Chapter 273: Myrn Carried a Penguin Across the Open Guild-Road

Jiang bit the broad cloth and hauled himself onto Myrn’s lowered shoulder.

His unstable leg folded halfway up. Myrn bent until her shell ridge met his breast, then waited while he dragged the failed wing clear.

That was answer enough from both of them.

Aylin laid the cloth across Myrn’s uninjured side only after the mount nosed its center toward her shoulder. Both ends hung loose. High-root remained clipped to Jiang’s coat and ran separately into Aylin’s hands.

Sivra checked the empty places where Myrn’s bit and saddle braces had once been.

"Nothing closes around her," she said.

"Nothing does," Aylin replied as Kessa came last.

Kessa kept Maelin’s severance blade at her hip. From inside her coat she drew a shorter mothglass edge, broad-backed and chipped near the point. One side had been wrapped for a hunter’s palm.

"It frees claws from broken tack," Kessa said. "Today it frees a hall."

She slid the wrapped back beneath the cloth over Jiang’s breast. The cutting side faced away from him, and enough of the handle remained near his beak for him to pull it loose.

Jiang looked at the red lantern.

It had swallowed more of the road-dark while they prepared. White chains shifted behind its shutters. The one around Maelin’s hall ran taut beneath the wounded flight wall, carrying each stolen wing stroke into the lantern’s black center.

"Bring the edge back," Kessa said.

Jiang turned one eye toward her.

Kessa’s mouth tightened. "I know. Wrong priority."

The stormmew on her shoulder bit her ear.

"You may both come back."

Myrn rose while Jiang dropped onto his belly and hooked the sound foot over the loose cloth. Her first step carried them onto the open flight scale. Her second found no floor.

Sivra moved with her to the edge.

"Choose a road that does not kill you," she said.

Myrn launched before Sivra could make the sentence worse.

Open guild-road struck Jiang like surf without water.

Pressure packed beneath his breast feathers, vanished from under his feet, and returned from the side. The Wake Scar opened to the cold as if somebody had drawn a blade along his belly.

Myrn’s sound wing caught the first current.

Her injured wing opened less than halfway. Clear vanes shook around the split, scattering drops of blood that rose instead of falling. She banked under the guildhall while Jiang pressed his keel to the shell ridge and made his body narrow. That part he understood.

A diving penguin carried no loose corners into water. Jiang tucked his beak, laid his feathers flat, and let the hard current pass over his back instead of catching beneath his ruined wing.

The broad cloth snapped around him.

High-root drew firm at his coat loop. Aylin had taken the slack, but the line offered direction rather than safety. The hall was moving. Myrn was moving differently. Between them, the cord traced every mistake Jiang could make.

A sailing forest crossed above.

Its silver roots combed the road-current into shining lanes. Myrn rejected the bright lane and folded toward a darker wake below it. Cedar needles spun past Jiang’s face, warm on one side and rimed with ice on the other.

One lodged beside his split beak.

He tried to spit it out. The current put it back.

Jiang accepted that he now had a passenger.

The exposed cut point appeared beneath the hall’s wounded wing.

An outer scale had lifted around the chain. Red tissue filled the gap, pulsing between black glass and the white links. Every pull from the lantern drove that tissue deeper into the hinge.

Myrn turned toward it, but the chain moved first.

It whipped across the current where her neck would have been. Myrn closed both wings and dropped. The white links passed over her shell with a sound like teeth dragged along glass.

Jiang’s bad foot lost the cloth.

His body slipped toward the sound wing. He caught the shell ridge with his beak, pain splitting from the old crack into his jaw. High-root tightened behind him.

Aylin pulled once, and Jiang struck Myrn’s shell with the sound foot.

The return jolt traveled up the line. Aylin let the cord breathe again before it dragged him from the mount.

Myrn had already abandoned the direct approach.

She entered the wake of a village-bearing road-beast below them. Bells hung along its belly, and each note lifted a warm column through open dark. Myrn rode one column upward without asking Sivra where the chain had gone.

Jiang found it over his shoulder.

The cut point passed close during every beat of the wounded flight wall, then leaped away when the lantern reeled the chain tight.

He pointed with his beak.

Myrn’s dark eye followed the movement. She kept climbing past the hinge.

For three wing strokes Jiang thought she had refused.

Then the bell-wake rolled. Myrn turned with it and approached from above, where the chain could not lash without striking the hall it meant to capture.

"Your idea was better," Jiang told her in a breathless croak.

Myrn flattened one ear ridge.

He chose to take that as modesty.

