“Hinte!” I yelled out.

On the other side of the dark-green wiver a slender, black thing shot out from the vog.  Like an arrow it plunged into Hinte’s side.  I didn’t see the bite⁠ ⁠—⁠ but Hinte growled deep in pain.  I was yelling out in fear, in useless warning.  My wings twitched but the sight had vitrified me.

Another shadow flew at her neck. The wiver twisted — the creature flew close, belly running along her neck, a near-miss.  There was a hissing growl.

Sudden knife-claws raked down my back. They tore into my sifting suit, and left small cuts.  The shadow above me yarled, vicious.  I felt the impact of more claws —⁠ but no pain.  Blood flowed down my neck.  Not mine.

The human! It’d saved me. Teeth sunk into my side — a fourth shadow. It ripped through the white suit and slashed my scales.  I buckled.  Head smashed into the ground.

Hinte’s fight came as a mess of yelps and growls, almost in turn. The wiver’s cries tended more frequent and pained.  Did she need my help?  What could I do?

 

I flailed my wings at the toothy thing beside me. It growled and backed off. I fled.  Above me, one still ripped or slashed at the human.  I clawed at the ropes.  They split!

I leapt high, the bloody corpse falling to the ground.  Dare to look back⁠ ⁠—⁠ the trick worked.  The third continued to rip into the corpse.

Below Hinte was fighting her pair of shadows. One gnawed on her right hindleg —⁠ ouch.  The other circled around to lunge at her neck again.  But that was all I glimpsed.

In the air, the fourth shadow still chased me! I smacked it with my tail. It bit my tail!  I curled in the air, growling.  I grabbed onto the shadow and we crashed into the lake surface.  The lake skin fractured and split open fiery gashes.

With a free forefoot, I reached for the mouth of the creature. Force it closed. I reached⁠ ⁠—

The shadow bit me!  Its teeth cracked the glass and pierced the scutes.  I grabbed its lower jaw.

Distantly, Hinte screamed.

Holding it in two feet, I swung the shadow.  Land in the lake, please!  But as I let go, the third thing came.  It lunged at a foreleg.  Old glass bore the brunt.

It clawed again and I saw it draw blood. I kept swinging — but the other creature ruined my aim!  I could only slam the shadow on the lake skin, shattering dustone.  I pushed harder, to submerge it.  The other shadow was lunging again!  At my neck!

I wouldn’t. I dodged away, and it only clawed my face — but it clawed again and again.  Blood dripping down my face, I couldn’t submerge the shadow.  I gave up.

I wasn’t a fighter. The lake had worn me away. Even with the frenetic, fatal energy in my blood⁠ ⁠—⁠ I could give up.  It was what I did.  The thought tang out in my head, but its echo was something⁠ ⁠—⁠ different:

Rockwraiths will fly away after you stop moving.  Hinte’s voice, the distant wiver who hadn’t seen me stand up to humans.

I feigned death, and fell limp. The two wraiths — what else could they be? — they continued to claw or bite at me.  I screamed, but I let the sound falter and die.  They stopped, and — brilles clouded — I could feel them staring at me, waiting.

Breathe, low, breathe calm.  I had to think!  They had caught Hinte by surprise, injured her even more.  She was over there, alone.  I had to help her.

But how? I needed to make them stop attacking her. Distract them? Lure them away?

A vague memory came to me, another echo that wasn’t my voice.

The gray season.  When volcanic activity waxed with the coming perigee of Laswaith, the great moon of violence.  When the animals in lake estivated to weather the heat and ash.  But if these wraiths were still active, well, they had to eat something.  The glasscrabs ate the crysts.  And what else could the wraiths eat but glasscrabs?

Breaking my feigned death, I did a quick dart to my bag, where glasscrabs poked out.  The wraith lunged in the corner of my eye.  I rushed a crab out.  Then threw it out in front of me.  It paused, and peered at the crab, tongues flicking.  I leapt up, running in the opposite direction.  The two wraiths disappeared in the distant darkness behind me.

When no razor fangs came crushing down on my legs, I breathed. I did it!

Away from the wraiths I was again limping on injured legs.  My left forefoot had teeth marks down its middle.  My right foreleg had three bleeding breaks in the glass.  Adding to the pain, my face dripped blood from numerous swipes, both deep and shallow, and the horrible bite on my belly.  Despite all of this, the pain felt distant, muted.

Free from the fight, I could flee. Fly up into the sky and glide back to Gwymr/Frina.  Hinte needed my help, but would I even make a difference?  Maybe it was better if at least one of us lived. She could understand that, right?

