Chapter 8 #2
Especially not to walk this terrain of foliage and broken clumps of ice that my ankles wobble over with every careful step.
I wonder if we’re making our way back to the camp—but then the thought is jolted from me as I lurch forward.
A quake rattles me.
My boots root to the frosted soil—and I stiffen.
Samick does, too.
His presence stills beside me.
Even in the dark, I feel him frost over, and I swear the whole unit falters.
All the noise, the bootsteps, soles slipping over ice, muttered curses and ragged breaths—it all cuts off so suddenly that I fear, just for a second, that I’ve spontaneously gone deaf.
I roll my jaw.
My ears don’t pop.
But something beneath my boots does.
Though the dark is thick, I drop my gaze to the earth—as though I’ll see what’s popping… what’s festering.
That’s what it sounds like.
Festering. Like bubbles coming up a throat, or the slow start of a boil in a pot.
Ropes of ice unfurl in my chest.
I turn a slack look on Samick—who I’m sure sees me and my terror just fine.
But maybe he doesn’t look at me.
Not now that the festering is spreading all over the forest floor. And a stink comes with it.
The whole unit is quiet—silent, waiting—as the stench of charred acid churns around us, like stomach bile and scorched earth.
The quake rattles me again.
Another shiver beneath my boots.
This one doesn’t stop. Doesn’t come and go.
It deepens, a low, rising growl from the earth.
A shout splinters the silence—
Then the earth cracks.
It’s a fucking earthquake.
I can’t see shit. But I hear it all.
The shouts, the cries, the stumbles—the cracks that splinter all over the earth, jagged and hungry.
Earth is collapsing into pits, and I only know it because of the sound of raining soil.
The crack of a tree rises up behind me—
And the unit scatters into chaos.
I’m yanked aside, my body bowing at the hip.
The roar of a tree comes crashing down.
Samick pulls me out of the way—and into a run.
He runs.
I stumble.
My legs are barely keeping up as the terrain shifts beneath me. My ankles wobble with every hard, uneven landing—and I need light.
I can’t do this in the dark.
Bootsteps thunder from every direction.
I don’t know which are ours.
I don’t know which are his.
I can’t keep up.
My breaths are tearing out of me in ragged gasps. But the oxygen isn’t feeding me, and my vision is blurring.
I start to sink, my legs giving out, my head spinning—but before I can fall to the volatile earth, I’m suddenly lifted.
Darkness and gravity twist all around me, until I come down a hard shoulder.
A grunt catches in my throat.
I dangle, folded over.
But the panic doesn’t ebb.
The shudder of the quake trembles all the way up Samick to me, rigid over his shoulder, hands fisted on his leathers.
Wind rushes over me, whips at my raw cheeks, and distantly, I hear a woman’s cry.
A human.
A kuri.
My chest is tight—but not for her.
It’s the suffocating, crushing pressure of Samick’s shoulder smacking into my middle with every step of his run through the crumbling woods.
Mika’s voice slices through the dark. A hollow shout, a single word.
She’s close.
Not close enough that I can reach out and touch her—not that I would let go of Samick’s leathers in this crashing chaos—but she’s sticking with us in the dark.
We don’t stop.
I don’t know what she said, who she was shouting at, but not a fucking heartbeat after, a crash rips through the woods—
My heart jolts to a stop.
Because the earth splits open.
My eyes widen.
The tear of crimson stretches through the blackness, wider and wider, like its eating the dark.
Holy.
Fucking.
Shit.
A guttural shout rips out of me, and in answer, Samick’s grip on the small of my back tightens, as if to hold me in place in case my panic turns on me, and I try to flee.
But I don’t.
I’m just frozen.
Trees are coming down all around, cries echo through the woods, and a growing crimson crack is splintering through the blackout.
Samick doesn’t stop.
He runs.
And he runs.
And he runs—for so long that I don’t hear the cries and shouts anymore.
He runs so far that the woods are left behind.
The he runs even longer, until his boots are smacking down on a road—and only then, does he stop.
The second he does, he tugs me off his shoulder and sets me down. But his arm stays looped around me, holding me up.
My legs shudder.
And I stare back at what we ran from.
Darkness splintering with tears of crimson.
Those gleams reach us, but there’s something flickering about it.
