This was a place of death and famine, that was clear enough from the bones that clattered underfoot more often than not as Cantrip meandered his way through the sandy terrain. 

Tundra and taigas were more to the gryphon's tastes but work was work, if some cartographer wanted him to take a stroll through this giant waste of space and get paid for it then who was he to turn his beak up? He even had the luck of going out to play adventurer while winter still had Empyrean in its grip, though he could already feel himself growing hot under the dense layer of feathers that covered him. One could hardly imagine what summer in such a place might feel like. 

Stopping to take note of a particularly large skeleton, Cantrip eyed the weathered spires of ivory bone that pierced up through the sand. If he didn't know any better he might have thought the grooves worn into several of the rib bones looked like teeth marks, something that could easily be attributed to scavengers, yet so far he'd seen nothing of the sort. The closest sign of life that the bird had seen all day was sleeping nestles between his shoulder blades like a hot little freeloading weight.

“You've got to move, Philter, it's too hot for this,” Cantrip groaned, trying to rattle the celestial feline free from where she dozed.

It was of course to no avail. He swore he even felt her claws seeking purchase through his feathers to cling in place even while she loafed lazily.

Foul thing, he didn't know why he tolerated her as much as he did.

With no other choice but to continue tolerating his otherworldly companion, Cantrip continued on with his survey of the lands. Over a field of broken bones, across a long dried out riverbed, through a patch of brambles that he really should have just flown over but severely misjudged the density of. It was lucky that his coat was as thick as it was from the chill of more northerly living, but the same couldn't be said for the pads of his talons.

Sitting down a short ways away from the damned bushed and its damned thorns, Cantrip carefully pulled the last thorn from his palm and flexed his claws as he watched a bead of red swell up from the leftover puncture. For all the shine and reflection His flesh had, it wasn't actually metal. Maybe it would have been a detriment to his ability to fly if he actually was weighed down by a body half made of steel, but for situations like this a bit of heavy metal would have kept him from getting stuck.

He clamped his fist shut just in time to avoid the wandering nose of a particularly pesky cat, not wanting her to get a taste for gryphon blood or get that scratchy tongue anywhere near the wound. 

“What do they even expect anyone to find out here?” Cantrip murmured, retrieving a bandage from his lightly packed supplies. There was an excess of nothing and none of it was particularly interesting, but it wasn't as if the job description had been thorough either.

‘Explore’ it had said. 

Well he had gotten a good, long walk through the Badlands and he was starting to feel like there were only so many piles of bones you could pass before they started to look the same. There were a few interesting rock formations to be found, even a cave opening at the base of one that he'd made note of, but they would need to be paying him a lot more to go sticking his head into uncharted holes in the ground.

“I think we're done for the day,” the gryphon hummed to his companion, receiving a trill in return from Philter. “Now get off my back before you fry us both alive.”

She did not.