Light shattered.

  It broke around him in hard, prismatic shards, each cut of color bright enough to sting. Blightcrest perched above it all, talons dug into a narrow spike that bit at the scales of his feet. Not a branch. Too cold, too smooth. The surface caught his reflection and threw it back in a hundred warped angles: beak, eye, wing, wing, wing, fractured into nonsense.

  Below him, a forest rose.

  Not trees. Not anything alive. Trunks of clear faceted stone thrust out of a ground he could not see, each hex and edge catching the light and flinging it upwards. They climbed in slow motion, as if pushed by some buried engine. No rustle, no creak. Just growth. Quiet, patient growth.

  Their tops forked into branches like claws. Angular talons reached and reached, each new facet unfolding with a slow, deliberate slide. A canopy built itself beneath him, crystal teeth knitting together, closing, climbing.

  He listened for wind.

  Nothing.

  He listened for river, for distant beasts, for the low groan of mountains.

  Silence. Silence thick enough to feel against his feathers.

  His hackles rose. He spread his wings, ready to take the sky, to leave this wrong place. The left wing dragged. Heavy. The right followed, sluggish, as if it had soaked up stone in his sleep.

  He looked.

  His feathers caught the light like the forest below. Not with the soft sheen of oil on water, but with hard, glassy angles. Tertiaries turned to blades. Primaries to panes. When he flexed, hairline fractures chased one another along the surface in tiny lightning bolts.

  No.

  He forced his wings wider. Fine cracks spread. A dry, delicate sound followed, like frost climbing a window. Feather by feather, the dark, living plumage stiffened, drained, froze. The limbs that had cut storms open now lifted like slabs of frozen stone.

  The crystal trees climbed.

  Branches closed around him with infinite slowness. A ring rose past his feet, his knees, his breast. Points hovered inches from his chest and throat, poised but not touching, as if waiting for some unseen signal. The pressure of their presence pressed in on him more than any touch—weight without contact, a cage without bars yet.

  He opened his beak to command the world to move.

  No sound.

  His tongue struck glass. His beak clicked against itself, thin and high and empty. The noise did not echo. It died in front of him.

  The forest rose. The shard beneath him thickened around his talons, swallowing the toes, then the base of his foot. Cold climbed his bones. The air itself cooled, a deep, marrow-freezing chill that did not sting the skin so much as smother it. His wings locked at full spread, more sculpture than limb.

  Still the branches climbed.

  They closed over his head.

  The light broke one more time.

  Then nothing existed except pressure on every side and a cold that carried no wind, no snow, no taste. Only mute, eternal weight.

  He tore out of sleep with a violent jolt.

  Wings flared wide, smashing against rough timber. The inn’s outer beam shuddered under the impact; dust rained over his crest. He crouched on the roof peak, heart hammering hard enough to shake the feathers on his chest.

  Air. Real air. Damp with dawn mist, smelling of woodsmoke, manure, yesterday’s stew. He dragged it into his lungs in harsh pulls.

  The dream fled. The shape of it slipped through his thoughts like water through talons. Only the cold stayed, clamped around his ribs.

  His wings stayed spread. He stared along the line of the left one, then twisted his head and raked his beak through the feathers. One pass. Another. Harder. Each plume came away soft, warm, pliant, leaving a faint iron-and-forest taste on his tongue.

  Flesh. Blood. Not glass.

  He went through every primary. Then the secondaries. Then covert after covert, down to the fluff hidden against skin. His beak clicked faster, more frantic, until loose fluff floated around him in a grey-black halo.

  Unacceptable. Disgraceful. A King reduced to grooming like a panicked fledgling.

  He kept going.

  By the time the eastern horizon bled pale gold over the treeline, every feather on his body had felt the sharp inspection of his beak. He checked the curve of each talon, the hardness of each scale on his legs. He rapped his beak against the roof tile, once, twice, listening for the proper dull ring of living keratin, not the brittle chime still echoing somewhere in his skull.

  The sound came out right.

  The echo did not leave.

  He tried to settle. Folded his wings. Shifted his talons, tucked one leg up, the posture of a creature at ease. His muscles twitched under him. The roof felt wrong. Too exposed.

  He hopped down into the yard instead.

  His feet cut grooves into the packed dirt in long, restless lines. He paced from fence to well, from well to stable, then back again. Each turn came sharper and sharper, claws digging furrows, tail flicking, feathers puffing and flattening in agitated waves.

