High above the Aethelgard’s dorsal watching deck, the five-hundred-meter avatar of the Divine Nine-Sun Golden Crow began its transformation.
Pip hovered in the golden corona, his vast wings beating in slow, majestic rhythms. To maintain a five-hundred-meter form composed of pure sun-hot star-fire needed huge living focus. Now that the battle was won, the young Golden Crow tilted his head, giving an affirmative, cheerful whistle that echoed through the soul-channel: wheeeee-chup!
He folded his wings inward.
The blinding, continent-sized dark shape began to compress. The white-hot solar star-fire didn’t bleed into the empty pocket. Instead, it folded seamlessly into Pip’s triple-keeled breastplate, drawn inward by the gravity holding of his nine orbiting crowns. The five-hundred-meter wingspan shrank to fifty meters, then ten meters, then two meters, until finally, Pip stood at the size of a robust hunting hawk, roughly sixty inches from curved golden beak to the tips of his tail feathers.
Yet his majesty was undiminished.
His plumage was composed of linked, feather-light scales of crystal-hardened golden light that shone with the iridescence of polished honey. His three forward crest plumes curled elegantly above his brow like a royal crown, and between them, nine tiny solar orbs the size of small glass marbles orbited in a whisper-quiet, counter-rotating star-pattern. Along his lower chest, his three sun-forged golden talons gleamed with ancient, ancient runes.
