by K Vale Nagle
The egg hit the ground with a wet crack.
Every fisherfolk turned to see what had happened, and Jun’s wingtorn seized the opportunity to push their advantage.
Feathers and blood were everywhere. The benefit of being among wingtorn was there was no confusion. Any gryphon with wings was the enemy. All opinici were the enemy. His jailors watched from the woods, afraid to be too close to the traumatized wingtorn during combat. While Jun, Thenca, and several others had adapted well, there were many wingtorn who had become unhinged since losing their wings. It was not a coincidence that no Crackling Sea opinici had been sent on this mission. They feared reprisal.
A few fisherfolk started to fly away, which is why Jun missed it at first. The light of the afternoon burned orange, but the sky darkened. He dove sideways as a spear was thrown down at him by an opinicus twice his size.
The fisherfolk from the rafts had made their way to shore and brought weapons with them.
The opinicus landed between Jun and the remaining eggs. His back was black, his front was white, and his neck and chest were splashed with a vibrant red. With his long neck and beak, he towered over even Jun. Interbreeding with gryphons had created the largest opinicus in the valley.
Jun had read about the leader of Swan’s Rest in the maps and scrolls. His people called him Rorin the Hunter. When the strange beasts of the ocean appeared, he was the one who sent them back to the depths. When the crowncrest sea serpent had come to feed on their schools of fish, he had made sure the fisherfolk dined on serpent that night, quipping that it was too gelatinous for his tastes. When other fisherfolk made kills, they splashed their chests with blood to look like him.
The hunter reared up on his hind legs and pointed a spear towards his adversaries. He didn’t ask why Jun did these things to his people.
Jun appreciated the lack of chatter and was looking forward to killing him.
Rorin’s harness held several fishing spears. They were long, thin, and light. Most were a treated wood, but at least two seemed to be the hollow spines of sea creatures. He brandished one at Jun now.
Jun had never known an opinicus to use a weapon before. Not like this. He’d seen the metal claws of amputees and the damage they could do in close combat. He’d seen the Crackling Sea opinici modify their fishing nets to be used on gryphons, a trick they’d brought with them to the Redwood Valley Eyrie. He’d heard that the taiga prides used bolas sometimes, coated in aneda resin, but assumed that was just a tale. When the Crackling Sea opinici pushed past the kjarr and into the taiga, the rangers had been brought down and were forced to retreat. The snowy forests of the mountains remained safe, for now. If things went well here, he suspected his next campaign would be at a higher elevation.
Jun rolled left as Rorin launched a spear at him. Where once the contact of his back with the ground would have caused him pain, now there was only numbness where his wings had been. He launched himself at Rorin and managed a scratch before Rorin went airborne.
The other wingtorn fought their own battle. The fisherfolk were tired from fishing and rushing back, but each held a spear and could still fly. The ones stupid enough to try to fight on land were taken down, but the wingtorn were at an impasse when the others took to the sky. Thenca, still unharmed, called to the trees for help from their opinicus allies.
Jun took a leap and nearly caught Rorin’s leg, hearing Rorin’s cry for the first time. It sounded like the rumbling of an iron bell, like chimes buried deep in the earth. Jun put some distance between himself and the opinicus. Rorin gave chase, and Jun led him back to the trees. Rorin was probably too smart to follow Jun into the forest itself, but at least he could buy the other wingtorn some time to clear up the shoreline problem.
He zigged, then zagged, careful not to provide a reliable target for Rorin’s spears. Jun’s feathers and fur were a sandy color similar to the rocks, but the black backs of his ears made for targets. Rorin was only willing to risk one of his spears, catching a patch of fur but no skin. He was smart enough not to pursue Jun into the woods and stopped just short of the tree line. What Rorin failed to intuit was just how high Jun could jump.
Jun leapt like he could still fly. From twenty feet up a redwood, across an impossible gap, he crashed straight into Rorin and brought the opinicus to the ground. He scratched at Rorin, his claws catching on the tough harness. Rorin’s harpoons spilled onto the rocky ground. They grappled, each attempting to catch the other’s throat.
