Chapter 20 Blood Between Realms
BLOOD BETWEEN REALMS
She had survived the night, and as the sun crested the ridge in a slow bloom of gold, the truth seemed to rise with it—certain and inescapable.
Ella had lost track of how many times she had tried and failed to summon her fire over the past week, yet she felt with unshakable certainty that it was no coincidence her power had flared last night.
Not when the mortal realm threatened to split at the seams. Something was stirring, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that an older presence had been peeking through the cracks, watching her.
She reminded herself that paranoia was not weakness. It was something she could harness, turning awareness into preparation.
She pushed herself upright with care, her muscles still stiff from the night before. Her body had not forgotten, but the new day demanded her focus, and she needed to stay alert.
The half of the bedroll where Jakobav had been beside her was now empty. She’d felt him untangle his arm from around her shortly before dawn, his warmth long gone.
She looked around and found him standing near the horses at the far side of camp.
She watched him check the tack and reins with quiet focus, then move down the line, brushing a hand along a dark flank before offering each horse its feed.
Frost steamed faintly from their coats in the cold morning light.
The others still slept, scattered in loose circles around the fire, their weapons lying close at hand, their rest uneasy but unbroken.
She considered calling out to Jakobav, knowing it was probably time for everyone to pack up and keep moving, but the words gathered at the back of her throat. Hesitation held her in place.
The silence didn’t feel like absence, but like tension, the entire forest suspended in waiting. It felt charged and brittle, as though she were listening for a note too low for mortal ears, one that hovered just out of reach yet refused to fade.
The wind whipped against her face, cold enough to sting and bitter enough to make her slightly nauseous. She hated how Dravaryn mornings always seemed to turn the air into a punishment.
Suddenly a howl broke through the trees, faint but wrong in a way that crawled beneath her skin. It wasn’t simply sound. It was dissonance, like a note bent too far on a string, the kind that unsettled without warning.
Her body reacted before her mind did, every muscle jolting tight, the hair along her arms prickling in answer.
The noise roused the others, steel flashing as they moved with the precision of soldiers who had woken this way too many times before, bodies falling into rhythm without a word.
Soren was no longer at the edge of the fire where she’d seen him moments ago; she would have sworn on Orchid’s throne that he’d been there, and yet he was gone, vanished so completely she couldn’t decide whether she’d actually blinked.
The sound came again, louder now, tearing across the forest in a pitch that was not human, a scream that cracked somewhere between howl and shriek.
The tone clawed at her memory, dragging her back to the first time she’d ever heard a mountain lion in Orchid’s eastern ranges.
Sleek predators, silent in their movements, yet when one screamed, it was high and raw and utterly jarring, like a woman crying out in distress.
She remembered thinking it was obscene, the way the noise betrayed the creature’s shape, how the mind refused to reconcile predator with that terrible cry.
This was worse.
The sound in Dravaryn carried that same wrongness but stretched beyond it, a warped echo that did not belong to flesh at all.
Ella turned instinctively toward the noise, as if tugged by the spine.
Shadows moved at the treeline, skittering shapes half-glimpsed and already gone. The horses reared, hooves tearing up soil, ears pinned flat against their skulls as they thrashed in terror, their panic so stark it was almost contagious.
“Move!” Jakobav’s roar cracked through the clearing and he was already sprinting toward her, sword half-drawn, closing the distance in seconds.
And then the creature came.
It lunged from the forest in a blur of motion, towering over the firelight, easily twice the height of any man.
Its frame was hunched but massive, the outline still human enough to suggest it had once been mortal before being twisted into something demonic.
Black flesh clung to its body like tar, stretched tight over ridges of bone and sinew that shimmered faintly with glassy threads of light.
Its arms were grotesquely long, ending in claws with fingers so extended they looked made for rending, while its taloned toes gouged the earth with every step.
A whip-like tail lashed behind it, anchoring the weight of its hulking body with each jagged stride.
There was no face to meet, no eyes or mouth to mark it living, only a smooth, skull-like head split clean down the center, a vertical seam that glowed faintly red, pulsing like a wound that refused to close.
