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A ripple of movement. “On our honour as Nhil, consider it done.” The entire clan clasped hands over their hearts, bowing their mis-coloured heads.
A shiver ran up my spine as gratefulness and belonging warmed my fearful chill.
Despite what Aktor and Kivva had done, these were good people. Caring, wonderful people, and I wanted so very much to be one of them. I wanted to be one of them so I could chase after the wolves tomorrow and speak on the stranger’s behalf. As Nhil, I could request the healers to treat him. I could gift him what Niya had gifted me.
A family.
Solin stepped forward; a deeper hush fell over the camp.
The sky burnished with rich golds, fighting the angry gathering storm as the sun split in half on the horizon. Purple shards struck the rain-churning clouds, and ruby shadows cast the world in blinding pink.
In all my lonely travels, I’d never seen a sunset so beautiful or so sinister.
The sun seemed to reach out, stroking my ash-branded skin.
Its heat mixed with the fire’s warmth already simmering in my bones.
It kissed my hair, and I gasped as a golden-glowing song rippled through my blood like a pebble in a pond, and something begged me to remember. Something white and hot and infinite.
Breathing hard, I opened my heart to remember...
...but nothing came.
Whatever song I’d heard vanished as the sun sank the final way, snuffing out its glow, spearing across the horizon, before dimming under the purple darkness of creeping grey.
“It’s time,” Solin said, his voice cutting through the clan’s tension. “No one is to disturb us, no matter what you hear.” With stiff steps, he left the chief and chiefess, stalked directly toward me in his bare feet, captured my painted wrist with his own ash-spirit tattooed hand, and dragged me silently into his lupic.
Chapter Eighteen
. The Stranger .
HOWLS CHASED ME AS I died.
Wolfen tears were the river I flowed on, gushing down the essence of life, tumbling over a waterfall of their whimpers, and sending me free-falling into cold, empty darkness.
Death.
It welcomed me.
Cold, empty blackness rose to greet me, wrapping oily arms around me, stealing me away from the howls and whimpers, sucking me deep, deep, deep until all my mortal warmth and heartbeats were replaced with eternal misery.
The world I’d left behind faded fast.
The wolf’s song became more and more distant.
I tried to claw my way back to them. I fought the darkness and clung to the final thing tethering me—a memory that flickered in and out of consciousness.
It tasted like smoke and sang like water.
Her.
A girl who caged fire in her fingers—
No, not fire.
Sunshine.
Sunlight spilled from her fingertips as tendrils of light coiled from her palms. Gold rained from her, cascading to the earth where those droplets of pure golden glow soaked into dirt and became more.
I groaned as my fevers sucked me deeper, swirling with sickness, retching my body with nausea even though I no longer had such a thing.
I was nothing but thought, watching the fevers paint a story for me as my mind slowly perished.
Creatures filled my head. Animals I’d never seen in all my lonely travels.
Animals as large as snow-capped mountains and beasts as beautiful as the jewels I’d found in a smouldering ravine far from here. More and more beasts prowled through my fading mind. Creatures that could breathe fire and swim in seas. Predators who shuddered the very earth as they walked, creating eddies in the air with their colossal breath.
Darkness swirled, turning me upside down and inside out.
I no longer knew how to return to the howling wolves who mourned me.
I chased after the beasts made of nonsense and magic instead.
I ran with legs I couldn’t see and swam through shadows that had no end, willing them to stop and face me. To tell me what they were. Where they came from. And where they were going.
But the beasts kept moving, kept lumbering, too fast for me to see them fully, vanishing with every stride until I was alone in the darkness once again.
Time lost all meaning as I hovered in that blackness.
The wolves were silent now. My heartbeat gone for good.
I wanted to give in. To sink. To float. Disappear.
My wish slowly came true as the darkness let me descend, sinking deeper than I ever had until I landed at the bottom of death’s abyss.
I opened my eyes to a different kind of existence.
Black, blotting air pulsed and shimmered.
Silvery spirits—orbs as sterling as the moon but as small as my palm—bounced and tumbled past.
I tried to touch them—to drift my fingers through their strange silver light—but I had no hands or fingers to touch with.
I was nothing.
Nothing but blackness.
Part of me fought the cessation of self.
I screamed with lips I didn’t have and panicked with a heart that didn’t beat.
Looking up into the inky endlessness, I tried to see where I’d fallen. To look past the lakes of silvery spirits all dancing around me, within me, on me.
