Auntie O is out of the house. I’m ahead on all my chores. My head basically doesn’t feel like it got run over by a truck.
It’s time.
Wren locked the door to her room. She dimmed her lights down to their lowest setting. She went over to the windows and closed the shutters to block out the glaring midday sun.
With one feathered finger pressed to the smooth cool disc behind her earhole, she brought up the augment display. The collection of hero figures and accessories on her shelves lit up in the dark, with bright auras and deeply nested context menus that offered pre-programmed holo routines and extensive customization options. She had gotten the augdisc embedded into the base of her skull last week, and for days afterward it felt like she’d gotten a spike driven into her brain.
Totally worth it.
“Manyel Eschaton,” Wren quietly narrated, “the Mage of Ending, crawls on broken wings out of the smoking crater of his own creation. His once-pristine gold and white feathers are sullied by soot, ash, and debris. His body is in incredible amounts of agony — as is his heart. So much destruction, he thinks. So many lost. His silver eyes would be crying, if they had any more tears to shed.”
Wren crawled the robed eagle figure along her desk, away from the smoldering holo volcano. Then she grabbed the robed raven figure from her shelf and set it down with a flourish.
“Suddenly, standing atop the crater is none other than Feareth, the Pharaoh of Fear. He stares imperiously down at Manyel with deep obsidian eyes. ‘This war has cost you so much, Manyel. So, so much. Yet you persist in this needless, destructive madness… all because you refuse to listen to me.’”
Wren twisted the dial on her augdisc with a click and the two wizards’ auras swelled like golden-white and blue-black flames.
“Manyel pushes himself up onto his knees — but suddenly hisses in pain and collapses forward roughly onto the sharp gravel of the earth. Pained, regretful, shattered, Manyel whispers, ‘I was afraid, Feareth. So, so afraid. But perhaps now… I am ready to listen.’”
“Feareth’s deep obsidian eyes stare imperiously into the distance. ‘All I’ve ever wanted… was for someone to listen to me.’ Feareth scoops up Manyel’s broken body in his strong, unyielding wings, and carries him to the Springs of Healing.”
Wren used the raven to gently lower the eagle into the holo jacuzzi at the other end of her desk. Then with a tap on her augdisc she turned on the tiny, immaterial jets.
“‘I’ve been hurt so badly, Feareth. So, so hurt.’”
“‘I cannot take away your hurt,’ Feareth murmurs to Manyel, ‘but I can give you comfort.’”
Bang! bang! bang! came the pounding at the door. Wren yelped and cringed and brought her wing-hands up to cover her earholes. Both wizard figures rattled to the floor.
“What’s going on? Who do you have in there, girlie? Don’t you lie to me!”
Auntie O. Back early. The worst-case scenario.
“No one!” Wren called out unconvincingly.
A screech of displeasure from her wrathful Aunt Ocypede, and then the beeping of the doorcode being keyed in. Wren shrank down in her chair, trying to make herself look as small as possible. Her aunt was in a mood.
The door swung open, the stark light from the hall blinding in its intensity. Wren blinked her eyes open to see Auntie O’s owlish glare flitting around the room, irritated and expectant. “Well?”
Please don’t yell at me, please don’t yell at me, please don’t yell at me. “I was… using my augdisc to… help me improvise a story, with my hero figures as the characters, and —”
Ocypede puffed up her chest. “You mean playing with your dolls again? Do you think I worked my talons to the bone to pay for that surgery just so you could —”
But then, instead of her usual shrieking-at-Wren-in-window-shattering-outrage, her aunt let out a raspy, exasperated groan and stalked away down the hall.
In a way, the weight of her aunt’s disappointment made Wren feel worse than being yelled at. Okay, not really. Aunt Ocypede’s yelling got painfully loud. But there was a cold, dull pit in her stomach that Wren thought must be some kind of guilt or shame or something. It didn’t feel great.
Wren turned off her augdisc and put Manyel and Feareth back on the shelf. She considered just locking the door again and leaving Auntie O to stew in whatever funk she was in.
No, see, that’s what she wants. Then I’d be the bad one. But I’m NOT the bad one, so screw her, I’m gonna go make sure she’s okay.
Wren peered around the corner into the kitchen. Ocypede leaned against the far linoleum counter, staring out the window, eating bite-sized red chili peppers from a serving bowl.
