Edger’s hands fly to his neck as he realizes that Ku is becoming feral. Dyeawan imagines what the expression on Edger’s face would look like were his features capable of forming any expression at all. His fingers attempt to pry Ku from his throat. The hollow protrusions on the creature’s back begin whistling like a boiling teakettle. The rest of Edger’s body seizes as the wind dragon closes its jaws, biting through the patch of flesh its mouth would otherwise harmlessly occupy.

Edger would scream if his throat were still sending sounds through the wind dragon’s body. In his panicked agony he tears Ku from his neck, the wind dragon’s mouth taking a large chunk of the man’s throat with him. Thick red blood begins regurgitating down the front of his tunic. Edger squeezes Ku in one hand until those long backbones pierce Edger’s palm and he crushes the wind dragon’s tiny body, very nearly popping the creature’s yellow and black eyes from his skull.

Dyeawan watches him stumble backward, the strength fleeing Edger’s legs even as his command over them wanes. He falls against the God Rung, sitting awkwardly at the base of the monolith as his life’s blood continues to gush from his torn asunder throat.

Dyeawan paddles a few feet closer to him.

“I learned well the lesson of Greenfire, my little duck,” she explains. “I’ve been studying other animals since that test, reading everything I could find and examining live specimens when I could. I was particularly interested in wind dragons. I took a portion of Ku’s blood while he was last off your neck, in the highest heat of his mating cycle. I tried injecting it into different creatures. It sent all of them into a killing frenzy. They weren’t easy experiments, but I knew it would be worth the effort. I’d like to think that, at the time, it was just simple curiosity. But the truth is I always knew this could happen. I knew one way or another I might have to make your death look like an accident, as though Ku had entered his mating cycle prematurely while on your neck and killed you.”

Edger is attempting in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck with one hand, pressing his palm into his throat and in fact only making matters worse.