The first fish struck Jiang squarely in the split beak.
He opened on instinct. The fish turned against his burned tongue, slapped one gill across his eye, and escaped beneath his breast before the two damaged halves of his beak could close.
Jiang nearly followed it backward.
Around him, the flooded road had narrowed against his shoulders. Broken shutter shell pressed the injured wing to his side, while the other wing could open only far enough to scrape its tip along stone. His straight leg trailed behind him and caught whenever he tried to reverse.
That small body found every space Jiang's did not.
It flicked past his bad hip, vanished toward Cairnspire, and left the taste of scales in his mouth.
Hunger woke all at once.
His stomach clenched so hard that his good foot lost the wall. The current shoved his breast into a shell edge, cold went flat through the Wake Scar, and a month of fasting became one furious demand with teeth.
Every nerve in his body screamed for fish.
