Far to the west, the verdant growth of the Jägerwald met the vastness of a nameless sea. It only took three hours’ flight to reach, but the only map of the area I’d found didn’t label the black-inked waves. It was as if our ancestors, who’d cared more about cartography than any griffin left alive, thought a name would have diminished the sheer magnitude of the endless water that stretched onwards to the horizon, forever.
There, I waited in the mouth of a sea-cliff cave.
A cool breeze interrupted the late summer heat outside, and it carried a salty tang as it ruffled my feathers. Fifty feet below me, water crashed against the sheer rock face. Besides the wind and waves, no other sounds kept me company; their echoes in the cave behind me reaffirmed that I was entirely alone.
We measured time with a cone-shaped rock formation—or specifically, we used its shadow. When the first of us showed up, we set two stones: one at the shadow’s current position, then one a palm’s length away. It took a few hours for the shadow to reach the second stone, and that was our time we had together.
In that whole nightmarish romance, easily the worst times were when I showed up to our cave and found two stones, but no Stephen. Early on, I’d gotten used to weeks—or during winter, months—passing without any sort of romantic contact. In our homeland, we were friends who were growing more distant as age took us down different paths. I had my siblings to help look after, he had his whims of exploration, and if we risked appearing as close as we were, we would be killed.
There weren’t enough males of our species left for two of us to be doing what we were. Intellectually, I knew that; mentally, I shamed myself for my selfishness and lack of a desire to prolong our dying race.
Underneath that storm of surface hatred rested one calm, core belief: Whenever we found each other, alone, far away from our dead society’s laws, and no matter how scattered the few hours were, when I could spend time with Stephen, he made me happy.
We had to be smart about our engagements, however—hence the rocks, the cave without any living beings nearby, and our separate arrival times. We couldn’t keep anything in the cave for the weeks between our visits; part of being careful meant we had to leave behind an empty cave. A camp in the middle of nowhere would be suspicious if found, suspicions would lead to questions, and questions might find answers.
Since it was empty, there wasn’t much else to do in that cave—our cave—than to sit and wait. Every time I waited for Stephen, watching the shadows close in on our chance to be together, the same doubts crossed my mind: He’d been delayed. He’d been found. He wasn’t coming.
He didn’t love me.
It seemed crazy of a thought, to doubt the convictions of someone who was risking the same thing I was—everything—to spend time with me. However, just like I couldn’t stop myself from feeling how I did for him, my mind wouldn’t lay to rest the possibility that he didn’t feel the same way I did, or that he was only with me for the physical part of it…
I shook my head. Those thoughts were probably some innate sense of self-preservation that reminded me of everything dangerous about what we were doing.
Movement against the southern sky snapped me out of my musings and steeled my nerves. My chest swelled and I relaxed when I saw a familiar, black-headed griffin in the distance. He’d made it, this time, and I was glad—but instinctively, my eyes trailed behind him to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
When I was sure Stephen was alone, I turned back to glance out to sea one more time. It gave me a vastly insignificant feeling, one which Stephen often referenced: We were just blips in a giant cosmic game, so what did it truly matter if we spent some time with or inside each other?
His arrival didn’t entirely shake me out of my pensiveness. When he landed near me, I smiled and nodded, but even after checking one final time to see that he hadn’t been followed, I still felt sad. Empty.
Stephen sat down next to me on my left, but instead of breaking the silence with a wisecrack, he wrapped his tail around my hips. My smile came back, and only then did he say, “Jerry. You made it. Everything okay?”
I turned my left eye to him. “I did make it. Everything…” I trailed off. It didn’t feel right to lie to him, but it didn’t feel right to kill any prospective mood, either. Instead, I sighed and shook my head. “It’s one of those days, I guess.”
He chuckled in the back of his throat, which was something I’d learned to cope with—Stephen could laugh at anything. He didn’t do it maliciously or carelessly, but for all the years we’d been together, it still bothered me when he took nothing seriously.
“One of those days?” he asked, sitting closer to me. “We’re here, together. What more can you ask for?”
To be able to do this more than once a month. I kept the answer in my head and instead went with, “I don’t know.” I pointed a claw at him and curled it to me. “Our fathers are starting something of a vie for power, which is just great.”
“And that affects us how?”
I held a sigh in my beak. “You don’t spend more than your sleeping hours in your own cave, let alone your father’s.”
“So move out. Not like there’s twelve caves per griffin, or four if you count the females.”
His simple answer made me chuckle, frustratedly. I brought my palms up to my eyes and rubbed, shaking my head. “That’s not the solution, and besides. Father needs me now, more than ever—”
“Which I’m sure he tells you—”
"—until the rest of his flock gets old enough to take their four caves.” I shot a heated glare at Stephen, but didn’t acknowledge his interruption any more than that. My father respected his children, if they deserved it, but I wasn’t going to take lectures on earning a parent’s love from someone who made a point of moving to the far end of the ridge from where his own family roosted.
“Besides...” I shook my head and tried to change the subject from what was quickly turning into a quarrel. “That’s not all of it. That’s background aggravation, piled in with all the other things we’ve got to deal with. Like...” I paused, trying to think of how to bring up the frustrations I was having about our relationship. There was no simple way to phrase it without being curt.
My silence stayed for too long, so he guessed the answer: “Thinking about your sister?”
