25. Sabine
SABINE
The mountain air hits my face like a blade the moment we clear the tunnel mouth.
I pull in a slow breath and let it anchor me, because I need anchoring. My body hasn't fully returned to me yet. Even now, moving through the dark tree line with Tovian a half-step behind, I can still feel him — the phantom weight of his hands braced against my hips, the low, wrecked sound he made.
I press my thighs together without thinking and feel the answering ache hum through me like struck iron cooling. A secret carved directly into my skin that no amount of cold mountain air will touch.
I force my attention forward.
The enemy perimeter glows amber through the treeline, campfires in loose clusters, too bright and too spread out. Tharros's scouts are watching the sky and the main pass. They're not watching the ridge.
We find Vorgrym and Velka crouched beneath a collapsed spruce forty yards from the tunnel exit.
Both of them are filthy, scraped raw from digging through rockslide debris, but neither looks broken.
Velka's jaw is set like she is personally furious at the mountain itself.
Vorgrym's single working eye finds Tovian first, then drops to me, and what moves through it is complicated enough to read as a full sentence.
"The human is still breathing," Vorgrym says flatly.
"So is yours.” I say. “We can't all be lucky.”
Velka snorts quietly. "I like her more every hour."
Tovian says nothing. He settles his hand on my lower back, then withdraws it. But I felt it, and from the way Vorgrym's eye narrows, so did he.
We move quickly into the operational brief. I spread the old hunters' map across a flat stone and press my thumb against the ridge line cutting northeast behind the enemy camp. Forgotten trail. Too narrow for gargoyle wingspans, too overgrown for any patrol bothering to look past the main approach.
"We take the vanguard," I tell Vorgrym. "You and Tovian follow the lower tree line and cover the eastern flank. If any aerial scouts break early, that's your problem."
Vorgrym looks at me for a long beat. Then he looks at the map. Then back at me.
"She's right," he says finally. "The ridge approach is sound."
Velka tips her head toward him with an expression of pure, weaponized delight. "Did it hurt," she whispers loudly, "taking orders from a gravekeeper?"
Vorgrym bares his teeth at her. She grins back, unbothered, and I love her for it.
The ghost trail earns its name. It is barely a trail at all — a suggestion of flattened earth beneath decades of overgrowth, winding through jagged rock and black-needled pine so dense the sky disappears entirely overhead.
Velka moves through it like she was born here, silent and precise, her hand signals crisp and economical. I keep pace two steps behind, reading the terrain ahead, watching for the amber leak of firelight through the trees.
We don't speak for a long stretch. Then Velka glances sideways at me.
"So," she says, voice barely above a breath. "The rumors."
I don't look at her. "No."
"I'm just asking."
"You're always just asking."
She's quiet for a few seconds, then: "You were in that tunnel a long time, Sabine."
"There was a rockslide."
"There was a rockslide," she repeats, like she's tasting the excuse. "Right. And the rumors?"
"Are none of your business."
The corner of her mouth pulls up. She faces forward again.
Another stretch of silence. Then, so quietly I almost miss it: "So they're true then."
The enemy camp resolves out of the dark in increments — first the smell, raw meat and sulfur and beneath both, a mineral ancientness I've come to recognize as concentrated gargoyle musk, animal and territorial and utterly inhuman.
Then the shapes. Silhouettes massive enough to block the stars.
Tharros's elite warriors move between torchlit tents in slow, arrogant patrols, and the casual certainty in their movements makes my stomach drop.
They're not afraid. They have no reason to be afraid.
We're about to give them one.
Velka touches my arm. Points. Below the main tent cluster, the earth drops in a series of cut trenches — makeshift holding pens dug directly into frozen ground and sealed with heavy iron grating. I scan until I find him.
Leif.
He's sitting upright in the trench despite the shackles. His face is a mess of bruising but his spine is straight.
I signal Velka. She nods.
