There was a thunk from within and Halvard looked at the boneshifter questioningly.
Fenri shrugged.
“Halvard!” It was Rook’s voice, thank the spirits.
“Yes, Chief?” Halvard opened the door and peaked in.
The foreigner sat slumped in a chair, as if he had just gone through some terrible crucible. A knife – one of Rook’s spare blades that she kept secreted throughout the room – lay on the table as if cast there in frustration.
“Tell the people to see to their weapons and armor, and have our best fighters patrol the village in pairs. We have reason to believe that the boneshifter attack will not be an isolated incident. The weak are welcome here when dusk settles.”
“Where are you going?” Halvard did his best to be the grim wall of muscle behind the chief. But when it came to Rook herself, Halvard knew he had a hard time keeping the concern from his eyes.
Rook paused and looked up at him. He was much taller than her, but the way she looked at him made him feel as if she were a hundred times his size.
There was a moment of softness there between the shadows. Then the darkness was back and she leaned in to whisper, “The foreigner speaks of an army from his homeland driving the boneshifters toward us. If he’s lying, I’ll drop him from the sky. If he’s telling the truth… well, we’ll cross that ford when we get there.”
***
Yaosen followed Rook through another series of tunnels, but to his surprise, instead of going deeper into the dark annals of the mountain, they seemed to be rising with each turn.
After a few moments of the ramping tunnels getting tighter and tighter, Yaosen got the sense that they were climbing up a chimney. As Yaosen spotted more fist sized tunnels in the porous rock, belching smoke, he realized that every fireplace carved throughout the village somehow funneled to this very point.
Either that, or the very rock beneath them smoked and burned.
By the time they reached the end of the upward spiraling tunnels, the smoke was so thick, Yaosen could barely see Rook in front of him.
Yet somehow, Yaosen sensed that the next few steps would bring them out into open air.
They had reached the highest point above Shadow Ridge and the place where the volcanic activity below – the mountain being anything but dormant – vented its smoke and ash.
“Gamayun,” said Rook in a tone Yaosen hadn’t heard before, “This is Yaosen. He’s a friend. For now.”
The smoke from the volcanic vent swirled. In the displaced air, Yaosen thought he saw something darker than smoke and ash slide through the space above them.
There was a thump that shook the rocks beneath them and a scratching that seemed to come from a wolfboar’s tusks on rock.
“Yaosen, this is Gamayun.”
A half dozen paces above Yaosen’s head, the curtain of smoke parted and a silver-black beak as long as Rook’s sword emerged to loom above them. Beady black eyes the size of Yaosen’s fist blinked all too intelligently.
“GAMA! GAMA!” The massive black bird repeated in a hoarse croak that thrummed with the size of the creature’s chest.
“Yes, Gama for short,” Rook laughed.
“What… what is it?”
“This is an ashraven,” said Rook, “There are few enough of them left, now that most of the mountains have gone cold. And they’re fiercely protective of their nests. Now, hop on, you’re sitting in front.”
“Hop on?”
Rook shoved Yaosen forward and he nearly stumbled into the creature. Her beak snapped down warningly. By the clack it made beside his head, Yaosen had no doubt that it could cut him in half.
“Rule number one when facing an Ashraven Queen,” said Rook, partly obscured by the smoke, “You either climb on like you’re a hatchling, or you try to run like you’re an egg thief.”
The ashraven threw back its head – about as big as Headbutt’s if not as wide – and cawed to the smoke above, “THIEF! THIEF!”
“Climb on!” hissed Rook.
Yaosen felt a boot in his back and before he knew it he was clutching at feathers, scrabbling up, pretending that this was some insanely strange wall he climbed, not a massive black bird.
The delusion was aided by the fact that he couldn’t see anything other than the feathers in front of him. After a moment, he found a place in front of its wings that seemed about the equivalent of a flying bison’s natural saddle, the one just behind its head.
That’s when chaos broke loose.
Rook came plummeting from the smoke to land flat on the creature’s back behind him and the creature was so startled that it launched itself skyward.
When Yaosen’s stomach was no longer in his ears, he realized that Rook was laughing as they fell into the sky.
The ashraven, for its part, was cawing, “ROOOK! ROOOK! ROOOK!” with a tinge of annoyance, as if it were a nanny forced to look after a troublesome child.
He looked back to see Rook’s yellow hair flying about her face, and in that moment of joy – for her; it was pure terror for Yaosen – she did indeed look merely troublesome, not the stern, callous leader he knew her to be.
The ashraven banked and the curtain of smoke fell away.
