Eternal Beasts

Chapter 15: The Last Binding

Jared frowned when, without warning, the padded bench they were sitting on, shuddered. Then, bizarrely, the light coming into the waiting room's floor to ceiling window flickered as if something was flying by it outside.

- ... -ed, can you hear me? - the book's voice, broken up and fuzzy at first, cleared in a rush to fill his head. - Jared, are you there?? -

- Holy shit, book. Yeah, I'm here. What's with the yelling? You're going to deafen my inside ear! -

- Ah, there you are! - the ancient entity breathed in relief. - Thank the Maker! -

Looking at the window, Jared felt his brow lift in question.

- Something just happened, didn't it, - he said. Then, emitting a strangled cry, Samantha pushed away from him.

"Jared!" she said. Or, at least that's what he thought she said. In truth, it was a garbled mess because, when he looked at her, her mouth had become an eagle's beak.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed for a second time, eyes wide. Then he was grabbing her and kicking open the door/ Where two spears dropped into view to cross in front of him.

"The king said you were to stay here until he was ready to speak to you, nysim," the guard on the right snarled.

Grimacing, Jared slapped the spears out of the way and pushed a stumbling Samantha through the resulting space. Then he was turning to face the two guards just as one lunged at him, meaning to drive his spear through Jared's chest.

"You were going to put that in my back, weren't you," he growled, neatly stepping out of the way of the thrust.

Then the second one was coming in, forcing the big man to turn that way next. This time, however, he didn't just step out of the way. He reached out at full speed as the spear, now looking as if it were traveling in slow motion, stretched past him and grabbed it by the seasoned wood of the haft just below the head. A hard tug was enough to pull it out of the stunned guard's hands. He then snapped it in a tight semi-circle to knock the spear out of the first guard's hands.

Before he could do more than that, however, a blast of pure sound washed over him, leaving his ears ringing. Still at full rider speed, he then watched it pick up the two guards and hammer them into the wall beside the door into the waiting room. Then a massive head was butting into him from behind.

- We need to get out of here, my Jared, - Samantha's voice came over the bond to say. Looking over his shoulder, Jared nearly swore to find himself staring at a full-sized griffon pulled right out of the pages of a fantasy novel.

Samantha now stood just a shade under three meters at the shoulder and was about four in length, from chest to hind quarters, a compact, powerful creature that looked like she could blast her way through a concrete wall and not feel a thing. The fore shoulders were thick and broad with hard muscle and the chest was solid stone with the muscles needed to anchor the great wings, which, at her height and weight, would easily be eight and a half meters in span.

Golden feathers, once peeking out of Samantha's curly gold hair in her nysim form, soft and perfectly lain, now covered her head, shoulders and legs to shortly above the great clawed feet. The feathers stopped there at the beginning of the hard-scaled raptor's legs, typical for the eagle forequarters of the fabled Beast, the scales the color of burnished gold. The talons themselves possessed the regular four toes and thumb claw arrangement of the hunting bird.

Going back up, he could see Samantha's shoulders flowed up into her thick neck and head, adding an additional meter to her height. On top of that neck, her heavy eagle's head with its telltale griffon tufts, was streamlined perfection, its massive beak threatening even in passivity, her great golden eyes peering with worry at him from their places. The entire fore part was held regally and with strength, with the inborn pride and royalty of the predator birds and continued about halfway down the expansive ribcage where the feathers disappeared into the soft, tawny fur of the hindquarters.