Wren #2
Part of me wanted to fill the silence, to start counting something, anything, to pull myself back into the safety of numbers and plans. But a larger part of me was so tired. Bone tired. Eight years of never stopping, never resting, never being allowed to just exist without being useful.
The cloak was warm. His heartbeat was steady. And no one was asking me for anything.
“Wren.”
I stirred. I’d been drifting, not quite asleep, floating somewhere in the darkness.
“We are close. I thought you might want to see.”
Yes. I did want to see. I wanted it more than I wanted to stay in this warm dark cocoon where nothing could touch me. Which was its own kind of warning, if I’d been smart enough to hear it.
The cloak parted, wings spreading wide, and the world spread below us like a map I’d never seen.
Mountains rose from the darkness, their peaks catching moonlight, snow gleaming like spilled salt.
A river cut through the valleys far below, and from this height I could see how it branched and rejoined, how it had carved its path over thousands of years.
But that wasn’t what caught my eye.
There was a lake. Small, tucked between two peaks, and the moon was reflected in it so perfectly that it looked like a hole in the world. Like if you fell into that water you’d fall right through into the sky on the other side.
I’d spent eight years copying maps. Trade routes and territories and the careful lies that cartographers told to make the world seem known. I’d drawn rivers I’d never seen, mountains I’d never touched, lakes that were just shapes on parchment.
This was real. All of it. Real and vast and so beautiful it hurt somewhere behind my ribs.
“The lake,” I heard myself say. “The one with the moon in it. Does it have a name?”
“I do not know if humans named it. I call it the Mirror.”
“The Mirror.” I watched it slide beneath us, that perfect reflection, that hole in the world. “I want to see it. From the ground. Someday.”
He didn’t answer. Instead he’d banked in the air to give me a better view before it disappeared behind a ridge.
No one had ever done that before. Made an effort, even slightly, just so I could look at something longer.
“There.” His arm shifted, pointing. “Home.”
A mountain, taller than the others, its peak lost in clouds. And carved into the face of it, high above where any human could climb, I could see windows. Walkways. A structure built into the stone itself, sprawling and ancient.
“You live on a mountain.”
“Inside it. Mostly.”
“How does anyone reach you?”
“They do not.”
Three words. Something in the way he said them made my chest tight.
I should have been relieved. No visitors meant no one to witness whatever happened next. No one to help, but also no one to watch.
I caught myself feeling sorry for him. Inconvenient.
He adjusted the wings and we began to descend. The mountain rushed toward us, and I saw a wide terrace of white stone, and then his feet touched down with barely a sound and the wings folded back.
Behind me, I heard the soft sound of the cloak settling, folding back into something that looked like fabric again. When I glanced back, it hung from his shoulders as if it had never been anything else.
The cold rushed in.
I shivered. I’d grown used to his heat without noticing. Now the mountain air cut through my thin dress like a blade, and I wrapped my arms around myself before I could stop.
He unstrapped the harness with quick, efficient movements. When the last buckle released, I stepped away from him on legs that shook and turned to look at the view.
Mountains in every direction. Stars blazing overhead, more than I’d ever seen. No roads. No cities. No lights except the moon.
“You weren’t lying,” I said. “No one can reach you here.”
“Not without significant effort.”
I turned back to him. He stood between me and the terrace’s edge. Between me and the long fall to nothing. I didn’t think he knew he’d done it. His body had simply put itself there, blocking the danger, and he hadn’t seemed to notice.
But I noticed.
I noticed everything. It was my curse, watching everyone and everything for the danger that was always coming.
Tavrin stood between me and the edge. His heart had raced the whole flight. He’d banked so I could see a lake a moment longer.
What did it mean? What did any of it mean?
“Come inside,” he said. “You are cold.”
I was shaking now, properly shaking, my teeth chattering hard enough that I couldn’t have hidden it if I’d tried.
“Wren.” He stepped toward me, and I saw it. The moment his mask slipped.
His eyes dropped to my shaking hands. To my arms wrapped around myself. And something crossed his face that wasn’t calm, wasn’t controlled, wasn’t the careful stillness he’d worn like armor since the moment I’d first seen him.
It was hunger. Not cruel. Not predatory. Just vast. A wanting so deep it had no bottom.
He wanted to warm me. He wanted to wrap that cloak around me again and pull me against his chest and keep me there until I stopped shaking. I could see it in the way his hands flexed at his sides, the way his jaw tightened, the way his whole body leaned toward me and then stopped itself.
He wanted. And he was fighting it.
“Please,” he said. The word sounded like it cost him something. “Come inside.”
That look in his eyes, that hunger, should have sent me running.
But I kept thinking about his heartbeat.
“All right,” I said. “Show me inside.”
He turned and walked toward the carved doors, and I followed him into the mountain.
I didn’t look back at the sky. But I thought about it. About the way he’d spread the cloak just so I could see. About the moonlight on the lake. About how it felt to fly, to fall, to be caught.
About the look on his face when he’d seen me shivering. That hunger he’d tried so hard to hide.
I thought about that most of all.