by Ivy Asher
Whatever-his-name-is hands the sword he just stole from his opponent back and readies himself for another round of Medieval Fighting 101. I strain to watch them reengage, but I spot Ryn walking back toward me with another bigfoot of a gryphon shifter, and suddenly they’re all I can focus on. Ryn’s cocky swagger is in place and on display, but it’s the guy he’s talking to that I focus on. What the hell do they feed these guys? Steroids?
He has long, gold-streaked, chestnut-colored hair that’s pulled back at his nape. He has a beard that’s just past short and just shy of unkempt, and his sage-tinted gaze is focused as he listens to whatever it is that Ryn’s telling him, while also keeping his focus on the sword wielding trainees. His gait is powerful and assured, lacking the cocky bounce of the asshole gryphon next to him. They come to a stop in front of me.
“This is her,” Ryn announces, like I’m unworthy now of having my name in his mouth. I glare at him as the big guy finally takes his attention from the sparring kids and brings it to me. His eyes immediately widen with shock, and he snaps his head in Ryn’s direction.
“This is an eyas?” he asks, confused, turning back to me like he’s double-checking if he’s right. He runs his sage green eyes down my frame, and I can see the moment my lack of clothing registers. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, and he shifts his weight like he’s uncomfortable, folding and then unfolding his arms.
“Trust me, she is,” Ryn assures him. “The little thing can barely fly,” he adds, looking at me with mock sympathy.
“If you’d stop trying to cuddle with me midair, maybe I could,” I volley back sweetly, even though in my head I’m pummeling the asshole. “What the fuck is an eyas?” I demand, not sure if they’re insulting me.
“It’s what we call our young,” the hot trainer answers and then returns his confused gaze to Ryn. “She’s highborn,” he suddenly objects, and I turn my glare on him.
Ryn shrugs. “She has the features, but no mark. She’s not even from here. Zeph found her near a gate. So until we can get rid of her, she’s your problem,” Ryn declares, and the trainer and I both round on him in shock. “Eyas, this is Sutton. Sutton this is the eyas. Get to work,” he orders and starts to walk away.
Sutton opens his mouth to say something, but I don’t hear what when a stinging slap lands on my ass cheek. Did this motherfucker just slap my ass? My hands fly to cover my stinging glute, and I spin and leap at Ryn’s back. My gryphon of course does jack diddly shit, but I don’t give a fuck if she sits this one out; I’m going to rip him apart if it’s the last thing I do. A feral growl bursts out of me as I soar closer to my target, but all of a sudden, I’m plucked out of the air like a pouncing cat and pulled back into a hard body.
I fight and snap to get out of Sutton’s hold, and then I seriously lose my shit when Ryn fucking looks at me over his shoulder and smiles.
“Cut that out, Ryn, or I’ll let her go,” Sutton warns, and I’m mildly pleased to see Ryn’s smile waver slightly before he turns around and disappears through the trees. I scramble and continue to try and go after Ryn while Sutton does his best to calm me. “Hey there, little bit, I can’t have you attacking the Altern on my watch, so you just have to let it go. I can teach you how to best him, but this isn’t the way to do it,” he coaxes, and the last statement gets my attention.
Like he can feel some of the fight in me waning, his voice gets even more encouraging and kind. “Stick with me, little bit, I’ll get you more vicious than a Thais Fairy in no time. Give you more bite to back up that growl, whatta ya think, huh?”
I sag against him, defeat coursing through me. I’m so fucking tired of feeling like this. “Can you teach me to never be helpless again?” I ask, and the pain in my question rises to the surface, coating the anger I poured into my words. I feel Sutton release a deep breath against me, and I can practically feel the empathy radiating off him.
“There will always be someone bigger and meaner, but if you work hard, I can teach you to shred anyone who gets in your way.”
I nod at that, and Sutton’s hold on me loosens. He sets me on my feet, and then we both realize that in my efforts to get away and his efforts to stop me, Sutton is firmly holding on to one of my boobs. He yanks his hand away as if I just burned him, and I turn around to find him slowly reddening like a ripening tomato.
