VOLUNTARY PRISONER

As Garrick and his squad pushed deeper into the forest, following the trail Elara had blazed, the undergrowth began to change. The withered, yellowing leaves gave way to ferns of a strange, persistent vitality—damp, glossy, and impossibly green. It was as if this corner of the forest had sealed itself off from the world's relentless sickness.

As the rustling and snapping of branches drew nearer, Krazoc quickened his pace. Beside him, the boy's heart was hammering, and his mind broadcast that wave of pure curiosity to Krazoc as plainly as if it were his own.

When they reached a small clearing where the trees thinned out, Broc was the first to see it, and the sight of the massive creature rooted him to the spot. "Holy Qysdes..." he breathed, awestruck.

In the very center of the clearing thrashed a magnificent creature, the kind that seemed to have leapt straight out of legend. Its serpentine body, some sixteen feet long, was sheathed in scales of turquoise, emerald, and gold that caught and threw back the sunlight. From its back unfurled two enormous, feathered wings. Each beat sent small whorls of wind spinning outward, scattering parchment-colored feathers that hung suspended in the air.

A Quatl. Nature's purest, wildest beauty, untouched.

But just beneath the creature's right wing, the teeth of a monstrous, rust-eaten steel trap had sunk deep into its flesh.

The creature hissed and thrashed in agony, and with every desperate movement the heavy iron jaws flayed a little more skin, pinning it ever more firmly to the earth. The ground around it was awash in its own bright, pure blood.

Garrick's eyes fixed not on the breathtaking Quatl but on the trap that had caught it. The captain stepped forward slowly. He studied the heavy black chains at the trap's edge and the jagged iron stakes driven deep into the soil. His face went chalk-white in an instant.

"Summit Wardens..." Garrick said, barely a whisper, but the words landed like a lash. A stone settled in his gut.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Broc asked, his hand tightening around the haft of his mace.

"Hired dogs who hold the Brothers' Pass," Garrick said, already drawing his sword and sweeping his eyes across the clearing. "This is their mark. Geared trap, serrated jaws. They wanted that thing taken alive—for its feathers, its blood, or some twisted notion only they'd dream up. If the Summit Wardens are close enough to lay this, it's only a matter of time before they come to check their catch."

Garrick spun to face Krazoc and the rest of the group. All the warmth had drained from his voice, leaving nothing but a soldier's command. "We're heading back to the wagon, now. We change course, make for the path Elara found. Move out!"

Vance, still staring at the trapped Quatl as if spellbound, let his shoulders slump in disappointment. "But its wings... it would only take five minutes to study the anatomy of those scales, Captain!"

"Unless you want them flaying your skin along with its, get your bony ass to that wagon!" Broc bellowed, reading the depth of the danger in Garrick's face, and seized Vance by the scruff of the neck to haul him back.

Everyone was moving. Everyone but one.

Krazoc stood where he was, planted like a thick old oak, his chained hands hanging loose in front of him. Beside him, the boy's eyes had welled with tears. The child pictured the creature's pain as though it were his own flesh, living out that pure animal's helplessness inside his own mind. The boy wasn't moving. So Krazoc wasn't moving either.

Garrick clenched his jaw when he saw Krazoc hadn't budged an inch. "I said move!" he snapped, grabbing the heavy iron chain binding Krazoc's wrists and hauling on it with everything he had.

The muscles in Garrick's shoulders strained, his boots dug into the dirt. But—Krazoc's arm did not move. Not by a hair's breadth.

The captain looked up, stunned. Krazoc turned those empty, cold eyes on him, slow and unhurried. There was no threat in that look, no anger. Only something stark and unmistakably true:

I wear these chains not because you took me, but because I chose to come with you.

In that moment Garrick felt it in his marrow—he had no real hold over this man at all. Krazoc was nothing more than a willing companion who happened to be wearing irons. He had served under no shortage of commanders in his career. Not one of them had ever been chained. His grip on the chain slackened without his willing it, and his hand fell slowly to his side.

Krazoc pulled his gaze from Garrick and started walking toward the Quatl, still thrashing in its agony.

The creature's panic doubled when it saw the human silhouette approaching. It threw its jaws wide, baring razor teeth, and let out a hiss that raised the hair on every arm in the clearing. It beat its uninjured wing with all the strength it had left.

The gust the wing threw off was so violent that Garrick and Vance lost their footing and staggered backward. Broc threw his massive mace up across his face on pure reflex. "Get back, you mad bastard!" he shouted through the wind. "It'll tear you apart in one bite!"

But Krazoc didn't so much as pause in the gale. His steps stayed heavy, steady, unhurried.

As the Quatl braced to strike, the boy at the rear squeezed his eyes shut. His mind filled with waves of feeling reaching outward, the same warm, tender sensation he'd used to calm Krazoc before—now turned toward the Quatl instead. He wanted to soothe the creature's animal terror, to whisper to it that no one meant it harm.

But the instant the boy's mental reach touched the Quatl, he struck something like an invisible wall.

