Broken Lands

Chapter 426 – Upstream

Following water sounded reasonable, so they headed upstream. Before long, the area around the water-filled canyons started to look less like a desert and more like mountains. They were still arid, but there were occasional desert plants and animals hiding in the shade.

There were also hollows and caves. The Flying Stars stopped to investigate several, but after the fourth different swarm of mana-enhanced desert animals in otherwise empty caves, they decided to look for a better option. This wasn’t leading them to the sort of Challenge chain they needed.

They rose higher into the mountainous territory and by midafternoon, they entered a layer of clouds that seemed to hover near the probably top of the range. Sophia was fairly confident that a cloud bank wasn’t normal near a desert, but that didn’t matter; it was clearly here and had obviously been here for a long time, because almost everything was covered in moss. 

There was magic in the cloud, of course. It tasted wet, almost soggy, so it was no surprise that everything felt just a little damp as they flew through the foggy cloud. That had to be why everything looked like green moss scattered across dull brown rocks.

At least, Sophia hoped that was the reason. She didn’t want to run into another moss monster like the one in the storm sewer under Old Kestii and the other things she could think of that would look like huge swathes of flat green were worse. Most of them wouldn’t be appropriate for people at the first upgrade, so at least she had that much going for her. 

They kept flying up until something caught Ci’an’s eyes: a spot of light glowed from a saddle between a pair of higher ridges, a spot of orange-red in the middle of the green. That was enough to be worth investigating.

They flew down far enough to see something small and white hopping around on the ground next to the light as the light dimmed in time with the sun disappearing behind a mountain, leaving only surprisingly bright fog. 

“I see something,” Ci’an projected. “It’s cute, but I don’t know what it is. A baby bird of some sort? It looks pretty big, whatever it is. I think it sees us, too.”

She sent an image of the white spot after she finished talking. It didn’t look like any bird Sophia had ever seen. It was covered in white fluffy fur that made it look like a slightly matted cat with a white puffball with gigantic eyes for a head, instead of being covered in feathers. Its wings were darker and feathered and its other limbs ended in scaly talons that reminded Sophia of a chicken’s legs, but it had four legs instead of two. Its tail was also more like a cat’s than a bird’s, though there was a lump at the end that made Sophia wonder if there was more to it or if it was simply a trick of the light. A pair of fully flexible ears was folded down and back as it watched Ci’an, as if it wasn’t certain it liked what it saw.

The creature sat on worked stone that looked like the top of a roof, but if it was a roof the building had to be mostly below ground. There was a small opening below the stone “roof.” 

Behind the creature was a stone pyramid. It was short, probably only about four times as tall as the creature. It seemed likely that they were looking at the peak of they pyramid, like the structure in front of it.

Both of the buildings were covered in moss, but orange-red symbols glowed on the stonework. Most of them weren’t legible, but Ci’an indicated one beside the creature as the source of the glowing light that drew their attention in the first place. If they were runes, they were in a runic language Sophia had never seen before, one that seemed to focus on smoothly flowing circles and spirals.

Or maybe those were the only ones that survived the moss. Some of the partially hidden symbols did have a different structure from what little Sophia could see.

The picture was enough for the World Tree … or perhaps Cliff … to tell Sophia what she was looking at. “It’s a gryphon. A very young gryphon; its wings aren’t big enough or strong enough for it to fly far, gliding is about the best a gryphon that age can manage. Its looks are deceiving; it’s going to be taller than Dav. Gryphons, even young gryphons, are big.”

Sophia paused and looked down at it. She knew a little more that was relevant if it was as young as it looked, but it came with a couple of large caveats. “If it’s really as young as it looks, one of its parents should be nearby. We should already know it, too; we’re too close already. Since we haven’t seen a parent, either the parent is waiting in ambush or the young gryphon is lost. There’s one other possibility, though. It could be a mockgriff. They look like gryphons, especially young, helpless gryphons, to lure in predators and then eat them.”

“So it’s either a fight or a baby bird we’re supposed to rescue instead of leaving alone?” Dav summarized. “Sounds like a win either way. Uh, can they talk? Some gryphons in stories can but definitely not all.”

“Prairie dogs and rabbits can’t normally talk,” Xin’ri pointed out. “Sophia should try anyway.”

“Love the way you’re volunteering me,” Sophia grumbled with a smile. She didn’t actually mind, but it was fun to pretend that she did. 

Sophia shifted her weight and started her descent. She descended slowly, floating down like a dandelion seed drifting on the wind. She was already blindingly obvious, so she might as well give anything that was watching the time to decide what to do; it wouldn’t help if this was an ambush, but it might help if there was a parent watching the youth from cover she couldn’t see. Being obvious also meant she wasn’t hiding or attacking, after all.

