Chapter 26 Eoin
EOIN
We leave the dead cavern at dawn. The air in the high peaks is thin and sharp, and the silence that follows us is heavier than the one we left behind. My new purpose is a cold, hard weight in my chest: keep them alive. Keep them safe. Keep them mine.
For the first hour, we move along a treacherous goat path, the mountain falling away into a misty abyss to our left.
Lyren walks between us, his small hand held tightly in Elza’s.
I am a predator turned shepherd, my senses extended, tasting the wind, listening to the silence, searching for any sign of pursuit.
It comes sooner than I expected.
A faint psychic signature on the wind, like the scent of ozone before a storm.
It is disciplined, cold, and familiar. Vrakken.
I scan the sky, and there, in the far distance to the north, I see them.
Five dark specks, flying in the precise V-formation of a military scouting party.
The Crimson Wing. The hunt has already begun.
Without a word, I take Elza’s arm. She flinches, her hand immediately going to her dagger. I register her reaction, the spike of fear and defiance, before she even speaks.
“What is it?” she demands, her eyes flashing.
“Scouts,” I state, the word a low, urgent command as I pull them off the path, down a steep, scree-covered slope. “Five of them. Three leagues north and closing fast. We must get below the tree line.”
My tone seems to override her suspicion. She scrambles after me, holding Lyren close as loose rocks skitter out from under our feet. We move for another hour, a grueling, downward plunge into a thick, ancient forest of silverwood trees.
I stop in a dense thicket where the silver leaves are interspersed with the pale, almost translucent petals of a plant I recognize. “Here,” I say, plucking a handful of the white flowers. “Crush these. Rub them on your skin, your clothes. Both of you.”
I observe her suspicion as she eyes the flowers. “What is this?”
“Ghostbloom,” I explain, crushing the petals in my own hand. They release a sharp, cloying scent, like sweet, rotting meat. “Its scent is offensive to the Vrakken olfactory senses. It will help to mask our trail.”
She hesitates for a moment, then gives a sharp nod and begins to follow my instructions. I hear Lyren wrinkle his nose. “It stinks, Mama.”
I listen as she murmurs to him. “I know, little lion. Think of it as a costume.”
We continue on, the dense canopy of the forest providing some cover from the sky. The psychic link between us hums with a frantic energy that I recognize as a torrent of her unspoken questions.
She finally gives voice to them. “Why are they so relentless?” she asks, her voice low as she navigates a tangle of roots. “You turned on them. The Matriarch sent them to eliminate you as much as to take Lyren. Why does she still hunt us with such fervor?”
“Because I failed her,” I say, my gaze sweeping the canopy above. “And because Lyren exists. To the Matriarch, sentiment is a disease, a symptom of The Fading. My choice to protect you is not seen as a betrayal; it is seen as proof of my corruption. An infection.”
I stop and look at her, needing her to understand the nature of the enemy we face.
“The Crimson Wing are not soldiers. They are zealots. They are the purest of our kind, untouched by the plague that is consuming us. They see you as a human contamination that caused my fall. They see Lyren not as a child, but as a tainted relic that must be repossessed and purified.”
I see her face pale, but her eyes remain hard as flint. She asks, “And you? What do you see him as?”
“He is my son,” I state, the words feeling both foreign and absolute on my tongue. “And they will not touch him.”
A sudden, sharp spike of psychic energy from above makes me freeze. Close. Too close.
“Down,” I hiss, shoving her and Lyren toward a narrow crevice in a massive rock face, a dark split in the stone barely wide enough for a person. “Now. Not a sound.”
She scrambles inside without question, pulling a frightened Lyren in with her.
The space is tight, a claustrophobic sliver of darkness.
I press in behind them, shielding their bodies with my own, my back to the opening, my wings folded as tightly as possible.
Elza is crushed against me, her face just inches from mine.
I feel her heart hammering against my chest, her breath a warm puff against my lips.
A massive shadow passes over the entrance to our hiding place. The powerful whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of Vrakken wings is a sound I have known for millennia, but for the very first time, it fills me with a cold, primal dread.
A spike of pure terror, sharp and stabbing, lances through the link from her to me.
The sensation is so potent it feels like a physical blow against my own discipline.
In response, a cold, protective fury rises in me, a silent, psychic roar that I direct outwards, a ward of pure possessiveness. Mine.
The sound of the wings recedes. I feel a shaky breath leave her lungs. We are safe.
But then, the wing beats stop.
A soft thud echoes from just outside our crevice.
The scout has landed. My entire body turns to stone.
I hear the faint scrape of its claws on the rock, its head tilting as its own psychic senses probe the area.
The Ghostbloom is masking our scent, but the lingering traces of our passage, the broken branches, the faint residue of our presence—it has found something amiss.
I look down at Elza. I see the terror in her wide eyes, feel her hand clutching the front of my tunic.
Lyren is a silent, trembling weight between us.
We are frozen, holding our breath, mere feet away from discovery by a creature that will show us no mercy, a zealot that believes it is cleansing the world of a pestilence. And that pestilence is us.