Chapter 7 The Wave Held Still #2
The moment cracked. Tension flared. Something passed between the two of them.
A new kind of familiarity. Resh stepped between them, but Zarrek wasn’t looking at her like a man looks at a person.
He looked at her the way a commander examined a battlefield that broke all convention.
Uncertainty was his greatest nemesis, and neither he nor Resh had ever encountered anything in their days together as uncertain as this woman and her magic.
“She saved us,” Resh shot back, regardless. “All of us.”
“At what cost? That wasn’t casting—it was something older. Something lost.” Zarrek’s voice dropped, but the tension behind it only sharpened. “You saw it. The stillness. The way the wave obeyed. No runes. No sigils. No conduit. Resh, that’s—”
Resh stepped closer, rain dripping from his brow, his voice low and firm. “Magic that saved our lives.”
Zarrek’s mouth pressed into a line—but he didn’t move. The silence between them stretched—thick as the fog creeping in at their feet. Rain tapped like fingers on armor. Somewhere, a horse stamped nervously. Men were shouting, rolling the wagons to a safe ridge.
“Zar, this isn’t the time,” Resh said. “Night is coming. We’re drenched. I may not feel the cold, but the men do. As do you. We need to secure camp, ensure the supplies are safe and dry.”
The grizzled warrior spat something in Old Krystopolitan and turned his back, walking away. Resh exhaled, pulse still thudding in his ears. He didn’t want to fight. Not now. Not when they owed her their lives. The mist had thickened, curling at their ankles like smoke.
Zarrek gathered stragglers, threatened those that continued to stare.
Among the last to cross the river were the Riftwardens, mages specialized in tracking tears and predicting their locations.
They argued when Zarrek told them to leave their precious dowsing rods behind in the wagons to help set up camp.
A few glared at Auryn with blatant hostility.
They were always trouble. Weak in body and just intelligent enough to cause conflict, but if anyone can handle them, it’s Zarrek.
When Resh finally glanced back to where she had stood—
Auryn had vanished.
A chill scraped down his spine. He turned, scanning the riverbank. There—a flash of silver through the fog. Moving. She took a step toward the shore. Staggering now. Then her knees buckled.
A shout from one of the men. Several Reskala converged around her. Resh ran, kneeling beside her. She hadn’t lost consciousness. Was still awake, but her entire body quivered and shook. When a Reskala reached to touch her, Resh grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t,” he snapped. “Everyone, back off. Give her some air.”
That was when she fell the rest of the way into the mud.
Panic slammed into him. He reached for her.
Hesitated. Images of her strange silver magic flashed through his memories.
What if it surged when he touched her? What if it lashed out?
He wasn’t afraid for himself, but for the gawking warriors gathering around them.
Another voice cut through the air. “You heard the Commander! Back away now!”
Zarrek pushed several warriors aside, his massive frame towering over them all. “Get to work on the camp and supplies. If I see one of you looking in this direction, you’ll be on latrine duty for a month!”
Auryn’s skin was pale, her breathing shallow, her fingers twitching.
“The Veil…pulls,” she gasped.
Their eyes met, and the moment that he saw a flash of fear there, he broke, pulling her out of the mud into his arms.
“Don’t…let me…drift…” she whispered.
Zarrek barked orders, men scrambled, and an Anchor was driven into the ground to buy them time until the mages and Wardens could secure the wards. The men brought firewood. Blankets. Cots. By the Bloodletter's orders, no one looked directly at her.
Resh sat holding Auryn against his chest, torn in two.
He wanted to be out there helping his men, securing their camp, preparing for the night.
But just the thought of leaving Auryn somewhere alone or in another’s care was enough to tighten his grip on her.
He looked down at her face, shocked to find her looking back.
Still shaking. Still barely breathing. Yet, when she spoke, her thoughts were not for herself.
“I’ve asked…too much,” she rasped. “Go…if you need to…”
“No. I’m staying here. With you.”
Her pupils—gray behind a veil of shimmering silver—dilated as her eyes drifted closed.
His earlier panic returned. Was this mana depletion?
Backlash? If so, she needed warmth and rest. She’d asked him not to let her drift.
Needles pricked into the nape of his neck like a warning from the stars themselves.
Resh cradled her head and whispered low in her ear, “Don’t sleep now, starlight. Not yet.”
She stirred. “Kailorien…”
“I’m here,” he murmured.
