Vhar met the charge on the narrowest shelf the bowl’s rim offered, the only ground where the animal couldn’t bring its full reach to bear without also risking its own footing.
CRACK!
Its shoulder took the impact of the same low strike it had used twice before, and this time Vhar didn’t try to redirect it sideways. He drove straight through the contact, forcing the animal back onto the compromised joint it had spent two prior fights protecting.
It didn’t disengage.
The animal recovered its footing and charged again. In the earlier fights, pain had driven it away. Three young curled in the hollow below the shelf. This time, it guarded them.
The shelf hollow gave it little room. Rock walls closed both sides, forcing a full-length charge to bend around broken stone. Vhar gave ground toward the narrow mouth of the shelf and drew the animal into a turn its long body could not correct. Its flank scraped hard along the rock instead of reaching open ground.
It rounded on him again immediately, no pause for the kind of reassessment that had ended every previous encounter within a strike or two. Vhar caught its foreleg strike against a raised guard, felt the impact travel all the way to his shoulder, and answered with a strike of his own aimed at the same shoulder Nyra had already marked twice before. It connected. The animal didn’t so much as slow.
"It’s not testing anymore," Nyra called, already circling to the flank rather than meeting it head-on. "It won’t stop until one of us can’t stand."
"We don’t give it a version of this fight where standing is the only way to win." Vhar caught the next strike on his forearm rather than dodging clear, absorbing the impact through Physique reinforcement he’d carried since long before this ridge had ever mattered, and used the same contact to drive his own weight forward into the animal’s exposed flank.
THUD!
It staggered, recovered, and came again immediately, jaws snapping shut on air where his shoulder had been a half-breath earlier. Nyra’s spear found the same weakened leg a third time, Thronebreak’s haft rather than its point, and the animal’s stride broke visibly for the first time since the charge began.
It still didn’t stop.
Vhar saw an opening at the throat and drove for it. The animal twisted. The strike opened its ribs. It staggered and bled. The open escape route did not draw its eyes.
"Vhar!" Nyra watched the animal move toward the hollow. "It left the pen through an open exit. This shelf holds its young, so it will not leave."
"I know." He set his stance wider. Ember Vessel heat ran through him. "The animal will keep fighting because its young die if we reach the hollow."
The animal came a third time on the ruined leg. Vhar let it charge past the narrow shelf, then turned at the last instant. Its weight carried it into stone before it could correct.
CRACK!
It went down hard against the same stone shelf that had cost it its footing minutes earlier, and this time it didn’t rise cleanly. One foreleg folded wrong beneath it, the compromised shoulder finally giving out entirely under weight it could no longer support, and for the first time since the ridge crest, it lay still enough that neither of them moved to close the distance immediately.
It was still breathing. Still watching them with an intensity that hadn’t dimmed despite the damage, still angled, however uselessly, toward the ledge above the nest rather than away from it.
Nyra lowered Thronebreak slightly, breathing hard, sweat and dust streaked across a face that hadn’t stopped tracking every twitch of the downed animal’s remaining strength. "It’s finished. It can’t get back up to press anything, not against both of us."
"The animal can still bite or claw from the ground." Vhar watched its ribs rise and fall. Its eyes stayed on the ledge. "It will keep trying until its body stops. We still have to choose what happens to it and the young."
Nyra followed his gaze down toward the ledge, toward three young that had gone silent somewhere during the fight’s worst moments, and back to the ruined animal between them and the only thing it had ever actually been protecting. "That decision isn’t just yours. You said that yourself, back on the ledge."
"I am not making the choice alone." Vhar exhaled. "We still must choose whether the adult dies, whether the young stay, or whether we move all four."
"If we finish it here, the three of them starve slowly instead of dying quickly. That’s not a mercy either way you weigh it." Nyra’s voice had dropped, the alarm of the fight giving way to something closer to exhaustion. "If we don’t, it heals enough in a season to try this exact fight again, against people who don’t have what you carry. Riona’s people. Dessin, maybe, once his arm’s sound enough that he thinks he’s ready."
"I’ve weighed worse choices with less time to think about them, and I’ve never once found a version where somebody doesn’t pay for it." Vhar’s voice stayed level, though the words cost him more than the fight had. "I killed something once that was guarding a nest half this size, and I told myself for a long while afterward that it didn’t count the same as killing something that chose to hunt me. It counted exactly the same. I just didn’t want it to."
Nyra said nothing to that, watching him with an expression that held no argument in it, only the recognition of a weight she hadn’t carried herself but understood well enough not to make lighter with words. The animal’s ribs rose and fell again, slower now, its gaze still fixed on him with a steadiness that asked for nothing and offered no argument of its own.
"This doesn’t get settled here," Vhar said finally, straightening enough to ease the guard he’d held through the entire exchange without fully lowering it. "Not standing over it while it’s still breathing and still watching us weigh it. We bind what needs binding, and we carry the rest back down with us instead of settling it in the one place it’s guaranteed to go wrong."
"How do we bind it? Rope will not hold this body." Nyra moved toward her pack.
"A splint. It must hold the shoulder and brace the chest so the animal cannot drag itself to the ledge." Vhar knelt within working distance. "I have splinted people who fought harder than this animal can now."
The animal didn’t fight the binding when it came, though whether that was surrender or simple exhaustion, neither of them could say with any confidence. Its eyes tracked the work without hostility, the same steadiness it had carried through the entire fight now turned toward something closer to resignation.
Vhar cut two straight poles from the scrub above the shelf and laid one along the animal’s ruined shoulder, the other beneath its chest. Nyra stripped leather from the pack frame and passed each length to him only after testing it for a split. He kept clear of the jaws while he worked, one knee braced against the animal’s flank whenever its good foreleg twitched.
"Tighter on this side," he said.
Nyra pulled the leather through until the pole stopped shifting against hide. The animal’s head lifted. Its jaw opened around a low sound that was not a growl and not quite pain. Vhar held still until the jaw closed again.
"It can breathe?" Nyra asked.
"Yes. It cannot roll the shoulder forward." He pressed two fingers beneath the chest strap. "The ribs still expand."
They added a third binding around the good foreleg, not to break it, but to stop the animal from dragging itself toward the nest with one strong pull. When Vhar tested the frame, the adult’s body moved only enough to scrape dust from the shelf.
Nyra sat back on her heels. Blood from the open ribs had soaked the stone beneath the animal, but the flow had slowed. "It will hate this."
"It can hate it alive," Vhar said. "That is the choice in front of us."
Nyra checked each knot again before she stood. The leather bit into the wet-stone hide but did not cut through it. The animal’s good hind leg flexed once, then stopped when the chest brace held. Vhar dragged a broken slab within reach of the frame and wedged it behind the splinted shoulder. Even if the animal gathered strength, it would have to move the slab before it could turn toward the nest.
"That buys us the descent," Nyra said.
"It buys us minutes at a time," Vhar answered. "We use every one."
Nyra crouched at the ledge’s edge once the binding held, watching the three shapes below stir again now that the worst of the noise had passed. "They’re going to need feeding long before anyone reaches a decision about their mother. That’s a clock too, whatever else we’re weighing."
"We don’t have the luxury of weighing it slowly." Vhar checked the binding once more, satisfied it would hold through the descent, and looked toward the ridge crest and the long walk back down toward Riona’s fire. "We carry all four of them down together, and we make the decision as a camp instead of as two people standing alone on a ridge."
The animal’s chest rose and fell raggedly. Its eyes left the ledge and met Vhar’s. It did not lunge or beg.
Neither of them moved to finish it. Whatever came next could wait a moment longer.