Nothing snapped out at Sophia, but when she was about twenty feet above the small gryphon, it looked up at her and swiveled its ears forward, then hopped in place. “Yip yip! Yipe?”

Sophia heard the sounds it made, but she also heard what they meant: “Fly fly! Glide?”

“Yes, I am gliding,” Sophia answered with a grin. The yips and growls that she made weren’t the same as the prairie dogs’ barks, but it was equally disconcerting to talk in a language she shouldn’t know. “Is that how you got down here?”

The gryphon looked down at its paws, then hopped in place and flapped its wings furiously. It rose at least a foot above what should have been the top of its leap before it sank slowly to the ground, wings still fluttering. “Yes, glide. Storm, falling, glide, wet. Cold, find warm. Warm dry! Alone.”

Sophia wasn’t certain if it was the gryphon’s age or language that couldn’t handle full sentences, but she was able to catch the gist anyway. It sounded like the gryphon was blown out of its nest by a storm, or perhaps the entire nest fell; that wasn’t clear. What was clear was that its parents hadn’t found it. “You want to go back to your parents?”

“Big gryphons? Want big gryphons. Want warm. Big gryphons want warm. Always cold. Warm here.” The young gryphon pranced in place, then tipped over onto its side and slid along the slanted roof onto the nearby ground. It wasn’t far, and the gryphon immediately picked itself up and then sat down and aggressively scraped the muddy claw that landed first with its beak. Most of the mud that it scraped off the claw ended up on top of its beak, but the gryphon didn’t seem to care about it after that.

Sophia suppressed a giggle. The gryphon reminded her of a big-pawed puppy or kitten that tripped over its own feet and then blamed its feet for its lack of coordination. “You want your parents but you don’t want to go to them? You want me to bring them here?”

“Warm, yes, big gryphons warm here,” the young gryphon agreed. 

“What do you guys think?” Sophia asked the rest of the Flying Stars. “It sounds like something that will take us into another zone, but if all it does is make us find the adults and bring them here, that’s not going to be enough to move on.”

“We might have to find both parents, in different zones,” Dav speculated. “And even if we don’t, it’s just searching and we have to do that anyway. I don’t see any reason not to look.”

“But not tonight,” Xin’ri added. “The light’s starting to go; we probably have an hour unless the fog makes it dark early, but that means it’s time to find a campsite. This looks like it could work, plus it means we can watch over the young gryphon since its parents aren’t here.”

“I’ll check the obvious places while you set up camp,” Ci’an offered. “If there’s a nest big enough for gryphons exposed to the weather, I’ll see it. I might not find one that fell, if it broke up enough.”

“That’s worth a try,” Sophia agreed. Ci’an was the right choice for it, too; not only did she have by far the best distance vision, she was naturally inconspicuous in her Nightowl form and had a couple of Abilities that made her even harder to notice if she didn’t want to be seen. She was the most likely to find the gryphons and the least likely to find trouble.

By now, they all knew their roles in setting up camp, even without Ci’an and Jax. It really didn’t take that much; Xin’ri would manage the wards, then set up the cookstone and get dinner ready while Sophia and Dav handled the tents. Sophia’s tent almost set itself up now that she could devote the mana to it, but the tent Xin’ri and Ci’an were sharing was not as simple. 

The hardest part was the anchor stakes; while Sophia could hammer them into place in the rock, it seemed like a bad idea when she wouldn’t want to leave them behind in the morning. That meant she needed to use the glyph-anchors, which were based on the enchanted gravity anchors of Sophia’s tent but were far more finicky. You couldn’t just feed them mana, you had to shape the mana through the glyph to activate it. Only Sophia and Xin’ri could manage the precise mana control required for the glyph-anchors, and each anchor took several minutes to set up for either one of them.

Sophia still preferred it to handling the cookstone. That thing was a hazard waiting to happen. It was better than a campfire only because it didn’t require lots of wood; in places where the wood was available, they usually had a fire. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of wood here and Sophia didn’t have a modern campstove; the one in her pack when she left Earth had long since run out of fuel and no one in the Broken Lands made compatible propane cylinders. 

Before the light faded, Ci’an returned with the bad news: there was no sign of any adult gryphons on the mountains to either side of them, at least not as far as she could tell in the limited time she had to search.

Dav was the one to tell Ci’an what they found out on the ground. Young gryphons weren’t particularly fond of stew, but they did like strips of jerky.