“My apologies,” he stammers out, and the whole situation suddenly seems really funny to me.
“Tit happens,” I offer, and then the laugh I’m trying to hold in bursts out of me like machine gun fire because I totally meant to say it happens. A smile sneaks over Sutton’s face, and he chuckles, although I can tell he’s trying not to. I extend my hand to him. “I’m Falon,” I introduce myself, and Sutton just stares at my waiting palm. “You’re supposed to shake it,” I explain, and his eyes move from my hand back up to my face.
“Why?” he asks, curious, and I chuckle.
“Honestly, I have no idea,” I admit. “Where I come from, people do it when they first meet.”
Sutton reaches out and grabs my wrist with his big meaty hand and proceeds to move my whole arm until my hand is shaking. I watch my hand flip flopping all over the place like a fish on a hook, and I realize that technically he is doing what I said he’s supposed to do. I crack up when he stops and then offers me his hand to shake. I don’t know why, but I do to his arm exactly what he just did to mine instead of showing him what a handshake is really supposed to be. Maybe it has something to do with the weight that lifts from my soul as I laugh and reinvent the handshake with him. Or maybe I’m just a fucking weirdo; either way, I feel safe and hopeful for the first time since I woke up in this strange place.
“Alright, Sutton, let’s make me a terminator,” I announce when our hand shaking is done. He looks at me, perplexed, and I slap his rock hard pec twice in encouragement. “I’ll explain later.”
Sutton nods at me and then a devilish smile takes over his face. “Let’s begin.”
10
“No, Falon!” Sutton bellows and comes stomping toward me. “You’re not feeling the counter attack!” he tells me for the four thousandth time.
I rub at my ribs and glare at him. “I promise you I am most definitely feeling the counter attack,” I argue, my irritation clear. I’m practically one big fucking bruise at this point, and I’ve yet to get a hit in. Sarai, my opponent, gives me a sweet smile, and I fight the urge to chuck my sword at her. My ego is probably more bruised at this point than my body, and that’s fucking saying something.
“You should feel the shift in the air when she changes her stance or the direction of a hit. You should feel it coming as easily as the air current through your feathers when you fly. You’re not tapping into your instincts. You’re not one inside,” Sutton explains once again, his closed fist hitting his chest at the end of his statement.
“I know that!” I shout, exasperation dripping from my words. “My gryphon is an asshole! I keep telling you that. She won’t even wake up to help me best a thirteen-year-old.” I gesture to Sarai who is momentarily distracted by something that looks like a dragonfly whizzing through the air.
Sutton’s gaze fills with sympathy, and he steps closer to me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Sarai’s the best with weapons I’ve ever seen, but you’re ready to learn from her. You’ve worked hard these past three weeks, you just need to figure out how to work with your animal at all times, or you’ll never get anywhere in the next phase of training.”
I look past him to the part of the field where shifted gryphons are learning to defend and attack. I exhale a deep resigned breath.
“I can’t make her listen to me, Sutton. She doesn’t even wake up when I actually need her. She’s a lazy, good for nothing gryphon who likes to pump me full of hormones to fuck with me and then gets off on leaving me hanging at all other times.”
I leave off that she sits up at attention whenever Zeph or Ryn are nearby, as it feels like TMI. I barely see them these days anyway, between train
ing and working on my project for Tysa, which means my bitch of a gryphon is pretty much dormant at all times.
My trade with Tysa has worked out well. I now own several pairs of pants and shirts, a couple bra-like garments I walked Tysa through making, and last week, she gifted me with my very own braided armor vest and pants. What looked like leather turned out to be something called Narwagh hide. I guess it’s like a pig or something. The material is protective on the outside but soft and somewhat stretchy against my skin. The pants she made are so badass they almost look like black scales all over my legs, and I laughed so hard when I saw them.
