Book One – Chapter 17

That was what broke him. It was the undertow. He did not hear it. He underwent it.

It ripped through him like sickness. His gut turned. His skin crawled. His feathers itched like they needed to be ripped out. It was too much. The voices, the cold, the storm-stung air, the suffocating pressure of everything, everything that tore at him for hours and days and weeks. Yu was at the end of his rope. He was fraying at the edges, worn thin by the endless stretch of dread. He had been made to cling there too long. He could no longer. Not one moment more.

He swayed. The stone beneath his talons shifted, tilted, as if the very world lurched away from the thing inside him. He lost balance —

Yu slammed his back against the wall. Hard. Cold. Solid. Real. But not enough. His talons curled tight against the grit. His legs locked. He squeezed his eyes shut —

Stupid. As if that would help. As if the Mountain King could be shut out by closing his eyes. As if that could make the deafening hunger and the sheer physical and mental exhaustion vanish. All it did was hurt. There was ice on his face, crystals which by now had settled into the base of his feathers, like shrapnel. When he grimaced, they tore at his skin. Tiny shards bit into him; flashes of pain along the curve of his beak, the ridge of his brow, and the corners of his eyes.

Yu blinked. Hard. Again.

And in that blink, in the space of that first shard-struck blink, just before his vision reset — he saw it.

Only for a split-second. Less. No time to make sense of it. But it was there. Not imagined. Not misseen. Seen, in that singular flicker of awareness that bypassed all logic. There, within that impossible crevice between raw perception and expectation in which his wizard-self recognised from within what could not immediately be overshadowed by what his fina-part assumed to find on the outside. In that crease, where logic had not yet snapped its harness over sensation, his wizard-self caught it. He caught it before he could even realise what it was, before he could stop himself from releasing, from blinking it away —

A Mountain Beast.