That same echo:

No, she would try to save me.  I needed to stop cowering.  She had saved me twice⁠ ⁠—⁠ I could show my thanks.  And, well, I’d been some help against the humans, hadn’t I?  If I could just think…

I had a plan, I just needed to find Hinte.  She’d been fleeing last you saw, and I’d… gone in the opposite direction.  Aching legs slipped me into a high walk.  I slinked over the gnarled ground as fast as I dared. The new speed ripped pain in my forelegs, but it didn’t matter.

The fight made ripples over the lake skin.  The fractured and bulging ground turned to another obstacle standing against me.  In the nighttime vog I was half-blind; but I could do better than just hope Hinte was in this direction; the burning cracks ripped open left me half-sighted.

The stark bright of the molten glass seemed to darken vog even more. I could see almost nothing but what had been limned by the wake of the fight.

Moments of stealth passed like this, and I was tripping over my claws with spicy anticipation on my fangs.

At last I came back around to Hinte and her attackers.

First thing you saw: the fading white glowy stuff spilled all over the ground.  What you smelt? Blood in the air. Tart and spicy venom. And rank, stinky wraiths.

Dogged by rockwraiths, Hinte fell into a crouch, and stumbled into a leap⁠ ⁠—⁠ a lopsided leap that was brought low in breaths by the wraiths.  She tried, again and again.

With an injured hindleg and wing, the bright-white figure couldn’t fly away. You were built to fly, take that away and how much was left?

“Hinte!” I shouted. “I have a plan — play dead!”

Already falling and crashing on the surface, she didn’t get up⁠ ⁠—⁠ I just prayed the endless stars it was on purpose.

Breath, Kinri.

My last glasscrab was in my feet, held tight, and I pulled back and aimed.  Between the bright-white figure and me it landed aright. One wraith glanced at it. And it went back to biting Hinte!

A growl left my lips.  I had one last gambit.  It might throw away all I’d worked for —⁠ but if I succeeded, it had to be worth it.

A glass came from my bag, a glass of glasscrab blood. I unlidded and threw it over the crab corpse.  As it fell, the contents spilled out below it.  It landed with a crack.

Both wraiths looked, this time. Hinte stayed still.

Breaths passed.

A wraith jerked its head back at Hinte. No!

My last glass was in my feet before I could think, before it was flying low over the lake skin before it smacked into a crag with a big pop that was only loud because it was so quiet all around and⁠ ⁠—

A rockwraith moved.  It ambled twitchingly over toward the crab and the spilled blood.

I still held my breath, but something eased when I saw the other, larger rockwraith lunge after the first with a gait that was like a very efficient limp.

At the creature, I peered. Like the cloudwraiths above, these things scented the air with two tongues.  Long, curling forelegs doubled as three-clawed wings, wyvern-like.  Hindlegs looked almost draconic, monstrous limbs for leaping into the air.  And midwings sat between those two pairs, much wider than the snakelike body was long.

When first wraith reached the crab, a small bite was taken. This smaller wraith then hopped onto it, and grasped the corpse in its hindfeet.  The leader leapt winging away, and the smaller followed, lugging the crab.

The rockwraiths winged over to where I’d left larger crab. There, my once-attackers were still taking ravenous bites out of the first crab.  The leader landed and in turn nipped both of the hungry wraiths.  Cowed, they fell in line as the leader clutched the big crab and led them winging off.

In formation, they all flew away, victorious.

I had lost my crabs.  I had lost the crab blood.  My face and legs were red and wet.  But, just maybe, there was a victory of my own: I had survived.  And Hinte?  The stars had to have spared her.  They had to.

My wings took me toward the spilled white glow on the ground, the glair-like stuff pooling out around her lantern like a cracked egg.  The dark-green wiver lay on the ground, in the same spot where I’d told her to play dead. 

With the wraiths gone, the frenetic energy in my limbs faded. My wounds roused awake, and I faltered in the sky.  When I crashed, I fell to my side and stayed there for a bit.

“…Kinri?” came a certain jagged voice. A head rose, and the lines of that dark-green face came to life.  The amber goggles still hid her eyes, but I imagined behind them, eyes opened and searched around.

“Hinte!”

“It’s over?  Your plan worked.”  Hinte had shifted from her slumped position.  She now crouched on her hindlegs, forelegs and wings supporting her weight. Others might look frail in that position. She only looked defiant.

“It did.”  I looked away.  “But it–it feels like a defeat.”

“It is not defeat until you can no longer play,” Hinte said, sounding like an echo.  When my head didn’t rise with her words, she added, sounding more urging, “Kinri.  Those are the same wraiths that killed the human.  I smelled the blood on it.  We lived.”

