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Valerian grunted, and even though I hadn’t seen the monster run its sword across his arm, I smelled the spilling of hot blood that followed.
“Valerian!” I yelled, and I dashed toward him, barely avoiding another of the shadow figure’s heavy kicks.
He stood cradling his arm, blood oozing out of the wood and over his fingers. “Leave it,” he said, “We have to keep fighting.”
“It’s no use! We have to run.”
“Don’t you understand? There’s no more running from this.”
The shadow figure marched toward us, his now bloodied blade dragging across the snow. This steady advance put us on the retreat. We backed away from it, watching it, trying to decide what to do next, where to go, what options we had.
There’s only one.
I dismissed the thought as soon as it came, only to realize an instant later, as my foot almost slipped over the edge of a ravine that I had backed myself into a corner. Behind us was a sheer drop. It wasn’t a slope that we could tumble over, but a fall, easily sixty feet into a deep scar of a chasm from which we probably wouldn’t be able to pull ourselves out.
It reminded me of the ridge I had found back in the forest just outside of Windhelm that day. It felt like years ago, now; like it had happened to another person. According to Fate, it had, but I still held the memory. I had wanted to go over that ridge, to figure out what was down there, to understand why it stank of dark magic. I didn’t want to go over this one.
Valerian grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me away from it. “This is it,” he said, his nose and cheeks shining against the light from the silver orbs that clung to him. “We go through it, or we go over.”
“We’ll break our bones if we fall down there,” I said.
“Then, that’s it.”
“That’s it?”
Valerian nodded. “For what it’s worth,” he paused. “I’m glad I got to meet you.”
“What?”
“Before I met you, I thought you were spoiled and uptight. I did everything I could to avoid winning trials so I wouldn’t have to marry you.”
Furious anger filled my chest, radiating heat to all my extremities. “Spoiled and uptight?” I asked, a growl in my throat.
“Now that we’re about to die together, I think you’re…okay.”
I gawked at him. “I’m not sure what’s offended me more.” I shook my head. “This?This is how you chose to spend our last few seconds together?”
“They’re memorable, at least.”
“Who’s going to remember them?!” I hissed.
The shadow figure was almost on us, its feet crunching on the snow as it made its slow, steady march toward us, but I heard something, then.
“Wait,” I said to Valerian. “Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything,” he said.
“I hear… I’m not sure… there’s something out—”—the shadows began to whisper, their indistinct voices rising maddeningly quickly, becoming a cacophony of shrieks and screeches within a manner of seconds.
Then I saw it; a white light growing in the dark, bouncing left and right, gaining intensity as it moved closer to us. The light grew, and grew, and the shadows shrieked and parted to reveal something racing toward us, running fast on four legs, leaping, and bounding, all the while bringing with it an impossibly powerful white light.
When the light reached the shadow figure, it stopped dead in its tracks, and for a moment, it was entirely illuminated. I saw its jagged, broken antlers, the wolf’s head it used as a skull, its branch-like hands and long, tendril-like fingers. The shadow figure screeched and retreated with horrifying quickness, as if some powerful force had yanked it back through the trees and sent it hurtling into the darkness in an instant.
Valerian shielded his eyes from the light, but I couldn’t. Instead, I watched it approach… and then I saw the creature at the center of the light. It was small, and furry… something between a rabbit and a fox, and it had the cutest little antlers poking out of its forehead.
“Tallin?!” I yelled.
“Sorry… late…” he said, panting, the light he brought with him fading as he came up to me. “Long… story.”
