“Alright, old friend,” he whispers. “Sun’s up. Let’s go remind the world what trust looks like.”
Kaelen smiles and shows them his scarred fingers. “He remembers every day,” he says. “That’s why he chooses not to be.”
Kaelen stayed. He sat in the ash, let the burns throb, and hummed a low, trembling note—the sound of a wounded Rhark calling for kin. Vex stopped hissing. His head, too large for his body, tilted. And for the first time, he listened . rhark trainer
The sun had not yet breached the ridge of the Cinderfangs, but the low, guttural rumble already vibrated through the clay floor of the enclosure. Kaelen pressed his palm flat against the warm, pebbled hide of the beast. “Easy, Vex,” he murmured. “I know. The dark makes you hungry.”
To Kaelen, he was a student.
Two years ago, Vex was a hatchling no bigger than a mastiff, found orphaned in a geothermal vent field. His mother had been poached for her heat-sacs—a crime that still made Kaelen’s jaw ache. The little creature had hissed and spat globs of superheated saliva, burning three of Kaelen’s fingers to the bone. Any sensible person would have run.
The rumble in Vex’s chest deepens, then shifts into a low, melodic thrum—a sound no instrument can replicate. It is the Rhark’s version of a purr. Kaelen leans his forehead against the great beast’s snout. The heat washes over him like a blessing. “Alright, old friend,” he whispers
Vex was a four-year-old Rhark—three tons of muscle, scale, and latent fire. His dorsal spines, still molting their juvenile fuzz, clicked softly as he shifted his weight. To the untrained eye, he was a monster from the deep-fissure tales, a creature that could melt granite with a sneeze and reduce a herd of ironbacks to slag.