The waterfall was even more impressive in the light of dawn. I sat, bathed in the mists, and meditated with Shunakhai while the sun finished rising. As the pinks and purples of the dawn sky gave way to regular light it began to refract through the mists kicked up by the waterfall and left rainbows wavering in the air all around us. It was breathtaking, and my normally hyperactive drake sat with me for nearly an hour and enjoyed the view.

That was the good news. The bad news is that the “path” that Temüjin had told me about was something that mountain goats would use. Water plunged down the falls for nearly a thousand feet and the first few hundred feet of cliff facing was nearly sheer, worn down by eons of rushing water. The few ledges I could see through the mists were covered in slick moss and less than a foot wide. I wasn’t optimistic about our chances of making it down and started looking around for an easier way. It was coming up on noon before I gave up the search. There wasn’t another way that I could find, and while the path did get much more accommodating further down, the first few hundred feet weren’t passable.

I was sitting on the rock in the mists, pondering our options, when I noticed Shunakhai playing with the rainbows. She’d rear up, flap her wings a few times, and then play-pounce on the whirlwind of mist she stirred up. I reached out a hand and willed water vapor to me. Given that the air was saturated with it I soon had a miniature tornado of rain and air hovering in my palm. I compressed it, pushing away the air, and formed it into a smooth sheet of ice. Then, I threw the ice over the edge of the falls like a frisbee. The ice flew straight at first, before it got caught in a draft and slowly dropped a few hundred feet to one of the wider ledges.

Another hour of experimentation quickly clued me in that there was no way I was making glider wings out of ice. The ice was far too brittle, even with qi reinforcement, to serve as a glider. Adding thickness wasn’t a fix either; that just turned it into a problem of weight. My last attempt had weighed almost as much as me and flew fine for a bit before an updraft shattered it and scattered shards of ice all over the ground below.

Shunakhai looked at the glider, then back at me, and I felt confusion coming from her. She stretched her wings a few times and flexed them, then leapt off of the rock and over the ledge. Unlike the gliders, she caught the updraft and used it to boost her altitude and circle back to a landing in front of me radiating a sense of accomplishment. It wasn’t true flight, I don’t think her wings were developed enough for that, but she was able to maintain a glide and ride the thermals long enough to land back where she started.

“Yes, you’re very smart,” I told her, “but can you carry me as well as all of our gear?”

Despite the fact that Tabiea had explicitly told me I couldn’t speak with animals Shunakhai proved that her understanding was growing and padded over to the pack, gripped it in her front talons, and then dove off the overlook again. She flapped her wings as she plunged downward, only to catch the wind and land back on the platform. The sense of accomplishment from last time had changed to a sense of smug pride.

If the overlook was any shorter, I don’t think I would have tried it. But I strapped the backpack on and nodded to Shunakhai.

“Just get us down a few hundred feet. No need to drop all the way to the bottom,” I said, rubbing my hands together nervously.

I got down on my hands and knees, and two hundred pounds of drake got on my back without prompting. Then I did probably the stupidest thing I had ever done in both lives…I took a running start with several hundred pounds of gear and drake on my back and jumped.

I immediately regretted my decision as the wind slapped at my face and I felt a jerk through the backpack as Shunakhai spread her wings. The feelings of excitement and pride I felt from her earlier were draining away, replaced by determination and fear, as we plunged almost straight down the falls. She frantically beat her underdeveloped wings, straining as hard as she could against my additional weight. Her claws dug into my shoulders and legs, digging deeper than I would have liked, in order to keep a firm grasp on me, blood from the wounds leaving a streamer in the air as we fell.

I started desperately summoning air qi to my control and gave her as much lift as I could, forcing the wind up into her wings to boost us and slow our fall. I spared a small amount of qi and used it to still the air in front of my eyes, allowing me to open them. The sight was not reassuring, the bottom of the waterfall which had seemed to be so far away, was rapidly approaching.

I could feel Shun tickling in the back of mind, a seed of frustration growing in her emotions as I kept a constant column of air moving below us. She didn’t like something that I was doing. Then, it clicked. I was trying to move air straight up, like one of those skydiving simulators. That wasn’t going to work if I thought of Shunakhai as a glider instead of a parachutist. She didn’t need a blast of air from below to glide. She needed something that would allow her to generate lift, and a giant column of air blasting straight up wasn’t it. It was basic aerodynamics. I started to angle the air, more like a stream, moving it under her wings. Almost instantly I felt Shun correct the angle of her wings to catch the air stream I was moving and when she caught the air I could feel a shudder run through her as she adapted to the strain. Our flight leveled out and the feelings of frustration immediately changed to happiness.