Yoasen saw the world in a way he could never have imagined. It wasn’t just a map laid out on a table, or the view from a mountaintop.
It was the viewpoint from which only the greatest spirits got to see the world.
Everything was beneath them. Nothing obstructed them. They could go anywhere on a whim, be surrounded by glacial mountains in one moment and forests the next, gray seas or oceans of dusty orange earth. From up here, Shadow Ridge was a pinprick of ash and volcanic stone, nestled in a haybale of glaciers. Beneath it, everything Yaosen had ever seen of the Farwilds could be held in the palm of one hand.
Yoasen felt as if his spirit had fled from his body to ascend into the clouds. Only then did he realize that he actually couldn’t feel most of his body. The air was so cold up here, his hands and feet and face had gone instantly numb.
As the great bird soared on the last of the thermal draft, it flapped its wings once, twice, jostling Yaosen like a kid running with a satchel. The monk’s teeth clacked with the impact in a most undignified way and he turned to see Rook smiling a spiteful smile.
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Now he knew why he was the one riding in front.
“Hold on!” she howled above the wind. She tucked her face into the bird’s feathers and Yaosen did the same.
The feathers smelled ashy and sulfurous. But more importantly, they were warm. No wonder Rook had made a cloak out of them. Up here, it was just about the only thing that could stave off the-
Every thought was blasted from Yaosen’s mind as the bird tipped, slowly at first like a small promise of the terror to come, then dove fully and completely downward.
Yaosen was screaming but nothing came out. His lungs, his stomach, his entire chest had been gripped by a giant hand of vertigo, and it held on for so long, Yaosen thought he would be dead before he could get another breath.
Above the sound of his own frozen blood and the rushing of the wind, he could still hear Rook laughing. What unholy spawn of dark spirits could create a creature that could laugh at this feeling of infinite falling.
Some semi-logical part of Yaosen told him that he needed to do something. He needed to get free of this madness and arrest his momentum with firebending. But the animal part of him knew he could do nothing but hold on as tightly as he possibly could, hoping to survive, begging the ashraven to pull up before they were nothing more than a meteoric hole in the earth.
When the beast pulled up, Yaosen wished it hadn’t.
Suddenly every bone and muscle and fiber of his being weighed twice as much – no five times as much – crushing him down into the bird’s feathers so deep he could feel his own ribs grinding against the ashraven’s.
His stomach did flips and he was reminded – in the worst, most undignified way – that he had eaten salmonsturgeon for lunch.
Then the bird leveled out, and they were gliding.
The most chaotic moment of Yaosen’s life was followed by perhaps the most peaceful. That was after he had finished emptying his lunch over the ashraven’s shoulder.
“Ugh,” said Yaosen, “That was no bison ride.”
When he wiped his mouth and resettled into the center of the bird, he turned to see Rook now kneeling on the flat of its back. One hand gripped a fistfull of feathers as she leaned far out over its side, to get a better view of the land.
The world that Yaosen had known as the Farwilds now gently drifted by, barely changing minute by minute, save for the herds of wolfboar or hummingdeer, no bigger than the size of ants and waterstriders in a royal garden.
The serenity of the image was shattered, or rather scarred, by the network of raised roads that emanated from the distant earth kingdom city. It squatted on the southern horizon like an engorged leech, bigger and more ominous, with more spires protruding from it than when Yaosen had last seen it.
And every resource the earth provided, the Earthbreaker’s roads sought out. The tendrils of precision and order and utility all emanated from that city to form mining camps and sawmills; leech-spawn that would one day form cities of their own.
“What are they?” Rook asked.
“People, like you and I, I suppose. But you found a mountain to live in. They made theirs.”
Nature moved in graceful lines, sweeping with the folds of earth that turned foothills into mountains, or rivers into marshes and seas. But the Earthbreakers moved in straight lines and precise angles, plowing through the natural curves of the land as if beauty didn’t have the right to get in the way of progress.
“Why?” asked Rook.
Yaosen shrugged. “It was easier I guess. When you can move earth and stone the way you manipulate shadow or I summon flame, you can place a mountain wherever you like. You don’t need to climb hills if you can walk through them. You don’t need to find your way in the forest if you can force the forest to part before you.”
Rook’s eyes darkened. Surely she could see now that her caves and her mountains meant nothing before a power such as this.
“Hold on!” she said, “I need to see how close they are!”
Yaosen hadn’t let go, but he held on tighter.
The silhouette of the earth city on the horizon veered away from them.
It hadn’t taken them long to fly down from the glaciers and mountains that placed Shadow Ridge high above the riverlands to the south, but the earth city would be too long a flight.