  Chickens kept well away. Sensible creatures. A goat glared at him from inside its pen until he snapped his beak once in its direction. The goat reconsidered and moved.

  Hours crawled.

  A door creaked. His Ward came out into the light, cloak half fastened, hair bound back in a lopsided knot that still dripped a little from some hurried wash.

  “Beakly, what are you doing to the yard?”

  She stepped around one of his trenches and planted a hand on her hip, the other cradling a bowl of something porridge-like.

  “That’s not a path. That’s… that’s an anxiety moat.”

  He turned his head toward her. One eye fixed on her face. She looked tired. Her tone carried that dry edge she used when she feigned amusement to hide concern.

  “I swear, if you keep stomping, Kael’ll have to forge you horseshoes. For the roof. Of my skull.”

  He clicked his beak and swung away, pacing again. The pressure under his breastbone did not ease. Every shadow looked like the beginning of some hard, gleaming shape.

  She watched him for a moment, spoon halfway to her mouth, then lowered it.

  “You’re jumpy. Did something spook you?” She took a few steps closer, slower now, voice dropping. “You hurt?”

  He locked his wings tight against his sides. Power coiled there, wanting to beat the air into submission, to climb, to flee. From what, he could not name. The memory had gone. Only the claw-mark remained.

  Her hand lifted, palm out, toward his neck.

  “Hey. Big murder-chicken. Breathe or whatever you do instead of breathing.”

  He flared his feathers, a ripple that ran from crown to tail. Her hand stopped in midair.

  “Right. Touching is off the table today.” She rubbed her brow instead. “Look, if you need to go kill something, go kill something. Just… stop turning the inn yard into modern art.”

  She jabbed the spoon at one of his deeper furrows.

  “At this rate I’ll break an ankle before the bandits even get here.”

  His eye narrowed. Insolent. Accurate, but insolent.

  Still, the word kill something landed with a clean weight. A task. Simple. Honest. Hunt, strike, feed, return. No crystal. No silence.

  He dropped from his anxious stride into a straight line toward the gate. Each step grew more purposeful. The villagers at the far end of the lane glanced up, then hurried to get out of his way. Children who might usually call after Count Chocobo hushed at the look in his eyes.

  Emily called after him, voice lighter again.

  “Bring back something with decent fat this time. We’re running low on soap ingredients.”

  He gave a short, hard croak over his shoulder. Acknowledgment. Or warning. Even he could not tell.

  The forest opened before him, dark and smelling of damp earth, sap, and prey. He snapped his wings wide and launched himself into the air, beating hard until the roofs of Oakhaven shrank below and the restless pressure in his chest met the press of real wind.

  Tamsin’s brass scales clicked against the table in a steady rhythm, like a second heartbeat under the inn’s noise.

  Between us lay three neat piles: boar?tusk buttons, bone toggles, and a shallow tray of stoppered glowgourd vials. The lantern vials looked like someone had bottled bits of firelight; even cold and dark they held a faint, muted glow.

  Finn hovered at my elbow, practically vibrating.

  Tamsin pinched up a button and turned it under the lamplight.

  “Clean edges. No splintering. Holes even.” Her eyebrow tipped toward me. “You drilled these or stabbed them with a meat skewer?”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Awl and nail,” Lysa's little sister announced from behind a wall of other kids. “Miss Emily showed us how to brace ’em so they don’t crack.”

  “Did she now.” Tamsin let the button drop, then raked her gaze over the rest. “You lot keep this up, I’ll have to start a whole ‘Desperate Boar’ fashion line in Dawnsbridge.”

  A ripple of giggles went through the cluster of children.

  Mayor Brody cleared his throat by the hearth. “We’re not giving her the lot for a song,” he muttered loud enough for half the room to hear.

  Tamsin ignored him. She took up one of the vials, shook it briskly. Soft orange light bloomed, catching on the sweat-shiny faces around us. The nearest kids let out a collective “oooh” as if they hadn’t been the ones to make them.

  “Right, plate?girl. Here’s the deal.” She set the glowing vial down carefully. “Buttons—two copper a piece. Lantern vials, six copper. Any objections?”

  The children collectively forgot how to breathe.

  Two of the older widows in the back—Maud and Brenna, who had been skeptics—straightened on their bench.

  “Two copper?” Maud leaned forward, eyes sharp. “For scraps we’d have tossed to the dogs?”

