While the rookeries dotted the mountainside, they faced out onto a glorious expanse of blue emptiness. The aetar had no use for battlements or gates. The sky was their moat. The mile upon mile of unassailable rock beneath their talons was their wall. Even I, acclimated to the glories of the Mortal Realms and the infinities of Azyr, stared out in wonderment.
At the sound of a joyous shriek coming my way, I dragged my eyes from the spectacle for the arrival of a powerful aetar female. Her chest plumage and neck were armoured in blued steel and topaz, glittering in what was left of the amber sun. Wings extended to their colossal span, she descended onto an artificial perch that jutted from the rock face at an angle about twenty feet above my head.
The ‘ground’ of the aetar’s fort, I should add, was a shelf of rock about as wide across as I am tall. The eagle knight who had plucked me from the Gorkomon had at least been thoughtful enough to deposit me on one of the stretches less completely stained by moult and droppings.
The aetar stretched her wings luxuriously as she deliberately stamped clawed feet on the perch, shuffled sideways, then delivered a shriek that could have turned a man’s hair white.
‘It is good to see you too, princess.’
She bobbed her head and cawed.
‘Of course I recognised you. You’ve the war harness of a queen, and as well curved a beak as any this side of the Seventh Gate.’
Aeygar puffed out her feathers in pleasure.
While it’s fair to say that I didn’t understand one word out of her beak, I’ve always had a knack when it comes to dealing with people, whatever wild or wondrous form they come in. I could natter with a Treelord like a native, and send the spirit away happy hours later without ever uttering a true word of Sylvan. It’s not like flight to a Prosecutor, or a Lord-Veritant’s sense for corruption; there’s no gift to it. It’s about being interested in people, enough to care, and – as with everything in this life – throwing yourself at it as though you mean it.
I got the gist.
‘It was your retainers that picked me up, I suppose.’
Her beak went up and down, which I didn’t think was an aetar mannerism but rather her attempt at a nod. I was touched.
‘Thank you. My hands were starting to get a little tired.’
She cawed, amused.
‘How did you know Vikaeus was after me?’
She leapt up from her perch, flapping her wings flaccidly, landing with a razoring caw that sounded like a wooden spoon being rattled about inside of a saucepan.
‘Good eyes. Even for an aetar.’
She gave a shriek, ruffing her neck feathers again.
‘Kind of you,’ I said. ‘But the king never allowed me up here. Not even in exchange for a reciprocal visit to Highheim.’ An offer I had no means of honouring, of course, but by the time he was in Azyr I was confident that an aggrieved aetar king would have been someone else’s problem.
Aeygar’s head tilted until it was almost completely sideways. I couldn’t decipher the gesture, but I felt an unfamiliar pressure beneath my ribs, a faint memory of a time when a woman had looked at me with the same mixture of superiority and fondness.
I sighed.
Aeygar, meanwhile, had stepped off her perch and spread her wings, gliding into an oddly graceless landing on the filth-encrusted ground before me. She hopped awkwardly from foot to foot, claws scraping at the griping rock in unease. With a softly trilling warble, she lowered her head to the ground, long neck angled upwards like a ramp.
‘For… me?’
She issued the exact same warbling note and despite everything I’d just done and been through to get here, I laughed.
‘Better than being borne in your talons, I imagine.’
She shuffled and cawed, tapping the ground with her beak.
‘Apology accepted.’
I took a handful of the soft feathers at the back of her head, tugging on them to make certain that my weight wasn’t going to hurt her before swinging my leg over her shoulders. She didn’t even seem to register it. She reared up sharply, almost throwing me from her back before I could grab a second fistful of feathers. Then she was turning to face the wall of sky, wings thumping, powerful muscles shifting beneath the seat of my armour.
One step.
Two.
And then we were aloft.
I bellowed for the joy of it. There were many godly feats and supernatural acts I had performed in Sigmar’s name, but flight had never been one of them. Keeping a firm grip on Aeygar’s feathers, I leant over and looked down past her working wings. The rock shelf I had been standing on shrank as though it were being absorbed into the mountain, and I looked up again, laughing uproariously at the aquiline bewilderment that greeted this unprecedented thing – a Stormcast Eternal bestride the back of an aetar princess – from the warmth of their rookeries. I waved to them.
‘Who needs to waste decades questing across the Mortal Realms for a solargem, or risk their neck to impress a wild Dracoth with his purity? Not Hamilcar Bear-Eater – friend to all peoples of land and sky!’
The princess shrieked and it too was a cry of joy.
I think that she was enjoying the attention almost as much as I was.
With slow, powerful strokes of her wings, she bore us upwards. Past rookeries and hollows, month-old chicks clamouring to see the fabled Hamilcar Bear-Eater only to be called from the edge by frantic shrieks from their mothers. Higher. The young males I had seen from the ledge squalled about us. The presence of the princess amongst them only strengthened their ardour and intensified their displays, swallowing us both in a storm of beaks and feathers and amorous cries.
I felt I had to ask.
‘Are you not already promised, princess?’
She gave a tilt of the head that struck me as uncharacteristically coquettish for a creature that could have ripped both arms from my body.
‘Really? At your age?’
With an irate squawk, she hauled us sharply upwards, leaving the increasingly hot-tempered flock behind us. There was a hole in the ceiling of the fortress eyrie, a jagged shaft about fifty feet long.
And beyond it – the very roof of the Ghurlands.
The air was so clear you could have imagined Alarielle bathing in it. Assuming that your imagination, like mine, runs that way. I took a long, deep breath. It was thin, and so shockingly cold that it actually burned to breathe, but I was a Stormcast Eternal and mortal child of the Eternal Winterlands, so believe me when I say that I’ve known deeper colds than this in my day. It smelled of frost, and of wind that was pure from having never sullied itself with the touch of earth. I was so high now that I had actually stopped thinking about the ground as a part of this world. I looked up at the raw summit of the Gorkomon. The great peak was narrow enough here that I could view it all in one glance. It was clad in ice, luminous and amber in this exalted place, this world without shadow.
A cleft had been dug into that ice.
It resembled the aetar rookeries I’d seen below, only far, far larger. Stained glass and coloured silks littered the rocky shelves and ledges, ivory and jewels, silver and gold. As the Seven Words was a hodgepodge of architectural styles from two Ages of the realms and a hundred different races that had briefly (and unwisely) claimed it for their own, so too were the nesting materials of the royal aetar. Gemstones engraved with duardin runes sat next to bullgor ivory figurines, mountain aelf filigree and spiderfang silk sculpture. In a few years I expected that there’d be a storm gladius or a set of Prosecutor wings in amongst the royal collection.