“You and I are failures, Wren Anthea Hawthorne,” Auntie O said without turning around. “You’ve spent so long cowering in your room, blocking out the world, hiding from life like a pathetic, scared little chick. And I’ve been so sentimental that I let you.” She swallowed another pepper, and turned to face her. “When’s the last time you left the nest, hmm?”
Wren looked down at the pattern in the linoleum. “Um, last week? To get the augdisc embedded?”
Aunt Ocypede picked through the serving bowl. Several peppers had gone brown and soft, or had visible mold. She tossed them into the sink. “They sent you a portal from our front door directly to the surgical center. And before that?”
Wren buried her head in her wing and didn’t answer. Six months and fourteen days.
“I want you to get out of the house. Today. Now. Go and…” Auntie O tilted the serving bowl, and made a sniff of displeasure. “Go and pick up a peck of peppers. From the farmer’s market on 53rd and i. It’s a five minute flight — though I suppose it will take you longer, since you’ll stubbornly insist on walking.”
Ocypede glared over her spectacles at Wren, who at this point was basically trying to curl up into a ball and melt into the floor. “If you can’t even do that, Wren Anthea Hawthorne… well, your mother would be very disappointed in both of us.”
It’s just a step. It’s just the ground.
Wren’s foot-talons hovered over the pavement, unconvinced.
Uh huh, so maybe I should just fly to the farmer’s market? And potentially die of crashing into a building? Again?
Her hand-wings clung to the tree ladder, making a show of stubbornness.
Or I know, I could climb back up and tell Auntie O that I’m too chicken to leave the house after all. Then maybe she’d scream at me, disown me for being an embarrassment to our whole family, and then lock me in my room with a water fountain and a bottomless bag of seeds for the rest of my life and I could just play with my hero figs in peace!
Wren ruffled the down on her face with one wing.
This is so dumb.
Gingerly, she lowered one foot to the asphalt and put weight on her talons. Hot! Rough! Stabby! She pulled back. This wasn’t a road, it was a medieval flaming tar pit. Pocked with tiny spiky pits and peaks. Baked in the noonday sun. Clearly optimized for hardened, unfeeling wheels and shoes, not soft, uncalloused bird feet.
Wren looked back up the ladder and saw Auntie O high in the boughs of the house tree, peering down at her from their front landing. The prospective disappointment in Ocypede’s eyes was palpable.
I’ll show my psycho aunt who’s too pathetic to pick up a peck of peppers. Her! Or at least, not me! Wren pushed herself off the ladder in a leap. Her feet landed on the stabby surface and she pitched forward, breaking her fall with her hands, which sent screaming pain signals up at her, which probably meant she had crazy gashes all up and down her palms.
Wren rolled onto her back and hissed and groaned. Her aunt shook her head with dismissive pity and then disappeared back into the nest.
Oh dear. Today isn’t going very well for you, is it?
An animated holo raven flapped its way in for a landing in the corner of Wren’s vision. An animated holo raven that stared at her imperiously with its deep obsidian eyes.
Feareth?! Wren thought at the raven.
Call me… Feary. It preened its wings with its beak. Not a dark wizard. Just part of the augdisc’s user education system. Here with a reminder that the disc can be used to adjust your sensory flow-through rate.
Oh right. The sensory flow-through rate. AKA the actual, practical reason she had used to talk Auntie O into getting her the augdisc in the first place. She had literally forgotten about it.
Wren hid her stupid blushing face with her wings. I’m so pathetic I can’t make it ten feet from my house on my own, I need COACHING from an imaginary pretend wizard bird.
Feary settled in on its invisible perch. It can also reduce acute negative emotions, such as embarrassment.
Fine. Fine! Wren reached around and tapped through some menus with the augdisc, until the sensory module popped up. There were various infographics and tutorials and safety warnings that she got rid of, until there was just a number in the corner of her vision showing the current flow-through rate of 100%.
Wren twisted the rim of the disc. Click click click. The flow-through rate dropped to 80%. Wren could feel the pain lessening from her hands and feet. Her embarrassed flush cooled off in her cheeks. And heck if she didn’t feel about 20% more capable of facing the world.
Thanks Feary. I’ve got it from here.
If you are in need, I shall return. With contextually relevant information about your augdisc’s feature set. With that, the raven took flight.