  “Scraps,” Tamsin repeated, weighing a cluster of buttons in her palm. “Polished, carved, drilled, etched. And in a city full of rich fools who can’t tell a pig from a dragon, these are trophies.” She dropped the buttons back with a clatter. “You want less, I can pay less.”

  “No,” Finn blurted. “No less.”

  Laughter rolled through the room.

  Elspeth leaned on the end of the bar, flour on her cheek, watching like a cat at a mousehole. “You brought extra goods, then?” Her eyes flicked to the crates stacked by the door.

  Tamsin tapped the little brass scales. “I did. Figured if the paladin here pushed you hard enough, I’d need more than lamp oil and yarn to part you from your treasures.”

  She began to lay out coins, careful, deliberate. Copper stacked in straight towers, every tenth marked with a worn silver piece. She organized them into small clusters.

  I glanced at Mayor Brody. “We talked about a cooperative split,” I reminded him. “Materials, time, the children’s work—”

  “We remember,” he cut in, but his tone held more pride than bite. “We’re not barbarians.”

  Tamsin’s eyes glinted. “I’ll trust your village maths. I just hand over the shiny bits.”

  She flipped a silver coin into the air, caught it on the back of her hand, then slid it toward Finn.

  “For you lot. Apprentice’s bonus.”

  Finn stared. “That’s… that’s half a goat.”

  “Or all of your own boots,” Harn called from a nearby table. “If you don’t grow out of ’em in three weeks again.”

  The kids broke into overlapping arguments about boots versus sweets versus beads versus “I’m saving mine.” The two widows looked like someone had quietly adjusted the laws of gravity.

  One of the older men in the back shuffled forward, his limp faint but noticeable. “If… if there’s still scrap tusk, I could… help. My hands aren’t what they were, but—”

  Finn twisted around. “I can show you. It’s easy.”

  “Easy,” he snorted, but the word already softened. “We’ll see about that.”

  Tamsin watched the shift in the room and counted it as neatly as she counted coins.

  “Elspeth.”

  The innkeeper looked over from the tap. “Hmm?”

  “Take your cut in trade,” Tamsin went on. “All this rabble wouldn’t have finished a quarter so fast without your stew keeping them upright.”

  Elspeth snorted into a clean mug, but a small, pleased line tugged at one corner of her mouth.

  “That the extra goods, then?” I nodded toward the crates. “Or is that just your wardrobe?”

  “You’d know if I owned a wardrobe.” Tamsin straightened, rubbed her wrists, then jerked her head toward the stacked boxes. “Thought ahead. Have finer yarn, some dried beans, good steel for Kael, more glass vials. A few charms, if anyone’s feeling reckless.”

  “And the thing I asked for.”

  Her eyes sharpened.

  “Ah. That.” She bent behind the nearest crate, rummaged, came up with a narrow, cloth?wrapped bundle bound in waxed twine. She set it on the table between us with more care than she’d shown the coins. “One mystery package, special order.”

  Finn’s attention snapped to it like a magnet. “What is it?”

  “Not for you,” Tamsin told him, without looking away from me. “Unless you’ve secretly become a surgeon in the last month.”

  The word landed in my chest like a stone. My fingers felt clumsy as I worked the knot loose. Inside lay a slim wooden case, pale, finely sanded. I flipped the latch. The lid lifted on stiff little hinges, and the inn faded to a hum at the edge of my hearing.

  Neat rows of metal glinted on a bed of folded linen—needles so fine they might have been wire, a pair of small, precise scissors, tweezer?like forceps, a knife with a narrow, flat blade. Not hospital?grade, not even close, but sharper and more exact than anything I’d held in this world.

  My throat tightened.

  “Couldn’t find half the things you described,” Tamsin went on, too brisk, too casual. “But an apothecary in Dawnsbridge owed me. She had a supplier in the city.”

  I ran a thumb along the nearest needle’s shaft. “These are…” I couldn’t come up with a word that didn’t sound stupid. “Perfect.”

  “You can fix more than pig flesh with that lot?” Her gaze flicked to my face, measuring.

  “I can… stitch properly now.” The words came out rough. “Set wounds the way they’re meant to be set.”

  Finn’s eyes were huge. “You can sew people up like a shirt?”

  “Exactly like a shirt,” I told him. “If the shirt screams and bleeds and tries to punch you.”

  That got a laugh from the men by the hearth.

  Across the room, Maud nudged Brenna. “Buttons and vials, was it. Not such a nonsense idea, after all.”

