Broken Lands

Sophia stepped forward. “I’m Sophia. This is Dav, that’s Ci’an, and that’s Xin’ri. And, uh … do you have a youngster who disappeared from your nest a few days ago?”

The gryphon lowered its head for a moment, then looked up at Sophia. “You have found the little one? Does he fare well?”

“He’s at a saddle between two mountains down in the fog, next to a building that has a beacon like this one. The building seems to be mostly buried.” Sophia paused, then realized that she hadn’t actually said how the young gryphon was. “He seems to be happy but hungry and asked us to bring him to you.”

“In the fog?” A slightly higher pitched and obviously worried voice spoke from inside the building. “I do hope he’s warm, the fog isn’t good for our feathers if we’re not warm.”

“He’ll be fine,” the deeper-voiced gryphon that Sophia guessed was probably the young gryphon’s father answered without taking his eyes off Sophia. “She said he followed a beacon, just like we taught him. You four should come on in; the roc won’t bother the pegasus but it’ll know you four aren’t immobilized. You need to be out of sight.”

The male gryphon shuffled backwards. He favored his left rear leg, wincing each time he forgot and tried to put his full weight on it.

Sophia followed him inside. The first thing she noticed was the temperature; it wasn’t just the lack of wind. The room was at least twenty degrees warmer than outside despite the open archway.

The interior of the building looked like an old, abandoned barracks. Bunk beds lined the walls, the old blankets left to rot where they lay. They seemed weirdly clean, something Sophia hadn’t noticed before and she should have. There was no stench of death or waste or even the heavy musk that often surrounded an animal’s lair.

The gryphon in front of her was also oddly clean, though her right wing bent strangely in front of her instead of flared back like her left wing. Her feathers were mostly white, with brown markings that were different from her mate and son, more like splotches. Her tail ended in a giant puff of fur that was far larger than her son’s; when Sophia glanced at the male’s tail, it was sleek and smooth at the tip.

“What is this place?” Sophia glanced around before her gaze settled back on the female gryphon.

“It’s a warming station for the trek over the Inchoate Mountains,” the male gryphon answered from behind her. “That’s what my mother told me, and you can still see the welcome on some of the doors, the ones that still have doors. There are remnants of damaged and destroyed ones all over the mountains, but if the beacon lights, they are warm and clean. Safe. That’s why the little one was supposed to find one. Our old nest was next to one.”

That explained why there was not a strong scent in the air. Magic.

“This is a roc’s nest,” the female gryphon disagreed. “It’s on a warm spot to hatch her eggs, that’s all. We need to leave, but neither of us can fly. You were healing the horse; can you heal us?”

“Maybe,” Dav answered with a frown. “It’s been a few days? We’ll have to set your wings and hold them so they won’t move. I’m not sure how well it will work.”

“If we can glide, it’s enough,” the female gryphon declared.

“We have to catch food.” The male gryphon limped next to his mate, then hunched down with none of his weight on his bad leg. “That means we need to fly, at least one of us needs to be able to fly. There won’t always be a roc dropping off food for us, not once we’re not hiding here waiting for its young to hatch and eat us.”

Sophia’s eyes widened. Of course the gryphons needed to eat something and of course they’d eaten other things the roc dropped in the sort-of-courtyard. The male gryphon said that pegasi were always smashed by the fall; that meant he’d seen others fall. Maybe that was before he was abducted by the roc, it kind of made sense that a gryphon might eat pegasus, but it was even more likely that they’d eaten pegasus after the roc dropped it off. “Are the eggs going to hatch soon? We guessed it was getting food for them.”

“At least four or five days, probably more,” the female gryphon answered. “The roc hasn’t started brooding over them yet. She’s still gathering food.”

“Food that we’ve been eating,” the male disagreed. “It could be sooner but there isn’t enough food for them so she’s still looking.”

“It’s still days away. If they can heal a pegasus’s legs in hours, they can heal our wings.” The female gryphon tilted her head almost horizontally and stared at Dav. “Start now.”

Dav smiled gently as he stepped forward. “Setting your wing will hurt. You’re going to have to hold still.”

“I can put you to sleep if you let me,” Ci’an said from near the entrance. “And I will if you attack Dav. We’ll heal you, but if you attack us afterwards we can still fight.”

The male gryphon coughed in something that might almost have been bitter laughter. “You know where our gryphling is. We’re hungry, not stupid. We could eat the pegasus?”

