No ceremony. Just muscle memory. They began.
The koi reached along the bond with the raw telepathic thread he'd once used for prophecy and now used for work. Frostwing, he sent, thin and clear, I need to ride you.
Her pupil tightened. Instinct spoke first—fly? wing says no—then something under instinct cleared its throat: duty. She extended her good wing, flexed the broken one, and let the pain happen without sentimentality.
The koi pulled up the shape of Ice Scale Spikes. Every cell in him flinched. He didn't have plates to throw around. He had a Tamer dying on the clock and a bird who could not do what birds exist to do. Cost is a sentence you end with a period when you set it yourself.
Not spear, he told the skill. Not collar. Splint. Lattice. Small.
The System obliged like a scribe irritated and impressed.
[HYBRID SKILL (Prototype) — Modulate]
[Mode: Structural → Micro-spine lattice]
[Target: external (ally)]
[Risk: Host integrity ↓; instability under load]
[Consent: required]
He pushed the diagram—an intuition more than a picture—toward Frostwing. She studied it the way a surgeon studies a knife and dipped her head. Consent.
He teased loose a dozen plates, then a dozen more, until wind he wasn't in stung his skin. He flung them not outward but over, a scatter of white-edged slivers that clung where Frostwing's primaries were ragged. Each plate kissed damaged feather and brought a thin frost that did not bite; frost met frost and shook hands; a lattice occurred.
Frostwing tested lift. Air cupped the wrong places less wrong. She growled—a low, embarrassed thing—and then buried it under pride.
[Wing integrity: 41% → 53% (temporary)]
[Load capacity: low altitude, short burst]
[Warning: Lattice failure risk ↑ with maneuver]
Brandon blinked up at them, pupils blown wide, jaw tight with venom's cursive. He found the koi the way a traveler finds a lighthouse in fog. "Go," he said. Not dramatic. Practical. He lifted the bowl with both hands, hands that shook, and set it into Frostwing's grasp. "Take my luck."
The bond warmed, the ridiculous holy feeling that did not care if you believed in it. The koi wanted to roll his eyes and kiss it.
Frostwing crouched. Villagers stepped back because humans know when air is about to turn sharp. The koi slid to the bowl's lip and braced.
"North-east. Gullies that steal winter."
Frostwing launched.
They skimmed low, not climbing so much as refusing to fall. The makeshift lattice ticked against the wind like cooling porcelain. The koi pressed what was left of Harden into the joints of his own work, imagining his plates as nails pinning a brace. The village went by underneath—a diagram of roofs, alleys, faces turning upward in a motion that hoped without admitting it. The mountain's shoulder loomed closer, wearing its cloud.
"Time."
[Elapsed: 24 minutes]
[Brandon projected tolerance: 40–45]
[Air ETA: 8]
A number you can fight.
The first line of trees reached out with hungry hands. Even from here the forest smelled alive—spice, sap, and something like citrus. The name Aroma was not poetry; it was cartography. Frostwing's pupils pinpricked; her breath hitched. The koi felt his Sense try to drown in too much—every leaf a whisper, every leaf a lie.
"Breathe shallow," he sent. "Taste is a liar here."
They slid into a gully that had kept winter like a secret. Frost clung where noon had no jurisdiction. Here and there, rime still laced last year's leaves. The ground turned springy under conifer fall. The koi's sight, such as it was, found little disks of dull green on red stems, curled as if listening.
He almost leapt from the bowl in vulgar joy.
[Aroma Hibiscus — juvenile]
[Stage: unflowered] [Nectar: absent]
[Calyx sap: minimal] [Efficacy: low]
"Older," he said, and luck—field, grace, cringe, whatever—put weight behind the word.
They wove deeper. The forest made mazes out of perfume. A puff promised a lover left, a mother right, a child behind, a self you'd forgotten straight ahead. The koi held to cold: Frostwing's thread; the gully's shadow; the places where sun had argued with frost and lost on points. The hibiscus liked where winter cheated. He followed the cheat like gospel.
"Time."
[Elapsed: 31]
[Brandon projected tolerance: 40–45]
[ETA to mature cluster: 3–4]
"Vector."
The System drew a ghost arrow on his mind; he tugged Frostwing that way with a thought's leash. She banked gently. The lattice complained; a micro-spine snapped with a sound only he could hear. He poured a little more of himself into the brace and called it a fair trade.
The gully widened into a pocket where cold had built a small kingdom. There—low shrubs wearing last season's leaves like shawls, and on three of them, the miracle: open flowers, five-petaled, palest blue with centers like spun sugar. There were no bees—wrong season—but the silence made the color louder.
[Aroma Hibiscus — mature]
[Nectar: present] [Calyx sap: abundant]
[Harvest: swift; avoid contamination]
[Preparation: cold maceration (immediate)]
"Down."
