Chapter 163: Rill Followed the Bell with Teeth

The Bellwyrm rang Harrow’s private answer again.

This time, Rill saw black-green fiber pull the homebell against a tooth.

The animal had not made the rhythm by rolling. Something in its jaw had listened, waited, and tugged.

"There may be another bell in that mouth," Rill said.

Harrow tightened his hand around the blue line. "There are many bells in that mouth."

"A second flight pair disappeared on your eastern side. If their bell is caught in the same braid, they may be wherever it leads."

"Or dead. Or nowhere near it."

Rill looked at the cloud where the long body had disappeared. "The answer changed after my strike."

"So did the thing trying to eat our nursery."

Slate beat against the cataract outside. Bracken’s weight came through Rill’s hook, down his arm, and into the dark wyvern’s saddle chain. Every wingbeat adjusted for a living body neither rider nor wyvern could see.

Rill could keep holding the known life.

He could also let the only changing trail vanish with anyone still caught behind it.

"One pass," he said.

Aylin sat beside Harrow’s bound leg. "A pass still has a length."

"To the next stone spur. If the Wyrm turns away, we return."

Harrow’s working eye narrowed. "Slate is the part of this line that feels Bracken move. Tie us to stone, and stone will not give when he fights."

"Mottle will," Rill said. "She can feel a live line through the upper chain. I need Slate for one pass, and then the load comes back to us."

Rill shouted up the chain. Rain took half the words, but Ilex understood the request. Mottle shifted around the upper anchor until the saddle line crossed her uninjured shoulder.

Rill clipped Bracken’s blue line into a basalt eye on the same chain.

Mottle took the new weight from above.

For a few breaths, the transfer held. Bracken tugged. Mottle’s shoulder lowered with him, giving the line the living movement Harrow had asked for.

High above cloud, Ilex folded herself over Mottle’s front rail and watched the chain links rise from wet stone. She could not see Bracken. Mottle could feel each pull arrive through the injured body. When the hidden wyvern fought, she stepped toward the ledge. When he stilled, she gave back the same ground.

No knot had replaced Slate. Another living pair had agreed to carry the absence for a little while.

"That is not stone," Rill said.

"She is also not standing beside the wing," Harrow replied.

Jiang surfaced at the shelf edge and struck Rill’s boot with his beak.

Rill crouched. "You saw the fiber make the sound too."

Jiang struck the boot again, harder.

"He is not agreeing," Aylin said.

"I know he is not agreeing," Rill said.

That made what followed a choice rather than confusion.

Rill pulled himself onto Slate’s saddle. The dark wyvern felt his weight settle and looked once toward Harrow’s air pocket.

Rill laid his open hand beside Slate’s bell cup and pointed into the cloud, then back to the shelf. One pass. Return. Slate could have folded toward Mottle’s anchor and refused the angle.

Instead, the wyvern touched his muzzle to Rill’s wrist and faced the rain.

Harrow knocked one late beat against the stone.

Slate answered with a scrape of his rear claw.

Then he folded his wings and dropped after the Bellwyrm.

The black-green trail showed through the cloud in brief wet arcs. Slate followed without ringing his homebell. Rill held the bell’s tongue against its leather cup so the Bellwyrm would not turn toward them too soon.

The missing eastern pair had flown with a white tail streamer and a narrow copper bell. Rill searched every break in the trail for either shape. Once he saw pale cloth and drove Slate lower, only to find nesting fiber wrapped around a tooth. The next flash showed a copper rim. It vanished before he could tell whether leather or root held it.

He had promised one stone spur. Cloud erased the spurs before he reached the first.

Above, Mottle carried Bracken’s hidden pull.

Below, Jiang felt the blue line tighten against the edge of the slot.

His good foot wedged between leather and stone.

The line shoved him sideways.

Mottle could yield at the upper anchor, but the new angle dragged the line across a sharp lower lip before her movement reached it. Blue dye came away on Jiang’s webbing.

Harrow saw it. "Rill!"

Cloud returned no answer.

Aylin grabbed the line behind Jiang. Her injured palm opened at once. She wrapped the leather over her forearm, but Bracken’s next frightened pull drove both of them toward the slot.

