Killian
Ashape stood on the swell of a hill, as though waiting for us. He leaned on a gnarled staff, his skin leathery from too much time in the sun. A white beard trailed down his chest and, beside him, an ox chewed the grass with slow, bovine contentment, indifferent to the ruin the world had become.
I glanced behind me as Ilaris and I sloshed out of the water.
The sea serpent had already vanished, but even if the man hadn’t been standing there long, he would have seen it release us from its coils and slip away.
Yet he wasn’t fleeing in astonishment or shouting in shock.
He merely stood there, watching us approach.
Ilaris gave a sharp breath. “I’ve seen this man before,” she whispered urgently. “When I got off the train, he was here, watching me.”
“Did you speak to him?”
She shook her head, then paused, her brow furrowing as though remembering. “I asked him for directions to the village, Stonehaven.”
“And he gave them?”
“He just pointed.” She went quiet.
Then he wasn’t a Guardian, so why was he here, waiting for us, as though he had known the exact hour we would rise from the sea? Fire shifted restlessly beneath my ribs as we closed the distance, and it was Ilaris who spoke first.
“I remember you. You gave me directions to Stonehaven. This was months ago, before everything unraveled. I thought you might have said something else, too, but I convinced myself it was my imagination.”
“Don’t go,” the man said, words rough as though his voice wasn’t used to speaking.
Ilaris tilted her head. “Why?”
“You went. The world burned.”
Ilaris frowned. “But how could you know that? Are you one of the Guardians?”
The man shook his head. “I am like you.”
“I don’t understand.”
The man pointed to his chest. “Ben. The Scholar.”
Ilaris staggered back a step. I reached out, but she caught herself.
“You,” she breathed. “Harlan mentioned you, the last scholar who went to the ruins. You never came back, you never wrote your findings for the House of Scholars.”
Ben tapped his head. “I saw. Truth.”
“You had a vision of the future,” she said slowly, piecing it together. “You knew what would happen if too many curious scholars came here. It was inevitable.”
He nodded, eyes watery. Turning to me, he bowed his head. At last, I’d been recognized by someone who wasn’t trying to kill me.
“The world burns,” he said. “Heal us.”
“I will,” I vowed.
But it was Ilaris who stepped forward. “Will you help us? We need to get back to the ruins. We have the gifts of the gods, we will seal the gates.”
“Run,” Ben said.
A moment later I felt it, vibration through the soles of my feet, the low drumbeat of hooves still distant but growing closer. “They’ve found us,” I said.
“Who?” Ilaris’s eyes went wide.
“The Four.”
Ilaris dropped her satchel, yanked it open, and rummaged inside. She lifted out her journal, her life’s work, notes, sketches, annotated maps, runes, translations, all that was most precious to her, and approached Ben. “Take this. It’s everything, documented. Do with it what you will.”
His hands shook as he took it, and pressed it to his heart, as though he understood the full measure of what she had surrendered.
I stood there, struck silent, heat banking low beneath my skin.
When she turned to me, her eyes were glassy but dry.
She picked up her satchel, now empty except for the three gifts of the gods.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
She’d never looked more beautiful. The sea wind moved through her braids.
The salt-smell of the water still clung to us both, and the sky above had gone a deep violet, pressing against the horizon.
She had given up the thing she loved most, and she had not wept over it.
I did not know what to call what moved through me then, grief edged with reverence, but I felt it down to the bone.
Jasper shifted his form, and we mounted.
He carried us in a blur of shadow down the shoreline, his footfalls drumming against packed sand.
Behind us the darkness thickened, not only the dust cloud of pursuit but something older, something in the sky and sea, an impending storm brewing on the horizon, as though the end had come.
A sharp wind blew. In the distance, thunder cracked. White lightning split the horizon. When I looked toward the mountains, black smoke rose, slow and deliberate.
Ilaris let out her breath with a sharp hiss, bringing my attention back to what lay in front of us.
The dock came into view, newly rebuilt from where it had burned down months ago.
The wood was still fresh, the scent of cedar in the air.
Boats bobbed in the choppy waters, bouncing on their ropes, and Harlan stood on the dock, arms crossed.
Harlan. The first Guardian to oppose us. Fire sang under my skin. Jasper growled, but Harlan threw up both hands.
“I came to take you across,” he shouted.
“Why?” I shouted back.
“Someone called Castor paid me a visit, told me you were coming.”
Prince Castor. Would he become the sole surviving giant, left to pick up the pieces of a lost civilization, and lead the mortals to greatness?
“What made you change your mind?” Ilaris asked Harlan as we climbed into the boat.
“I’ve kept guard of these shores for decades.
” Harlan untied the rope and dipped the oars into the water.
Instead of the waves fighting him, they appeared to calm to let us through.
“But the things that come out of the holes in the ground are nightmares. They only come at night, and they attack. I have no name for them. At first, I thought the two of you were responsible. Then word came from the city, trains stopped running, and we received messages that they were everywhere. Widespread attacks. Vicious creatures that came at night. Then the fires started burning. That strange man flew out of the sky and told me you were coming to save us, to stop this.”
I stared at the waves, recalling Numen’s words.
The truth. “I caused it,” I admitted, facing Harlan.
