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The raven cries out, the sound cracking through me.

Elixir is more direct and less forgiving. With his features reinforced, he rotates his arms in a rapid-fire sequence. His pronged daggers chop through the air and catch the animal in its left wing.

The animal caws and veers. Its beak jabs, clanging with the daggers.

Although my brother senses its movements, can decipher them in his head, this isn’t his domain, and he’s lost that cord of wind I’d provided early. He’s lost the path that helped direct him. His delayed reflexes illustrate as much.

Puck pounds across the crest. The raven detects his approach. It swerves and strikes out with its uninjured wing.

At the last moment, my brother springs into the air and leaps over the black panel of quills. Mid-air, he executes a full twist and looses another arrow, which sunders a talon.

The raven’s pain peals through the night, penetrating my bones. Its rage is palpable as it whacks Puck off his hooves just as my brother lands. Then it swipes at Elixir, cuffing him in the ribs.

My brothers recover but not swiftly enough. The raven launches their way, hellbent on impaling them.

I vault into the air, circle the scene, and careen in front of Puck and Elixir. On a roar, I reel back my arm and haul the javelin forward. The resistance of a helix blade meeting flesh robs me of breath. The weapon’s spiraled tip hacks through feathers, the crunching of bone swarms my ears like a torrent, and the raven teeters backward.

Crimson sprays my hands. The beautiful corvid crashes on its side, its screech fading.

I hover in place, my wings flapping and then giving way.

As I land on uneven feet, my boots lose their balance. I let it happen, let gravity take me down beside the raven. My knees smack the grass, dropping me into a kneeling position, as if fate knew I’d seek immediate penance for this.

The sacred fauna or my brothers. I’d had no choice.

Grief clots my throat and steals the oxygen from my lungs. I bow over the creature and behold its eyes fluttering as they focus on me.

Puck and Elixir rush to my side and lower themselves. Our stunned pants flood the mountain peak. The reek of sweat and blood saturate atmosphere.

In Faeish, Elixir recites a lament. Puck brushes his fingers over the raven’s wings. The creature lets out of feeble sound as he and I fixate on one another, as he struggles to stay alive.

Will he survive? Or have we forsaken him?

My hands shake, so I close them into fists. I was this dweller’s peer once, his monarch and his servant.

How the devil did it come to this?

Puck whispers in a fractured tenor, “No fucking way, said the satyr.”

It’s rare to penetrate Elixir’s facade, to break him down and expose his emotions. Only Cove is routinely capable of it. Yet Elixir’s baritone sounds brittle, scraped raw. “I heard the wings beating.”

That’s how he’d known what we faced, long before the raven had cawed. He and Puck had identified the animal earlier than I had.

The choked words eject from my lips. “Have either of you encountered anything like this before?”

Elixir shakes his head. “I have not.”

“Neither have I,” Puck murmurs.

And of course, they haven’t. If something this harrowing had transpired in the woodland or river, my brothers would have confided as much by now.

“Fables almighty,” I rasp.

I lift my head to my brothers, our turmoil transcending into fury. Faeries have slain fauna out of self-defense, and we hunt them for food.

Likewise, animals have attacked us for the same reasons. In fact, during Cove’s game, she had battled a bask of crocodiles with Elixir.

However, this is different. This hadn’t been the product of hunger or territoriality. It had been premeditated, as if someone had enabled or somehow manipulated the corvid.