Chapter 30
Xavi’s first conscious thought was the memory of pain.
A searing, bone-deep agony as his enemy’s very essence ate away at his skin, muscles, and sinews.
He’d been wounded a thousand times over the centuries.
Nearly died a dozen different ways. But this…
this pain defied description, and he knew only that he would do almost anything to avoid experiencing it again.
Even now, it throbbed. Even after he’d entered the death-like sleep of healing so that his body could restore itself. But the pain was diminished enough that he knew it was time to wake up. Time to take up his weapons once more, return to his troops, and…
No. There was no war. He no longer commanded armies. He was…
Ryn.
He was supposed to protect Ryn.
The clinging shroud of torpor fell away, and he surged up, driven by instincts honed by years of battle.
Fully awake, ready to defend, but there was no one and nothing to defend.
No enemies to confront. He stood in a blank stone corridor, and around him were no signs that anything or anyone else had ever trespassed there.
The amorphous horror was gone.
The blood and bones of his kill were gone.
And even Ryn was…
No. She might be missing, but she couldn’t be dead. He’d promised. Promised to protect her from this place. Promised she wouldn’t have to go alone.
And then he’d passed out like a weakling child in the face of pain and magic depletion.
Xavi’s eyes slammed shut, and he grasped for the last shreds of memory from before he blacked out.
He’d already been lightheaded from fighting the poison on his skin, but he’d chosen to use the bonefire—a lost magic that blended his own power with the wyvern’s deadly breath.
It had burned the enemy away to nothing, and yet, if the enemy was defeated, what had happened to Ryn?
Had she left him for dead? Abandoned him to save herself?
Preposterous. There were many things in the world that he was no longer sure of, but he knew that much. No matter what he’d told her to do, the human was too foolish to save her own skin and too stubborn to leave him.
Something had taken her.
And in this vast, shifting landscape of never-ending stone corridors, even with the bear’s nose, even with all his magic, he stood very little chance of finding her again.
But that in no way meant he wasn’t going to try.
It was too soon yet for another shift—he was still weak and shaky from the healing sleep—but he could stagger along just as he was. Ryn had said there was a pattern, so he would learn it too. He would…
“…and then left, but only every fourth time.” A distant muttering reached his ears, growing louder with each passing second. “Quarter turn to the right with each pass, which means I go straight at the junction and then…”
Ryn stumbled around the corner, her notebook clutched in white-knuckled fingers. Her golden hair hung in limp strands around her face, her cheeks were pale and smudged, and her voice shook, but she was alive.
And when she saw Xavi, she stopped dead. Stared at him while drawing in a handful of shuddering breaths. Tears began to gather in her eyes, her lips trembled, and the next thing he knew, she’d flung herself forward, wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest.
“Sweet saints, Xavi, you’re alive. I was so afraid…
” She paused, sniffled quietly, then clenched him even tighter.
“I know this is probably weird for you, and I shouldn’t be doing it, but right now I don’t care.
I was so scared, so please… please just let me stay here for a few more seconds and then I promise never to maul you again. ”
She was hugging him—not some tentative, polite embrace, but with every bit of her body and every bit of her strength. Not caring who or what he was, or that it was his own fault that any of this was happening to her.
There were no words. No words for his surprise, for his relief, or for the feelings that rose up and threatened to overwhelm his control.
First, a rush of warmth. Then fierce exultation.
Longing. A furious desire to rend and destroy whatever had frightened her.
And then simply… rightness. As if something he’d been missing for every moment of his cursed existence had finally appeared, and now every moment of that cursed existence made sense.
It was too much to take in, and Xavi realized he’d frozen only when she tilted her head back without letting go. Looked up at him with uncertainty in her eyes and a question on her parted lips.
That uncertainty was a knife to his shriveled and calloused heart, driving straight through to the bleeding core of it and opening it to the light so he could see…
She who was so certain of what she wanted that she’d travelled through a deadly wilderness for months, enduring hazards and storms and ridicule in pursuit of it, she who’d been willing to step through a magical doorway to save a man she barely knew—that tiny, fragile, precious creature was somehow undone by his silence and it broke him.
He forgot the pain in his arm and swept her up, crushing her to his chest with her feet off the floor, his face pressed to her hair, and his eyes shut so tightly that they burned.
His arms shook. His heart pounded against his ribs like a battering ram, as if trying desperately to break free.
And for the next few moments, neither of them moved or spoke.
He simply breathed, fighting back something he still had no words for.
And then he set her down. Searched her face in silence.
“I…”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” she warned him, her voice wobbling precariously with the remnants of her tears. “If you do, I swear on my father’s grave, I will take one of your daggers and stab you with it.”
He could not imagine Ryn stabbing anyone. Although she had impaled that one hapless drunk with a pencil, so perhaps she was more dangerous than he gave her credit for.
“Where did you go?”
Her nose wrinkled adorably. “I was looking for water. You wouldn’t wake up, I thought your wound might need cleaning, and neither of us has had water in… far too long. I was terrified I would never be able to find you again, but it wasn’t going to help if we both died of thirst, so…”
“You didn’t find it.”
She shook her head. “I managed to make my way back, but the cisterns don’t seem to shift according to the same pattern as the corridors.”
“You also need food,” he observed.
“So do you.”
“Ah…” He hesitated.
She shot him a startled look that soon turned to horror. “You didn’t.”
Why was she so surprised? “It was fresh meat, and I often hunt in one of my shifted forms. Saves the need for cooking or preparation.”
