Damien had been very clear with himself, since the swamp decision, about not wanting to spend energy on things that could be avoided.
He looked at the grass.
At the movement beneath it.
He looked up.
And gave the command. "Summon Aquila."
The portal opened in the air above the grass line, the blue light of it appearing in the early evening sky above the plain's edge, and before Aquila had even begun to emerge through it, before the griffin's form had materialized on the other side of the fold.
The portal finished opening.
Aquila came through it with the clean, committed descent of something that had been summoned into a specific purpose and had read the purpose before it arrived — the terrain below, the grass wall, the plain beyond it, and the person waiting at the grass's edge on the back of a large wolf.
