Chapter 19 #2
Naila stepped aside and bowed her head. “Hovding,” she murmured. “This is Arvyn, our chieftain.”
Unsure what to do, I imitated her, dipping my head in awkward reverence.
The gesture earned a deep, rumbling laugh from Arvyn that echoed through the cave.
Then he quieted, speaking to Naila in Elvish, words I did not understand, though the warmth in his tone told me I was being welcomed, if cautiously so.
She nodded once, meeting my gaze a final time. “I will return to the work. It was good to meet you, Evangelina.”
I managed an awkward smile. “Likewise.”
Then she turned and walked away toward where I had last seen Kael.
Arvyn regarded me for a moment before speaking. “Humans seldom cross to this side of the mountain,” he said, voice deep as stone. “It is good to see you again, my friend.”
“We know these mountains belong to the elves,” I said lightly. “Perhaps that is why we keep our distance.”
He chuckled, a low, rolling sound. “The mountains belong to no one, lilla.” His tone shifted, grave now. “And they are ill, gravely so. Kael tells me you have seen something.”
“I…” The word caught in my throat. “I think the source lies at the summit. Something happened up there, and this blight is the echo of it.”
I remembered my vision—the tower, the wizards, the screams. Something terrible had taken root above, and I needed to know what.
Arvyn’s gaze darkened. “I sent pathfinders to the summit,” he said quietly, “and none returned. Taken by the blight, as Vall?ne was. Vila i frid. May our brothers and sisters rest among the spirits.”
He carried his sorrow with the composure of the ageless, his grief worn like a mantle of honor. I wondered how many centuries he had borne such loss.
“You are welcome to stay in Stenhalla tonight,” he continued. “It is a blessing to have Kael among us again, especially now. You may rest and gather strength here.”
“Thank you,” I said softly, then hesitated. “Do you know Kael well?”
A smile touched his face, warm and paternal. “Ah, lilla, that is a tale best told beside the fire. Come, sit.”
I shook my head, guilt pricking me. “No, please. You must have a hundred matters on your mind. I don’t wish to intrude.”
He waved the concern away with an easy flick of his hand. “Stories are part of grieving. Sit with me.”
He led me to a firepit where rough-hewn logs served as seats. A few elven children played nearby, their laughter faint against the murmur of the cave. They called out “Hovding!” as they passed, bowing before darting away again.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if they were orphans.
“Their parents are gone,” Arvyn said, as though reading my thoughts. “They are all that remains of their generation.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. It was all I could find to say.
Arvyn sat down with a groan. He must have been very old. Elves like him could live for half a millennium, if the spirit willed it. I lowered myself beside him and gazed into the fire in silence.
“Kael was much younger than they were when I found him,” he began. He lifted a hand, measuring roughly at his chest. “Three decades ago. He was as big as three apples.”
“You found him?”
“Well,” Arvyn said, the corners of his mouth curving faintly, “it was a…
varghona. A wolf-mother, who came to me one night when the clouds were thick and the rain fell heavy.
The beast led me to her den, where she had tried to care for him as best she could.
But Kael was no wolf, only a small, human infant with hay for hair, white and frail as snow.
“I do not know how long she had watched over him, but he was starved, crying like a thirsty pup. He needed a mother who could feed and hold him. Mauriel—may she rest with the spirits—offered herself. She called him Forlorenkel, the abandoned boy, and the name remained. Mauriel raised him with love, and her daughter Naila cherished him as a brother.”
I listened to his tales, still as a deer at the water’s edge.
Firelight wove through the lines of Arvyn’s face, deepening its shadows, softening the weight of his words.
Kael, raised in the wilderness by a wolf who could no longer keep him.
Somehow, it made perfect sense. Of course he had been shaped by something untamed.
He carried the wilderness in his every breath.
That the she-wolf had turned to the wood elves for help, entrusting her foundling to their care, spoke of a bond deeper than I had ever imagined.
There was beauty in it, savage and sacred, that a creature of fang and forest had chosen him, had loved him enough to seek help beyond her kind.
Such love did not belong to this world. It was raw, ancient, the kind that left marks no magic could ever erase.
Arvyn’s features darkened. “But as Kael grew, something within him stirred—the curse of the wilds, a power none could master. We tried to shield him, to teach him restraint, but we were not skilled in such arts. The magi of your academy felt his power. They came searching. A man named Henrich arrived in Vall?ne one spring, when Kael had begun to hunt alone. He offered to guide him. For years he returned, taking the boy to the lake, where it was safe to release the storm. But when that storm grew too fierce for these mountains, Henrich took him away, to the city of men.”
His voice fell low, roughened by memory and regret. I could hear the bond behind it, the affection for the wild, fair child he had helped raise, and the pain of having to let him go. Perhaps he blamed himself, as the she-wolf must have, for not being enough to keep him safe from himself.
I swallowed hard. That same ache that always came with Kael’s name stirred again in my chest. Everyone who had loved him had, in the end, let him go, because they had no choice. And maybe that was why he had built his walls so high, why even his gentleness felt like the edge of a blade.
He had learned long before I ever met him that loving him was impossible, because it meant either dying for him, or leaving him behind.
“Where do you think he comes from?” I asked, unable to stop myself from wondering who—or what—Kael had been before the wolf’s den.
Arvyn exhaled deeply. “That, lilla, is this century’s greatest mystery. The months before the wolf-mother found me, a treacherous storm ravaged these mountains. Fenrir’s roar rolled from cliff to valley. Perhaps he had been gifted to the wolf-mother by Fenrir himself.”
Fenrir. The elven wolf-god of storm and ruin.
“But we will never know where the truth lies,” Arvyn finished, his voice dropping to a hush.
A throat cleared, and a low voice sounded behind me. “Evie.”
Arvyn turned and smiled, rising slowly to his feet. “Here he is, Forlorenkel.”
Kael stood behind us, breath misting faintly, flushed from labor. His leather tunic hung over one arm, the black undershirt clinging to him, sweat-damp. His ash-blond hair fell wild about his face, and somehow that made him seem even more himself.
“Greetings, Arvyn,” Kael said softly. Then his gaze found mine, and my heart stumbled. “Our chamber is ready.”
Our chamber?
“There is stew coming,” Arvyn said. “Sit, both of you, and eat first. You must be hungry.”
At the word stew, my stomach betrayed me with a quiet growl. I prayed no one had heard, but my cheeks warmed all the same. Arvyn said something to Kael in Elvish that I couldn’t catch, then took his leave.
I watched him go, his back outlined by firelight, his silhouette dissolving into the smoke. The warmth of the flames lingered on my skin, but inside I felt cold.
Kael stepped closer, his nearness both anchoring and unsettling.
I thought of the she-wolf, of Mauriel, who had mothered him for a time, of the storm that lived within him.
A boy loved by a beast, raised by elves, claimed by the academy.
Every part of him was born of ruin, and yet he stood unbroken, steady, self-contained, untouchable.
He caught me staring. For a heartbeat, I thought he might speak, might finally let me see the truth beneath his silence. I ached for it, to know him whole. But he only nodded toward the fires, where elves were ladling stew into wooden bowls.
We joined them in the glow of Stenhalla. Naila, the pathfinders, the laughing children, all wrapped in the low hum of grief and renewal. And in that moment I understood. Of all his power, Kael had never truly belonged anywhere. Not to the wolves. Not to the elves. Not to the world of men.
And yet… Somehow, impossibly, I wanted to be the place he could.