Its movements shifted unnervingly between a predator’s fluid grace and the marionette-jerk of something dragged on invisible strings, every twitch a reminder that this was not a beast of flesh but something far older and utterly wrong.
Jakobav met it head-on, his own roar answering, his sword flashing as it sang through the air in a single strike.
Maeren cut left without hesitation, twin blades gleaming as she dipped low to the ground, while Savina mirrored her in the opposite direction, their movements so perfectly aligned it was clear this was not chance but a pattern drilled into their bodies by years of training together, a dance rehearsed a thousand times with blood as its music.
Thane surged forward with far less grace, his curse ripping through the clearing like an oath as he tore twin axes from his belt, his broad shoulders rolling as if eager to split something in two.
Soren, by contrast, made no sound at all. In one heartbeat, he was at the edge of the firelight, cloak drawn close, and in the next, he was gone, swallowed by shadow completely.
The creature shrieked again, and the forest responded in horror. Every leaf curled inward on itself, branches bending as though recoiling from the sound. The very air trembled, brittle as glass about to splinter.
Ella flung out her hands, calling on her fire. Nothing answered.
She tried again, and her power sputtered once, a weak static jolt under her skin, then collapsed in on itself like air punched from her lungs. The creature didn’t seem to notice, still entirely focused on Jakobav.
“What the hell is that?” she gasped, her voice torn raw.
“Veil Leach,” Jakobav snarled, meeting its bulk head-on, his blade already sinking into its chest with brutal force. Sparks scattered as steel hit bone. “Stay back, and don’t let it feed on you!”
Ella tried again, desperation delving deeper than fear.
This time, her palms shuddered with heat, but what came forth was stranger: a shimmer in the air, no light, no flame, just a wrongness that bent the clearing for a single heartbeat before snapping back into place.
A ripple. Small and barely visible, yet undeniable.
The Veil Leach reacted instantly. Its eyeless head jerked toward her, the vertical split along its skull peeling wider with obscene hunger. The scream it unleashed was not sound but force, low and vibrating, a pressure that rolled outward in a wave so dense it buckled Ella’s knees.
“Shit!” She stumbled back, legs locking against the ground that seemed to heave beneath her.
It lunged, abandoning all others, limbs snapping wide like broken spears, every line of its misshapen body angled toward her.
Jakobav intercepted in a blur of steel, his blade flashing across its side. “It can’t see!” he barked, shoulders braced against the impact. “A Veil Leach senses power and feeds on it! I’ve never seen one hone in like that—what did you do?”
“I—I tried to access my power…I don’t know!” she shouted, and with no other weapon left, she hurled her knife.
The blade flew true, spinning end over end, but when it struck the split in its skull, it vanished as if it had never existed, swallowed whole into that endless wound like a drop into a bottomless well.
The Leach reared back, towering higher, its limbs stretching unnaturally wide, then drove forward again with enough force to crack the ground.
Maeren was faster. She vaulted into its path, blades flashing in an X that raked across its chest, the sound like steel scraping glass.
The strike landed, but the creature’s counter-blow was brutal.
The force hurled her backward, her body slamming into the dirt with a crack that made Ella’s stomach lurch.
“Maeren!” Thane roared, tearing toward her, but the creature was already descending, its too-long arms bending at wrong angles as it prepared to finish her with a blow that would cleave her in half.
And then, movement so swift Ella almost missed it. Soren emerged from the treeline as if the shadows themselves had spit him out, his knives already in motion. One blade sliced clean across the Leach’s shoulder, while the other buried itself deep into the sinew of its hind limb.
Ella’s eyes widened, and she stumbled backward.
The creature screamed again.
Savina struck, erupting from behind Jakobav with the ferocity of a storm breaking its banks, her blade gleaming brutal in the firelight as she drove it deep into the creature’s chest. The steel sank straight through the pulsing split in its skull, biting into the core that seemed to shudder in recognition.
The Veil Leach seized, its limbs locking in place, then it exploded, flesh and blackness spraying out. The clearing convulsed as a shockwave burst from its core, not wind but something visible and tangible, bending the fabric of the world around them.
The Veil between realms buckled like glass under a hammer. The blast threw everyone to the ground except Jakobav.