“But — you killed that human.” I glanced tilting back to her.

“It was a mercy killing.  After the wraiths attacked, it could only die.  I decided when.”

“I–I guess.” I sighed in relief. Hinte had survived with me. Not even a defeat like this could keep her down!  My legs relaxed with the calming breath, and I buckled before I caught myself.

With that fight feeling so far behind me, injuries from earlier screamed. The pain fired up through my legs and side, winging from my mouth as a pained groan.  Hinte stared at me, hidden gaze meeting mine, lines of her face softening further.

I looked away, again. “How bad are your injuries?” I asked.

“…They got my wings and hindlegs. Again.  I will not fly for a half-cycle, at least.”

“That’s harsh. Do we — do you have enough medicine for that?”

“No.  Not for both of us⁠ ⁠—⁠ I saw the wraith bite your side.  And your face is more red than blue.”  My frill wrinkled.  “I shall bandage it up.  Did they get your legs?”  I nodded.  “Feh.  We can start with that, then.”  She shifted, digging into her bag.

“No — I think you got the worst of it. Could we start with your legs?” I said, and rubbed my gashed foreleg with my other foot.

Hinte stared, for a breath. “Do it, then.” She turned around so that both of her forelegs faced me, then nudged three containers toward me.  They looked vague forms in the darkness.  Crouching down, I examined and unlidded two containers⁠ ⁠—⁠ one, the clear ointment from earlier in a small, ball-like vial; the other, a translucent green substance in flat container.  When I picked in up, its contents wiggled.

“What do all these mixtures do?” I asked. I had to learn more about alchemy if I was to impress Hinte without the Sieve.  No shame in just asking, right?

“It varies.” Hinte’s voice was clear and steady, as if this were any other talk at any other time.  When the lid came off the clear green mixture, and she tapped my claw with a wing.  “No, save that for the small cuts.  The pink one.”

I did, but not before wiggling it again. “This looks like jelly~”

Hinte clicked, and I smiled.  Like that, I started applying it to her legs.  She winced.  As if to distract herself, Hinte’s earlier tone returned and she continued, “That green mixture there is die kleine Heylpflanze, a simple mixture of nutrients and healthful plants.”  She shifted her weight a bit, and relaxed the leg I worked on.

“The ingredients are cheap, or as near as alchemicals are to cheap; and it is straightforward to ferment and cool.  Even if some tongueless alchemist managed to botch it up⁠ ⁠—” a grunt was swallowed as I switched to the other hindleg “—⁠ you would more than likely get something inadequate or useless than lethal.”

I’d taken too little of the pink solution, so I stopped to get more. Hinte grumbled, and said, “Do not use too much⁠ ⁠—⁠ die Wundervernarbung is powerful enough.  And you must save some for yourself.” I only hummed. Would we need to ration it if that starless human hadn’t wasted a third of it?

“Regardless, that is die Heylpflanze.  A pigeon of mixtures.  Hatchlings brew it in our academies in their first gyras.”

I finished with her hindlegs. As if sensing this, the wiver put her leg down, and spread her wings.  I stared at them, scowling at how the leathery membrane was littered with clawings and bitings all over.

Despite myself I was reminded of how small grew surface-dweller wings. Hinte’s wings were maybe three, maybe four times as long as her legs, while mine were near five times as long as my legs.

Focus, Kinri. This could take a while.

Hinte was saying, “Use die Heylpflanze for my wings.”

So I scooped out clawfuls of the stuff and lathered it onto her wings. “It sounds like the pink stuff is the more interesting of the two.”

“The pink mixture is die Wundervernarbung.” Why did her voice sound so songly?  Her uttering that polysyllabic monster sounded almost an excited lilt, if that could ever describe Hinte’s voice.

The dark-green wiver just remained silent after that, and I caught the definite note in her tone.  As if that name spoke for itself.

“What is the pink Wunder thingy?”

“Die Wundervernarbung.  It means⁠ ⁠—”

“I know what it means.  Wonderful scarring or something like that⁠ ⁠—⁠ I speak Drachenzunge, Hinte.  You just can’t expect me to pronounce all of those big fat words you all have.”  I had finished with the one wing, so I moved around to the other.  “Tell me about the pink stuff, please.”

“Die Wundervernarbung” — (it was definitely a lilt) — “was a miracle, plain and simple.”

“Why?”

“Well, to understand, you need to know of die Verdorrenderpolypen.”

She paused there; I growled at her.

