Chapter 6 Tanith
SIX
TANITH
We walk in silence for another hour. The Dead Roads wind through increasingly ruined territory, past landmarks that used to mark thriving communities.
My journal fills with notes. Boundaries marked.
Magic conditions documented. The picture that emerges confirms what I already suspected: the Reach is winning.
Whatever forces hold the corruption in check—ley-line stability, natural magical resistance, the slow regeneration of the world’s underlying fabric—they’re failing.
We stop for midday rest near a spring that still flows, one of the few water sources in the Dead Roads that hasn’t gone metallic or dry. The water tastes flat but clean, and I drink deeply while Arax conducts what I’ve come to recognize as his standard perimeter check.
He doesn’t sit. Doesn’t rest. He patrols the boundaries of our temporary stop with the same relentless thoroughness he applies to everything, eliminating threats I can’t see and probably wouldn’t survive.
“You should eat.” I toss a travel ration in his direction without looking. “Even dragons need fuel.”
He catches it one-handed. “Dragons require less sustenance than humans.”
“Less isn’t none. Eat.”
A pause. Then the sound of the ration’s wrapping being opened.
I hide my satisfaction behind another mouthful of water.
“You’re documenting patterns.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question.
“What about them?”
“You’re tracking expansion rates. Comparing current conditions to historical data.”
“Someone has to.” I cap my water container and tuck it back into my pack. “The Reach doesn’t follow normal patterns of magical decay. It’s not entropy—it’s acceleration. Active expansion rather than passive spread.”
“The Ashen Flight has similar documentation.”
“Then you already know how bad it is.”
“We know.” He finishes the ration and disposes of the wrapping with a precision that borders on ritualistic. “We have known for decades. The question isn’t whether the Reach will consume the realm. The question is how long we can delay the inevitable.”
The casual fatalism should surprise me. It doesn’t. I’ve spent three years watching the world unravel. Hope died somewhere around the second city I watched disappear.
“What happens when there are no more rituals to end? When the Reach expands on its own, without catalysis?”
He doesn’t answer. The silence stretches long enough that I think he’s refusing to engage.
Then: “We adapt. Or we die.”
“That’s not a strategy.”
“It’s the only strategy that matters.”
I can’t argue with that. I’ve lived by the same principle for years—adapt or die, survive or become another absence in a world full of them. The difference is I never stopped hoping for a better option.
Looking at Arax—at the flat certainty in his posture, the absolute acceptance of extinction—I wonder if hope is a luxury the Ashen Flight never learned to afford.
We resume walking.
The afternoon brings worse terrain. The Dead Roads deteriorate from damaged to actively hostile, paths crumbling under our feet, ash storms materializing without warning to reduce visibility to arm’s length.
He watches. I notice.
This is how you survive in the Reach—by not naming the things that might kill you. Speak a danger aloud and you give it power. Keep silent and maybe, maybe, you can pretend it doesn’t exist.
Except pretending is getting harder.
The ash storm hits properly near dusk. Not a natural weather pattern—nothing in the Reach is natural—but a surge of corrupted air dense enough to turn the world gray-white and featureless. Visibility drops to nothing. I can’t see my own hands in front of my face.
I stop moving, because moving blind in the Dead Roads is suicide.
“Arax?”
His hand finds mine in the murk. Not my arm—my hand. Fingers lacing through fingers with an accuracy that suggests he navigated to me without sight.
“Don’t let go.”
I don’t.
He leads me through the storm, each step chosen with the same preternatural certainty he brings to everything. I follow blindly, trusting his guidance because the alternative is standing still until the storm buries me.
His hand is cooler than I expected. Scarred, the texture rough against my palm. But the grip is steady, unyielding, an anchor in the white chaos that surrounds us.
The storm breaks as suddenly as it started, ash clearing to reveal a stretch of road I don’t recognize. We’ve traveled at least a mile in the blind—moved through terrain that should have killed us without ever losing footing or direction.
Arax releases my hand.
The absence of contact produces an immediate awareness of cold. My palm feels exposed, vulnerable in ways that have nothing to do with temperature.
“We need shelter.” He sounds exactly the same as he did before the storm—untouched, unmoved. “There’s a stable structure ahead. We’ll wait out the night there.”
“How far?”
“Half a mile.”
I look in the direction he indicates. The structure is visible, a dark shape against the gray twilight—another ruin, another temporary safety in a world that offers nothing permanent.
“Let’s move.”
We walk the remaining distance in silence. My hand burns where he held it, a phantom sensation I can’t shake no matter how many times I flex my fingers.
The shelter is better than last night’s—three walls, a partial roof, a floor that shows no signs of imminent erasure. Arax conducts his sweep while I claim a corner and settle in with my gear and notes.
He builds the fire without comment, the movements practiced and spare. Arax settles against the opposite wall, keeping the same careful distance he established last night. Watching. Always watching.
“Ask me.” His voice cuts through my concentration. I look up to find him observing me with an intensity that borders on uncomfortable.
“Ask you what?”
“Whatever question is preventing you from focusing on your work.”
The audacity of it—the sheer presumption that he can read my distraction from across the fire—should irritate me. Instead, I feel a pulse of awareness behind my ribs, dangerous and sharp. Recognition. He sees me the way I see him, reads my patterns the way I’ve started reading his.
We’re both observing. Both calculating. Both pretending the calculations mean nothing.
“Does it bother you?” I shouldn’t push. Should let the subject drop and return to my notes and the comfortable pretense that we’re simply allies of convenience. “Not knowing why you didn’t turn me in?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you change your mind? Turn me over now, follow the protocol you abandoned?”
“Because the thought of doing so produces a response I cannot justify but will not reverse.”
“What kind of response?”
“Violent.”
The word lands heavily, full of implications. Violent. He’s saying that the idea of turning me over to others makes him want to hurt someone. Kill someone. That his instinct to keep me produces a protective aggression he didn’t choose and can’t explain.
Where’s the fear? This violent, aggressive dragon wants to keep me. That alone would make any normal person hyperventilate.
I’m not a normal person.
I close my journal and set it aside, breaking eye contact because maintaining it any longer will lead somewhere I’m not ready to go. “Tomorrow will be worse than today.”
“Is that a prediction or a certainty?”
“In the Reach, they’re the same thing.”
He’s watching. I feel it.
I watch him back, through the veil of my lashes, counting his breaths and tracking his micro-movements and collecting details I’ve no business noticing.
The night passes slowly. Sleep comes in fragments between stretches of hyperawareness—his presence a constant pressure at the edge of my consciousness, impossible to ignore, impossible to escape.
A current runs between us now. Unnamed. Unacknowledged.