Chapter 4
MOURNING PASS
Gavrel
As we neared the end of the towering wall, white dust speckled the cracked raven-colored path. The random sputter of dark flames lessened, and an inverted dusk settled over the sky in shades of hazy teal and clover.
Maya’s crew paused, Thesa jerking Melina’s chains so she, too, halted. She’d been unusually quiet on this journey, a gleam sparking in her silver eyes every so often.
Prickles rippled down my back.
“Don’t say it,” Thesa grumbled. She looked ahead irritably and then upward, almost longingly, following a steep byway haphazardly carved into the cliff face.
Maya shook her head. “You know well enough that the quickest route is through Mourning Pass. We need to make haste and hide her”—her chin jutted toward Melina—“before Phobetor finds us.”
Thesa cursed but pressed forward regardless, flicking a displeased glance at the ascending trail one last time.
We rounded the corner, and a brittle crunch under my next step brought my focus to the jagged, ashen expanse before us. A field of splintered bones stretched across the terrain, jabbing and teetering on the edge of the cliff that loomed above the Insomnis Sea.
“Just ignore them,” Maya directed, shoulders pushed back as she strode forward, disregarding the grinding beneath each step.
I followed her and the others, my boots crunching over bony fragments. “Ignore them?”
There was a shrill screech to my left. I whipped toward it, sword now in hand, and then spun to my right as another cry came.
There was no one there. The others didn’t pay any mind to the rising cacophony of screams and pleas.
My eyes locked with the lifeless sockets of a partially crushed skull sitting atop a thick pile of femurs. Its jaw connected on one side as it flopped open precariously.
“Have mercy!” it shrieked, teeth clacking.
All right then.
These were the aforementioned them.
“Save me!” another skull cried as I sheathed my sword and caught up to the others.
“You pathetic fool. Shut up. They never help us,” another responded.
They did not shut up.
I ground my molars together, pretending the sound clattering through my senses was my teeth and not the cracking of living skeletons under my feet.
The sobs and screams and insults followed us as we continued.
After what felt like an eternity, we reached the edge of a dark forest. Ghostly, barren trees with gnarled trunks and twisted branches scratched at their neighbors and the sky, as if desperate to tear free from the Nether Void.
A smattering of bone shards scattered across the obsidian gravel, crunching underfoot as we left the tormented wails of the Mourning Pass behind us.
“Welcome to the legendary Gloaming Weald,” Maya murmured.
“The stuff of night terrors and neurosis,” Thesa muttered, causing a few chuckles to ripple throughout the group.
“You might as well let me off my leash. You’ll likely need the extra pair of hands.” Melina wiggled her pointed nails in front of her.
Thesa tugged on the chain as she strode into the forest, making the Elder stumble. Something between a giggle and a snarl escaped Melina.
“Just focus on your path; don’t let the shadows in the corners distract you. If you do, they’ll take you, and you’ll be lost to their deceptions,” Maya warned.
“You’ll be worse than dead, is what,” Therrok added, his black eyes cold and assessing. “And you’ll join your brethren in the Mourning Pass after the critters and trees pick your flesh from your bones.”
My mouth pulled into a tight line as I braced myself and eyed the trees warily.
As we moved, an air of thick paranoia and dread crept among us. I kept my focus forward, willing myself to ignore whatever stalked at my periphery.
Again, variegated radiance glimmered beyond the trees, but I ignored it, unsure if it was the forest playing tricks on me.
Several rebels ahead, in front of Melina, a man’s head whipped to the side. My chest tightened at the sound of his yelp. He threw his hands out as Maya and a few others called his name.
I made a move toward him, but Maya flung her arm against my chest. “Don’t!” she commanded. “Look forward. It’s too late for him.”
I stared straight ahead, ready to pounce, as something yanked his body to the side and into the shadows along our path.
As we passed where he’d been taken, there was nothing but a slinking darkness like suspended ink. So dark that it gobbled up the moon’s eerie glow.
My eyelids crushed closed, and the hilt of my broadsword bit into my palm.
“Gaaaaaavrel,” a rattling, throaty voice whispered in my ear. I lurched forward, eyes snapping open but fixing on Melina’s platinum strands well ahead of me.
Ancients damn it, why couldn’t the forest take her? It’d be doing me a favor.
We walked another dozen paces, and I concentrated on the scraping of gravel under my boots.
“Don’t slow,” Maya warned.
“Poor little Gavrel,” the other voice whispered, this time from the opposite side. “Always following. Always failing.”
I stiffened, eyes narrowing. No one else had reacted. They weren’t hearing the creature.
Shut up.
Mist pressed closer, wrapping around my ankles.
“We’re nearly there, Gavrel.” Maya’s voice seemed far away, as if I were underwater. Like I was soul-wandering, my astral body detached, floating with the suspended glowing ashes in the air.
“Let go,” the voice crooned. “You can rest now. What do you have to lose? You’ve already lost everythiiiiing. You’ve lost herrrr.”
An icy pressure gripped my ribs.
The pale trees faded away. Maya and the rest of the group evaporated like dark mist into the horizon.
No. Not her. I wouldn’t—
I staggered, raising my sword. “Enough,” I growled, swinging my arm, blade slicing through the shadows.
They recoiled with a reverberating hiss.
For a moment, I thought I’d won.
Then the sentient darkness surged back, and misty fingers coiled around my wrist, squeezing until numbness crept up my arm.
I tore at it with a snarl, muscles tensing as I ripped free and stumbled backward.
Pain exploded in my shoulder as something raked across it. I slashed high, then low. The dark billows danced around my blade giddily, toying with me like a cat with a dying mouse.
“Just lie down. You’ve fought enough.”
No. No, I—
A fog seeped into the crevices of my mind. My limbs were numb. Sluggish. The tip of my sword clanged against the stones, and my knees buckled.
Get up! I bellowed deep within my soul. But my body wouldn’t listen.
I shrank and shrank, my mind spiraling down a deep well.
“See how easy it is?” the darkness purred. “See how good it feels to stop fighting?”
Perhaps the shadows were right. What would it matter if I went into the abyss? Let it embrace me? What was the point of going on when I’d lost everything that mattered?
My home.
Kaden.
My purpose.
Seryn.
Nothing mattered except the blackness beyond.
I could simply walk into its embrace and be done with it all. Feel the pure relief it offered. Let it carry my burdens.
No! That isn’t true, some distant part of me barked. Seryn matters. My khorda …
Clumsily, I wrenched my arm back, but the gloom cloaked me. Clung to me, inside and out.
Its fingers brushed against my flesh. My bones. The deepest parts of me.
I shuddered, and my sword slammed onto the ground.
The cold was so comforting.
The night so resplendent.
For a moment, I thought I heard the faint whisper of my name, but I ignored it, pressing my palm into the scar on my chest. There had once been something under there.
Haze crept into the edges of my mind. There had been something … something golden twined around my rib. Connecting my heart to something. Or someone? But I’d lost it, hadn’t I? There was nothing but an empty hollow under my bones now.
“Come to meeee,” the umbras beckoned.
My head turned. I was desperate to slip into the darkness.
Craved it.
Damp, inky fingers tenderly caressed the high angle of my cheek.
They were all I ever needed.
My eyelashes fluttered, and the shadows took my hand.