The story of what I thought I was when I woke up flying in the sky that first time, slipped out one night when I was working late at Tysa’s house. She and her mate, Moro, laughed so hard they had tears streaming down their face, and now I have black dragon scale-looking Narwagh armor. Tysa is the fucking best, and aside from Sutton, my only friend here. The looks of mistrust and disdain from people are still a daily occurrence, but mostly they just ignore me now, which I suppose is a step in the right direction.
Sutton snaps his fingers in front of my face a couple of times. “Focus, Falon, you’re as bad as Sarai sometimes with daydreaming and distractions.”
I offer him a sheepish look, and he chuckles and reaches out and tucks a wayward strand of ghost-white hair behind my ear. He’s been doing that a lot lately, touching me or looking at me softly. I’m not sure how to take it. Is he expressing attraction, or is this just how he is? I honestly have no fucking clue what to think about any of it. Sutton is handsome and nice. He’s an incredible teacher, and I like talking to him, but I don’t know if there’s more beyond that.
“Ami!” Sutton bellows out of nowhere, and I jump from the shock of his sudden booming beckon. “I’m going to have you pair off with Ami for a while. He struggled with his gryphon too, and I think he can teach you to get past your blocks. You two have some things in common,” Sutton tells me cryptically, reaching out and tugging the end of my braid as he walks past to intercept Ami and fill him in on the plan.
I stand there awkwardly like a forgotten kid after school, waiting at the now empty pick up line. Ami looks over at me as Sutton speaks to him, and I almost expect his eyes to go white as he observes me, like they did when Zeph brought him into my first interrogation. Ami gives Sutton a nod and then makes his way over to me. He’s just slightly taller than me, lean, and from the look of him, still growing into his body. He shakes Bieber-brown hair out of his face, and his light brown eyes land on mine.
“You won’t need that,” he tells me, his chin jerking toward the wooden sword still gripped in my hand. “Follow me,” he instructs, and then he turns and walks toward the bordering trees. I turn back and look for Sutton like I need his reassurance that this is okay, but he’s busy working with the other trainees. So I drop my practice sword at my feet and follow the mysterious Ami away from the training fields.
I’m grateful for the boots that Tysa got for me as I follow Ami in silence over rocky terrain and then through a shallow part of the river until we’re standing close to the edge of the cliff on the opposite side of the cliff castle. We both stare out into the never-ending water, and I wait for him to tell me what we’re doing here. He walks casually to the cliff’s edge, and I tense. He sits down and hangs his legs over the rim and motions for me to do the same. I hesitate.
“You afraid of heights?” he teases.
“I always think I’m not until I get somewhere dangerously high, and then I rethink my answer,” I offer as I inch slowly closer to the edge. I move like a baby fawn on shaky legs, arms outstretched like if I trip and go over, somehow my noodle arms will stop me.
“You do have wings, you know,” Ami rags, and I shoot him an unamused glare.
“Psshh, pretty sure my gryphon would get a kick out of me falling off this cliff,” I inform him, and he chuckles.
“You most likely wouldn’t die if you fell,” he offers, as if that should be all the reassurance I need.
“Yeah, I’ve been there and done that thanks to your fearless leader. I’ll take a hard pass on any future bone-crushing falls.” I sit carefully next to Ami and hang my legs over the edge like he does. Wind rushes up the cliff side like it’s trying to escape the crashing waves below. It carries cool mist on its back, and the breeze flirts around us as we sit and take it all in.
“It’s beautiful here,” I offer reverently.
“Yeah, something about this place is very calming to people like us,” he agrees, and then he pulls his arm back and chucks a pebble over the cliff. It’s impossible to track the little rock as it falls to meet the water, but I try anyway.
“People like us?” I query.
“Yeah, you know, highborn, dirty bloods, Ouphe tainted,” he sneers. “This place used to belong to the Ouphe. Their magic is practically built into the cliffs themselves. You’ll see their writing all over the castle and the surrounding land. I think that’s why people with more Ouphe in their blood than Gryphon, people like you and me, resonate so much with this place.”