Wren walked down the no-longer-intolerable street toward the farmer’s market, directions floating in her peripheral vision. The city around her was a riot of crazy lights and sounds and people, as usual. But as long as she kept her eyes straight ahead, and ignored the flashing billboards, and the possibly-fashionable possibly-homeless people shouting at each other, and the falling building —
OH DEAR MOD A FALLING BUILDING!
A towering skyscraper ahead on her right buckled and crunched, metal beams screaming and glass shattering. Wren froze, beak hanging slack, horrorstruck. Blocks of concrete tumbled past her on one side, then another, nearly taking her head off with their mangled, rusty red rebar. This is it, I’m gonna die, I’m absolutely gonna die.
Unable to move or look away, Wren stared as one person after another leapt from the windows of the collapsing tower, screaming, and flailing their arms, and hurtling toward certain death, and… pulling their parachutes. And high fiving each other in mid-air. And floating gently to the ground. And wearing matching purple windsuits with “Tom’s Adventure Emporium” printed on the back.
A deafening chiptune gong melody rang out, and the collapsed skyscraper decohered into rainbow-colored piles of foam nanoblocks. Two rows of squat plow-bots rolled out from their hiding places in the alleys and started sweeping things up. A tan, hairy ape-man with a clipboard and a bullhorn shouted directions at the “survivors.”
Fucking… fuckers! Wren shook the adrenaline out of her wings. Her eyes were doing the thing where they weren’t crying yet but they were absolutely ready and waiting. Part of her definitely wanted to find somewhere out of the way and just rock back and forth and keen for a while.
No. Not today. She reached behind her and clicked the dampening on the augdisc down to 50%. Click click click. A cool, heavy, muffley blanket slipped between her and the scene ahead of her.
I can handle this. This is me handling this. Nothing’s gonna stop me now.
“Stop. Stop right there. You, tiny brown bird hobbit, stop.”
Wren looked over her shoulder without breaking her stride, like a cool super spy. It was the bullhorn guy, shouting at her as if from a great distance. Pff, whatever. Try and make me. Then, the shouting was as if from a less great distance. In fact the shouting got louder and louder until the ape-man grabbed her by the downy scruff of the neck and lifted her off the ground.
The augdisc did nothing to stop Wren’s gut-level feeling that she was about to have her head torn off and her body thrown into a canyon with lots of sharp rocks at the bottom.
“Bird hobbit! This is an active adventure zone. You can’t just wander through here without a purple windsuit!” Bullhorn ape-man — or “Tom”, as his nametag claimed — stopped yelling in Wren’s face long enough to wave an arm at the nearby sweeper robots mopping up rainbow blocks. As if on cue, the robots let out a multi-octave roar and merged together into some kind of kaiju-sized mechatron covered in spikes and burning truck tires. The gang of purple windsuits drew out laser guns and reflector shields and started pressing a tactical assault.
“But… I have to buy peppers.”
Tom gave Wren the same look that her aunt gave her when she dropped a basket of blackberries into that pile of maggots and animal filth. He set her down roughly and pushed her off toward a side street, telling her to run along before she got hurt. Flushed, scared, ashamed, relieved, she complied.
By the time Wren calmed down enough to get her bearings, her map app said she had gone half a mile out of her way. Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Now instead of a straight shot from her nest to the farmer’s market, she would have to route through a weird twisty snarl of high traffic streets.
Feary! Why didn’t you pop up and tell me to do the flow-through thing again? I was freaking out!
The raven appeared in a puff of animated purple smoke. Increasing the dampening effect of the augdisc would have been… inadvisable. As with conjuring an armor of black ice, done too much it can chill the soul, and leave one unresponsive to true threats.
Yadda yadda yadda bullshit. Wren wasn’t going to come home to Auntie O empty-handed, so that was a risk she would just have to take. She shooed the stupid raven, clicked her augdisc a few ticks, and steered herself toward the farmer’s market.
She made it a good three blocks before she heard the drums. And the thumping sound of a herd of animals. And brass. Lots of brass. There was… a marching band? Full of mythical beasts? Sampled from a representative slate of historical cultures? Wren could only cock her head as they burst out of a hidden underground stadium, playing a clanging, slamming, irrepressible rendition of Frankenstein by The Edgar Winter Group.
Huh. Only one thing for it. Click click click.
