5. Sabine
SABINE
My stomach cramps again, sharp and mean, and I press my fist against it like that will help.
"You are shaking," Tovian says from behind me, his voice carrying a clipped precision.
"I'm cold."
"You haven’t eaten since the fall. That is two days."
"I know how long it's been." I finally look at him over my shoulder. He is crouched at the entrance of the smaller chamber, arms braced on his knees, watching me with those molten eyes narrowed. He does a lot of his thinking through irritation.
"What exactly did you expect? There's nothing down here but rock and dead air and your extremely charming company."
"You require food."
"Brilliant. Truly, the mind of a ruler."
He rises to his full height, and I take an involuntary step backward despite myself. Even after days of this, his size doesn't stop being shocking. Eight feet of obsidian stone and coiled violence filling the chamber doorway, and the worst part is he moves quietly for a creature so enormous.
"You will go to the settlement," he says. "Collect what you need. You have until the mist thins."
I blink. "You're letting me leave?"
"I am allowing you to not die of starvation." His tone suggests these are two very different things. "You will return."
Blackstone Valley looks wrong in the middle of the day.
Torches are burning along the market row, lit at noon like it's the dead of night.
I can smell the fear before I reach the main road—woodsmoke, metal, and the sour edge of a community that hasn't slept properly in days.
Old Shaela from the cooper's shop is standing in his doorway with a splitting axe across his lap.
Two women I vaguely recognize from the tanner's row are walking in pairs with iron kitchen blades tucked into their belts.
I pull my coat tighter and keep my head down. I don't make it ten steps before a hand catches my arm.
"Sabine." Velka looks me up and down in a single sharp sweep, and whatever she sees makes her expression shift from relief to suspicion in about a half second. "Where the hell have you been? You look like you crawled out of a cave."
"Close enough." I try to keep walking. She falls into step beside me, which I should have expected. Velka doesn't take hints.
"The valley's been in a state," she says. "Elara's son swore he saw something perched on the north ridge three nights running. Wings, he said. Big ones."
She looks at me sideways. "You wouldn't know anything about that."
"I've been managing the upper cemetery. Landslide damage."
"For two days?" She doesn't phrase it as a question.
I shrug.
Velka stops walking. I don't. She catches up in two strides.
"I'm going up there, Sabine. Tomorrow morning. Father Corren gave me old trapping maps of the cathedral grounds, and Sedgewick is lending me iron-tipped bolts. Whatever's nesting up there in those ruins—I'm going to put it down."
"Be careful," I say, and I hope it sounds like general caution. "The upper grounds are unstable after the storm. Sinkholes."
She studies me for a long while. "You're a terrible liar, Sabine."
"I'm a phenomenal liar. You just know me too well." I manage a thin smile. "Let me get home. I'll come find you later."
Leif is on me before I'm through the door.
"Sabine." He grabs my coat by the lapels and I barely get my footing before he's pulling me inside. He's thinner than I remember. Dark circles beneath his brown eyes. "I thought something happened to you. I thought—"
"I'm fine." I squeeze his arm. "I'm here."
"You weren't here." He releases me and steps back, and his voice drops into a register quieter and more frightened than his usual anxious loudness.
"Sabine, the things people are saying. About the shadow on the north ridge. About the sounds at night from the mountain." He swallows. "We need to pack. Both of us, tonight. There's a trade road south through the lower pass—"
"Leif—"
"Before it burns the valley. Before it comes down from the mountain and we're still in our beds when it does." He's gripping my coat again, both hands this time, and his knuckles are white. "Please."
A sharp, splitting tension pulls me in two directions hard enough to hurt. I look at his face and I want very badly to say yes. Pack your things. Let's run.
"Give me an hour," I say instead. "There's something I need to do first."
"Sabine?"
"One hour, Leif. I promise."
Father Corren's study smells exactly the way it always has: damp wool, old parchment, and the particular staleness of candle wax burned down to nothing in a cold room. He doesn't look surprised to see me, which means he was expecting trouble.
"Sit," he says, before I've said a word.
"The carvings in the great cavern beneath the cathedral ruins. The markings on the walls." He goes very still. "You know what they are."
He moves to the locked chest behind his writing desk without another word and produces a key from beneath his collar.
The records he sets before me are barely records anymore—crumbling sheets wrapped in cloth, the ink faded to brown, the edges crumbling to dust at the corners.
At the top, in the formal script of a cathedral official, the name Sevrik Mourne is written in careful, authoritative strokes.
I read, and my worldview quietly begins coming apart at the seams.
The gargoyles weren't invaders. They were defenders—winged protectors holding the mountain passes against raiders and predators in exchange for something they needed to survive, something the humans were glad to give.
The alliance held for generations, rooted in a mutual survival that felt less like a transaction and more like a heartbeat.
The cathedral itself had been anchored to the peaks to serve as the physical manifestation of this pact—a shared stronghold and sacred ground where the two species could meet without the shadow of suspicion. It was a monument to coexistence, built to bridge the gap between the stone and the flesh.
The great cavern beneath the cathedral wasn't a prison or a ruin. It was a gathering hall. A place they met every year, humans and gargoyles both, to renew a peace that was as fragile as it was important.
The trail back up is cold and getting colder, afternoon light going flat and grey above the tree line. I'm halfway to the first ridge when I smell blood.
I round the bend and stop.
The snow is torn up across a wide stretch of the path—not cleanly, not the neat prints of deer or mountain cat.
The kind of destruction that comes from a fight.
Eight wolves, maybe more. And among them, the pale, eyeless cave predators I remember from the cavern—longer limbs, wrong proportions, jaws that don't close right. Several of them. All of them dead.
I crouch beside the nearest wolf. The gash across its flank is massive. The bone beneath is shattered, like something with much larger hands decided the outcome before the fight began.
The predators were heading downhill.
Following scent, warmth, and the fires of a sleeping village that had no idea they were being tracked through the dark.
I stand slowly and my breath fogs white in the cold air.
He was out here last night. While I slept in the cave chamber and told myself I was a prisoner and a victim and that the fastest road back to normal was away from all of this—he was out here in the dark, cutting down anything moving toward Blackstone Valley. Toward Leif. Velka.
I look up at the jagged peaks dissolving into grey mist.
I know he's up there. Watching me stand over the evidence of a mercy he would never admit to. He claimed human blood was an insult to breathe. He said we were fragile animals fit only for guarding, like livestock penned for convenience.
But livestock don't get guardians. Livestock get fences. This was something else.
The plan to run with Leif feels suddenly distant, as if conceived in a different life. There's a weight settling into my chest, a realization that I have chosen a side, and the choosing has already begun to change me.
I turn back toward the mountain, and I start climbing.