The badlands however, were much closer. An expanse of dusty orange centered into view as the ashraven leveled out into their new course.
There were no raised roads to follow here; the badlands were all one big flat road, save for the gorges cut but by the runoff through the thin soil.
But in the slanting rays of the setting sun, the dustcloud glowed like a raging fire.
Yaosen had not been wrong in his estimation of one hundred thousand Earthbreakers, or, as he had put it to Rook “a hundred ten hundreds.” In fact, the sight of that many Earthbreakers on the move was even more dramatic than the number alone would suggest, given the amount of siege equipment, supply wagons, and earthen tanks that trailed after them.
Gone were the days of metalbender police forces and finely crafted war-blimps. Gone were the days of intricate machines that could move themselves without horses. Gone were the days when every nation commanded legions of metalbenders and metal tanks.
But an earthbender army was still a force to be reckoned with, perhaps even moreso, when the machine of war was turned by earthen wheels.
Terra Cotta tanks were just as deadly as the lost machines of old, and far easier for an earthbender to make and to move. Simple scout balloons powered by clay fans and braziers were just as much of a strategic advantage as the fire nation’s balloons in the Hundred Year War. Forge-hardened steel was just as deadly when launched on an earthen shaft as it was when thrown by a metalbender.
But there might be at least one metalbender among them, Yaosen knew.
If Lu Gun was clever enough to survive his own sabotage on the ship that had brought them to this continent he might be clever enough to survive Yaosen’s uncontrolled wildfire.
If Lu Gun was alive – and Yaosen felt in his soul that the metalbender’s evil did still plague this world – he would have found his way to the Earthbreaker army, maybe even the head of it. And nothing Yaosen told himself could shake the feeling that this mobilization, the plan to cross the badlands and drive the beasts before them as skirmishers, distractions, fear-sowers felt like Lu Gun’s calling card, as Torun had so eloquently pointed out. The machine of war may have been earthen, but it was driven by an iron will.
At the front of that structured ordered machine, clouds of fur and bone and bestial shapes looked up at the shadow of the ashraven and howled their defiance.
“We’re spotted,” said Yaosen.
“So what,” said Rook, “It's not like they can-”
A distant thrum.
“Move!” Yaosen dove to the side, pressing into Gama’s wing and forcing the ashraven to bank.
“ROOOK!” The raven cawed once before the wooden bolt the size of a tree whooshed by them. It had traveled more than a hundred paces into the air and it likely had at least another hundred paces to go before it would start falling to the earth.
“It wasn’t me, you ashy beast,” said Rook when they righted themselves again.
“Are you convinced?” shouted Yaosen, to the thrum and thwack of clay machinery launching a dozen more ballista bolts skyward.
Rook fell flat against the ashraven and banked hard, forcing Yaosen to do the same.
“I’m convinced we’re not welcome here!” she said after a series of maneuvers that left Yaosen’s stomach in knots, “But Gama doesn’t take kindly to sharing her skies with anyone! Hold on!”
Yaosen still hadn’t let go, but he looked up briefly to see what was coming next. A wall of Earthbreaker green and black rose up before them. He didn’t have time to wonder what it was doing all the way up in the air, before Gama let out another shriek and then tucked her wings tight to her body, like a missile.
Yaosen realized they were going to ram into it even as he pressed his head as tight to Gama’s body as possible.
There was a great ripping sound and Yaosen felt cloth cling to his back as darkness enveloped them. Another tear and they emerged back into the light, Gama shrieking and flapping hard to regain lost momentum.
There was a thunderous crash in the distance below and Yaosen saw the wreckage of an Earthbreaker scout balloon smoldering in the dusty earth.
They must have shot right through it like a pin!
“Let me take care of the next one!” said Yaosen, “Just bank around the top of it!”
Rook nodded and they veered off again, Gama scything her way through the air, dodging missiles from below and clay darts from the second scout balloon. One missile came straight for them and Yaosen crushed his head back into the bird’s feathers as the world flipped sickeningly.
“Now!” Rook shouted.
Yaosen look up to find the balloon right beneath them and impossible to miss. He let go of the feathers with one hand to send a single fire fist into the side of it.
He must have been frantic with fear, because the blast was all power, no control. What was supposed to be a surgical lance of fire shot into one side and out the other like a volcanic eruption.
“It’ll do!” shouted Rook as the balloon flapped, canted to one side, then collapsed completely to plummet to the earth, spinning like a top all the way.
Rook made a quick scan of the sky, and seeing no more scout balloons, banked to the north, then eventually toward home.