Two streets later, she came across an explosion-riddled swordfight between a four-armed woman covered in gold and jewels and a matte black spider robot with six scythes sticking out of it. Click click click.
Then it was a pop-up shop owner aggressively selling psychedelic time-looping mini-volcanoes. Click.
Then it was the reverse solar eclipse, where some asshole’s giant magnifying lens crossed in front of the sun and made it a thousand times brighter, frying a supercolony of radioactive mega-ants in the process. Click click click click click.
When Wren arrived at the farmer’s market, it was uncharacteristically grim. Distant shades muttered to themselves and exchanged dark, formless plants. Wren walked through the muddled bazaar feeling like a wraith herself, as if she were hardly there at all.
Wren approached a clouded-over stall, more from a sense of some forgotten duty than from any attraction to its drab produce. The available wares inspired neither pity nor hate. The weight of the thin red fruit as she took it in her feathered hand felt unreal, like it was underwater. Mechanically, she swept an armful of the things into one of the baskets. Then she walked away, drifting, carried as if by a current that she could not discern.
A rustling. A murmur. The word “birdbrain” yelled out from the bottom of a very deep well.
A solid grip closed on her wing and spun her around. An angry face floated in her vision, either a foot away or in another dimension, its mouth forming all sorts of words that basically didn’t matter.
Typical. Just more Fusion City chaos. Wren reached up to adjust her augdisc yet again, but the angry thing in front of her smacked her hand away.
Wren stumbled from the blow and fell over backwards. Her head collided with the ground, and the impact was like a firecracker going off inside her skull. Instantly she was overcome by searing sensations. Sunlight of fire, shouting of thunder, pavement of steel wool, skin of biting ants. The shopkeeper in front of her wasn’t a stout bearded fellow in a headscarf, he was a wrathful shining demon of vengeance and destruction.
“Stop! Stop! Please, just stop!” That’s what Wren would have yelled if she were able. What came out instead was a terrified nestling’s keening scream.
Wren must have screamed for a good five minutes. After a while, she settled into a rhythmic pattern: in-breath, keeeeeeen, in-breath, keeeeeeen. Eyes closed, lying on the ground, knees hugged to her chest in the ovum position.
The waves of shock and pain eventually subsided. Then there were the waves of horrific embarrassment and shame. Then the waves of self-judginess. Then a few waves of meta-upsetness for good measure.
Apo— apo— apologies. Feary the oh-so-helpful, always-there-when-you-need-it holo raven popped into existence with a burst of staticky fuzz. It would seem the impact of the augdisc colliding with the ground knocked the system offline. But not to worry, the sens— sens— sensory —
Wren didn’t bother waiting for Feary to finish its stuttering. She felt around on the back of her head, and finding the augdisc undamaged and right where it was supposed to be, twisted it all the way around, click click click click click click.
Nothing happened.
— sensory flow-through module is self-repairing as we speak. It should be back online in nine— nine— ninety minutes.
Complete. Freaking. Disaster. Well then I guess I’ll just find a deep dark hole to crawl into for the next HOUR AND A HALF, you horrible, useless little bird!
Feary cocked its head at her. It faded out into static, its imperious obsidian stare the last thing to go.
Wren rubbed away the wetness in her eyes. Stupid.
With one wing held up to shield her eyes, Wren peeked out between feathered fingers. She was faintly surprised to see that she was still at the farmer’s market and not in like, the shame dimension. No one had harangued her aunt into picking her up, or arrested her for grand theft pepper. In fact, no one was even staring at her. They were just going about their business.
Probably something to do with the circle of coarse rope and wooden posts sectioning off a 6-foot berth around her. One of the posts had a sign hanging on it, facing out away from her. Wren sat up and shook the pins and needles out of her legs, and then hobbled over and ducked under the rope line.
“NOTHING TO SEE HERE,” read the chunky charcoal letters on the sign.
“Awake,” rumbled the mountain suddenly standing over her.
“Eeep!” said the freaked out little bird girl.
Wren collapsed back to the ground like one of those goats that can’t handle surprises. A hulking rock monster with big broad teeth and massive bird-pummeling fists towered over her, blocking out the sun. On instinct, Wren frantically spun her augdisc. When that had approximately no effect, she went ahead and started back up with the keening.