His perception couldn't slip into the creature's consciousness; it was like striking a smooth, impenetrable mirror of diamond. The Quatl's mind was sealed shut against the world entirely—shielded by something older and more innately natural than any Channeler of Consciousness could ever hope to crack. It was clear now why the Summit Wardens had resorted to a trap this crude and brutal instead of simply taming the thing.

What calmed the creature in the end was Krazoc's steady, unbroken approach.

The Quatl went suddenly still. Its hissing slowed. Looking at the man before it, it felt no trace of predatory instinct radiating from him, no hunger for its death. That blank, white expanse inside Krazoc's mind registered in the beast's wild and otherwise closed senses not as a threat, but as a quiet, still emptiness.

Or—an echo of something far older still.

Krazoc stopped directly in front of the Quatl. The creature's enormous, gold-colored eyes bore straight into his face. Slowly, Krazoc reached out his hands. The Quatl did not pull away; it only lowered its neck a fraction and yielded itself to his touch.

Garrick, Broc, and the others stood holding their breath, watching this moment beyond words.

Krazoc set his chained hands against either side of the brutal, serrated trap. He drew a deep breath and locked his muscles. The thick black iron groaned, a sound that scraped at the ear, twisting between Krazoc's hands. The metal's resistance gave way within seconds, and the trap split apart with a dull crack, freeing the creature's wing.

The instant it was free, the Quatl's massive body traced a slow, grateful arc around Krazoc.

Krazoc turned his head back toward the squad. His eyes found the boy directly, and he gave a small nod: You can come.

The boy ran to Krazoc's side, a wide smile breaking across his face. He reached out his small hands and stroked the Quatl's coarse yet silken feathers. The creature met his touch by lowering its head like a docile cat.

This time Krazoc's gaze shifted to Vance, who had pressed himself flat against the forest floor a short distance away. "Medic," he said in his deep voice. "Bind its wing."

Vance swallowed, his eyes going wide as saucers. "Me? Where exactly did you get the idea that I want to be torn limb from limb?" he said—even as some part of him was already talking himself into seizing this chance to study the creature up close. "You really think it's going to understand I mean it well?"

"Bind its wing," Krazoc repeated. His voice never rose, but it carried a weight that allowed no argument.

Vance looked to Garrick in desperation, but the captain only nodded. The irritable herbalist got to his feet, muttering and trembling. He approached the creature slowly, drawing plant extracts and clean strips of bandage from his satchel. The Quatl stayed docile so long as Krazoc and the boy remained close.

Vance tried to treat the most urgent part of the wound using Essence of Being. But the creature didn't respond to the essence-magic at all. His hands froze mid-motion.

"That's strange," he murmured aloud. There was no real curiosity in his voice, only a faint bafflement—the kind a scholar feels the second time something defies the rules he's built his understanding on. One of the very things that made Quatls so prized was how rich they were in Essence of Being. For centuries men had hunted them down to fill crystals by the hundreds with that essence, driving the species to the brink of extinction and into legend.

"This goes against everything I've read," he said, looking up at the captain. "This is the first time I've ever encountered a creature whose essence I can neither draw nor augment. I'll have to treat it the old way—by hand."

Vance might have complained, but he was a genius at his work. As he expertly cleaned the open wound, he forgot, just for a moment, his fear in the scholarly thrill of touching those legendary scales. He worked an extract of mudwort into the cut, then bound the wing firmly in place to keep it still. "T-this is only a temporary fix," he stammered, drawing back. "Quatls regenerate fast. Essence of Being runs pure in their blood already. It should heal on its own in a few days—it just won't be able to fly until then. Assuming any of that's even true."

Krazoc nodded. He touched the boy's shoulder and stepped back.

The Quatl gathered its great wings in close. It cast one long, grateful look toward Krazoc, then slid its body silently into the deep green of the forest and vanished among the trees.

Garrick let out a long, shaking breath and sheathed his sword. Watching this prisoner of his show mercy had shaken something loose in him, deep down. But the danger wasn't past yet.

"If the show's over," Garrick said, keeping his voice flat, "we'd best get back to the wagon before the Summit Wardens' dogs come sniffing around. We've got a long road ahead."

The squad gathered itself quickly and turned back the way they'd come, toward the wagon. The boy walked close at Krazoc's side, glowing with the happiness of the moment he'd just lived, glancing back now and again into the depths of the forest.

But as they started walking, Krazoc felt a strange, heavy weight settle on the back of his neck—the prickling sensation of being watched. As if the forest itself had its eyes on him.

He slowed his steps and, muffling the sound of his heavy chains, glanced back over his shoulder one last time, toward the misty green clearing where the Quatl had disappeared.

The white emptiness inside his mind rippled, just for a moment.

In the shadows among the trees, there was no longer a massive, winged serpent. In its place stood a tall, human-shaped silhouette, watching him from within the mist. It was draped in exotic, silk-like fabric the color of gold, turquoise, and emerald—the same colors as the scales of the creature from moments before. The mysterious figure, woman-shaped, met Krazoc's eyes and bowed her head slowly, with deep reverence.

When Krazoc blinked, the shadows had already folded back into one another, and the graceful figure had vanished entirely into the forest's deep green.