“But you don’t even know where it came from!” she protested. “That creature could have been composed of pure magic. It could have poisoned you or made your hair fall out! How could you eat it when you had no idea what it was?”
And instead of being annoyed, Xavi discovered that he found her protests rather… cute.
There was that word again. Shadows above and below, what was happening to him?
“As a bear, my sense of smell is quite keen. I would have known if it was poison, or incompatible with my magic.”
Ryn shuddered. “I will take your word for it. And don’t worry about me. I can go on for a while yet without food, as long as we find water. But more importantly, how is your arm?”
She did not look at him when she asked, and considering her aversion to blood, Xavi guessed that she would have no stomach for the unpleasant details of tending it.
“Well enough,” he lied, grateful for the magic of the shift that ensured his clothing was once more whole and covered the grisly wound. His sleep would help him heal, but an injury like this did not do so overnight. “We should keep looking for the way out.”
Assuming such a thing even existed. If the fae witch intended to trap them here for the sole purpose of feeding off their pain, fear, and uncertainty, perhaps there was no exit. Only endless halls, filled with strange and terrible monsters that would eventually overpower and consume them.
But there was no value to the fae if they died. No way for her to win if she trapped them here forever. So what was her game? To push them to the very edge of death before relenting?
There was no way to know. But if this was to be a trial of stubbornness? He might be willing to pit himself and Ryn against the worst this world had to offer.
They’d been walking for some time when the sound first reached their ears—beginning as a whisper before swelling to a chorus of rustles and clicks. First distant, then nearer, growing to a dull roar that set Xavi’s teeth on edge and made his fingers itch for his blades.
“What do you think it is?” Ryn asked nervously. “It doesn’t sound like footsteps or breathing exactly, but it does seem alive somehow.”
She was not wrong. Every instinct he possessed screamed of approaching danger, and he decided to blame those same instincts when he reached for her hand and tugged her after him down a blind corridor.
Her fingers seemed to curl instinctively around his. “Xavi, where are we going? This leads to a dead end. If whatever it is comes for us, we will have no way to escape.”
“I don’t want my back exposed,” he muttered. “We have to assume that anything in this labyrinth is indeed coming for us, and I need a place to make a stand.”
Her hand grew colder and trembled in his grip, but she did not pull away. If anything, she held on tighter. “I wish there were some way I could help,” she confessed. “But my skills are useless here, and I don’t know how to fight.”
“Not with blades, perhaps,” he agreed. “But there are other weapons of war, and knowledge is not the least of those.”
She made a scoffing sound. “And yet, what do I know that can help us here? Yes, I could work out the pattern of the labyrinth and assert the obvious truth that it contained monsters, but I cannot find the way out. And these creatures are all strange to me.”
“Without you, I would not have known how to combat either of those we have already faced,” Xavi reminded her.
“You make sense of what you see and connect reality with legend in a way that no one else would be prepared for. Do not belittle yourself when you are perhaps the only human who could have survived these trials thus far.”
Ryn drew in a quick breath, and when he looked down, she was wearing a wry, resigned expression.
“I don’t know why I’m admitting this,” she murmured.
“Maybe because it seems likely we will not actually survive this trial. Maybe I just feel like telling someone the truth. But what you just said… It’s exactly what a part of me has been waiting to hear all my life.
Or at least since my father died. But lately, I’ve come to believe it was just a silly, self-centered dream to believe that my work might have some useful application.
Even my fellow scholars have never seen my passions and my pursuits as anything but burdens.
So now I struggle to imagine how you—this immensely powerful, magical, self-sufficient warrior—could possibly find any value in them. ”
She shrugged and offered him a twisted smile. “I guess what I’m saying is, I feel like you’re probably just being kind. But thank you.”
Xavi tugged her to a stop and pulled her around to face him, unable to fathom how she might have arrived at this bizarre conclusion.
“Whatever other illusions you may harbor about me, allow me to dispel this one without delay.” He hated himself for the harshness of his tone, but he could not endure the idea that her friendship and loyalty might be based on a version of himself that did not exist. Because the longer she remained in this ugly, violent world, the more she would see through that facade, and he did not think he could bear to have her friendship and then lose it again.
“I am not kind,” he said fiercely. “I have not been kind for far longer than you have been alive. And while that admission brings me no satisfaction, it is a fact, and I cannot change it. Whatever kindness I once possessed was burned up by curses and war and hopeless waiting, so you may believe that anything I tell you now, whether good or bad, is simply the truth.”
But Ryn only patted his arm and smiled wearily. “That, I think, is Lesh talking. The Xavi I know might not always be gentle, but he has been kind more times than I can count.”
She was still wrong, but he did not wish to correct her again, so he took refuge in a caustic retort.
“You are strangely terrible at math for someone who claims to be a scholar.”
“And you are strangely talented at sarcasm for someone who claims to be a dignified, immortal warrior,” she returned, utterly undaunted.
So because it was deeply important that she believe him—for reasons even Xavi was not yet certain he understood—he let just a sliver of his true power escape its bonds and shiver in the air, beyond the reach of sight but impossible to miss, even for a human.
He heard her gasp, saw her freeze in place like a startled deer, and then leaned in until their foreheads nearly touched.
“If you truly see me as such,” he said sternly, “then you have no choice but to believe me when I tell you—you are not a burden.”
And that, of course, was when the first wave of monsters came pouring out of the darkness.