Damien watched them as Aquila descended.
He looked at them the way he looked at most things that produced an ambiguous read — not with the full active attention of someone expecting threat, but with the passive, gathering awareness of someone who was collecting information and had not yet decided what to do with it.
Aquila landed at the plain's inner edge.
The griffin's feet found the soil carefully, the landing precise in the way Aquila was precise about things involving terrain it had not previously encountered. It stood with its weight distributed evenly, its golden eyes moving across the plain with the sweep of something that was doing the same gathering Damien was doing and was less patient about keeping the concern it found out of its posture.
Damien dismounted.
He stood on the plain's soil and felt it underfoot, the specific quality of ground that had not been walked on recently, the surface intact in the way that surfaces that had been undisturbed were intact.