Like shadows moving…
Or people running.
Samick’s urgency hasn’t settled.
He shoves something cold and hard into my hand.
The shape of it is familiar in my palm, even through the gloves.
My fingers fumble over it, tracing the length before recognition hits.
The crimson light isn’t strong or close enough to reach these shadows we stand in, but I don’t need the light—ironically—to see what’s in my hand.
My torch.
The small one with the wrist strap.
I don’t know when Samick took it from my backpack, and I don’t get a moment to think about it, because his hand is snatching up my forearm in a blur of frost—
And I’m chucked away from him.
Air whips me as I tumble through it.
I hit the ground.
The torch clatters onto the wet road.
I scramble for it, hands splashing in shallow puddles. The second my fingers fumble over it, I’m feeling along the metal for the switch.
I flick it—and spin around to swerve the beam of white light over the road.
I expect Samick to be standing there.
But it’s Arwyn who’s towering in front of me. His back to me, he is a solid wall of ice, the ice that prickles over his hands, crisps along his fingers.
I tilt onto my side, submerged in a cold puddle, my lips already shuddering—and I see what’s coming up the road towards us.
Three fae stand with their backs to me.
Samick.
Mika.
Shark.
But there are others. Three more.
The shadows that were racing away from the earthquake weren’t just fleeing, they were chasing us—and now, they come to a stop on the road, puddles at their boots.
A fae with a ribbed scar twisting over his mouth, like his lips have been sewn together, a permanent snarl I’ve noticed around the unit.
Then the one who looks like that orange drink, Fanta, if it were a fae. Bright orange hair, eyes to match, and so many pale brown freckles that his face looks like fizz.
But the one who hooks my gaze—and the aim of my torchlight—is the one who bolts my heart to my chest.
The one who freezes me.
Rust.
The raging flare of his gaze is locked onto me.
It pins me to the asphalt.
I can’t look away.
I’m stuck, rooted to the road.
Rage curls his lips into something feral.
Still staring me down, he shouts and points a jagged black dagger right at me.
A chill ripples down my spine.
His words prickle through the cold, sharp air. That unfamiliar language I don’t understand, sounds I can’t make with my own throat—but I get the gist of it.
Hand her over.
Give her up.
She’s nothing.
I swallow back a lump in my throat, then turn my watering gaze on Samick.
He stands tall against the threat.
Rain hangs in the air like a mist, stagnant, and it glistens his leathers against the spanning darkness, an ocean rippling at night.
A muscle slashes across his cheek—but there’s no answer to come.
He stares Rust down.
My gut worms with each passing millisecond—that harrowing, frozen fear that Samick will concede.
Not just concede, but… make the logical choice.
The choice to hand me over, and all of this ends.
The burden of me ends.
I would do it.
I would hand someone over to spare my friends.
I would hand anyone over to spare Bee.
The tears are cold down my cheeks.
Samick plants his boots, firm. A fighting stance. Prepared and ready.
He speaks a single unintelligible word.
But the sound of it loosens something tight in my chest, and I feel like I can breathe again. Not much, but enough.
Because that was undeniably a rejection.
That stance was a message.
You’ll have to go through me.
Samick must have a bargain of steel with Dare.
Rust takes a menacing step closer.
Whatever he says, I don’t understand. It’s aimed at Samick. And I don’t think it’s about me, because whatever he says—it pisses Samick right off.
Frost blooms.
It starts at Samick’s fingers. Pale skin threading with white, ice forming between his knuckles, as delicate as lace. Then it spills down the length of the glassy dagger in his fist, spreading, growing, as intricate as snowflakes multiplying faster than I can track.
It’s not the cold air.
It’s him.
Rust snarls an animalistic sound, raw and utterly vicious.
It throws me back into the puddle, cringed.
The moment that stale, dirty water splashes up around me, there’s an explosion of urgency on the road, and it’s feral.
Two walls of fae collide.
Samick and Rust clash.
Their daggers take the brunt of the impact before they shove back from each other.
Neither of them wastes the step.
They spin, cutting out their sharp weapons fast enough that I hear the hiss of the blades slicing the air.
The blades strike with a burst of frost and sparks.
Then again. And again.
Glued to the puddle, my wide eyes can’t tear away from the constant strikes and blocks, the swirling mist of crimson and frost.