“Thousands of years ago, I opened a door that should have stayed shut, and I unleashed the horrors of the world. My people managed to shut the door, but it was too late. I am the reason for the Great Sundering. The end of the giants. Every creature that crawls out of the ground at night traces back to me.”
“I woke him,” Ilaris blurted. “I woke Prince Killian. Fire Giant. I read from a scroll I had no business reading, and the seals began to fail. We’ve been traveling together to find the gifts of the gods. We go to seal the gates, once and for all.”
Harlan was quiet for a moment. Then he snorted as though our admission of guilt did not surprise him.
“You both want to shoulder the whole of it, don’t you?
Young fools, the pair of you.” He pulled hard on the oars.
“Yes, you acted. Yes, your actions led to devastation. But this was always going to happen. Why do you think the Guardians exist? We were made for this day, to hold the line as long as we could. You didn’t cause this alone, you only arrived at the hour it became impossible to ignore. ”
“You’ll have to stop them first,” I said, pointing at the shore.
Harlan let out a curse and rowed faster.
Ilaris gripped the sides of the boat, eyes wide as she stared.
The Four had arrived.
They were but a legend, horsemen who came to rid the world of evil.
They awoke at the end of time to unmake what had gone wrong, and now they stood at the waterline, their mounts’ eyes glowing.
Each horse was a different color, one red, one white, one black, one pale as ash, fiery swords burning in their gauntleted hands.
Their heads were skull-like, hands taloned, and they urged their horses forward into the surf without hesitation.
Jasper’s voice danced through my head. I will slow them down.
No. Don’t you dare. We need you. Meet us on the shore.
I watched the sky until Jasper flew by, obedient. We needed his speed to take us to the ruins of my former home.
Harlan thrust the oars at me. “Row.”
I moved, pulling hard on the oars as Harlan chanted, summoning those strange beasts from the deep.
It was then I realized that Numen had no power here, not in these waters, the domain of the fire giants.
No, this was where the beasts of the Guardians lay in slumber, waiting to rise, to thwart those who threatened the world.
Long, sinuous shapes surfaced and wormed toward the Four. I heard the clash of something, blade against scale, the wet crack of impact, high thin screams that did not belong to anything mortal. I kept my focus on the island and rowed.
Rain began to fall, fine and cold, prickling against the back of my neck. The mist that wrapped the island thickened around us like a closing hand.
The boat slammed into something hard, and the island rose before us.
“Go, go, go,” Harlan shouted.
Ilaris half fell from the boat. I caught her, lifting her in my arms as I sprinted for the shore where a winged creature waited. Would something wait for us at each shore?
“Prince Castor?” I breathed.
He stood with his legs apart, wings spread, bracing himself. His jaw was set, eyes hard like flint. He nodded at me and Ilaris.
I set her down gently, and she straightened, gathering the satchel tight to her chest. Jasper materialized from the shadows and trotted to her side, pressing his flank to her knee. She let one hand rest briefly in the fur at his shoulder, and I watched the subtle steadying of her breath.
“I will hold them off as long as I can,” Prince Castor said.
“Harlan will help, he’s the Guardian here.”
Prince Castor nodded. “We’ve met. You need to go to the volcano. Fire will seal the door, once and for all.”
I walked up to him and clasped his arm, shaking it firmly. “Thank you.”
Jasper barked once.
Ilaris glanced over her shoulder at the water, but the mist hid the threat, and the only path was forward.
Jasper carried us through the sand dunes, past the small hut where Ilaris and I had spent that first evening together. I recalled the meal we’d shared, the moment she’d looked at me with desire in her eyes and leaned forward to taste me, and my fire had sparked, driving her back.
We moved down a dirt path through the wood, and the silence of the island crept around me like a second skin. The trees had grown from the ash of what I’d unmade. Every stone here had witnessed the end of my people. The quiet was not peaceful.
Memories flashed, one after another. Of the time before, the relentless drive, the addictive need for more.
Of my return, the rage and hollowed grief that had turned everything it touched to ash.
I had wanted to rage and rant, to burn everyone and everything.
As if sufficient destruction could ease my pain and make the loss make sense.
I recalled the feeling of that fire banked in my chest, the overwhelming memories that had driven me into the water.
All along, there had been Ilaris.
She looked at my fire with curiosity instead of fear.
Even that first night, she’d tried to kiss me, tried to duck under my barriers and bring us together.
The blood oath may have sealed the bond, but ever since waking, we were fated for a time like this.
Somewhere, beneath my anger, I had known she meant something.
And even now, with the sky burning and the Four at our backs and the mist closing in, some stubborn part of me still searched for the loophole, the alternative version of this where neither of us had to sacrifice everything. Where we walked out the other side.
I did not let myself think too long on the odds of that.
When we reached the stone archway of the ruins, the runes glowed, much like they had in the Sky Kingdom. I slid off Jasper’s back and pressed my palm flat against his nose. “This is how far you go,” I said out loud, for the benefit of Ilaris.
She did not weep, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his fur for a long moment. The silence of that goodbye was louder than any word she might have spoken. Then she stepped back, shouldered her satchel, and took my hand.
She looked up at the archway.
I watched the line of her jaw, the deliberate steadiness of her breathing, and swallowed against the thickness of my throat. I felt the tremor in her hand, but sensed her determination as she put one foot in front of the other.
And it was I who followed.