Chapter 21 #2
That name in your head. What a dangerous name. What a curious name …
The look on my face must show I have no idea what he’s talking about, because he speaks it right into my mind, carving it like a knife.
Vander Evren.
The name Stellan whispered as he was bleeding out onto the floorboards. The immortal I’m supposed to find.
He must be able to feel or see the hope surging within me, because he begins to chuckle, the sound raking through my thoughts. Summoning Vander Evren would be a death sentence for you …
“Summoning?” I manage to get out. “How would I summon him?” Can I summon him now is my real question, but of course, the immortal ignores me, moving on, studying me.
Curious little human, stumbles into my mists …
Unprepared. Na?ve. Soul dripping rage and regret …
Each word slices into my brain. He says it like a poem. Like a joke. Like I am simply a plaything in his long, immortal life.
“What do you want?” I gasp out, tears slipping down my cheeks.
At once, he’s right in front of me.
To feast on your flesh, to lick your bones clean, to swallow your soul, he says.
I take a shaking breath. I wait for those teeth to sink into me, but all he does is circle again, the mists spinning around him.
“Do you like to play with your food before you eat?” I bite out, turning on my knees, refusing to give him my back.
I lift my sword. I won’t test it, but if he lunges at me, I will strike. Even if it’s the last thing I do.
No. I’m so very hungry, I eat everything that enters the mists before they even have a chance to see me … The woods must be fed …
But the depths of your emotions … of your anguish … It makes me remember …
He trails off, as if he has been snared by another place and time completely.
Then, in a flash, his bottomless eyes are on me again.
Today is peculiar. So very peculiar …
He looks at me, and I can imagine how weak and insignificant I look to this ancient presence, but I don’t drop my gaze. I don’t cower. My eyes remain locked on his. His next words are just the slightest bit gentler, the claws of his voice not sinking in as deeply as before.
I want to know why a starving girl has more courage than even immortal heirs.
I bark out a silent laugh. He can’t be serious.
But he doesn’t chuckle. His expression is firm. You plan to face the gods, when even immortals have remained silent and complacent for centuries.
So, he has seen in my mind. He has seen … everything.
And he still hasn’t killed me.
Is he against the gods? Does he want to see them fall? Maybe I can convince him to let me go, to finish my quest. I answer honestly. “I don’t have anything to lose. Everything I loved, I have lost already.”
He hums, the sound rattling through my mind. Yes … that loss … those memories …
He turns his head with a crack. His night-torn eyes seem to ripple. I swallow. You want to leave? You want to escape?
I nod.
I want one.
I blink. “You—”
I want a memory.
I should feel relief at the chance to get the hell out of this place, but all I feel is crushing sadness. My memories are all I have. “Why?”
His cape swirls behind him, melting into the rest of the mist.
When I feast on flesh and bone, I feel but a ripple of your life. Then it fades. But if you were to give me a memory willingly, it would last …
Ten. I have just ten happy memories. I could offer up another, but I know he means them. I just know it. If my mind is a room, these memories are kept in the drawers. Locked tightly. Guarded. “No,” I say, backing away.
He rushes at me, full force, that mist turning into a thousand claws and blades, all pointed toward me.
I gasp.
The mist settles, as if the weapons were never there at all. As if they could be summoned in half a second.
I grow hungry.
I can almost feel that hunger, as if the mist is an extension of himself, and it is also starving. I look around at the forest. Thousands of trees that must have been people at some point.
The creature is right. I’m not afraid for me … I’m scared I won’t be strong enough to make it to the end of this journey.
Give me the memory, and I will spare you.
I don’t want to. But if I don’t … if I die here, in the mists …
All of this will have been for nothing.
“Fine,” I say, my eyes burning.
He smiles, the bone of his face fracturing slightly with the movement.
His longest metal finger reaches toward me, parting the mist. As he gets closer, that burning in my eyes intensifies, that sorrow distilling—until a single tear slips down my cheek.
He presses his finger to it, the curious shimmering blade scraping against my skin. He pulls it toward him.