Mika cuts through my line of sight like a sword.
Her glacier hair whips with more sharpness than what’s in her tired eyes. The fatigue clings to her, slowing her down. It’s in her staggered steps, her low lashes, the weight of the weapon in her hand.
Steel chases her. A warrior brandishing a greyish metal sword, longer than my arm, slashes and slashes too close to her middle.
He battles her out of her space, throwing her back with every near miss of the blade.
Arwyn stiffens.
Tension runs up his spine.
The sudden turn of his clenched jaw angles his cheek to face me. He watches Mika stagger back from the near-strikes.
Shark and the orange fae blow past in a billowing cloud, stealing my gaze from Mika’s lethargic retreat.
But as he passes, Shark takes a heartbeat to kick out at the scarred fae closing in on Mika—
The scarred warrior hits the ground.
Mika gets her bearings, hoists her blade, then rushes at him.
But it’s all moving so fast.
Faster than my human eyes can track.
It shifts into moments of blurred whirling clouds sweeping over the road, in and out of my torchlight, and each time I blink, the fight has shifted.
Shark blasts into the orange fae with fisted blows, no weapons in either of their hands.
It takes me a moment too long to find the blades glinting in a puddle, dropped and abandoned.
Then a boot lands in that puddle.
Water splashes up a leather-sheathed leg.
I trace it up the muscled, sculpted body to Samick’s sharp face. His eyes are as white as the snow we left behind in the northern winter.
There’s a cut on his brow. It bleeds that white liquid again, blood that used to turn my stomach.
Now, my stomach is turning for other reasons.
Rust ducks before Samick’s blade can slice apart his throat, and as he ducks, he boots out and catches Samick in the middle.
That blows Samick back a few steps—
And my insides lurch, because I know Samick could have dodged that kick.
I’ve seen him fight before, I’ve seen him fight Rust.
Samick moves with the cold in the air, like he’s one with all things winter, and the way he moves—it’s shuddering, it’s alien, static shifting through space.
He could have dodged it.
But he didn’t.
And he doesn’t avoid the next kick that throws him back, his boots skidding too close to me.
Dread sinks my heart to my worming gut.
Rust is using Samick’s protection of me against him. Samick won’t dodge his kicks, because if he does, it leaves a straight line of attack between Rust and me.
Arwyn leans onto his right boot, and his bulking form is suddenly blocking me from a new angle.
Then his arm moves—quick, precise.
A knife flies past my shoulder, disappearing into the darkness.
I hear it clatter on the road.
Arwyn whacked the blade away.
But if he knows who threw the knife, he doesn’t share it with me. I have no idea who got that close to striking me.
I just know that I’m stuck in a puddle, the torchlight shuddering over chaos, because my hand won’t stop trembling—
And the fight is sickening.
Brutal. Relentless. Sometimes spilling too close to me.
Warriors roll into each other, pairs forming clouds of chaos, then they split apart again.
I can’t track it all.
I just catch fragments—Shark taking a hit, Mika staggering, black blood spilling from her nose, and she shouts something strangled before she rams into the scarred fae’s back.
He is thrown off his boots from the impact—
And he crashes into Samick’s side.
The impact staggers Samick, slips his boots, and he stumbles into my line of sight.
Everything in me freezes.
Because Rust has an opening.
There’s no fucking hesitation.
Rust vaults for me.
Time stutters.
Arwyn rushes forward, intercepting Rust with a clash of swords that strikes the cold air.
Orange fae peels off and lunges for Arwyn.
And my panicked gaze hesitates for a beat, swerving around for Shark who should be coming any second now to take down the orange warrior…
But instead, I find a crumpled body on the road.
Shark.
A twisted neck and dead eyes.
Samick whips towards us, but he shouts, sharp and hollow—
“Run!”
My face twists with the sudden wave of tears, but I scramble onto my boots—and throw myself into a sprint.
The torch jerks wildly in my hand, its thin beam cutting through the dark just enough to show me—
Nothing.
Endless ruins of nothing.
Debris smears the ground, jagged and uneven, but beyond that… there’s no shape to the world.
No horizon.
No landmarks.
Just blackness.
All I can do is chase the rough surface of the road, and hope that Rust isn’t right behind me.