She went limp in his arms—still aware, but drifting somewhere between dreams and wakefulness. Her fingers rested near his chest then stilled.
Resh held her for a long time after the others dispersed.
Even Zarrek kept his distance, his shoulders less rigid, his weapon no longer glowing.
The camp moved like ghosts—quiet voices, lowered eyes, no one quite willing to speak above a murmur.
Someone handed him a fur blanket to help keep her warm.
Time drifted as the men finished setting up his tent. He stood and walked to it, Zarrek at his side taking last-minute orders. Warriors, cooks, crafters, and blacksmiths milled about them as they walked. Gossip carried on the wind.
“She stopped the river,” someone whispered.
“Witch,” one of the Riftwardens hissed. “Heresy. Blasphemy.”
“No runes.”
One Reskala signed reverently. Then another. More soon followed, all signing the same.
“Sokar.”
“Child of the Void.”
Zarrek silenced them all with a single look. His golden eyes met Resh’s, and the command did not need to be spoken. Silence the rumors before they grow too vast.
Night came, and with it, the howling of the varkhounds, new rotations, and the smell of freshly warmed rations.
In the flickering firelight of the Commander’s tent, Auryn lay still on his bed.
The winds settled, the Anchor and its wards holding the rain at bay.
Resh sat nearby, watching the slow rise and fall of Auryn’s breath.
He didn’t know what she was.
But she had saved them all.
And he knew—deep in the marrow of his bones—that if she stopped breathing, something inside him would stop too.
Resh drifted at the edges of wakefulness. He let his mind wander, but not his guard. Darkness beckoned, but a sound pulled him from the cusp of it. The soft scrape of a chest opening.
Auryn.
On her feet.
Her steps were steady—but slow, as if her body remembered the weight of the river she’d held with nothing but silver light and her will.
He surged up, startled. “Auryn, you should be in bed.”
She didn’t respond. Just crouched, rifling through a pile of objects—books, sticks, pressed flowers, a wind chime.
It was her chest, the one he’d given her to stash all of the little bits and baubles she’d collected over the last weeks.
Whatever caught her interest on their travels made it here, except for the objects she couldn’t bear to part with.
Those she kept in a small leather satchel that rarely left her hip.
He called to her again. She glanced at him. Then at the bed. Suddenly, without explanation, she tore off the oversized wool socks he’d put on her feet to keep her warm and kept searching. Her bare toes curled against the cold, but he couldn’t miss the sigh of relief that fluttered from her lips.
She was ignoring him, likely distracted. When she was of a mind to do something or explore a thought, hardly anything could sway her from her course. He sighed, sinking back into his chair.
The day’s journal lay open before him. He tried to focus. Winds, troop morale, scouting positions. Rumors of allies moving to cross paths with the Kelvasari. Joining forces could prove advantageous, especially with the rifts so near.
A tug at the back of his neck stilled his hand.
He reached back to scratch his nape on instinct when he realized it was Auryn.
Long fingers, small and steady, smoothed a section of his hair between them.
The sensation was simultaneously jarring yet soothing.
Like tiny bolts of lightning running from his scalp down his spine then melting into pleasure.
Once. Then again.
“This is like a river,” Auryn whispered, far too close. “And soft. I like it.”
He stared at the page, paralyzed. Her fingers began to braid. He didn’t stop her. Heat flared low in his abdomen, coiling with slow, dangerous purpose. His body was already betraying him, aching toward her before he’d even dared admit it aloud.
Her fingers threaded through his hair, gentle but sure. Each motion tugged something deeper than flesh. He clenched the quill tighter, jaw set, eyes fixed on the page. He read the same sentence three times. Not a single word landed.
There was no use pretending anymore. He wanted her.
Not just in some vague, distant way—but fully.
Viscerally. The heat of her skin, her breath against his neck, the curve of her waist, the sound she made when she concentrated—he wanted it.
All of it. And he was losing his Voids-damned mind because of it.
“In town,” she said, oblivious to his turmoil, “girls gave ribbons to warriors. Some had no hair, so they tied them to their armor. They said it was to give them strength.”
Her hands moved with slow certainty, like she wasn’t just braiding hair, but weaving some kind of vow into the strands. He barely registered the words. He only felt her—the soft drag of her fingertips, the brush of her knuckles as she worked through his locks like he was hers to tend.
Then she moved.
Stepped around him.
Between his knees.
And Resh forgot how to breathe.