That was the good part. The downside was that I fell. Shun’s claws were designed for slashing and traction on ice, not for holding prey. When her flight leveled out it did so with a slight jarring, which was just enough for her to lose her grip on me. My arms and legs began to squeeze free of her grip, and in a last-ditch effort she banked hard into the direction of the wall, effectively slinging me toward the cliff face.

I hit the stone hard and through sheer determination and fear I wedged my hand into a crack in the stone. If I’d still been a normal human the combined weight of my body and backpack would have ripped my shoulder out of socket. As it was, I still felt the strain, but it wasn’t horrible. I immediately began to heal myself, closing up the deep gashes Shunakhai had inadvertently caused with her claws, and took stock of my situation. I was still over a hundred feet off of the ground. The river was raging below me, fed by the meltwaters of the snows in the valley, and sported a tiny strip of bank along its sides. Dropping wasn’t an option. I’d break every bone in my legs from this height, cultivation or not, and I didn’t want to be out of commission for the better part of a day while I healed them up. Stab wounds and cracked bones were the work of minutes to fix. Shattered bones took much longer since I’d have to coax every single shard of bone back into place before I fused it together. Besides, even if I could fix my legs after dropping from this height it would still hurt like hell. Might as well avoid the pain if possible.

Climbing down like normal would likewise be hard. I had been extremely lucky when I hit the cliff face. The crack that I had wedged my hand into was the only one I could see from my vantage point. So, I cheated. I channeled qi into my free hand and used it to create a handhold. Then I removed my hand from the crack and made another one. I made my way down the cliff face easily enough after I got over my initial predicament. It wasn’t until I was twenty or so feet off of the ground that I started to laugh at the absurdity of basically free climbing a wet cliff face by making my own hand holds. I wasn’t even using my legs to bear my weight, only my arms, and they were barely feeling the strain.

I dropped the last ten feet and landed on the riverbank. Rolling my shoulders to get rid of the last bit of tension that had built up I sent reassurance across my bond to let Shun know I was ok, and then set out downstream. She stayed in the air, riding the thermals, as I picked my way down the bank. It was actually louder in the canyon than it had been up top. The river wasn’t more than a hundred or so feet across, more in some spots, less in others, but it was flowing fast. Boulders the size of cars were dotted here and there in the river, giving silent testimony to the power of its flow. Several times I was forced to hop from rock to rock when the riverbank vanished under the roiling froth. Other times the canyon widened enough that I was able to stroll rather leisurely while avoiding the ice-cold spray coming off of the water. It took nearly two hours of picking my way through the canyon before I reached a point where the sides resembled hills more than cliffs and the river widened from a fierce mountain torrent to something that would be reasonable to wade through if needed.

The wildlife here was different than in the valley. I ran across a salamander-lizard thing that was nearly ten feet long in one of the calmer sections of the river. A thousand or so feet down I came nose to nose with a badger the size of my old pickup. It was covered in a rock-colored fur that blended in nearly perfectly with the surrounding boulders. There were birds that I didn’t recognize, fish that I had never seen before, and more. All of them ignored me, and I left them to their own devices. They were just trying to survive, and I wasn’t going to interrupt that.

Shunakhai joined me on the ground as the thermals ran out and immediately demanded that I give her attention. She had been worried about me during my hike and although I could feel her hunger, and she was hungry, she didn’t demand food. She just wanted physical contact for the moment, to assure herself that I was fine. The endless stomach was trying to mother me like a hatchling. It was adorable.

We feasted that night on fish out of the river and some biscuits I baked up using our limited supplies. I’d have to ration those until we found civilization, but I felt the need to use some of them in celebration of making it out of the valley and to the next stage of our journey. The stars were shining in the sky as we enjoyed the warmth of the fire and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Our trip to the first of the Free Cities took two and a half weeks of hard travel. We ran out of food just over a week out from the cabin and were forced to subsist solely on what the two of us could hunt. Rabbits mostly, although I did manage to kill a small boar which I cured over an open flame. That was the only time we spent more than a single day in one spot. The rest of the time we moved as fast as we could, following the river as it wound to the east and south. The alpine forest of the valley swiftly gave way to a band of hardwood forest, which in turn gave way to grasslands. The temperature rose swiftly as we shed altitude as well. When we had left the valley there were still patches of snow hanging around in the shade. By the end of the second week of travel the heat, and especially the humidity, had risen enough to make me sweat even before the sun had gotten directly overhead. On the sixteenth day of our trip, we found a bridge that was crossing over the river. From there we abandoned the overland route and followed the road toward our destination. Two days later we could see it in the distance sprawled out before us.

Silibes, first of the Free Cities.