The morning clouds were already beginning to dissipate under the sun’s warm eye, laying the face of Crylis bare in the sky over Nilvar. It seemed to Leslyn that the crystalline moon was doing his best to fill the entire blue expanse, as he did every Flood. He was glad that Nilvar didn’t fall in the moon’s shadow during the season. The absolute futility of trying to fly and fight off the dracats in a perpetual pinkish-purple twilight was painful to imagine.
Gathered in the field just outside the Aerie, the fifteen newest recruits stood with their sparsely-feathered keets, the sons and daughters of the feral blue griffin Wrath. At a barely-respectful distance were several rows of senior Guard riders seated on the grass, with some standing at the back. Beyond even those were more riders, perched upon their griffins for a better view.
To one side of the main crowd waited three or four clutches’ worth of more experienced recruits whose griffins were nearing their full adult size. Leslyn noted that they were geared up and ready to go, as if prepared for an incoming dracat swarm.
Altogether, that was a lot of eyes available to stare at Valiant, the tiny griffin wonder.
“I heard he tried to surrender the little ‘egger back to his mother,” was one comment he’d heard about five times already in just the few minutes they’d been gathered.
“Coward was just trying to skip out of joining the Guard,” was inevitably the very next sentence out of every gossiper so far. “As if that wasn’t already guaranteed by the size of the poor beast.”
Nobody seemed to want to speak out against the popular prince, but somehow it seemed that their eyes always trailed over toward Koben once they’d reached that point in the conversation. Leslyn was still bound under the man’s sponsorship until he reached the age requirement of twenty-five to apply for Nilvaran citizenship.
Normally, non-citizens weren’t supposed to receive keets, but Koben had believed in him and made a preemptive decision to invite Leslyn to present himself at Wrath’s first Assigning because of his help in capturing her. He had definitely skipped a few steps in the usual process, as had Erin. Thankfully, she had flown beneath the gossipers’ watch for the most part.
The youth did his best to shut out the faultfinders’ words, focusing instead on General Xavara, who was coming forward to greet the recruits.
“Good morning,” she called out in a booming voice. “Welcome to basic training.” Her eyes went to the crowd of senior riders, and she shook her head. “Fur and feathers, what a turnout! You’ve all seen this before, some of you a dozen times over,” she said with warm bemusement.
Among the laughter that rose up from the riders, someone spoke out with, “We just like to see them bumbling, to remind us that we were green once.”
“Just wait until their first flight,” another of the widely-smiling soldiers added. “Another wyvern would have to drop on us from the hand of Ardor himself to keep us out of the way that day.”
“Let’s not give him any ideas,” Xavara chuckled. “Now, recruits: Let’s start with a review of your fundamentals. Show me ‘low.’”
In tandem with the other recruits, Leslyn bent and touched his keet on the shoulder, pressing gently as he repeated the general’s command. Valiant complied by lying down, crossing his clawed wing “paws” in front of him in a similar manner as a housecat.
Nearly all of the keets successfully obeyed that first command, except for two who decided they were more interested in looking around at all the new faces than they were paying attention to their masters.
“Good. Show me ‘paw.’”
Leslyn pointed at Valiant’s left hind leg. “Paw, Val.”
Pinning his ears, the yellow keet looked a little miffed at being asked to rise so soon after he was bid to sit, but he listened well. Once he was up on all fours, he lifted the indicated leg, letting Leslyn cup it in his hand.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As usual when they practiced, Leslyn used his thumb to part the griffin’s small toes two at a time, checking them over in a similar manner as he had with Romo’s much, much larger paws earlier that morning. Also as usual, Valiant squawked and pulled his foot back after tolerating that treatment a little too briefly for the checkup to be completed.
They went through several more commands before Xavara nodded approvingly, her hands on her hips. “You’re doing well, but you’ll need to be certain that your keets learn all of these commands perfectly by the four-month mark, else they’ll be settled in their ways and you’ll end up with behavioral issues in the long-term. If you need any assistance, Aeriemaster Gunu has several alternative training methods to share. If he’s busy, you’ve your pick of these buffoons here.” She grinned as she gestured toward the crowd of senior riders, many of whom responded by good-naturedly booing at her, thrusting their thumbs toward the ground.
Leslyn caught himself smiling, appreciating the easy familiarity among the Guard’s members. Reality was quick to rear its ugly head, though. Because Val was expected to never grow big enough to be able to fly with Leslyn on his back, it was almost guaranteed that this would not be a camaraderie that the pair would be permitted to participate in.
On that note, he glanced over at Kaleit, whose freshly-bitten forearm was now wrapped in a blood-stained bandage. Zabor seemed to be behaving himself now, even excelling at the majority of commands he’d just been given. Still, Captain Tannoran had warned Kaleit about him since before the Assigning. If he proved too unruly, Kaleit would also be held back from graduating to the Guard and then forced to redo basic training, if they weren’t scratched off the recruit roster altogether.
Leslyn couldn’t bring himself to wish that would be the case, but he certainly wouldn’t complain if things did turn out that way.
“Now, to learn your first formations,” said Xavara, pacing back and forth before the recruits. “We’ll start with the wedge and diamond, the two you’ll be using almost exclusively throughout your career in the Guard.” She nodded toward the older recruits and their mostly-grown griffins. “These fine riders graduated into the Guard just a few short weeks before your own keets arrived. I’ll let them demonstrate.”
The older recruits got up on their griffins, quickly filed into their places on the ground, and took off in the wedge formation, a triangle with a single pair taking point. Behind the leading rider were three others, then five, then seven, and so on.
Once they had leveled off, they circled the field once, keeping the formation as tight as they could without getting too close to each other.
“The most important things to be aware of up there is wingspacing and drafts,” Xavara explained. “You get too close to another griffin and you’ll end up with a broken wing and a scant few moments to say goodbye to your partner. If you’re moving in behind someone and get too close there, you’ll end up tripping on his draft and getting shunted back into whoever’s flying behind you. Also a wonderful opportunity for that goodbye. We’ve lost even seasoned riders to silly accidents like these over the years, so you recruits are certainly not going to be immune.”
At an energetic hand motion from the formation leader, several of the griffins at the two rear points began to lag behind the others, breaking off and reforming into smaller wedges of their own.
The main bulk of the first wedge carefully shifted, multiple griffins along the outer edges slowly easing back and inward to form the rear point of a diamond, their former middle and side positions being filled by griffins from the center of the remaining formation delicately sliding over in the proper direction.
“As you can see,” Xavara continued her narration, “to avoid anyone getting shunted off course by other griffins’ drafts while trying to reform from the center, the riders who are already on the edges move around the outside instead.”
Once that was done, the smaller groups also began to shift into diamonds, demonstrating a simpler version of the maneuver that was much easier for the fresh recruits to follow.
As the rather large audience watched from below, the fliers reformed the large wedge and proceeded to break it apart again in the same way as before. After that, they made one last circle and came back down to the field, welcomed by thunderous applause.
After a heap of praise from General Xavara and the senior riders, the older recruits retired back to their place on the sidelines and settled in to watch the greenhorns take up the reins.
Aeriemaster Gunu stepped in as Xavara began to appoint each recruit and his or her griffin into small five-man groups, helping her select based on what they knew of the future Guard-hopefuls’ personalities, abilities, and social standing in the Aerie.
When they pulled Leslyn, he was not surprised when they directed Erin to join him. Next was Arlis, then—unfortunately—Kaleit. They spent a few moments discussing who would be the fifth and final member of the group.
For some unholy reason, they chose Effran, the troublemaking heckler.
Lovely.
Just lovely.