We galloped through the desert. I rode the hawk’s mind, and the hawk rode on the speartip carried by Shine-Catch, and she rode on Ramses’ back. The winds were picking up, strange echoes of foreign Mana flashing across the landscape as windows to other horizons flickered open and closed.

The Elsestorm was a knot of tangled reality. Some of the distant horizons caught within were like flat planes, always facing towards you so you never saw the thin edges. Others were fluttering ribbons, the window of sky dancing wildly, twisting. It was a gyre of stormwinds on which countless rifts in the fabric of space turned, all of them moving impossibly, and in the end it looked like a stained glass window shattered and swept up by a whirlwind.

For a momentum, one of the rifts changed, opening beneath the sea.

An immense wave of sea water exploded out into the air, and was whipped into sprays of salted froth by the wind. Fish twisted like silver coins scattered from a god’s hand and fell to the dust below.

Lightning split the air, and the sand rose into streams of grit flowing in the sky. Every second, bits of ancient stone ground down to dust was tossed in our face, trying to shred its way down through our skin. The world was dark with the stuff.

And in the distance the mountains loomed. The closer we got, the more we were shaded from the storm.

The roar was building every moment. The sound of the air grinding against itself, in conflict, and the trees at the mountain’s edges bent and twisted, groaning, their dry wood splintering with sudden whipcracks. We pushed on. Ramses was relentless, his huge bulk bouncing off the ground with heavy footfalls that bore us through the undergrowth like a tide of flesh.

And then-

Silence.

We burst into a snowbank, Ramses’ feet slamming down into the wet slush. The wind was gone. The trees no longer moved to the storm’s commands. The pines were thick with green needles and snow, a deadly silence filling the forest.

As one we turned back. The storm was still there, a stain of clashing colors.

It just wasn’t here. Here there was only stillness.

Shine-Catch shivered, pulling on the fur cloak I’d spun for her. The spear’s crystal tip flashed, and I felt the Mana shift, spiraling inwards. A strange flickering darkness accumulated as the enchantment tried to steal our lives and was sucked up instead.

A single thread of lightning raced down the edge, and my hawk took flight.

Above the treetops, the world rang with an eerie lack of sound that amplified the rare whistle of a wind scraping past the stony mountain-tops. The farther we got from the spear and its Mana-stealing, the colder the air grew, hardening against us.

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Below Ramses trudged on, his heavy stomp upsetting the snow underfoot. Rampaging forward.

I saw the ruined fort above us, and nested beneath its shadows, the buried rooftops of the old town. The hawk’s mind was one with my own as its cold amber eyes searched for the window, the single, tiny entrance I’d taken on my flight with the crow.

Something moved. The snow twitched, and pushed up.

Like a sleeper casting off a blanket a dead man climbed from the snow. Its armor was ancient and rusting, its body covered in skin gone black from frostbite. The skin was brittle, cracking apart as it moved, drawing a sword from beside it in the frost.

There were more. Not many, some eight, but enough. They lurched forward with an unsteady motion as I turned back towards the two on the ground.

High above, shadows began to flock from the fort. As Ramses crested towards the buried town the flock of giant bats took flight, winged shadows bursting into the sky above.

We would have to draw them away. The hawk drew a breath and cawed a single clarion shriek, filling the silent mountain valley with the thunder of its voice.

Our wings bent, and the air shifted beneath us, carrying our body on a long shared glide out from the valley. The bats turned and followed, dipping into their own sleek dives, a flock of leathery black wings chasing our golden silhouette as we swooped down low across the canopy, cold flakes of snow stinging at us like bitter needles.

We’d only have a handful of minutes before the leeching enchantment in the air crippled us. Behind us, the horde was closing in, each racing to be the one whose claws sank into our backs. They shrieked with the joy of the chase.

My hawk felt it too. I felt it.

I ran on the winds in the body of a magnificent creature meant for this. For the moments when the wind clutched at his feathers but could not hold him, and became a solid river under his wings, lifting him up. The feel of his heart racing faster and faster, drumming hard, his breath slowing at the same time, becoming steady and regular and deep-

It was a moment of utter calm in the second before we turned. Folding our wings entirely, we twisted in the air and lifted them open again, breaking against our own moment. The glittering gold of the hawk’s wings caught some distant spear of sunlight coming through the snowstorm, racing down the inner curve like a lightning bolt.

A breath of harsh, cold air filled our lungs.

We let loose a sound like thunder, a high, imperial scream that echoed and echoed in the basin of the valley, shaking snow loose from the peaks. A sound that built until all but the lowest note faded from human hearing and even that last syllable flickered in and out, a piercing-high whistle that stung the ears.

The bats with their sensitive hearing, with their bodies built on echolocation, were half-blind in the air. They still had their weak, beady eyes.

The luminous glands on the hawk’s underbelly flickered once, and erupted. Reflected on the twin curves of his bent wings, a blinding flash became a column of blazing golden light filled with the orange-yellow luster of the sun, bursting forward like a spear from heaven to strike their nocturnal eyes.

For a moment the sky was full of painful light and blinding sound.

They were lost in the chaos, the flock crashing into each other. Bodies falling from the sky.

Our wings beat as we turned on them, claws outstretched. We grasped a bat, twisted it, and ripped its throat open with our gore-stained beak before throwing it into another and sending both towards the earth. As they rushed past us in a blind tumble we tore and kicked, claws and beak alike claiming blood, wings powerful enough to strike them unconscious.

The snow beneath us was painted with a blood-red streak as we burst free from the swarm, a golden streak ripping its way out from their dark mass.