An hour could pass like a dream, speeding by, blurry and unreal. And a minute could stretch for an hour, chokingly slow, painful in its passing. I’d experienced both in my life. Hours with Inara when she was lucid racing by as though someone were pushing the hands of a clock faster and faster, until the hour was gone and so was she. Or the minutes in the drawing room when I wanted to be anywhere but there, plying needles, dreaming of the freedom of birds, minutes creeping by like those same hands of a clock trying to sludge through a mud bog, weighted down and impossibly slow.
But as my sister’s body dropped, as her gryphon and Loukas’s and my father’s all dove after her, as her hair pooled out around her head, and her arms waved as though she were floating in water and not falling through air and sky, my heart slowed, my breathing stopped, and seconds turned into hours that passed like a lifetime of nightmares.
I saw Sharmaine try and fail to create a shield, too drained—and the only one who Inara hadn’t healed.
I saw Loukas stretch for her, his fingers almost brushing hers, but missing.
I saw my father’s mouth open in a scream, but Loukas had edged him out and he couldn’t reach her.
I saw where she would land, on what remained of her gardens, her plants charred and trampled.
I saw her gryphon pin her wings to her sides, zooming for the ground so quickly, there was no way she would be able to catch Inara and break her own headlong descent in time to keep from breaking her neck.
Those seconds drew out, as death closed in, and my heartbeats were an eternity.
Then, somehow, impossibly, as impossible as so many other things that had happened—miracles and tragedies, both—her gryphon opened her wings, mere feet before Inara slammed into the raised garden beds, before the gryphon herself would have broken herself on the ground, and caught an updraft, her talons extending out and—
Snatched my sister out of the jaws of death, inches before her head would have cracked open on the wooden edge of the only place that had ever brought her joy for the first fifteen years of her life.
In the seconds it took for that gryphon to carry my sister back up, away from the earth, away from death, time raced forward again, along with my heart.
After she’d saved all of us—over and over again—the gryphon had saved her.
I sagged forward into Raidyn, let my eyes close, and sobbed.