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“If it fell,” Byron filled in, watching Clay. “If someone took it down the wrong way…”
“Or if they wanted it to kill all the giants still alive out here,” Lars said, still rubbing his wrist.
A sickened feeling twisted in my gut as I realized what he was doing. That wrist bore scars from the first and only time the twins had encountered a smaller version of the wall.
I remembered the story they told me about it weeks ago. During the war, Lars and Clay had joined with a few other giants in an effort to break some of their people free. But when they came in contact with the smaller version of the Warden Wall around an Aneiran camp, everything went wrong. The magic chewed into them, trying to devour them both, while all the other giants around them died grisly and awful deaths. Only the fact they were dwarves seemed to buy them time enough to escape and survive.
But not without scars—both outside and inside.
I swallowed hard and walked over to Clay. His face was cold as he stared out at the forest, his jaw muscles jumping, but when I came up beside him, he flinched, blinking fast and trying to bury the expression.
“Are you okay?” I asked in a quiet voice.
He let out a breath, clearly struggling to push away the pain of his memories. “Fine, baby.”
It wasn’t his normal tone, but it was closer. Carefully, I reached out, putting my fingertips on his forearm to test whether he wanted to be touched and then leaning into him when he wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close.
My hand rested on his middle, where I knew he bore his scars from the camp wall. A shudder went through him, but he only tucked me tighter to his side.
“If that wall is down,” Casimir said, “what does that mean for our passage into Aneira? Are there any other obstacles to hinder us?”
I cast a glance back and saw Byron shake his head. “None that we knew of,” the scholar said. “The wall was more than sufficient.”
A quiet scoff left Clay like that was definitely an understatement.
“We need to head out,” Dex said. “See what we’re dealing with. If the wall really is gone and there’s nothing else stopping us from entering Aneira again…” He shook his head. “Maybe whoever’s in charge has decided to take a less monstrous approach to protecting the borders.”
I felt Ozias tense at Dex’s choice of descriptor, but across the clearing, I noticed Roan do the same.
Which was strange.
Yet no one argued as we set out again, although I could hardly say anyone seemed excited that the magical barrier that could have killed us was possibly gone. And I couldn’t be either. Yes, it meant we could enter my nation without confronting a wall I’d had no idea how to pass. But for most of my life, the Warden Wall had always been there, surrounding the border of Aneira, while a smaller version encircled the capital city of Lumilia too.
For it to just fall like that…
Of course, there was always the chance it could be coincidence. Though the Jeweled Coven feared my stepmother might have survived being ripped from the world into the empty realms, neither they nor I had real proof she was alive. So if she was gone, perhaps the magic of the Warden Wall simply couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and the fact it had fallen was nothing more than the last bits of flame dying after a candle wick ran out.
I wanted to believe that. It would be a stroke of luck in what otherwise had been a perilous mess of a journey. But I couldn’t shake the fear she was alive somehow. That the destruction of the ley lines that had driven us from the Jeweled Coven’s hideout and the cracks in the earth that had unleashed the Voidborn were both byproducts of her plans, as was the sudden destruction of the Warden Wall.
Except I couldn’t fathom how taking down the wall could possibly help her in any way.
A night and another day passed as we traveled, and though the desire to explore my bond with Ozias more deeply pushed at me, there was no privacy to speak of and nothing I could figure out to say to the others besides. Likewise, I would have done what I could to comfort Clay and Lars, but they only seemed focused on keeping me close to them, nothing else. The memories of their last encounter with the magic of the wall haunted them. At night, they tucked me between them, wrapping me in their arms as if being protective of me somehow left them feeling safer too.
Another day later, the sun was sinking toward the horizon when we finally crossed a rise and saw the massive stone pillars that marked the edge of the Warden Wall on the plain ahead.
To a person, we stopped, speechless.
Every pillar had fallen. The carved stones lay scattered as if struck by a massive hand, their pieces hurled across the terrain like thetoppled construction of a child’s building blocks. Scorch marks scored the grass, stretching away along the line where the pillars once stood, and I realized with a sinking stomach that it was a minor miracle a wildfire hadn’t started.
But there was no trace of the shimmer of the Warden Wall on the air.
“What could have done this?” Niko whispered.
Byron shook his head, looking dumbstruck. “I don’t know.”
A shaky breath left me. “Could the Voidborn?”
Both men gave me a worried look, and then Byron’s head twitched in a tight nod. “Perhaps.”
