Page 16 of Gryphon in Light

Treyvan shrewdly asked, “You already have plans for what you will do if this rejuvenation succeeds, don’t you?”

Kelvren smiled slyly. “Oh, yes. A few. If you’re in a fair fight, you didn’t plan it properly. If this works, it will mean more than if I lingered on. It will be a glorious life—or a glorious death.” He dipped his head solemnly. “Thank you for giving me the chance at either, my lord Treyvan.”

Treyvan bowed his head, mirroring Kelvren’s own motion. “The site has been prepared. You must go in alone, and lie down in the exact center. When I release the sequence, you must raise your wings if you can, and breathe deeply. In that instant, cast your self-healing spell. If you can stand, then stand. If you can—” He paused, obviously trying to hide something. “If you can fly, then fly. Straight up, as far as you can.”

Kelvren said the obvious. “If I can’t fly, then I burn.”

Treyvan looked down. “Yes,” he said softly.

Kelvren stared at the center of the circle. His heart beat harder as he stepped across the circle’s edge, and more than a hundred people held their breath.

Pena stood at Treyvan’s side, with a look of dismay and sorrow on her face. “He doesn’t know it’s a Heartstone—does he?” he asked Treyvan.

The gryphon mage looked down at her with a look of resignation. “No. He doesn’t know.”

Pena’s eyes glittered from the reflected lights that were starting up from the ground as Kel approached the circle’s center. “It is probably best that he doesn’t.”

Whitebird and Rivenstone walked up beside them. “Treyvan’s made a minor node,” Pena explained to Whitebird and Rivenstone, “but it’s channeled into a Heartstone—a purposely fragile one. It’s why Treyvan used glass. When the spell reaches its height, it will consume itself. Even a tiny Heartstone will release its power in a saturated burst.”

Treyvan nodded. “I didn’t tell him. I completed the node hours before I buried the glass sphere. And the control points I buried, around the rest of the circle, are not to draw the power in from outside. They are to contain the power and direct the burst upward from the center. If his system restarts—he will absorb it. If it does not—hurrrh. He will only feel pain for a few seconds.”

Ammari and Jefti approached the four, who were speaking Kaled’a’in. “What’re you all talkin’ about?” Jefti asked.

“We arrre—wishing Kelvrrren luck.” He stepped toward the circle and spread his wings widely as Kelvren neared the center. “It isss time.”

Pena ushered the humans back to where the Herald and his Companion stood even with the soldiers, locals, and patients who came to see the fate of their gryphon. Dusk descended further, making the light from the circle even more apparent. Kelvren neared the center and walked around the packed earth there, until he faced the crowd.

He lay down on his belly, and carefully and deliberately folded his wings.

Treyvan stepped to the edge of the circle, sat on his haunches, and pulled his wings straight back behind him. Faint beams of light broke through the ground around the perimeter. The light of the nearer control points visibly pulled toward him as his wings swept slowly back. Treyvan spread his arms wide, curled his claws toward the sides of the circle, and swept his wings forward again. The light pushed back and caused the next nearer points to flare brighter.

Kelvren watched Treyvan—and then looked at every one of the gathered crowd. A sharp eye could see that tears ran from his eyes and dripped from the hook of his beak.

He laid his head down flat on the ground and his wings slumped.

The sixty control points around the perimeter blazed fully now, all of them matched columns of light tapering to a foot high. Treyvan went back to all fours and walked a horse-length further from the crowd, and stopped again at the edge of the Change-Circle. He sat up, raised his forearms higher than before, and swept his wings back, then forward again, harder. All the perimeter lights swayed inward and another ring of them blazed up from the ground in unison. Another massive flap of his wings, and a third ring shot up and steadied, encompassing Kelvren. Arcs of energy extended from one light to another, seemingly randomly, and then all at once they made a stable, steady pattern that looked like a stained-glass rosette.

Treyvan held his own breath for a moment, and said in Kaled’a’in, “Wind to thy wings, sheyna.”

Treyvan snapped his wings open.

A boom of thunder struck the crowd.

Inside the circle, a rising ring of light closed in on Kelvren in the center.

And consumed him.

Daylight surged upward from the circle’s center, and the briefest shadow of wings flickered in it before everyone watching was blinded by it. Treyvan’s irises pinned to the width of a finger. He peered resolutely into the light.

There was movement.

There was the shape of a gryphon—getting to its feet. Standing. Its wings were unfolding, and rising up.

Except it was not a shadow against light.

It was light, and everything else was shadow compared to it.

Treyvan stepped back, one step. Two. The figure in the center rose up onto its hind feet. It was Kelvren, but he was radiating light like nothing Treyvan had ever seen before. His body color wisped away, replaced by a glow from inside the feather shafts themselves. The edges of every feather gleamed and rippled in a yellow-white radiance, like the edge of burning paper. His eyes more than glowed—they shone outward in tapered rays of light, wherever he looked.