Rolling her head, she continued, “They are also, more briefly, called die Polypen or das Verdorrend⁠ ⁠—⁠ a parasitic, virulent plant disease, inventive, with relentless mutations and variations.  Die Polypen are the tumors.  Das Verdorrend⁠ ⁠—⁠ ‘the withering’ in y Draig⁠ ⁠—⁠ is the rot that creeps over the plants.”

A rockwraith had torn through her wing, leaving a puncture big enough to stick my toe through.  I put some Heylpflanze around the edges.  The stuff must have hurt less, because Hinte had stopped interrupting herself with gasps or yelps.

The wiver was continuing, “Eating an infected plant will not still you, but will sicken your stomach, and open you up to worse diseases.  Das Verdorrend does not destroy the plants⁠ ⁠—⁠ or it would not be so dangerous⁠ ⁠—⁠ in the end, it renders them inedible and cancerous.”

“A blight?”

“Yes,” she said.  Then her tone became at once less and more abstract: concrete, but like something which had long since stopped being concrete.  “One day, a researcher, Faulchra, wasting away in some tiny farming village in the depths of the cold southern forests, had discovered a new formula. He never published, and it was near lost.  But when he died some two hundred gyras ago, the notes and recipes were passed to his niece.  That niece was a warrior instead of a scholar, so she gave the inheritance to a university.”

I found another puncture, in a fold, and I let out a low whining sound.

She said, “What?”

“Just — your wings look awful. You can’t even fly!”

Hinte’s claws dug into the ground.  She said, “I will heal.  Just finish applying the pflanze.”

“Okay.” I should have gotten to Hinte faster. All of my deliberation, having to convince myself not to just run away.  And Hinte suffered for it.  It wasn’t fair!

The wiver flicked her tongue, frills working as she found her place again. She said, “It took dances, but a Dozentin’s students investigated the notes, and within them discovered the Wunder mixture.  Faulchra had devised a novel treatment for the polyps.  His method was complex, grossly complex, but the idea was said to be brilliant.”

The lathering was finished, so I grabbed the bandages from her bags, and some sticky paper to keep them in place.

Hinte had paused, as if to remember or decide some detail. “I never cared for farming⁠ ⁠—⁠ but my grandfather had studied it extensively.  He tells me the idea is to turn das Verdorrend against itself.  It does not work⁠ ⁠—⁠ the mixture Faulchra discovered was as ineffective as it was convoluted.  But the students had worked on it, simplified it.

“Because die Verdorrenderpolypen is a blight on crops, the research was carried out on a farm suffering from it.  The farmer was lucky.  But after cycles on the farm, moiling on the technique, with no results, the Dozentin, the students, the farmer, had all grown weary.  The farmer did not understand the complexity and hard work that goes into alchemical research, and the students didn’t understand how long one must go with seemingly no results.

“When one student had lost their motivation and taken a rest from the work, the farmer grew finally irritated.”

It had taken Hinte that long to realize she could sit down and rest on her haunches.  I blew my tongue at her, and she didn’t react.

She said, after another pause, “That irritation came to a bud when one of the animals ate one of their blighted test crops and grew very sick.  The farm took the animal to the resting student and demanded it be healed.”  Hinte was chopping her forelegs in the air in quick imitation, and then she dismissively tossed her head.

“The animal couldn’t be saved, and it would have been a waste regardless. But the student was stimulated by the interaction between the alchemically modified blight and the animal’s body.  When they returned from the farm, the student refined the idea of mending flesh with polyps.  Dozens of gyras later, he turned it into something usable, into die Wundervernarbung.

“That student was my grandfather. The new method had utilized the inventive mutations of the polyps to⁠ ⁠—⁠ I digress.”

I blew my tongue at Hinte again. I came that close to getting forest-dweller alchemy secrets for free!

The fledgling alchemist rolled her head. “The rest is history. Newly fledged, but historic.  Die Wundervernarbung is⁠ ⁠—⁠ was the pride of clan Gären, and of the forests.  We had been tweaking and refining it in the gyras since.  My grandfather was at the forefront of the research until…”  Hinte went silent, but it wasn’t her messing around again.  I didn’t push.

“It is hard not to love it. It is — it is an amalgam of everything that is good about alchemy.  Progress, simplification, making the world better.”

I had finished applying salve to her wing earlier, so I sat, listening to her finish her story.  There was a heavy silence following her declaration.  When I spoke, It felt like sullying a beautiful ideal with dull reality.

“I uh… finished with your wings.”

Hinte lowered her head.  “Wrap my legs and I can start on your side.”

We did just that. I had no wonderful tales to regale Hinte with as she handled my injuries⁠ ⁠—⁠ so we worked in silence.  But it was a good silence.