I take a moment to contemplate his words and chuck my own rock into the depths of the water as I do. “So is that how you can do what you can, because you’re more Ouphe than Gryphon?” I ask, hoping I’m not crossing some kind of line with my curiosity.
“Yeah, I’m a seer, or at least that’s what my mom called it before she…” Ami trails off, and I can tell by his tone and the look on his face that’s not a statement that ends well.
“How does it work?” I ask, veering around the what happened that sits on my tongue.
“It feels like an extra sense almost, something I can tap into whenever I want, just like I can with my other senses,” he explains, and I nod my head in understanding. “When I tap into the sight, I can see colors mostly. Different colors mean different things, and a person’s colors can shift and change depending on what they’re doing, saying, or how they’re feeling.”
“Are you glad you can do that?” I ask, and I watch his face as he thinks about my question.
“I don’t like or dislike it, it just is. I’ve always been like this. I don’t know any other way,” he tells me matter of factly.
We fall into an awkward silence as Ami goes full Yoda mic drop on me, and I sit there and process his it just is attitude. After a minute or so, the drive to either move or talk has me opening my mouth again.
“So Sutton said you also had issues with your gryphon; was yours a lazy pigeon, too?” I ask, trying to make the question light and ignoring the undertone of tension that reverberates in my words.
Ami nods and releases a humorless chuckle. “Sutton will tell you that you need to be one with your animal because you are one. There is no us and them. We’re the same being inside when we’re in both forms, but it never felt that way for me. Maybe I just relate to my animal differently, or maybe for us it actually is different. It’s possible that for us, we are separate beings from our gryphons because we have more than one natural strain of magic pumping through our veins.”
“So if I can’t be one with her like Sutton is saying, how do I make this work?” I ask, gesturing to my body and the dormant gryphon getting plenty of beauty sleep inside of me.
“Your animal was locked away for how long?” Ami asks me.
“I’m twenty-five, and I just shifted for the first time almost four weeks ago. I mean, I could feel her before, more than I can now anyway, but I could never shift,” I explain.
“What changed to make her shift now?” he queries, curiosity clear in his tone.
“I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I suspect that my grandmother gave me a ring that kept me from shifting. It also made me look different. I never had the white hair and the lavender eyes until after it was destroyed and I woke up here,” I add.
Ami runs his gaze over my white locks for a second before bringing his light brown eyes back to mine. “What about your parents?”
“They died when I was five; I was
raised by my grandmother.” I can see the question he’s about to ask, and I answer it before it can escape his eyes and fall out of his mouth. “She knew what I was. She had to. I suspect that she was a gryphon too, but I have no idea why she wouldn’t tell me the truth. She obviously sent me to that gate for a reason. Maybe she knew this would happen, maybe she didn’t, but I’m left trying to piece it all together.”
Ami nods in understanding and pulls his gaze from mine to look out over the water. I reach back, ready to eject another pebble out into the dark depths of the massive lake when suddenly, out of nowhere, I feel Ami’s hands slam hard against my back as he pushes me off the cliff.
I know without any shadow of a doubt that I have the last three weeks of training to thank for my now quick as lightning reflexes. They don’t stop me from going over, but they do help me to reach back and grab Ami’s forearm, which is the reason I’m slamming into the hard dirt and rock of the cliff instead of tumbling down into the crashing waves a couple hundred feet below. I grab onto the meat of Ami’s arm with everything that I have in me as I bounce back from the side of the cliff and proceed to dangle in the air. My weight pulls Ami forward, and it looks like all it would take is an angry breeze to send him toppling over me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I scream at him.
My yell bounces back at me and dislodges a couple of rocks from the cliff face. They clunk ominously down the steep rocky ledge. Terror pulls at me, and I look up into Ami’s calm light brown eyes. My ability to judge a person’s character is clearly fucking broken. I did not pick up on any psycho vibes from this kid until now.
“I know this probably seems abrupt, Falon, but I promise you this is the best way. Your gryphon won’t let you die, and you have to force her hand,” Ami yells down at me, his voice lacking any of the panic and fear that mine has.