Chapter 7 Elena
The darkness that came before dawn wrapped around me, the cool air kissing my skin, sharp and biting, as I moved through the forest with the Shadow King—Dario—at my side.
I couldn’t ignore the strange pull—magnetic, elemental—that kept drawing me toward him, no matter how much I resisted it.
I pushed down my feelings. I had had time to examine my feelings, and I knew it was just the instinctual draw of light to the dark.
Our powers were two sides of the same coin, and they drew us to each other, regardless of our thoughts on the matter.
Dario moved beside me with that unnatural grace that was starting to become familiar, his figure cloaked in darkness, silent and fluid. The only sound was the faint rustling of leaves under our boots and the distant hoot of an owl, somewhere high above.
I looked up to see a snowy white figure following us in the sky. I frowned. Was that the same owl I had seen before? The way it was following him now suggested that it was his pet.
We hadn’t spoken much since the edge of the forest came into view, and each minute of silence stretched further, pulling the tension tighter between us.
I could feel his presence—dark, consuming—yet he was unnervingly calm, his face unreadable in the shadows.
His features, sharp and almost too perfect, faded away in the brief glimmers of moonlight that filtered through the canopy, while shadows swirled around the part of his body that remained in shadow.
It only served as a reminder of how utterly otherworldly, how dangerous he was. How dangerous this entire situation had become.
I tugged my cloak tighter around my shoulders, the crimson fabric frayed and dirt-streaked from the journey. Its soft weight reminded me of my duty, of my purpose.
I was the High Priestess of Solaris, chosen by the Sun God to protect the city and its people.
But how could I reconcile that with this—traveling beside the creature I had been taught to hate, the one I had been hunting for years?
And worse still, having come to a truce with him?
I stopped, confused, when instead of taking me to the edge of the forest, Dario veered right, toward the village closest to the Forest of Night’s Bane.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked again, breaking the silence, my voice quieter than I intended.
It felt as though the forest itself was listening, waiting, as if something dark and unseen lurked just out of view.
“You said you couldn’t leave the forest,” I said, my voice growing higher with suspicion. I clenched my fist, calling upon my powers, weak as they were, and keeping the light hidden in my palm.
“This is at the very edge of my powers,” he said brusquely.
“But—”
“I will prove to you that your Elders have hidden things from you,” Dario replied, his voice as low and steady as always.
But there was something in his tone—something colder, sharper than before. He was holding something back, just like I was.
I glanced over at Dario, watching him carefully from the corner of my eye. His expression was unreadable, his jaw tight as if he, too, was caught in his own storm of thoughts.
“Why do you care?” I blurted out, the question escaping before I could stop it. “About the orphans, about Solaris—why does it matter to you what happens to the people of my city?”
Dario didn’t answer immediately, his gaze fixed ahead as if he were weighing his response. The silence that followed was thick, suffocating.
And then he laughed, the sound chilling in its bleakness. “Maybe it’s to prove to myself that I’m not just a creature of darkness,” he finally said, his voice low and filled with a weight I hadn’t heard before. “I once knew what it was to care about people, about… protecting them.”
I swallowed hard, the raw honesty in his words catching me off guard.
I glanced at him, at the fine lines around his mouth and eyes. There was pain there, buried deep beneath the calm of his exterior—pain that mirrored something in me.
For all the power I had as the Phoenix of the Sun God, for all the strength I possessed, I, too, had been bound by duty, by a fate I hadn’t chosen. The loneliness, the isolation of it all—it gnawed at me, just as it gnawed at him.
We reached the edge of the forest, the trees thinning to reveal the drought-stricken village that I knew lay ahead. One minute the trees pressed in around us like a chorus of black-throated sentries; the next the canopy thinned out and the sky opened into a hard, indifferent dome.
From the height of my chambers in the Temple of the Sun, the land of Solaris was a ribbon of color and promise: markets and temple spires and golden roofs.
Down here, at ground level and nearer the real world, the Temple’s blessing ended in ragged lines. The air here felt different—dry, parched, and heavy with the scent of desperation.
This was not the bustling; vibrant village I had envisioned from the stories I had heard of our outer lands. This was a place that had been forgotten.
Dario walked beside me, moving carefully through the shadowed night. I had never seen him look more like a man and less like a myth than he did tonight—jaw tight, shoulders coiled, an edge of something like grief in the set of his mouth.
“You said you would show me,” I told him, drawing the hood of my cloak higher against the dust. My staff was strapped to my back; my palm itched for its familiar weight though I forced the need down.
“Patience,” he murmured.
We came over the last rise and the village opened below, like a wound made visible. Small cottages leaned away from one another, their roofs thin and sagging; a well stood cracked and ashamed in the square.
Fields that might once have fed a dozen families were a patchwork of dry furrows. No roosters crowed. A dog howled once and then quieted as if remembering hunger was a sin.
“This is what they’ve kept from you,” Dario said, his voice quiet but unyielding. “Your Elders have turned their backs on these people.”
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head as if denying it could change the truth. “They wouldn’t… they told me they were sending aid.”
“Did you ever see it with your own eyes?” Dario asked, his voice cutting through the darkness. “Or did you simply trust what they told you?”
I hated that question. Hated that it made me doubt everything I had believed. I had always trusted the Elders. I had always believed they were doing what was best for Solaris, for the people.
But as I stood there, staring at the lifeless fields, I couldn’t ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. This place looked…forgotten.
Then movement flickered at the edge of my vision: a figure, robed, moving like a shadow between houses. Not a villager. There was a strange light under his hood, the sort of pale sheen that comes from candle-wash on satin, and the sigil pinned to his breast glinted in the last of dusk.
My heart stuttered, an animal alarmed. The sigil was blunt and familiar—the stylized orb and rays of Solaris’ Temple.
I had seen it stitched on paladin cloaks and stamped on grain sacks meant for the poor.
I had worn that symbol on robes given to me for rites.
Seeing it here on a man slipping like a thief through a drought-stricken village nearly undid me.
I tensed, my hand instinctively going to the hilt of my dagger.
“Who is that?” I whispered, narrowing my eyes as the figure stopped at one of the houses.
Dario’s gaze followed mine, and then his hand was at my elbow—not restraining me so much as steadying me. “I don’t know. But we’re about to find out.”