While Jun and Rorin fought, Thenca’s cry brought the four eyrie opinici crashing down upon the remaining fisherfolk, driving them into the paws of the awaiting wingtorn. The ones who escaped with eggs were not pursued into the ocean, but those who remained were killed.
When Thenca realized Jun was not among the wingtorn and rushed to find him, what she found instead was his body impaled upon three spears. Drops of blood formed a trail leading out to sea. The most keen-eyed of the wingtorn could just make out Rorin flying past the floating fishing docks to an island in the distance where the surviving fisherfolk had fled with the eggs. She let out a call to the pride across the delta and heard back a sound of victory. Crane’s Nest had not received backup and was destroyed. She returned her brother’s cry with one of her own, one of mourning.
9
Wingtorn
The fisherfolk retreat was short-lived, and Thenca was already under siege by the time her half-brother Urious and the other wingtorn returned from razing Crane’s Nest and rejoined the main forces.
She’d managed to build a small pyre for Jun’s body after seeing that crabs were scavenging the dead. Just after one of the guards managed to light the driftwood, the counterattack arrived.
Rorin himself was not in attendance, but small groups of six to twelve opinici would fly in, exhaust their supply of fishing spears, then retreat. Then the wingtorn would come out from the forest and try to scavenge what they could from the huts and make sure no caches of eggs remained. Urious and his forces came and joined in. It was obvious they wouldn’t be able to hold the shore without flight or cover.
One of the four opinicus guards, Maurle by the look of his orange talons, tried to get advance warning of the raids by flying out over the ocean and keeping watch on the docks and distant island. His build was slight enough that he could, if not hover, come close to it. He wove back and forth, watching the skies. This taught the besieged wingtorn a new lesson: fisherfolk could swim.
While two crane fisherfolk flew just in view at a far anchored raft to hold the guard’s attention, a third of a new type swam from under one raft to the next, hiding beneath it and catching her breath. While the wingtorn had once played along the banks of the river that gave the kjarr its name, and while the eyrie opinici had splashed and swum in Crater Lake from time to time, neither would have considered it possible to swim the distance between the rafts without coming up for air.
Thenca did see a dark shape moving under the water, but it looked like a dolphin. It slipped between Maurle and the shore, then swam down. The tip of a dark tail broke the surface, but by the time she realized it had feathers, it was too late.
The aquatic gryphon exploded from the water below the guard and pulled him under. Thenca’s first thought was that Maurle had been eaten by a shark. It was only after the gryphon emerged from the water, shook off the blood and gore, and flew back out that she realized it’d been a gryphon. The next volley of spears came right after.
And so, Urious arrived just as Thenca led the last of her wingtorn back into the forest for cover, fearful and rambling about “the shark.”
Even from across the camp, Urious could hear the three remaining guards arguing amongst themselves as the sky changed from blue to black and the stars came out.
Larren insisted they hold the beach at any cost. They’d been given explicit orders. The other two pointed out they’d also been given orders to destroy all the eggs at the beach, and that hadn’t worked out.
They hushed when Urious and Thenca came over b
ut perked up when Urious handed out some fish scavenged from Crane’s Nest.
“It’s cold but good. We can’t risk a fire. They may or may not have someone with good night vision, but they can certainly throw their javelins at a bright light,” Thenca apologized.
Larren’s thanks were a courtesy, but the other two guards had the good sense to ask about the well-being of the wingtorn.
“They mourn Jun,” Urious said, “but this was a better death than he expected after his surrender to the Crackling Sea Eyrie. Those opinici had to steal children to hobble him. At least these fisherfolk have fight in them.”
Ari, a yellow kjarr gryphon with black spots, had seen Jun’s leap in the fight against Rorin and had spread the word of his heroics. Jun had taken a special interest in encouraging her after she’d lost her wings, and this was her way of repaying the debt. Even now, Urious could see her talking with another group and mimicking Jun’s leap.
