak and claws for this fledgling. “Zeph, was it? Let me show you the pride of your father.”