Morning sunlight struggled through the soot-stained high window row windows of the sickness office. He cast pale quadrangles of dust-mote light across Arthur’s heavy oak desk. The smell of formalin and carbolic soap from the cutting-open theater below was hardened by the fresh scent of wood shavings and a bowl of dried sun-berries steeping in hot water on the side table.
Arthur sat in his high-backed wooden swivel chair, an ink pen balanced between his fingers, reviewing a stack of supply order forms and tactical patrol maps for the Rust-Belt outer edge.
Spread out across Arthur’s boots like an eighty-pound charcoal rug, Grimm was fast asleep. The Obsidian Bone-Fang Hound lay on his side, his paws twitching lazily as he let out a low, window-rattling snore that rang through the floorboards every four seconds. Sometimes, his black tail gave a heavy thump against the oak baseboard, fully content with the world.
Arthur, however, was unable to move his head.
Perched squarely on the crown of Arthur’s dark skull. He gripped the thick locks of hair with needle-sharp black talons, was Pip.
The Ash-Plumed Falcon was deeply, fanatically at work.
Pip’s head darted with clean, steady care, his razor-sharp golden beak clicking in rapid, staccato bursts: clack-clack. With delicate, micro-meter shifts of his neck, Pip was separating Arthur’s unruly dark hair into single strands, combing them flat against the scalp, and parting the center line with obsessive symmetry.