I jerk forward, hooked, then released, as something more than just a tear is taken. It sits on his finger, solid as ice, and as he brings it to his face, I can hear it. Laughter. Playing. Voices that I would give anything to hear again.
In a flash, the creature puts his sharp finger in his mouth, swallowing the memory, humming. Smiling. Tasting.
I collapse onto the ground, heart beating against the dirt. New tears turning it to mud.
It’s … gone. That tiny, bright pocket in my mind is dimmer. The drawer in my brain has been ransacked.
“Thank you, Aris Godslayer,” he says, before drifting away. Lost in thought. Lost in my memory. I look up at him from the ground, somewhere between cursing him for taking something priceless and thanking him for sparing me.
Before he fades completely, he looks over his shoulder. “I might be the oldest thing in these woods, but I am far from the deadliest. If you want to kill those gods … I suggest you run.”
He disappears.
And all the sounds of the forest hit me at once, like a veil has been lifted.
Scratches. Growls. Right behind me. As if there were beasts waiting on the fringes, scared of the Gardener. But now he’s gone.
I don’t look. I just bolt.
The Bone Woods thicken, closing in, and I duck below branches, jump over roots, chest heaving. But even through my panting, I hear them.
Growls, echoing from every direction. Thundering steps against the dirt. Panic pounds through my blood as I count several. Whatever they are … there’s a pack of them.
I push myself even more, not daring to look over my shoulder, hurling myself forward, but they’re faster. I hear their snapping maws, just feet away. Their hunger—I can feel it, like a second mist, closing in.
I can’t outrun them. They’re going to mow me down any second. So, when I reach a tree with branches low enough, I throw myself onto it and begin to climb.
The bone is smooth beneath my fingers, as if well and truly licked clean, and I resist the urge to vomit. I haul myself up, groaning—
Just as a jaw snaps an inch shy of my foot.
Heart in my throat, I scramble higher, then turn. I brandish my sword.
And curse.
Saberwolves. I read about them in the immortal’s text. They’re three times as large as normal wolves, with two fangs that curl out of their mouths like curved daggers, sharp enough to shred their prey to ribbons and containing immobilizing poison.
Before I can even think about forming a plan, one of them leaps, and I jerk back, barely missing the brush of its fang. I cling to the trunk, my feet settling on a different branch. They can’t climb. But I can’t stay in this tree forever.
The saberwolves seem to know that … and their hunger makes them restless. Foam spills down their jaws. Their eyes are black. They snarl, revealing the full size of those massive teeth.
Shreds. I would be ripped to unrecognizable shreds by those fangs, by this pack. I wouldn’t even become part of this forest; I have a feeling they would grind my bones to no more than powder.
There’s nowhere to go. Nothing to do but hold my sword out in front of me—which is all these days of training have really added up to—and try to plan some sort of distraction. But there’s no time.
One of the beasts takes a few steps back, then lunges. But not toward me. No.
Toward the trunk.
I hold on to the closest branch for dear life as the tree lurches to the side. If they can’t reach me, they are going to bring me to them.
FUCK.
The wolf slams into the tree over and over and over, and I remember Raker’s sword doing the same thing, how the leaves all came down. How he cut them in half. I am at risk of a similar fate as I cling to the trunk, my head banging against bone, my hands slick with sweat.
The wolf pulls back to go again. And the other two saberwolves glance at each other. That look is far too knowing, far too intelligent. One of them breaks from the group. It runs in the opposite direction, turns around—then rushes toward the tree. It jumps.
And uses the other one’s back to launch off, right toward me.
I barely leap out of the way in time, clinging to another branch as the tree sways again. But this branch is lower. The third wolf leaps. I rush to pull my legs up—but not before its fang grazes my calf.
It’s the simplest brush. But it cuts right through fabric and skin.
And burns like an inferno.
I scream, the sound echoing through the forest—before the pain is muted. And that’s worse. Because I feel its venom slinking through my blood, until I can’t feel my leg at all.
I’m so fucked.
Especially when the other wolf slams against the tree again, and I fall out of it.