This is it. This is how I die. Crushed by a boulder monster the size of a forklift. Maybe they’ll send my body home crammed into a coffin the size of a coconut, and Auntie O will feel the slightest tinge of regret for throwing me out of the nest.
“Peace. Friend.” The mountain unfolded a pair of rocky gray-black hands in a gesture so gentle that Wren half-expected a flock of doves to flutter out. “Here to help.”
Wren took a few deep breaths and managed to steer her keening noise into a sort of thoughtful humming. It helped that the mountain didn’t make any sudden moves, e.g. to squish her like a little brown marshmallow peep.
The rocky giant sat down and wrapped its arms around its knees. It had a horizontal crack for a mouth, and glittering, crystalline black eyes, set in a craggy face of mottled gray-and-black granite. Down closer to her level, the giant was less overtly threatening, even though it could probably still flatten Wren into a pancake with a single smack.
I just have to make it… Wren peeked at the countdown in the corner of her vision. …eighty-seven more minutes. Then I can crank up the augdisc to a totally responsible level, march straight home, and hide my head under the pillows for the next ten thousand years.
Wren kept her beak shut and waited. Gradually, the giant filled the silence with harmless small talk, and, over the course of a few minutes, introduced herself.
She sold crystals and rare minerals at this market on Wednesdays and Saturdays. She lived in a house under a hill not far from here. She had family, but they all lived deeper underground and she liked it up on the surface, with the wildlife and the sky. Her name was Tourmaline.
Tourmaline was the one who got the bearded-shopkeep-slash-vengeance-demon to calm down, and the one who set up Wren’s impromptu safe space.
“When people don’t understand… they worry. When I don’t worry… they move on.”
Wren nodded and mm-hmm’d as politely as possible. Her initial terror at the possibility of being snapped in half like a twig faded to negligible levels. Tourmaline seemed… nice. Wren realized she didn’t know many people who were nice.
When Tourmaline invited her to come over for afternoon tea, Wren instantly perked up. She was eager to stop doing the thing where everyone hustled and bustled around them while they sat on the ground making chit-chat in the middle of a farmer’s market.
About half a second after Wren responded “Sure!”, her eagerness got run through with a spike of anxiety. What are you thinking?! Your awesome plan is to crash the house of a total freaking stranger who oh by the way could probably tear a tree out of the ground with her bare hands?
Wren took a deep breath, and tried to relax her tensed-up flight muscles. Look, it’s either socially awkward teatime, or full-intensity disaster gauntlet. Wren could cringe her way through a no-stakes, never-have-to-see-them-again social visit for… eighty-one minutes. Probably.
Tourmaline folded up her stall into a rough-hewn granite boulder, with multicolored ores and crystals sticking out invitingly at all angles. It rolled along the bumpy road behind her on four casters like little marbles.
She took them along lesser-known footpaths, ones that weren’t marked on Wren’s virtual map. They passed an old stone church, and rows of high arching trees with branches full of green buds, and a little family of sleepy bunnies. The smallest bunny lifted its head up to look at Wren, and then snuggled its nose back into the bigger one’s white fur tummy.
A hilly sort of berm rose up, between a sequoia filled with squirrels and songbirds on the left and a condenser tower that cycled purple and green liquid up to a satellite dish on the right. On the face of the grass-covered hill, Wren caught the shifting of sunlight across a great circle of stones and metals. Some shining, some matte, some natural, some elegantly cut. A mosaic of bare minerals, painted with dancing sunlight.
Tourmaline parked her stall-boulder out front. She caught Wren’s eye and smiled, showing off her broad square teeth, each one the size of Wren’s head.
She’s not going to eat me, she’s not going to eat me, she’s not going to eat me.
Wren followed the giant through a huge round door at the center of the mosaic, then down a gently sloping, gently turning tunnel. The walls echoed with the drip of water. The floor was carpeted in spongy moss.
The sitting room that Tourmaline brought her to was… cozy. In spite of having 20-foot-high ceilings. There was no echo, no feeling of being in a cavern or a cathedral. Patchwork quilts and unframed painted canvases overlapped on the walls. The floor was covered in rag rugs and patches of soft moss.
There weren’t any huge, barn-sized tables or chairs, which was good since Wren didn’t need anything else making her feel like a tiny child*.* There was just a central redwood board on the ground, surrounded by floor mats and a cascading pile of pillows. This is where Tourmaline laid out the stoneware tea service.
