“This will be cold,” he says, his voice soft as he approaches Lyren. “But it will draw out the worst of the heat.”
He gently pulls back the cloak and begins to apply the poultice to Lyren’s forehead, his chest, the soles of his feet. His hands, the same hands that have killed hundreds, that have torn my world apart, are impossibly gentle on our son’s skin.
And he begins the vigil. He does not sleep. He sits beside Lyren, a silent, tireless sentinel in the flickering firelight. He dips a strip of cloth in the cool water and periodically wipes Lyren’s brow. He is a mountain of stillness and unwavering focus, his entire being dedicated to this one small, fragile life.
Hours pass. I do not sleep either. I watch this monster, this warrior, this… father, tenderly caring for our son. The word hangs in my mind, a foreign, impossible thing.Father.
In the darkest hour of the night, when the fire has burned down to glowing embers, Lyren’s fever breaks. A great, shuddering sigh leaves his small body, and the unnatural flush begins to recede from his cheeks. He murmurs something in his sleep, and Eoin leans in, his deep voice a low, comforting rumble that is not a language I know, but Lyren quiets instantly, settling back into a peaceful sleep.
I watch this scene—the massive, winged warrior and the small, silver-haired boy—and the last, hard kernel of hate I have held onto for five long years, the armor that has protected me, the fire that has kept me alive… it does not just crack. It dissolves. It washes away in a silent, cleansing wave, leaving me feeling terrifyingly vulnerable, utterly exposed, and irrevocably changed.
28
EOIN
The pace she sets is relentless. For three days, we have moved south through the foothills of the Dragon’s Tooth mountains, and Elza has not once suggested we slow. She pushes herself past the point of human exhaustion, her face etched with grim determination, her hand often resting at the hilt of her dagger as if drawing strength from the steel. I, with my Vrakken stamina, feel no physical strain, which leaves my mind free to observe.
And I find myself observing her constantly.
I watch as she halves her own meager ration of dried meat, giving the larger portion to Lyren. I watch as she soothes the boy’s fears at night with quiet, made-up stories of heroic squirrels and clever foxes. I watch her stumble on the loose rock, her body crying out for rest, only to see her push herself back to her feet, her gaze fixed on the southern horizon.
My mind, accustomed to the Vrakken model of leadership, draws an involuntary, and deeply unsettling, contrast. Matriarch Brinda rules through fear and manipulation. Her subordinates are tools, valued only for their utility. Loyalty is a transaction,enforced by the promise of swift and final punishment for failure. She commands obedience.
Elza leads through love and sacrifice. Her people are not her subjects; they are her family. Their loyalty is not commanded; it is earned through her own unwavering devotion to their well-being. She does not punish failure; she grieves for it. The human way, a way I have always dismissed as weak and chaotic, suddenly possesses a strength, a resilience, that my own kind has lost. It is a profound, and deeply disruptive, revelation.
On the fourth day, we find shelter in a small, abandoned trapper’s outpost, a single-room stone hovel nestled in a narrow valley. It is a chance to rest out of the biting wind.
“Stay here,” I tell Elza, gesturing for her and Lyren to remain by the door. I enter first, my senses extended, sweeping the small space for threats. It is empty, save for the dust of years and the faint, lingering scent of woodsmoke and old furs. But beneath that, there is something else.
“They were here,” I say, turning back to her. “The scent is three, perhaps four days old.”
A frantic, hopeful energy ignites in her eyes. She pushes past me into the hovel, her gaze sweeping every corner. “Tarek would have left a sign. He would have…” She trails off, her hands running along the rough-hewn wooden walls, searching. Lyren stays close to her legs, his own eyes wide.
“What sort of sign?” I ask, my own gaze scanning the room for anything out of place.
“A broken chain. It is the symbol of Haven,” she explains, her voice tight with a desperate hope. “He would have carved it somewhere.”
She drops to her knees, running her hands over the rough, dusty floorboards. And then, she stops. “Here.”
I move to her side and look down. There, almost invisible in the gloom, is a crudely carved symbol etched into the wood of a single floorboard: two links of a chain, one of them shattered.
“It is loose,” she says, her fingers digging at the edges of the board.
“Allow me.” I kneel beside her, slipping my dagger into the crack and prying the board up with a groan of old wood. Beneath it is a small, hollowed-out space. And inside that space is a tightly rolled piece of cured leather.
Her hands are trembling as she takes it and unrolls it. It is not a map, not in any traditional sense. It is a complex series of symbols and numbers, a cipher.
“Only a handful of us in Haven know the key to this,” she whispers, her finger tracing the symbols. She pulls a piece of charcoal from her pack and begins to work on a blank patch of the floor, her brow furrowed in concentration.
I watch her, but my attention is drawn to the map itself. While the specific points are a mystery to me, the general geography, the faint outlines of a river and a mountain range, are familiar. I have seen them before, in the war archives at Kryll.
“The ruins of Silvanus,” she finally breathes, looking up at me, her eyes shining with a triumphant, desperate light. “They are in the very heart of the Gloomwood. That is where they are waiting.”
The name sends a cold, hard knot of apprehension to my stomach. The light in her eyes fades as she sees the change in my expression.
“What is it?” she asks. “What do you know of this place?”
“The Gloomwood,” I say as a grim warning. “My people have another name for it. We call it The Maw.”