Then Tovian and Vorgrym hit the eastern flank like a controlled detonation, and the camp erupts.
Tharros's warriors respond in seconds — too fast, too coordinated — and the camp transforms into a collision of massive bodies and drawn weapons, stone skin cracking against drakestone blades, the ground shuddering under forces that have nothing human about them.
Tovian moves through the chaos like a dark current, efficient and devastating, and I can’t watch him right now. I will watch him later. Right now I am running.
Velka and I drop into the trench system at a dead sprint. The iron grating on Leif's pen is bolted with a lock the size of my fist and I jam Vorgrym's gifted blade into the hinge mechanism while Velka guards the lip above.
"Sabie." Leif's voice is hoarse but immediate. "You're insane. You absolute—"
"Yes, I know I'm crazy." I wrench the hinge. Metal screeches. "Can you stand?"
"My legs work. My pride doesn't."
"Your pride will recover." The grating gives. I drop into the pen and get under his arm, taking his weight across my shoulders. He leans into me, and even through the chaos I can feel how badly he is shaking. "I've got you. Come on."
As we step up the trench wall, I hear a massive displacement of air — sudden, enormous, like a great weight dropping from height.
I twist my body and put it in front of Leif's.
The impact is heat, first. Blinding, searing heat across my side and shoulder, and then the snow is rising up to meet me and I am falling, and the sound that tears out of me is a harsh jarring scream ripping out of my throat.
I hit the ground hard enough to scatter my vision into fragments.
White. Black. Red bleeding through both.
The lacerations are deep. I can feel each one individually, can feel the exact path each talon carved. I press my palm to my side and the copper smell hits my throat, sharp and sudden.
I roll onto my back. The sky is full of fire and wings and violence, and somewhere above me Velka is screaming Tovian's name.
Then the world stops.
I watch it happen across the span of thirty feet — watch the exact moment Tovian’s gold eyes find the blood soaking through my coat.
There is no wasted motion. He catches the closest warrior by the throat, the sound of vertebrae snapping like dry kindling. With a casual, backhanded jerk, he rips the gargoyle’s wing clean from its socket
I watch, paralyzed, as he descends upon the next two.
He drives his thumbs into the eye sockets of one, the granite skull caving inward with a hollow crunch that vibrates in my own teeth.
He doesn't flinch as the creature's life-force spatters across his chest. He simply pivots, his talons whipping around like a serrated scythe to disembowel the warrior rushing his flank.
The warrior's midsection opens in a jagged horizontal line, spilling gray, calcified organs onto the floor in a steaming heap.
The silence is the most terrifying part.
The enemies are screaming—high, whistling sounds of absolute agony—but Tovian is a void.
He is a statue granted the gift of murder.
He catches a blade meant for his throat in his bare palm, the metal snapping against his skin, and uses the jagged shard to throat-punch the attacker.
He twists the metal deep, carving through stone and sinew until the warrior’s head hangs by a single, pulsing tendon.
He is tearing them down to their component parts. He reaches into the chest cavity of the last standing soldier, his claws hooking under the ribs. With a sickening, rhythmic heaving motion, he pries the ribcage apart.
He stands in the center of the carnage, chest heaving, his hands dripping with the thick, dark evidence.
The scouts that survive do what prey does.
They run. They hit the sky and scatter into the mountain dark, screaming as they go, and even through the thickening fog at the edge of my consciousness I can hear the shape of what they're carrying with them — the words already forming, already spreading across every ridge and valley they'll touch before dawn:
The Ashwing Alpha has gone mad. The human has broken him.
Tovian gathers me from the snow. His arms are shaking. His hands, enormous and blood-soaked, hold me with a gentleness so violent in its contrast that my chest cracks open somewhere I can't reach.
"Sabine." His voice is destroyed.
The dark is already closing in at the edges, and the last thing I feel before it takes me is a cold, devastating certainty settling into my bones like frost.
I am the thing that destroys Tovian.