Urious stayed while Thenca left to make sure the lookouts, four wingtorn who could see fairly well at night, were in place. The guards talked tactics in a half-hearted way that included amazing aerial battles.
Urious stared at the ocean, and his mind wandered back several years to the kjarr. Neither him nor Thenca had children that he knew of, but the thought of escaping had been too much for them. They couldn’t bring themselves to flee after Jun surrendered. Giving up flight had been a terrible cost. Getting to serve with Jun had been worth it, Urious thought. He’d never asked Thenca if she regretted going back to the kjarr to surrender. There’d been rumors she had a suitor she’d met where the kjarr lands and the taiga pride’s hunting grounds interlocked. Even if it were true, the taiga was a cold place. Would she have gone and lived there if he hadn’t suggested they turn back?
While he mused, he kept watch on the water. There’d been some movement along its surface, but nothing had come ashore. The star-laden sky reflected blue light upon the ocean. Strange, he thought, but he’d never seen water like this before. The Crackling Sea was grey and choppy. The ocean felt different. The blue starlight collected, intensified, and flowed towards the shore. He stood up, alarmed.
“Do you see that?” he asked.
The opinici looked out at the glowing mass that seemed to grow closer to shore without moving. His first thought was of the bog wisps that appeared sometimes on the kjarr, but there were so many, and they were an intense blue, like the rarest flowers of the deep bog. The spots of light concentrated on the bodies of the dead wingtorn and fisherfolk on the shore. Where the water touched the corpses, the blue flowed over them. The outlines of gryphon, opinicus, and wingtorn alike became terrestrial constellations.
Turresh, Tresh to her friends, kept her wings half-folded when she swam, imitating the diving petrels she resembled and had modeled her technique after. They had the benefit of webbed feet to move them along, but with the help of an enterprising opinicus tinkerer, she’d managed to develop some simple webbed additions for her back paws that helped a lot, and a slightly less useful version for her forepaws that still allowed her to kill things.
She climbed up the anchored raft, shivering, and dried off in the starlight. She could fly coming out of the water, but it would burn energy she wasn’t sure she had. A day of hunting fish, swimming, and fighting wingless gryphons left her tired to the marrow of her hollow bones.
She grimaced as she preened her feathers dry. The scars on her beak ached in the cold, and her feathers tasted like the salamander blood she’d used to lure the bioluminescent shrimp to the shallows to scavenge the bodies of the dead. The giant salamanders on Luminaire Island, named after the shrimp, were ideal for this work. Few ocean predators other than the shrimp would eat salamander. That limited the chance the trail of blood would attract sharks before she finished guiding the glowing scavengers to the dead. The shrimp wouldn’t be enough to clean bodies in one night, but perhaps this would allow the spirits to leave the bodies and ascend into the sky ocean.
She hissed softly into the wind as she watched the shrimp do their work. So many dead, why? It was hard to think of the chicks and gryphlets. Her nieces and nephews had been at Crane’s Nest. As the tide came in, the shrimp gained access to more of the dark shapes on the shore. Many of the new bodies were small, too small to be adults.
She thought she recognized the outline of her brother in the sand between the water and his hut, but it could’ve been her mind playing tricks on her. She wasn’t as close to her brother as she’d wished. She’d been too serious-minded for him. He loved the sea, loved tending to the gryphlets.
One day, when a swarm of flying fish had kept everyone busy, he’d flown all the way out to Luminaire and picked up a sleeping salamander. He carried it from raft to raft, pausing to douse it with fresh water at each stop. When he reached the shore with his new pet, the chicks and gryphlets had gone wild for it. Not yet fledged, none of them had been to Luminaire or seen a salamander before. Soon, it became a challenge to see who could carry the largest salamander across the water.
Rorin had laughed his songlike, resonate cry when asked to join in. “Let me leave some glory for the others!” he told the gryphlet and begged exemption from the antics. He helped them set up a pen for the salamanders far enough up the river that they could stay safely moist. The enclosure had to be fixed every few days or the water would erode it away.
