Gray spreads outward, smoke rolling across the morning in slow gathering waves until the light dulls beneath it. Then the sound comes, low at first and then rising, something vast and alive moving just beyond sight. The soldiers look up. Even the horses shift beneath it.
Forms move through the smoke and then break through it.
Firebirds, wings wide, cutting through the gray in controlled arcs, one after another until the sky fills with them, hundreds moving in formation above the Avanki lines. They circle once, then again, holding position above us, watching and guarding and entirely without question.
Colsar lowers his gaze to where Trophi stands beyond the transport. "I am not taking any chances with them," he says, nodding once toward me and the children.
Trophi looks at them and then back at him. "I understand."
Colsar steps fully inside and the opening closes behind him. The light dims. The hum presses faintly against my skin as though the interior has sealed itself around us.
My eyes are still on the firebirds. They are beautiful. Some burn deep orange, alive and consuming. Others move in colder flame, blue and sharp in a way that does not belong to fire.
Firebirds are rare. Known to exist, but seldom seen. The kind of creatures people place in distant terrain and leave there, as though distance alone explains them. I had never seen one. Not like this. Not in numbers.
The birds continue above us, though Colsar’s glyphs no longer glimmer and his eye is now blue again.
“Colsar,” I say quietly. “How are you doing that?”
His attention stays on the sky. “I’m not.”
I look at him.
“Then what is this?”
A brief pause. “I reach,” he says. “And they come.”
My eyes return to the sky, tracking their movement, the way they hold formation without breaking, without colliding. “All of them?”
Another pause.
“It doesn’t feel like all of them,” he says slowly. “It feels like… a few.”
I glance back at him.
“As though there are some that answer first,” he continues, his voice quieter now, more uncertain. “Core ones. And the rest…” He exhales. “The rest gather from wherever they are.”
“From wherever they are,” I repeat.
He nods once, though his expression tightens slightly. “That’s what it feels like.”
Then the world begins to move, not with the jolt of wheels or the pull of uneven ground but with something smoother and faster.
I close my eyes.
The pain is still there, and the weakness, and the hollow place left behind by too much blood lost, but beneath all of it something comforting holds. We made it this far. I pull the children closer, one on either side, their warmth grounding me in a way nothing else can.
"Two days," I murmur.
Colsar's hand finds mine without looking. "Two days," he says. “We will make it.”
I believe him.
The Ship Arrives
NOX
The horns sound as the ship pulls into dock, loud and grating, the trumpets following a moment later, sending a wave of irritation across Nox’s skin before she has even stepped off the gangway.