The next problem waited beneath her sound side.

Jiang pulled Kessa’s edge from the cloth. Its handle fit badly across his beak. He could carry it or hold Myrn, not both.

He placed the wrapped back under his sound foot.

The outer cut point moved below them. Jiang crawled down the shell ridge until his breast hung beside Myrn’s sound wing. His failed wing dragged uselessly. The loose cloth slipped with him and bunched under his keel.

Myrn held the wing open.

Jiang crossed onto its hard leading plate.

Air beneath the vane had none of water’s mercy. There was pressure enough to tear him away and no buoyancy to return him. His webbed foot spread over the plate. The unstable leg followed late and shook against the current.

High-root pulled toward the hall.

Myrn carried him the other way.

The two forces pinned Jiang low enough to reach the hinge.

He took Kessa’s edge in his beak and drove its chipped point into the red tissue around the chain.

The tissue clenched and tried to beat in Jiang’s stolen call, but open road changed the pressure before the copied pause could finish. For the first time, the rhythm stuttered.

Jiang shoved harder. Mothglass entered to the width of its chipped tip, until white root fibers tightened beneath it and lifted the blade back out.

He could not saw with a beak that was already splitting.

He put the edge under his breast instead.

The wrapped back pressed along his keel. His sound foot held the handle. His bad foot found the flat near the point, where the wrapping ended before the cutting side.

The hall’s wounded wing opened, and the chain tension eased.

Myrn dropped with the same change in current.

Jiang let his whole body fall onto the blade.

Mothglass cut through red tissue and struck a white link. Pain burst through his bad foot as the flat jumped, but the edge stayed inside the wound.

The chain pulled tight again.

Its force dragged the blade, Jiang, and Myrn toward the lantern.

Myrn drove one stroke through her sound wing. The injured wing failed to match it, and her body rolled under Jiang. He lost the bad foot, then the cloth, then every contact except one webbed toe hooked over the blade’s wrapped spine.

High-root snapped straight, and Aylin went to one knee at the hall.

Hest caught the back of her coat. Valea set the bent yoke crosswise at the flight edge and braced Aylin’s hip against it. Neither touched the line in her hands.

"Pull him," Kessa said.

"The blade comes out if I do."

"Then you wait with me," Kessa said.

Aylin looked at the penguin hanging beneath a wounded mount over open dark.

"I dislike your improvements."

"Maelin said the same."

Kessa flinched at her own answer. She kept watching Jiang.

Myrn rolled until her sound wing faced the hall.

She could have followed the warm bell-wake away from the chain. Its rising lane remained open beneath her. Instead, she drove her shell shoulder against the current and brought Jiang back under the cut point.

He reclaimed the blade with his sound foot.

The white link had cracked but not parted. Living fibers inside it stretched across the break, pale and wet.

Jiang pushed his beak against the handle.

His foot pressed the flat.

His keel supplied the weight.

Myrn folded the sound wing.

Together they dropped across the chain.

The mothglass edge passed through the living fibers, and the white chain broke.

Its lantern end tore away through open road, flinging red water across three passing wakes. The severed hall end recoiled into the wounded hinge and threw Myrn backward.

Jiang left her wing, but high-root caught his coat before the road-dark did. The loop crushed torn feathers into the Wake Scar and swung him toward the hall with Kessa’s edge still trapped under one foot.

Myrn vanished below his belly.

Then her sound wing rose beneath him.

She carried Jiang through the rest of the swing, matched the hall’s broken flight for one brutal stroke, and pushed him onto the outer scale.

Hest caught the loose cloth. Valea caught the mothglass edge after Jiang’s foot released it. Aylin hauled high-root until Jiang slid across black glass and struck her boot.

Myrn remained outside long enough to bank away from the infected hinge, choose a clean wake, and climb toward Sivra without waiting to be called.

Only after the severed chain disappeared into the lantern did the System speak.

[STAR-ROAD PROOF ACCEPTED: CROSSING / SEVERANCE]

[EVOLUTION POINTS: 1 -> 3]

Jiang lay against Aylin’s boot and tried to breathe around the copied call. It was beating faster.

Freed from the outer chain, the embedded heartseed had stopped pulling toward the Armada. Red tissue spread through the lower joint and closed around the hall’s own flight pulse instead.

The wounded wing folded toward the lantern.

Three names opened across Jiang’s sight.

[ADAPTATIONS AVAILABLE: COST 3]

[ANCHOR BREAST I | HUDDLE DRAFT I | STARCURRENT KEEL I]