Now the young would play as stars in the heavens, the giant salamanders would eventually escape their enclosure, and she would have to return to Rorin to report in, lest he worry about her.
The rafts anchored as stepping stones to Luminaire revealed the set of shallows connecting the once-peninsula to the shore. Before the last great storm, a strange low tide had revealed the path to the island, and the rafts had settled on the ground. Tresh would not have expected this to be their refuge now, but she wouldn’t have foreseen an invasion by a legion of gryphons who could not fly, either.
She called a greeting as she flew close to the island. Even in the dark, her outline should be obvious to all the fisherfolk. She was jet black with a white stomach—her nickname of Tresh was bolstered by her resemblance to a thresher shark—and her beak had several small chips in it from a childhood encounter with a rock crab.
The crustacean had been as big as her, but she’d still managed to kill it. Once it was dead, smashed by a rock she’d pushed down a hill at it, she chipped her beak trying to get inside it before she went for more rocks. The grooves along her beak matched the small spikes on its shell more than shark’s teeth, but fisherfolk enjoyed an interesting scar and a good story, so it’d worked well for her.
Her beak may not impress the fish, but it’d impressed several suitors, including a beautiful slate blue opinicus who’d suggested they build a nest together. She told him she wasn’t that sort of gryphon, which wasn’t entirely true. She just wasn’t that sort of gryphon for him.
The fisherfolk weren’t immune to the biases of the weald and eyrie. They still called their offspring gryphlets or chicks, as one example. Maybe a quarter of the adults had been part of a pride or an eyrie before coming here. They turned away from their biases on a conscious level, but some of it still bled through in their stereotypes. Especially the ideas that gryphons didn’t want to be tied down and opinici were only interested in nesting. Neither was necessarily true, of course. Gryphon-gryphon pairs did nest out here. Some of them had left the prides because they wanted a place where their relationship could be recognized. Still, the stereotypes lived on, often in arguments between couples, but the day-to-day reality was closer to parity.
Tresh had always seen herself as having a nest full of sharp-beaked, slick-swimming predatory gryphlets that she’d take hunting while someone else took care of the boring task of grooming them. Nesting didn’t work that way—it was supposed to be more of a partnership—but she could dream.
The sentries acknowledged her reply, and she landed on the island.
They’d built a small encampment here years ago. While most sal
amanders were docile, they did grow up to six feet long, so the encampment was made on a stony protrusion on the west side as a safety measure. The rocks reached into the ocean like the claws of a rock crab, and a large tidal pool could be laced with salamander blood to lure in shrimp and illuminate the camp. It was a nice place to get away and think, but it wasn’t designed to house a hundred gryphons and opinici.
The few rescued eggs were guarded by those most incentivized to protect them, parents. Some eggs had marks for parents who were now dead. Those were guarded as securely as the rest. The communities of Swan’s Rest and Crane’s Nest were close. A fisherfolk may not be friends with everyone but would still probably recognize most on sight. That made it all the more heartbreaking that no one had heard if the third fisherfolk community, Sandpiper’s Dune, had been attacked, too. While trapped on Luminaire, they had no way of knowing if the dune fisherfolk were in trouble.
The fisherfolk’s medicine opinicus, black circles around his eyes, tested the water. It was fine for drinking, but no one was sure if the spring could support so many. There were several spots in the salty shallows where fresh water erupted from the rocks. Rorin had called Tresh crazy when she’d told him that, but she’d challenged him to swim down with her and taste it. Sure enough, fresh water springs under the ocean. She hoped the water on Luminaire was from a similar spring and not dependent upon rain.
Rorin was talking with a few of the survivors from Crane’s Nest. His wounds had been cleaned and treated with a poultice of aneda. The advantage of gryphons and opinici loving fish was that the fisherfolk had been able to trade with everyone. The aneda trees formed the bulk of the taiga but didn’t grow in the neighboring weald or kjarr.