  “Next batch won’t have rough backs, then,” Brenna muttered. “I’ll not have some city lord thinking Oakhaven folk can’t finish a thing.”

  Through the open door, a gust of air knifed in, sharp with early winter. I caught, just for a second, the distant silhouette of Beakly on a rooftop across the green, black against the pale sky, wings held tight, watching. Then the door shut again on warmth and coin and the clink of my new tools in their box.

  “Cold’s biting hard for this time of year.” Tamsin shivered and rubbed her arms. She glanced toward the shuttered windows. “Snow’ll come early. Roads too. I won’t be back this way till spring, not unless I fancy freezing to the axle in a ditch.”

  The chatter thinned. Coin stacks, glowgourd vials, bone buttons—everyone looked at them a little differently now.

  “Not even once more?” Mayor Brody’s fingers worried the edge of his ledger. “We’d—ah—we’d planned on…”

  “Everyone plans on one more trip.” Tamsin’s mouth twisted. “Winter doesn’t read your notes, Mayor. Once the ice grips the passes, I stay near Dawnsbridge and hope the city guards remember which end of a spear points out.”

  Elspeth’s gaze slid around the room, counting mouths. Finn clutched his silver a little tighter.

  I closed the case on the new instruments and felt the weight of it in my hands, heavy as responsibility.

  A harsh cry cut straight through the murmur. Not a random caw—short, sharp, commanding. Beakly.

  I flinched, half out of habit, half at the tone. That wasn’t his usual “I brought you something disgusting, praise me” shriek.

  Harn grimaced toward the door. “That’ll be your feathered nightmare wanting his share of stew.”

  Another call. Longer, flatter. Less demand, more order.

  My shoulders prickled. I slid the case into my satchel.

  “I’ll check on him.”

  Finn shot for the door. Elspeth hooked a hand into the back of his tunic and hauled him short.

  “You will stay inside where it’s warm, and where there are no beaks the length of my forearm. Go on, mind the coins.”

  He wilted, but his eyes followed me all the way to the door.

  Cold slapped my face as soon as I cracked it. Not normal evening chill; something sharper, dryer, like air over ice. I stepped out, pulled the door shut behind me, and the inn’s warmth cut off with a muffled thump.

  Beakly waited in the lane, facing the gate.

  His plumage looked different. The green and blue along his feathers had deepened, like someone poured ink into them. In the low light his body seemed to drink shadow instead of reflect it. Frost fogged from his nostrils with each breath, more than the air warranted.

  “Hey, Count Chocobo.” I moved closer, boots crunching on the hardening earth. “You ringing for room service?”

  He didn’t lean in for a neck rub. No disgruntled huff, no possessive shuffle. He fixed me with one round eye, cool and distant, then snapped his beak once and strode toward the gate.

  “Okay, rude.” I trotted to keep up. “What’s wrong?”

  He reached the gate and stopped, talons scraping a slow arc on the packed dirt. Then he looked back at me, then through the gate, then back again. Clear as any hand gesture: come.

  The hairs on my arms rose. “You want me outside? Now?”

  Another beak click. One wing twitched toward the darkness past the fence.

  Behind me, hinges creaked. Kael stepped out, wiping his hands on a rag, jaw already set like he expected trouble. Harn followed, pulling his coat tighter, eyes narrowed.

  “Bird throwing a fit?” Harn peered past me. “What’s he found now, another three pigs?”

  “If it’s more boar, I’ll kiss him on the beak,” Kael muttered. “But we don’t open that gate for a bird’s whim.”

  Beakly’s head turned toward Kael. He fluffed once, slow and broad, feathers rattling like distant thunder. The air around him felt a degree colder.

  I swallowed. “He doesn’t… feel whimsical.”

  The gate guard—old Tomas with the half?healed leg—shifted his spear. “Monsters don’t usually knock first.”

  Beakly drove one talon into the dirt and furrowed a line straight toward the gate, then lifted his foot and stared Tomas down.

  I stepped up beside the old man. “Open it. Just a crack. We don’t go far, we don’t linger. If he’s found something, it’s better we know than guess.”

  Harn groaned. “This is how stories start. ‘They only meant to look.’”

  “Stories with meat in them, if we’re lucky.” Kael planted himself on the other side of the gate bar. “Tomas, lift it. I’ll be first out.”

  Tomas hesitated, then grunted and heaved the bar up. The gate creaked inward. Cold spilled through the gap like water.

