Page 63
“Where?” I asked, looking up at him. “The open valley is a graveyard, and the forest is made of needles.”
Caspian turned his head, his gaze locking onto mine with an intensity that made the silver brand on my shoulder throb. “Into the trees. The canopy is dense enough to block aerial sightlines. If we stick close to the banks of the silver river, we have a water source, a light source, and a clear path toward the interior caldera.”
He reached out, his large, calloused hand gripping the back of my neck. His thumb pressed firmly against the base of my skull—a brief, fiercely possessive anchor that sent a wave of heat straight through my shivering frame. “Keep your daggers loose, Trouble. And do not touch the water. If those rivers are laden with elder magic, it will strip the skin from your bones.”
We descended the back side of the ridge, picking our way carefully down a treacherous slope of loose basalt scree.
The moment our boots crossed the threshold into the black forest, the temperature dropped violently. The stifling steam of the volcanic pass vanished, replaced by a freezing draft that smelled of damp ash, cold stone, and petrified wood.
The canopy above closed over our heads like a vaulted ceiling of dark iron, swallowing the sky. The only illumination came from the silver river running twenty paces to our left—a wide, silent vein of glowing, mercury-like liquid that cast a ghostly light across the massive trunks of the obsidian trees.
The forest was eerily, suffocatingly quiet.
There were no birds. No insects. No rustling of small prey in the underbrush. The only sound was the heavy crunch of our boots pressing into the thick carpet of volcanic ash and the ragged breathing of our small squad.
We moved in a tactical formation. Mal took the point, his eyes scanning the high branches for low-hanging threats. Dax held the left flank, his daggers held low, his gaze sweeping the thickets of iron-thorns. Caspian commanded the rear, his massive frame acting as a barrier between us and whatever might be trailing our scent from the gates.
I walked at the center, my fingers wrapped tightly around the hilts of my obsidian daggers, my senses dialed to a hyper-aware vibration.
Every instinct in my body was screaming.
Survive.
The wine from the solstice was long gone, but the volatile magic buried in my blood—the dormant Remnikai that had flared so violently at the altar—was thrashing beneath my ribs like a trapped beast. It reacted to the island. It recognized the raw power humming through the petrified roots of the trees, pulling at my center as if demanding I let the light and the shadows erupt once more.
Not yet, I told myself, locking my jaw until my teeth ached. If I let it out now, every beast on this mountain will hunt us down.
We marched deeper into the interior for hours, the passage of time marked only by the agonizing, cumulative toll on our bodies. My muscles burned with a deep, nauseating ache. The soles of my boots felt thin against the freezing ground, and the brand on my shoulder had settled into a dull, rhythmic throb.
To our right, half-buried in a dense tangle of rusted iron-thorns, lay the fossilized spine of a medium-sized dragon. The vertebrae were as large as boulders, bleached white, forming a natural, skeletal tunnel through the thicket.
“Look,” Dax whispered, pointing a blade toward the base of one of the massive vertebrae.
Fresh blood was smeared across the white bone. Bright, crimson Fae blood, still warm enough to steam slightly in the freezing air. Beside the smear lay a discarded vanguard helmet, its iron plate crushed flat as if a massive weight had stepped on it.
“One of the western transfers,” Mal noted quietly, crouching down to inspect the tracks in the ash. He ran his gloved fingers over a three-toed indentation in the dirt—a footprint four feet wide, lined with deep claw marks. “He ran blind into the woods. Didn’t stay on the high ground.”
“How long ago?” Caspian asked, his voice low, his sapphire eyes scanning the dark beyond the trees.
“About an hour,” Mal replied, standing up and wiping his glove on his trousers. “The beast didn’t linger. It took him whole.”
A cold spike of dread dropped straight into my stomach. Sixteen candidates. Now fifteen. The island was already whittling our numbers down before we had even reached the halfway mark to the interior caldera.
“We don’t stop,” Caspian commanded, his hand settling briefly on the small of my back, pushing me forward. “Keep moving.”
The faint, dim light filtering through the petrified needles vanished completely as night fell over Isath Nalore.
It didn’t come with a gentle fade, but with the sudden weight of an iron curtain. The forest dropped into a suffocating darkness that rendered everything beyond the cold glow of the silver river invisible. The ambient temperature plummeted, turning our breath into thick clouds of steam. The iron-thorns on the trees groaned as the frost settled over them, making tiny, clicking sounds like footsteps in the dark.
“We need a defensible position for the night,” Dax said, his voice laced with a rare thread of fatigue. “We can’t navigate these roots in absolute dark. One wrong step into an iron-thorn thicket and you’ll bleed out before dawn.”
“There,” I said, pointing toward the riverbank.
Emerging from the edge of the glowing silver water was the complete skull of a dragon. It was colossal, easily thirty feet long from its blunt snout to the base of its sweeping, horned crown. The lower jaw was half-submerged in the glowing liquid, but the upper snout and the massive, hollow eye sockets formed a natural shelter made of solid bone. The interior was dry, raised above the damp ash, and protected on three sides.
Caspian evaluated the structure for a brief second before nodding. “Lieutenant Varyn, check the interior for nests. Dax, scout the perimeter. We set up a cold camp inside the skull.”
Mal moved quickly, ducking beneath the massive, three-foot-long fangs jutting from the upper jaw. A moment later, he stuck his head out, giving a silent nod. “Clear. Dry stone, no scent of live territorial marks.”
