18. Chapter 18
AMARIA
The world outside the Sensorium felt too loud.
After days of muffled sounds and filtered light, everything here was sharp. The crunch of gravel under our boots. The cry of actual birds—normal birds, with the right number of wings. The wind that carried promises of danger instead of delight and wonder.
We walked single file through a rocky pass, the terrain rising on either side in jagged walls of grey stone. Good cover for us. Good cover for anyone else, too.
Dreadscale took point. Eryndor brought up the rear. The rest of us moved in the middle, too tired for conversation, too wary for what it may bring.
"How far to Liraeth?" Serenya asked.
"A day. Maybe less if we push through the night." Dreadscale didn't turn around. "We won't."
"Why not?"
"Because you need rest. All of you." He glanced back, his gaze moving over each of us in turn. "One more night. Then Liraeth."
One more night. I could do one more night.
Eryndor froze.
It was sudden—mid-stride, his whole body going still in that way I'd learned meant threat. His hand came up. Halt.
We halted. My hand sliding to my daggers.
"What is it?" Dreadscale moved up beside him, hand on his axe.
Eryndor pointed down. At the ground. At a spot where the rocky path met a flat stretch of stone.
A footprint. Pressed into solid rock. The stone around it ground almost to powder, like someone had stepped down with enough force to crush granite.
"That's not possible," Maxx breathed.
Dreadscale crouched, studying the print. His expression hardened.
"It's recent." He looked up, scanning the terrain. "There. And there."
More tracks. One set. Pressed into dirt and stone with mechanical precision, each footprint exactly the same depth, exactly the same distance apart. The stride of a weapon, not a fae.
"King's soldiers?" Serenya asked in a hush.
"No." Eryndor straightened, eyes still on the ground. "Soldiers travel in groups. Make noise. Leave mess. This is one fae. Moving with purpose."
"Fae bodies don't leave prints in stone," Dreadscale stated.
Eryndor and Dreadscale exchanged a look. Then they set off to follow the tracks.
The rest of us hung back, watching as they traced the trail along the rocky terrain. The prints led toward the treeline—toward the dark edge of the Sensorium wood.
Eryndor stopped. Crouched. Pointed at something.
Dreadscale nodded. They turned, following the tracks in the opposite direction now.
"What are they doing?" Serenya said.
"Mapping the pattern," I said.
They walked maybe fifty paces east. Stopped again. Turned. Walked back past us, heading west this time.
I watched them go—two predators reading the signs of another predator. That was never a good thing.
Eryndor returned first, his expression grim.
"The tracks run parallel to the Sensorium border," he said. "East to west. Then back again. Over and over." He looked at Dreadscale for confirmation.
Dreadscale nodded slowly. "Worn into the stone in places. He wasn't passing through. He was patrolling. Waiting."
I saw it now. The visible path worn into the rocky soil. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a beast pacing a cage.
"He was waiting for us to emerge," Dreadscale said.
"One person." Maxx's voice had lost its usual lightness. "One person, tracking us through the Dead Zone, through the Sensorium border, and he just... waited? For days? No camp. No fire. No rest."
No one answered. Because there was no good answer.
I moved toward the tracks without deciding to. My feet carried me forward, pulled by my Griefweaver. Up close, the footprints looked wrong—too perfect, too even. No fae walked like that. Nothing alive walked like that.
I crouched. Reached out.
My fingers brushed the edge of the nearest print.
Pain.
It vibrated through my body, my Griefweaver mark flaring. I gasped, hand flying to my chest, vision going white at the edges.
—priority conflict. Abort. Environment hostile. Hunt state active.—
Not words. Not really. More like—commands. Orders barked into a void where a person used to be. My Mark had never done that before. It absorbed grief. Sorrow. The weight of things people couldn't carry. This wasn't grief. This was absence. A hole where the humane had been scraped out.
"Amaria."
Eryndor's voice. His hand on my shoulder. I flinched back, blinking the tears from my eyes.
"I'm fine." The words came out frayed. Shaky. "I'm fine. I just—"
I looked at my hand. At the dirt clinging to my fingertips. At the perfect, mechanical footprint I'd touched.
The Mark throbbed in my chest. A slow, sick pulse that matched my heartbeat.
What was that?
Dreadscale was already heading back toward the path. "The Wood hid us. Now nothing does."
The others followed. I fell in after them and didn’t look back.
We made camp on a ridge overlooking the canyon below.
Tomorrow, Liraeth. Tomorrow, answers—or at least the hope of them. But tonight, one more night under open sky, with nothing but rock and scrub and the distant smudge of the Sensorium at our backs.
The others moved through the familiar rhythms of making camp.
Dreadscale building the fire ring. Serenya sorting rations.
Maxx gathering what passed for firewood in this rocky terrain—twisted branches from stubborn trees that clung to the cliffside.
Eryndor checking the perimeter, silent and watchful.
I drifted away.
Not far. Just to the edge of the ridge, where the rock jutted out over nothing. The drop was sheer—a hundred feet, maybe more—and the valley spread below like a dark quilt, stitched with the silver thread of a river catching the last light.
I sat. Let my legs dangle over the edge.
The wind was cold and clean up here. It smelled like sage and sun-baked stone.
My mind kept circling back to the tracks. The footprints pressed into solid stone. The mechanical precision of that stride. The way my Mark had burned when I touched them.
Cold and dark and alone and hunting hunting, always hunting—
I shuddered. Wrapped my arms around myself.
What was following us? What had waited at the border of the Sensorium with the patience of something that didn't need to sleep, didn't need to eat, didn't need anything except to find us?
My fingers found my thigh. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
The rhythm came without thought. Old. Familiar. Worn into my bones before I was old enough to remember learning it.
I hadn't sung it out loud since before my brother was taken. Since before silence started feeling safer than memory.
And then—I finally let it escape—I started to sing.
“In the dawn when stars could speak, And shadow drank the light, The Veil was spun from sacred thread— To keep all things as one.”
My mother's voice. That's what I heard when the words came out. Not my voice—hers. The way she used to sing it in the dark when the nightmares came. The way it made everything feel safe, even when nothing was.
“One soul heard the weeping world, And tried to mend the seam, He drank the dark, embraced the light, And dreamed a healing dream.”
The wind shifted.
I kept singing, eyes on the valley, fingers tapping the rhythm against my leg.
“But pain too vast will crack the glass, And love can break the brave— His soul split thrice, and with its fall, He tore the sky like wave.”
The wind picked up again. And this time—
It sang back.
“Now Light walks blind, and Shadow bleeds, And truth is bound and torn— Each fae-born child must wear the mark Of what the soul has sworn.”
I paused.
The voice wasn't mine. Wasn't fae. It came from everywhere and nowhere—carried on the wind from the direction of the Sensorium, high and strange and ancient.
“So mark the face and mind the scar, And never cross the thread—”
More voices now. Layered. Harmonizing in ways that made my chest ache. The Wildlings. Singing from the trees we'd left behind, their voices threading through the wind like memory.
“For those who seek to weave again,”
Their voices grew softer. Fading back into the forest. Into the wind.
“ Will walk where gods have bled.”