40
Beneath the Endless Dark
Iam Resh’Agar, and in twelve centuries I have never retreated from a battle. I have never known defeat. Have never turned my back on my men.
Until now.
Light recedes behind the crystalline door with a final hiss, plunging us into velvet dark. Only my runes light the surroundings—dim lines of blue crawling up my skin like slumbering lightning. To my eyes, the path ahead is clear, every ancient carving and fissure in the stone stark with clarity. I can see everything.
But Auryn cannot see a thing, and the blindness worsens her fury.
I run through narrow passages of stone and emerald crystal with the varkhounds’ snarls and shrieks echoing through air and memory. Their monstrous chanting of my name pulses and throbs in my ears like rhythmic beats of muffled voices.
“Resh…Reshh…Reshhhh…Reshhhhh…”
I can't tell if it is real. But I feel no fear. No regret. Not in this moment.
War is my lifeblood. But now, so isshe.
My starlight.
My Auryn.
The one I carry in my arms even as she screams for the sacrifice of our comrades. I’ve never heard her scream. Never seen tears like these. But Ihave no time to soften. No time to think of the men still dying far behind us.
No time at all.
Her nails dig into my arms. She thrashes and squirms. Demands that we go back. And her voice—Void help me—some of it is hers, and some not. The screams—those are my Auryn’s. But the commands, the words that spit curses at me in a tongue I’ve never known, those belong to that voice. Thatthinginside her.
“Release me! I must return. Seal the rift. Those abominations cannot be allowed to roam free!”
I run, not daring to answer.
“Silari, you will release me now! The consequences of this night will echo in the Garden for centuries to come!”
Every time that voice gives an order, something pulls at my very core. A compulsion to obey, muffled only by the Vargrún at my nape. It burns and itches, as though a scalding brand is pressed against that place. But if it interferes with her will somehow, if it allows me to maintain my agency, then—for once in my unnatural life—I will not curse it.
I keep moving. Run harder. Crush her to my chest so she doesn’t slip from my grasp.
When I can no longer hear the chanting, when the air turns cold and the markings on the walls take a certain shape, I pause.
Auryn hasn’t moved. Not in moments.
Her screams have stopped.
Her limbs have gone still.
“Auryn?”
She flinches at my voice. Completely blind, shivering now not from anger but from trepidation. Her fingers curl tighter around Thessia's braid—tense, uncertain, afraid. The floortilts beneath my feet.
“It’s all right,” I promise, though I have no confidence in that. I adjust my hold around her. “I was forged to see in darkness. I will not let us fall.”
Her only reply is a slight nod against my shoulder. But the tension in her limbs doesn’t ease.
I move us through the Veinroads, the blood vessels of Elendria, long dead and abandoned by its gods. They are carved from stone and earthflesh, yet devoid of any life. Only sorrow lingers here, swallowing sound, water, even breath—anything that dares its desolation. The passages are wide and swollen, as though entire oceans had once passed through here. Now, only barren soil remains, twisted from the rifts and all that lingers in the Shadowfold.
Ancient paths. Not Krystopolitan in design. Older than the Flaeme which powers my city. Older, perhaps, than my brother. Magic clings to the stones like a lingering scent, thick and cloying. Vibrates in the marrow, as though the world’s heartbeat is trapped inside these walls.