Frostwing landed like a secret. The lattice nearly didn't survive the stop; two spines cracked. The koi didn't care. He vaulted the bowl's rim into a puddle that existed because shade had cut a deal with air, bounced once to shed mud, once to reach a bloom, and set his Bite where calyx meets stem, gentle as a kiss.
Sweetness spilled. He filled his mouth and spat into the bowl.
"Cold film."
Frostwing breathed a spider-thin skin of ice. The nectar drop sat on it like a jewel and didn't run. He bit the next flower, then the next, learned the motion that drew calyx sap without mangling, scraped with his lower plate until taste numbed and purpose sharpened. He worked clean. The System ticked doses like a metronome.
[Dosage: 3 staged sips (adult human)]
[Carry: Host mouth + bowl film]
[Time to saturation: unknown] [Hurry]
"Time."
[Elapsed: 34]
[Return ETA: 8–10]
[Brandon tolerance: 40–45]
He took one last calyx, squeezed its sap, and flung himself back into the bowl. The ice film wobbled under the weight of what might be life. He spread himself as a lid against it, Harden whispering hold to two fragile surfaces at once.
"Up."
Frostwing leapt.
The forest tried to keep them with warm smells of bread, hearth, victory. The koi pressed Brandon's belief into the link like a road of no. "Left," he sent; "higher;" "cut that scent;" "ignore that sweetness." Frostwing obeyed even when obedience hurt. Another spine snapped. The lattice sang an ugly chord, then settled into a new balance. He told pain good job and meant it.
The ridgeline broke into view. The village spread below like a diagram of need. People looked up, faces that hadn't practiced hope doing it anyhow.
Brandon lay where they had left him—paler, jaw tighter, breath writing messily. The ash-haired woman held his shoulder like an argument she refused to lose.
Frostwing slammed down in a controlled fall and nearly folded. The koi smacked the rim, cracked the ice with his head, and let sweetness and sap spill toward Brandon's mouth.
"Staged," the System reminded.
"Don't you dare lecture me now," he hissed, but he obeyed. He nudged a drop against Brandon's lips. The man swallowed. The koi waited the longest three heartbeats in history, then gave another. Again. Again.
[Antivenin uptake: yes]
[Binding: initiating]
[Neuromuscular degradation: slowed]
[Vitality: stabilizing (fragile)]
He noticed he was trembling only when the water looked like rain. He tried to stop; he didn't. He let the shaking carry the last rancid adrenaline out of him and make a little room for quiet.
Frostwing folded to the cobbles. The lattice resigned its commission with crystalline sighs. The koi looked at the ruined brace and wanted to apologize to every feather. The phoenix touched her beak to the bowl instead. Forgiveness without words.
Brandon's eyes focused by degrees. He found the koi like a man finds the horizon after tumbling. "You flew," he murmured, proud and faintly offended on physics' behalf.
You told me to live, the koi sent, too tired to find the edge of a joke.
Around them, the village exhaled—buckets, cloth, small weeping that decided not to last forever. Above them, Emerald Peak wore its cloud and kept its comments. The road still ran up.
The System cleared its throat in blue text like a clerk discovering a new drawer.
[Observation: Luck field assisted pathfinding in Aroma Forest]
[Causation: Brandon belief resonance]
[Advisory: Maintain bond proximity during high-variance searches]
"Noted," the koi said. It was the thinnest word for the biggest debt.
He let the bowl hold him. He did not die. He did not collapse into the part of him that had weighed find another Tamer against keep this vow and found the scale disgusting.
The ash-haired woman sat back on her heels and dragged the back of her hand across her eyes, smearing ash into a different pattern. "Thank you," she told all three of them, and then, smaller: "Again."
Brandon shifted, tested his hand, grimaced, and grinned at the same time. "It works," he said, in the surprised voice of a man whose plans did not used to pay out this often. He set his palm on the bowl's rim. Frostwing breathed a soft ring of harmless rime around it, a circlet that meant we.
The koi tasted hibiscus on his tongue—sweet, medicinal, improbable. Borrowed wings had carried him. Borrowed time had been bought. In the ledger of impossible tasks, a thin new line appeared under survive, and a hand that didn't know how to stop wrote again.
He looked at Brandon and Frostwing and finally said the sentence he'd been forging since the river bed chewed him and spit him out.
I won't be a burden.
It wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. The bond heard it and tightened, not like chains, like a seatbelt.
Night came down with the smell of stone and secrets. Somewhere up there a lake had screamed. Somewhere up there a dragon made of history lay on rock like a law.
The koi closed his eyes. For one breath he let the fantasy of sleep exist. Then he set it aside.
"Tomorrow," he whispered along the link.
"Tomorrow," Brandon answered, voice thin but iron-shaped. Frostwing's answering breath sketched a pale crescent on the rim—yes, and yes again.
The mountain listened with its usual patience. The road pointed up. The clock, for once, looked away.