Near. Nearer than necessity dictates.
I don’t move away.
He doesn’t either.
We sit in silence while the weak sun tracks across the sky, and I try not to think about how natural this is. How right. How dangerous.
The wind carries ash across the plains in lazy spirals. Somewhere in the distance, a structure collapses—the delayed casualty of some battle fought days or weeks ago. The sound reaches us as a faint rumble, barely audible over the whisper of dead grass.
Kaster’s attention shifts toward the noise, then back to the horizon. Always scanning. Always processing. Even in stillness, he’s hunting.
But he doesn’t move away from me.
Being near Kaster is a threat.
But being away from him?—
That might be worse.
ELEVEN
KASTER
The mountain pass rises before us like a wound carved into the earth.
Gray stone. No vegetation. Wind channeling between peaks with enough force to strip exposed skin raw. The path ahead narrows from thirty feet to barely five in places, with sheer drops on either side that end in fog-shrouded nothing.
I’ve traveled this route before. Decades ago, when merchants still used it and the guard stations were staffed. Now the stations stand empty—stone structures built into the mountainside every two miles, their doors missing, their interiors picked clean by scavengers and time.
Ambush territory. Every instinct I possess screamswarning.
“Bad ground.” I don’t slow my pace. The plains behind us offer no cover, and we’ve been exposed for hours. Anything tracking us already knows where we’re headed.
Soreia matches my stride without slowing. Her power has recovered in increments. The trembling that plagued her hands has steadied. The shadows beneath her eyes have lightened from black to gray.
Still fragile. Still mortal.
I push the observation aside. It serves no strategic purpose.
“Guard stations?” She gestures toward the structure visible on the ridge ahead.
“Every two miles. Stone construction. Defensible if they had doors.”
“Killing boxes if they don’t.”
She understands terrain. I’ve noticed that about her—the way she catalogs space, calculates sight lines, identifies chokepoints without being taught. Survival instinct sharpened by years of running.
Years of running alone. Years of bleeding herself dry to stay alive another day.
The thought lodges in my skull. I don’t examine why it bothers me.
The first Executorhits us at the halfway point.
It descends from above—not the ridgeline where I’ve been watching for movement, but the rock face itself. Massive. Armored. Talons the length of my forearm punching through stone as it drops in a controlled avalanche of muscle and divine malice.
The sound of its approach should have warned me. The scrape of those talons against rock. The shift of loose debris under its bulk. But the wind swallowed every signal, channeled the noise away from where we walked.
Designed for this terrain. Built to ambush in mountain passes.
