The winds of the high atmosphere howled with a predatory shriek, clawing at the black furs of the Sovereign, but within the pocket of space shared by the two riders, the air had turned into a thick, suffocating syrup of lust and desperation. Hannah McKay was no longer a scientist of cold equations; she was a woman playing a game of biological chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race.
She knew the secret of the Clemadead. In the clandestine archives of Heathwat, she had poured over ancient scrolls detailing the symbiotic link between a Lympory and his mount. The reigns were a neural tether. To release them mid-flight was to invite a psychic fracture that would send the beast into a terminal tailspin. Hebner Grand was a prisoner of his own power, anchored to the beast's will while she was free to roam the landscape of his body.