Jiang set his belly across the groove and tried to become the missing give in the line. The leather cut through wet feathers until stone stopped it. He could soften one jerk. He could not become a flying wyvern at the far end.

Harrow struck the stone with his knuckles, spacing each request through pain: stillness, release, stillness.

Bracken answered late. The line eased only after another strand had frayed.

Outside the cloud, Slate caught the Bellwyrm.

The long creature rolled along a falling sheet of water, half swimming and half dropping. Old copper filled gaps between its teeth. Mottle’s homebell shone near the back of its jaw, braided to a black-green strand that flexed with every copied note.

Behind that bell hung blue leather.

Rill saw the color and forgot that every Red Aeries pair used blue somewhere in rain. Harrow’s braid had been blue. Bracken’s line was blue. The strip behind the Bellwyrm’s teeth looked close enough for hope to erase the differences.

Harrow’s name tore out of Rill as a shout.

He released Slate’s homebell tongue and struck three notes into the cloud.

Vibration drew the Bellwyrm around.

Its mouth opened wide enough to fill the clear space in the cloud.

No rider hung behind the blue leather. The strip was Bracken’s torn line, carried down from the nursery root and twisted around Mottle’s bell.

Slate tried to climb over the bite.

Wet wings answered too slowly.

The Bellwyrm caught Slate’s homebell between two teeth.

Leather tore beneath Rill’s knee. One tooth raked Slate’s flank as the bell ripped from the saddle. The dark wyvern screamed and folded on that side.

Rill cut the last strap before it could pull him under the jaw.

Slate’s homebell vanished into the mouth beside Mottle’s.

The torn leather cup struck Slate’s side with every wingbeat. He turned his head once, searching for the weight and voice that had hung behind his shoulder since he and Rill first paired. Only the ripped strap answered. Rill felt that look more sharply than the tooth passing under his knee.

Black-green fibers found the fresh copper.

Both bells rang together.

Rill did not chase them.

He flattened over Slate’s neck, pressed one hand above the bleeding flank, and pointed toward Harrow’s shelf. Slate turned through the pain without waiting for an apology.

They climbed on one clean wing and one that leaked rain through a shallow cut.

At the basin, Bracken’s line frayed through its outer braid.

Jiang moved his foot before the cut leather trapped his webbing. The line jumped into the groove he had blocked and sawed deeper into stone.

Harrow’s air-pocket shelf tilted.

His broken leg struck the bell fork they had freed him from.

He made no joke this time.

Aylin put both arms under his shoulders. Jiang pressed his back beneath Harrow’s hip again, but the old bell metal was moving with them now.

Far below, Bracken fought the reef.

Mottle yielded from above. The lower groove refused to pass that mercy onward.

Stone broke around the blue line.

Harrow dropped to his waist.

The sudden pull tore the basalt eye from the outer shelf. Mottle’s chain whipped free and struck the cataract.

For one breath, nobody above or below held Bracken.

Harrow caught his own rear strap and wrapped it around his forearm.

The weight slammed him against the slot.

His broken leg bent under the shelf.

Rill and Slate came through the rain.

Slate landed badly on the outer lip. The cut flank left blood along stone. Where his homebell had hung, only a torn cup strap remained.

Rill leaped from the saddle before Slate had folded his wings.

He caught Bracken’s blue line with both hands.

Harrow’s forearm loosened one turn.

"I followed it," Rill said.

Harrow looked at the empty bell cup on Slate’s saddle, then at the blood below it.

"I know," Harrow said, watching Slate hold the injured side away from stone.

"There was no pair."

"I know that too."

Rill braced the line over his shoulder. "I was wrong."

Harrow did not tell him that hope was kind or that anyone would have made the same choice. Neither sentence would hold Bracken.

"Then be right next," he said.

The reef shifted below them.

A wide arc of buried homebell metal peeled away from the cliff. Bracken’s weight dropped with it. Harrow slid to his chest in the slot, his injured leg disappearing into black water.

Rill had one free hook.

Harrow’s hand was within reach.

The blue line jumped beside it.

Rill moved the hook toward Harrow.

Harrow knocked it away. "Bracken first."

The last support tore loose.