Wren picked out the smallest floor pillow and plopped down in the middle of it. She tried to ignore the tense, gripping tightness in her chest. And the fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip of her heartbeat. And the frantic voice inside of her, flapping its wings in her face, saying, Pay attention! Don’t relax! If you let down your guard for even a second, you have no idea what could happen!
Wren rubbed her face with her wings and checked the countdown. Sixty-five minutes. Then I can go home.
Her giant rocky host came back from the kitchen with a granite teapot and a cedarwood box of loose leaf teas. There were twenty different teas, and Wren smelled a pinch of each one.
They all seemed like normal, interesting flavors. They weren’t called “Molten Gold” or “Aged Gravel Dust” or anything. But that just meant they were all appealing in different ways, and Wren had absolutely no way of deciding which one she should take.
By the time Wren had gone through and smelled all the different tea varieties twice, her chest was painfully tight, her heart was *fwip-fwip-fwip’*ing faster and faster, and her frantic inner voice was going Agh! Agh! Aggggh! She had escalated from “jittery standby” to “low-grade panic attack.”
Tourmaline waited, as still as a mountainside in a gentle breeze. Her mouth, and her eyes, held a faint warm grin that showed no trace of mockery.
Wren ducked her head, closed her eyes, and clenched her flight muscles. “Would you… pick for me?”
Instantly Wren felt a wave of regret. Oh no oh no, why did you do that, what were you thinking? It was over, she had ruined everything, again. Now the terrifying rock monster would snap at her and say, “What are you, a child?” or “It’s not a final exam, just pick one!” or “Fine, I’ll explain the pros and cons of all twenty different varieties, and maybe then you can stop wasting my time and just choose, okay?” And then Wren would flip out, and the giant would get mad and crumple her up and throw her through a wall, and then she would die of shame.
Tourmaline made a low, rumbling “Hmm.” Took a pinch of a yellow-green tea called “Spring Medley.” Put it in the strainer of the teapot. Gave it a quiet moment to steep. Poured a stream of tea into each of their cups.
Wren’s body was confused at the complete lack of disaster. It was like… flying full-tilt into the side of a building, but then not making impact. Like maybe she wasn’t in horrible danger.
She reached out and took the tea, her hands shaking from the adrenaline. She sipped the tea and breathed in. She could taste lemongrass, and honeysuckle, and ripened hay, and little white wildflowers. It was sweet. Subtle. Quiet.
Wren closed her eyes. The warmth of the tea spread through her chest, and a memory rose up in her, like a vision. A bed of soft grass. A hanging mobile. Glow-in-the-dark stars and carved wooden trees. Her mother on a rocking chair, just out of sight, humming a gentle melody.
Wren opened her eyes, and felt the wetness in them. Tourmaline was watching her intently. “Sorry! I – I like the tea! I’m not crying because of the tea!”
Tourmaline’s laughter was like a warm stone you could fall asleep on in the afternoon sun. “I have a niece. Like you. Always trips herself up.”
The rock giant sipped her tea, and savored it for longer than Wren had ever savored anything.
I come bearing news. Fusion City’s favorite holo raven circled in Wren’s vision cautiously before landing. Due to your augdisc’s excellent neuro-engineering, as well as a strikingly pessimistic forecasting unit, the self-repairs have been completed in half the expected time.
Wren blinked. Forty-five minutes. Coming to in the farmer’s market, meeting Tourmaline, the walk along the path, the tea… it had all only taken forty-five minutes.
The sensory module is operational once more. Feary bowed with a solemn flourish.
Thanks Feary. Sorry for yelling at you earlier.
The raven raised an eyebrow, its gaze more inquisitive than imperious. Apology accepted. Shall I reduce the sensory flow-through rate to something more tolerable for your journey home? Twenty percent perhaps? Or five?
Wren looked around at the patchwork quilts and canvases on the walls. Listened to the distant drip of cave water and the nearly silent whisper of steam from the kettle. Felt the plushness of the pillow pressed against her feathers and the warmth and softness in her stomach. Smelled the low scent of limestone and the tickle of honeysuckle.
What if… we leave it. At one hundred. For now, at least.
Feary nodded, and took flight once more.
Wren cleared her throat and looked up at the giant with the craggy face and the glittering black eyes. “Could I… have another cup of tea?”