25. Rowan
ROWAN
SO MUCH FOR THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
Rain doesn’t fall in the high Cascades when a front like this moves in.
It attacks. The water comes down in sheets of gray iron, turning the dust of the North Ridge into a slurry that pulls at my boots with every step.
I stand between the trees, perfectly still, perfectly concealed, and watch the two men.
They’ve stopped walking, and they’re panting now.
Their lungs are soft, unused to the thin, wet air at six thousand feet, and their gear is far too heavy for the terrain they were trying to conquer.
Jax, the one with the shaved head and the stabilization rig strapped to his chest, slips for the third time in ten minutes.
The camera stays steady—a marvel of modern engineering—but his knees hit the shale with a wet thud.
He doesn’t curse. These people are professionals, I’d give them that.
They’re also persistent in the way of a biting fly, impossible to swat away and always returning for another taste.
“We need to keep moving,” Jax says as he gets up.
“Give me... a second,” the second one, a man named Miller, gasps. He’s holding a thermal tablet, a plastic hood shielding the screen. “The signature... we’re losing it. The rain is cooling the rocks too fast.”
I look toward the tree line. My concealment was a steady presence in the back of my mind, a mental muscle I’ve kept flexed since they first stepped off the lodge porch three days ago. It’s a constant redirection of their attention. I make myself a shadow in their periphery.
The geography is working against them. Wren assigned them to follow me, a clever move that should have kept them contained.
She thought she could use me as a leash.
But the mountain had other plans. We’re three miles from the lodge, deep in the throat of a drainage that turned into a waterfall during a deluge like this.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I slink back deeper into trees, far away enough that they won’t hear me.
“Rowan?” Wren’s voice is distorted by the electrical interference of the storm. There is a sharp edge to it that has nothing to do with the signal.
“Wren.”
“We have a situation,” she says, and I can hear her pacing.
I can picture the lobby, the way she’d be twisting her father’s old pen between her fingers.
“A solo hiker. He’s on the Eagle Crest cutoff.
He called the hotline. He’s trapped between the washouts, and he’s hypothermic.
SAR is six hours out, minimum. A mudslide at mile marker twelve is blocking the roads. ”
I close my eyes, letting the mountain speak to me.
I felt the vibration of the peaks, the frantic rush of water, and the specific, hollow ache of a life flickering out in the cold.
He’s close. Less than a mile from our current position, but on the other side of the ridge.
In this weather, for a human, that mile is a death sentence.
“I know where he is,” I say.
“Rowan, the crew is with you,” she whispers, her voice dropping. “If you go, they’ll see.”
I look back at Jax, who’s adjusting a lens, his eyes fixed on the red light of his recording deck.
There is no way around them. The ridge is up ahead, and I’ll have to pass them to get there.
I could hold the concealment, keep them blind to me and my nature, and watch a man die. Or I could let the curtain fall.
“The hiker doesn’t have six hours,” I say.
“I know.” A beat of silence follows, filled only by the scream of the wind. “Rowan, if you do this, there’s no taking it back. Aethelgard... they’ll have it. It won’t be a myth anymore. It’ll be a file on a server.”
I don’t answer. I end the call and put my phone in my pocket. The choice isn’t a choice at all. I’m a Guardian. I don’t protect secrets. I protect the mountain and those who are lost or stranded on it. And right now, the mountain is trying to swallow a man.
The concealment is a membrane, a thin skin of lies. I let go of it. The mental drain vanishes, replaced by a surge of heat that makes the raindrops sizzle against my skin. The two cameramen whip around, the shift in the air alerting them to my presence.
“What the hell?” Jax breathes, his hands shaking as he grips the camera. “Miller, look at the thermal. The levels... they’re off the charts. He’s glowing.”
I start running. I don’t run like a man, but I move like the wind through the trees.
My stride triples. The shale that trips Jax is nothing more than grip for my boots.
I vault over a fallen cedar, a fifteen-foot leap that felt like stepping over a puddle.
Behind me, I hear the frantic clicking of a zoom lens and the heavy breathing of two men realizing they had just found exactly what they were looking for.
This was the cost, and I paid it gladly.
The secret is a heavy coat I’ve been wearing for centuries, and throwing it off feels like the first real breath I’ve taken since Wren Cassidy started the hotline.
I reach the crest in under a minute. Below me, the Eagle Crest cutoff is a graveyard of broken tree limbs and rushing silt.
I spot the hiker, a small, blue speck huddled under a granite overhang.
The water is rising, a brown tongue of debris licking at his boots.
He’s shivering, his movements slow and purposeless. The early stages of the end.
I descend the slope in a controlled slide, kicking off boulders and catching myself on saplings that groan under the force. I land ten feet from him. He looks up at me with glassy, unfocused eyes. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t have the energy left for fear.
“I have you,” I say, scooping him up and tucking him against my chest. He is as light as a bird, a fragile collection of wet clothes and failing heat.
On the ridge above, the two silhouettes are clear against the gray sky.
Jax has his camera level, the red light a steady, mocking eye.
He’s capturing it all—the speed, the strength, the impossible scale of a man who could navigate a landslide like it was a groomed lawn.
