Page 61 of Griffin Food

“Could you identify them?”

I shake my head. “They were deep in the trees. No fires. But the scent was human. No shifters among them, not that I could tell. Traveling from the south. The way they moved made me feel like they were together. Coordinated, maybe.”

“The Blighten have been pushed back,” he says ominously, “and the querulous humans are up to mischief, it would seem.”

I nod. “That is my thought, too.”

Yet a familiar prickling sensation is back, and there are threats worse than humans out there.

“When human wars come to a stop, they find new ones, and if they cannot find them, then they create them,” Darrion agrees.

His age is measured in centuries—he is nearly as old as Atlas—and he has seen the patterns of human existence through his own experiences, whereas I have only read about them in books.

“War is expensive,” Atlas says. “Yet it becomes a way of being. With the coffers depleted, they seek ways to use their trained, battle-hardened minions to replenish them.”

“Humans are strange,” Darrion says dryly, like he has forgotten what it is to be human, so long has he been bound to his griffin, Darkan. “Never satisfied unless there is blood spilling in some way or another. Not that I tar all humans with the same brush. Our people are good. Many people are good. It is the kings, queens, and lordly fuckers who set greedy eyes on things that do not belong to them out of boredom that piss me off.”

“All the more reason to expedite matters with her faux beta mates,” Atlas says decisively. “If we are to have a battle on our hands, then we shall definitely need the matter of our food resolved.”

Food. The word lands like a little explosion inside my head and is followed by a swift tightening in my groin.

“Is she… does she… will she?” I ask, barely coherent in my eagerness to know if she truly is a chosen one, the one who can be our nourishment.

“Yes,” Darrion says, surprising me when he is the one answering. “If our leader’s expression was anything to go by when he tasted her, she is assuredly a perfect and pure source of food.”

Atlas cuts him a scowl, cheeks darkening. “It was but a small taste from my fingers, not the source. But yes, even that much…” He leaves it hanging.

“Gods,” I mutter weakly. I can’t fucking wait. Galeor rumbles a complaint that he wants to taste her, too.

“We need to turn them. Both of them. Today,” Atlas states.

“I believe they are ready,” Darrion says. “Ready to break.”

“Good,” Atlas says, all business. “Let us proceed. Have the servants bring them to the training pit immediately.”

This is progressing fast. Faster than I anticipated. Yet the restlessness inside me never really finds peace, not while a threat lingers on our lands.

It is not the human kind of conflict I worry about, although they are assuredly bad enough. No, it is one far more personal to me.

Scars: the deep kind that even after all these years, never fully heal…

One hundred years earlier…

“Help me.”

The voice is low and guttural, the words shaped awkwardly around tusks and a tongue not made for this language.

I don’t help him—not in the way he wants. Couldn’t, even if I wanted to. But I open the small metal slot at the bottom of his door and shove the bowl of slop that passes as food through. Then I close it again and move on to the next.

Prisoner two is quiet.

Prisoner three demands to know what’s going to happen next.

The fourth curses me and my late mother.

The fifth tries to reach through the gap for me.

The overseer is ready. The crack of his club is swift and hard. The orc recoils with a grunt.