They didn’t have enough food to feed the gryphons for long, but they did have enough to quiet their immediate hunger pains and make them take back the offer to eat the pegasus before they were healed. Sophia fairly strongly suspected that was exactly what the male gryphon wanted when he offered to eat the pegasus, but she couldn’t be entirely certain. It seemed fairly likely that the offer was real, if they didn’t have food or didn’t care if the gryphons ate something that they’d just healed.

Even if the pegasus hadn’t woken up yet.

They left the pegasus outside. It was probably safer there, away from the hungry gryphons, and the eggs hadn’t started to hatch. There was always the risk of the roc, but the gryphons confirmed what Sophia thought she knew: the adult roc didn’t eat. It made sense; it was bigger than a dragon, and any predator that size would need an absolutely incredible amount of food if it didn’t get most or all of its energy elsewhere. The gryphons didn’t know, but Sophia was pretty sure the roc had to be a manavore, just like a dragon.

Sophia watched Dav and Ci’an set the female gryphon’s wing bones. They were far easier to move into place once the gryphon accepted Ci’an’s offer to put her to sleep. Just like with the pegasus, Sophia and Xin’ri weren’t really all that helpful; Ci’an couldn’t hold more than one of the gryphons unconscious at a time while they set the bones, though her sleep would last for a while once they were no longer jostling the damaged flesh.

It was enough to make Sophia decide that her time (as well as Xin’ri’s) would be better spent exploring the rest of the “warming station.” The large room they were in covered essentially all of the building they were in, but there were all those other buildings stacked on top of it; those buildings were smaller, but maybe there was something there to find.

There was no staircase, not even a ladder, but there was a hatch in the ceiling against the wall farthest from the entrances. A little searching revealed that there was a hatch in the floor, too, under one of the bunkbeds. That made sense now that Sophia thought about it; they were on a roof.

They started the exploration by heading upwards. It required them to fly almost straight up, but both Sophia and Xin’ri could do that.

They found exactly nothing of interest. There were more old bunkbeds and a few tables, but the upper levels were mostly furnished with very large perches instead of beds. This was very obviously living space; if what the gryphon said was correct, it was always transient living space, at that.

Going down required moving one of the bunkbeds. At first, they thought they were going to have to disassemble the bed, but after a few minutes, Xin’ri was able to find a catch that released the bed. It creaked and squealed as it moved, but it did move.

The hatch was a trap door, but like the ones that went up, there was no ladder or stairs; it was a sheer drop. It seemed like a terrible design, which made Sophia certain she was missing something. Either there had once been ladders or there was some reason the interior hatches were set up to be inconvenient.

Now that she thought about it, maybe that was exactly the point. It would make an easy way to separate groups that didn’t get along well if it was possible but difficult to move from area to area. Sophai didn’t know why that would be necessary but it seemed all too likely that the place was modeled on something real, probably something elsewhere on Arcatiz. The area near the tree had literal islands that floated above the clouds; it wasn’t too far fetched to assume that elsewhere on the planet there were mountains that were mostly blanketed with a constant fog and only a few peaks that emerged above them. It would fit.

The evidence of mixed humanoid and avian travelers would fit, too. The trap doors probably implied that humans were the ones who built the place, since the more birdlike Archons used elemental telekinesis to move things instead of hands; they wouldn’t need the handholds that were used to open the door.

Or maybe they would, maybe it was still convenient to have something to “grab.” That wasn’t something Sophia had thought to ask. If that was true, maybe the avian species were more likely since they could fly?

Well, whoever built the place, it was clear that it served a wide range of people. The runework was clearly sturdy, though the World Tree might well have reinforced it so that it held up as well as the Tree wanted. Dungeons did that sometimes, when it was easier overall.

Sophia hopped down the hatch once it was opened and she confirmed that the drop was safe, then looked around. This level was not like the ones above; instead of being mostly open other than the sleeping furniture, it was absolutely filled with stuff. Most of it was clearly broken junk; one entire side even had rubble that looked like it had rolled in from rockfalls on the side of the mountain.

They’d have to spend some time looking through it, but Sophia didn’t expect to find much in the piles of broken furniture; the area that looked like an old kitchen probably wouldn’t have anything either, but Ci’an would definitely want to check it out before they left.

The corner of the room next to that looked the most promising. It was the only area other than the kitchen without piles of discarded stuff; it looked like someone lived there more recently than the rest of the room, but they’d clearly taken most of their stuff with them. All that was left was a single table with three books, a key, and a snow globe that looked like it was filled with a storm.