The air was hot and acrid, carrying the particular smell of burned demonic construction that he had encountered twice in this forest now and had come to associate with finality—the specific olfactory signature of a demonic presence that had been thoroughly ended.
He walked out through what had been the entrance.
The forest received him.
Dark, quiet, the canopy overhead doing what it always did—filtering the night into something denser than night elsewhere, the particular darkness of the Forest of Twin Disasters that had stopped feeling oppressive some time in the last several days and had become simply the quality of the air here.
He reached out through the bond he had with his summons.
"Skylar."
The Shadowfang Wyvern was somewhere above the canopy—had been circling since he entered the stronghold, maintaining the pattern it defaulted to when he went somewhere it couldn't follow. He felt it adjust immediately, the distant awareness of it reorienting, descending.