  We stepped out: Kael in front, me at his shoulder, Harn muttering behind. The village light fell away fast. Outside the fence, night pressed in, thick, the sky a low lid of cloud that glowed faintly with stolen glowgourd light from the houses.

  Beakly slipped ahead, almost silent for something his size. He didn’t wait, didn’t look back to check that I followed. He moved like he owned the dark.

  “Just to the edge,” Harn hissed. “We’re not traipsing halfway to the river in this gloom.”

  “Edge,” I agreed. “If he goes further, we haul him back by the tail.”

  Harn snorted. “You first.”

  We left the hardpacked lane and stepped onto the faint path villagers used for woodcutting. The ground softened underfoot. Bare branches clawed at the cloudy sky. Every crackle of twig sounded like something choosing where to bite.

  Kael’s shoulders bunched. “We shouldn’t all have come. One look and back.”

  “Too late to argue,” I said. My heart thudded against my ribs, fast but steady. “Eyes open. Listen for—”

  The smell hit first. Copper and musk, rich and heavy. Blood, but not the frantic tang of a boar that died angry. This lay thick and quiet.

  Beakly reached the treeline and stopped. He stepped aside like a courtier making way and only then looked back at me.

  My boots slid on frost?stiff grass. I nearly stumbled into the clearing.

  The stag lay there. Enormous, more boulder than animal at first glance, its coat a pale grey dapple that faded into the cold ground. Frost rimed its flanks, turned the edges of its breath—no, not breath, just the ghost of warmth rising from where it had bled out—into drifting mist.

  Its antlers speared the air like bare trees. Each tine carried a dusting of ice that caught what little light there was, a crown of winter.

  “By the Chapel,” Harn whispered. “That’s… that’s no valley buck.”

  Kael stepped closer, boots careful. His hand hovered over the stag’s side, not quite touching. “Winter lord,” he breathed. “Haven’t seen one since I was a boy. They don’t come this low. Not ever.”

  I recognized the creature from game memory, but the screen version had never captured sheer mass. This thing could have walked over a cart and barely noticed.

  A deep gouge tore its throat open. The wound was clean. No torn mess, just a decisive rip exactly where it needed to be. The snowless earth beneath the neck had turned almost black with blood.

  I looked at Beakly.

  He stood a little apart from the body, not on it. No talon planted possessively on the kill, no proud puffing of his chest. His neck stretched tall, eyes on the tree line, not on us.

  “You did this?” My voice came out softer than I intended.

  He didn’t bob or preen. He flicked one wing in a small, impatient motion, then glanced once at the stag, once at me, like: There. Use it.

  Harn prodded one of the stag’s forelegs with his boot, then grunted as he tried to lift it. It didn’t budge much.

  “Too big,” he muttered. “Kael, we’d need eight men and a blessing to drag this brute, never mind hoisting it.”

  “We’re not butchering it here,” Kael added. “That much blood near the trees? Might as well ring a dinner bell for every beast from here to the river.”

  “So we go back.” My mind ran through options like a checklist. “Wagon, ropes, boards to make a ramp. Maybe two wagons, side by side, if the axles will take it.”

  Harn straightened, already dredging objections. “We’ll need every spare hand, and the good wheels. If the ground softens even a little, we’ll bog down. And if snow starts while we’re—”

  “Then we work fast before it does.” I cut across him. “We can salt and smoke half of this and still have meat left over. Tamsin may not come back, but this thing can. In pieces. Into our cellar.”

  Harn shut his mouth, but his eyes kept moving, counting antlers, haunches, possible disasters.

  Beakly listened to us without interest. He still watched the treeline, statue?still, the cold halo around him seeping into my bones.

  I stepped closer to him. “You could’ve dragged part of it back,” I murmured. “The heart, at least. Or a leg. You usually can’t wait to show off.”

  He ignored my voice, if he even heard it. His feathers lay tight to his body, no friendly ruffle, no head?tilt toward my hand. The eye that met mine felt ancient and far away, as if some part of him perched on a much higher place than this little valley could offer.

  For the first time since waking on his back, he looked like a wild raven writ too large. Not my ridiculous, fussy mount. Not Count Chocobo.

  “Come on,” Kael called. “We’ve seen enough. We make a plan, bring what we need, and take it proper.”

  I gave the stag one more measuring look, then turned toward the village lights, faint and golden behind the bare branches.

  Beakly stayed where he was a moment longer, silhouette sharp against the gray sky, before he finally stepped away from the corpse and followed, his claws whispering on the frozen ground.