That took me by surprise, since it came from nowhere. “Sister? Which one?”
To say that I had several sisters would be an understatement. Twelve of them still lived in my father’s household, two of them had moved into caves of their own in our village, and one of them…
Stephen raised the insides of his eyebrows as he clarified which one. The dead one. “Wasn’t it about this time, five years ago?”
I scoffed. Fifteen years of special lessons and attention from Father, and my younger sister by a year repaid his sentiments by falling to her death at some Beute-ridden children’s camp. “The accident, or whatever it was, happened in July. Father learned about it in August, and…” I shrugged. “It’s early September now, right?”
“Dead middle of August.” Stephen grinned. “Just ‘cause your dad’s got a thing against calendars doesn’t mean you need to, too.” His grin widened at my glare, for a moment, before he fixed his face. “So, it’s not your home life, or memories of the not-so-recently departed... What’s on your mind, Jer?”
I shot him a weak grin. “I was just thinking—”
He nodded, disapprovingly.
“Shove off,” I fake-snarled. “I was thinking about things like the present, the future…”
“Sounds tense.”
“Us.” I appreciated what he was trying to do, but it wasn’t the time for humor.
Sure enough, Stephen sat up a little taller and folded his arms over his chest feathers. “Us? Anything I need to be wary of?”
I shook my head. “Not really. We’re going as well as can be expected, correct?”
“Yep.” He closed his eyes and wobbled his head. “And you’re worrying again. Stop it.”
My arm shot out in a shrug. “How can I not?”
“Easy.” He opened his eyes and leaned over to me, finally putting his arm around me in an embrace. Even though we were miles away from anyone, his voice dropped to a whisper that I could barely hear over the waves below. “I’ve told you a hundred times already, this ends in pain no matter what we do.”
“That puts my mind at ease.”
“It should.” Stephen shrugged. “I mean, imagine tomorrow, you decide to sever ties with your family for whatever reason, and we finally get the best-case scenario where we can spend the rest of our days traveling…”
I pointed a finger at him. “That is your best-case scenario.”
“Well, whatever you want that lets us be together, regularly, indefinitely, then.” He didn’t quite roll his eyes, but his half headshake served as a clear reminder that I didn’t have an answer to that question. The choice between Stephen and my family wasn’t open to compromise; I loved him and had a duty to them, so I was at an impasse. “Imagine, somehow, we get to live the rest of our days together, without secrets or crap like that. Even that ends, eventually.”
My glare didn’t falter. “I still don’t see how that is supposed to make me feel better.”
Stephen looked away, out to the sea in front of us. “Embrace death. Once you stop fighting the inevitable, you can enjoy the time before it.”
That, however, took some of the harshness out of my gaze. “And that’s how you feel about us?”
“Yeah, I…” His eye darted to me, then he turned the rest of his head. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You just said you don’t care this is going to end painfully.”
“I didn’t say that.” He shook his head slowly. “Just because I know where this eventually goes doesn’t mean I’m not going to hate when it’s over.”
“Which doesn’t worry you because…”
“Why should I let ‘us’ end a million times in my head before it really happens?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, which prompted Stephen to pull me closer to him and wrap his other arm around me. I didn’t return the hug, but I did pat his hand.
Stephen chuckled. “Advice like that, and all I get’s a hand pat?”
I scoffed, but not in a heated way. “Some advice.” I did my best to mimic his voice. “‘Feeling sad? Don’t worry; everyone you ever knew will eventually die, so none of this matters anyway’.”
He laughed at that, and then slid himself around me so his stomach pressed against my spine. I felt heat involuntarily rise to my face as he pressed his hips forward to wrap his legs around mine. He completed the full-body embrace by resting his head on my neck. That close to him, in his arms, I felt some of my worries about the future vanish; for the present, things were nice, soft, and warm.
Or so I thought. In his position, Stephen had enough leverage to grab my elbows and begin flopping my arms up and down in front of me. “‘My name’s Jerry,” he mocked in a falsetto, “I’m so used to everything being miserable, I’m afraid of anything that might change that.”
Perhaps it was the absurdity of being turned into a griffin puppet, or maybe he’d finally broken through a gray shell in my mind, but I couldn’t suppress a grin. “I don’t sound like that.”
Stephen dropped my arms and wrapped his hands around my stomach, pulling me back tighter. In my ear, he whispered, “Maybe not the voice. But don’t worry so much.” He burrowed his head deeper into my neck. “Okay?”
He hit a reflexive nerve in my neck, so my head lurched over to rest on his. I kept it there, though, and I rested my hands on his. “I’ll try,” was all I could agree to. Maybe Stephen found it easy to dodge worries, but I still felt too burdened to fly as free as he did.
I fell with Stephen as he leaned backwards and pulled me with him. His legs slid forward, spreading mine out forward too; in one fluid motion, we were lying down, with me on top, being held. Stephen's right hand began stroking its way down my stomach, which made me smile; I moved my arms to my sides so I wasn’t getting in his way.
He pulled my left hand away, above both our heads. I rose when he drew a breath, and I melted down into him when he whispered, “I love you, Jer.”
I clasped my left hand around his. For another fleeting moment, I knew why it was worth risking everything I was to be with Stephen. I closed my eyes and relaxed, trying to enjoy the moment. It was easier to do when we were together, and my doubts vanished when I could honestly say two words:
“I know.”