Mech Pilot whose only shot at surviving is by taming a Feral Mech.
Bedwyr moves haltingly down the hillside, a hot, bright feeling in his side, where he knows fresh red blood blooms in his bandages.
Nine days he fought the wyrm, with its rending spurs and gnashing jaw, its crushing coils, and the sickly, withering witchlight of its pale blind eye. Nine days, with lance and sword and the fist-sized monster-ending bullets for which the Knight of the Round are named. Nine days of pursuit and skirmish, ambush and melee, until it screamed and glared and thrashed and finally died.
With the final spitting radiance of its fell eye, his Destrier's battered and curse-withered flesh finally sundered; its very last twitch drove a clawtip through him, and slew his mount. He is injured sore, and afoot, and nine days from home across the Fogs of War, wandering the slope of an intensely green valley. He would wonder if it lay under an enchantment, it grows so verdant; but everywhere the eye falls, should it linger, it begins to pick out the form of bones. This place was the wyrm's lair, and its feasting-hall, lush on the rot of the slain of ages.
He wipes the sweat from his clammy brow, and continues his hobble downhill toward the babble of water.
He thinks for a moment, when the brook comes in sight, that fever has claimed his mind, putting sights in his eyes — his Destrier stoops to drink. But the startled noise from his throat sees the mount startle upright, and he sees better its unfamiliar lines, its antique pattern and the faded, unknown coat of arms blazoned upon it. Its injuries at the wyrm's hands must have been terrible, of old; it bears scars scarcely credible in their survival.
And he sees hope for his own, even as it shies back from his alien presence and canters into the trees.
It caution nearly outlasts him, even with the stink of the wyrm and his own mount's death washed from him as best he can. He coaxes it with an emergency Destrier nutrition brick salvaged from his old mount, watching it creep closer and closer, snatching up slices and bolting.
The sun rises and sets. His wound weeps. Fever begins to grip him, after all.
He rouses, blearily, on his back in the grass, the Destrier nudging at his crumpled form. He laboriously raises an arm to pat its blunt chin, and realises that it has knelt by him, opened itself, and extended long-damaged and atrophied umbilicals; the cool of painwyrd and medical potions spiders through his veins.
"That's it," he says hoarsely, scarcely knowing what words come out of him. "You're a fine steed, aye? Your knight must be ages dead, and still you're good and loyal."
It's some time before the painwyrd numbs his aches enough for him to struggle into it, the fumbling embrace of a long-disused and half-wild thing, injured and abandoned long ago. He fumbles equally, in turn, to instruct it where to take them; out of the valley, across the Fogs.
"Good steed," he says drowsily, full of medicines and exhaustion, and lets the rhythm of its feet lull him like a rocking crib. "Good steed. It's finished at last; let's go home."