It is undeniable. It is high-definition. It is the end of the quiet.
I begin the climb back up, the hiker cradled in one arm. I don’t hide or blend into the shadows. I move with a brutal, efficient grace, making sure the camera could see every second of it. If I’m going to lose my world, I’ll do it while saving his.
When I reach the top, Jax is white-faced, his mouth hanging open. He doesn’t lower the camera. He’s a creature of his own instincts, and his instinct is to record the impossible.
“You’re... you’re him,” Miller whispers, his eyes wide with a terror that was slowly being replaced by a frantic, commercial greed. “The Mountain Wraith. You’re actually real.”
“I’m a man who wants to get this hiker to the doctor,” I say, stepping past them. “You can follow, or you can stay here and wait for the SAR team. But if you get in my way, I will leave you behind.”
They follow. I’m the only thing in this storm that makes sense, even though I’m the thing that defied all their logic.
I lead them down the back side of the ridge toward the lower trail, moving at a pace they can barely maintain.
I don’t look back at the camera, but the lens’s gaze is like a brand on my back.
We meet the SAR team a mile from the lodge.
They are a group of three, led by a man named Henderson who has been pulling people out of these woods for twenty years.
He sees me first, coming through the mist with the hiker in my arms. He doesn’t reach for a weapon, and there’s not even a trace of surprise on his face.
“Rowan.” He nods as he walks over with a thermal blanket. “Should have known you’d beat us to him. He okay?”
“Cold,” I say, handing the hiker over. “But breathing. His pulse is thready.”
“We’ve got him,” Henderson says. He glances at Jax and Miller, who are hovering ten feet back, their cameras still rolling. Something like pity flashes in his eyes. “You know they’re filming this, right?”
“I know.”
“All right then. Get yourself inside, Rowan. You look like hell.”
The adrenaline is beginning to ebb, a hollow clarity taking its place. Jax and Miller are huddled together, looking at the playback on the camera’s small screen, at the gold mine they had just unearthed.
The lights of the lobby are a glowing beacon in the rain. Through the window, I see Wren standing next to the desk, her head in her hands. She knows. Even without seeing the footage, she knows what I’ve done.
I stop at the edge of the gravel lot. I look at my hands—the broad palms and blunt fingers that have just ended centuries of silence. I protected the mountain. I saved the man.
And I lost everything else. I walk toward the doors, the sound of the rain drowning out the world I used to know.
I don’t enter through the front. I couldn’t face Sarah Vance yet, not with her professional hunger and her linen shirts.
I go through the mudroom and silently slip into the small washroom.
I strip off my soaked shirt, leaving it in a heavy, sodden heap on the floor.
My skin is still humming, the residual heat of my true form refusing to dissipate entirely.
In the mirror of the small washroom, I see the man I pretend to be.
Beard. Amber eyes filled with exhaustion.
But underneath that, bark-like patterns still flicker like embers under ash.
Wren finds me there. She doesn’t say a word at first, just leans against the doorframe, her face pale, eyes tracking the steam rising off my shoulders. She searches my face for the irritation or the ancient, dry distance I usually maintain. She’ll find neither. I’m just a man who made a choice.
“Jax is in the lobby,” she says, her voice barely a whisper over the drum of the rain on the roof.
“He’s already uploading the proxies to their cloud server.
He didn’t even take his coat off. He’s shaking, Rowan.
From the adrenaline. He knows he just filmed the most valuable three minutes of footage in the history of his industry. ”
“I know,” I say, grabbing a towel off the hook. “He was very thorough with his framing. Professional to the last.”
Wren steps into the small room, closing the distance until she can put a hand on my chest. Her skin is warm, a sharp contrast to the damp chill of the air.
“Rowan, I’m so sorry. I tried to build a fence around you.
I tried to turn them into a joke so they wouldn’t look for the truth. I thought I could outsmart the world.”
“You’re a human, Wren. You believe the world can be managed with contracts and cleverness. But the mountain has no fine print. A man was dying. I am the Guardian. There was no other sum to that equation.”
“But the cost,” she chokes out, her fingers curling into the skin of my shoulder.
“They have it. It’s not a blurry photo or a shaky infrared blob.
It’s you, leaping fifteen feet and glowing like a furnace on that thermal scanner.
It’s undeniable. By tomorrow morning, every news outlet on the planet will have a copy.
Aethelgard will own the right to hunt you with every lens they have. ”
I cover her hand with mine. “Let them come. They will find that the mountain is larger than their servers. But you were right, Wren. The quiet is over. The secret your family kept for a hundred years... I broke it to save a man who won’t even remember my name.”
“He’ll remember,” she says, looking up at me with a fierce, tragic kind of pride.
“Henderson and the SAR team? They’re already calling it a miracle.
But Jax? He’s calling it a series. He’s in there right now, Rowan, staring at the screen like he’s found the Holy Grail. And I’m the one who gave him the map.”
I pull her closer, resting my forehead against hers.
We stood there in the quiet of the mudroom, two people tethered together by a disaster of our own making.
The footage is racing through the wires, leaping across the sky, turning a myth into a commodity.
It was out of our hands, out of the forest, and into a world that would never stop looking for me again.