Chapter Eleven
Erindor
We had left the forest floor behind just before dawn, climbing until the trees thinned and the cliffs loomed overhead like ancient teeth. The trail narrowed to a ribbon of stone with mud-slick switchbacks and knife-thin ledges that would have sent even the surest mount over the edge.
It wasn’t merely a matter of caution. It was survival.
We couldn’t bring the horses. Not up there.
“We tie them and come back,” Tyren said, glancing toward the hollow below where grass still grew and a thin stream whispered through the rock.
“You tie them,” Gideon mumbled, “it’s like offering them up on a silver platter. Predators will smell them by nightfall.”
“So we just let them go?” Tyren frowned. “And hope they find their way back?”
Alaric stood between them, hands on his hips. “Horses know the land better than we do. They’ll follow the stream. With luck, circle back to Graymere or farther.”
There was no correct answer. But we didn’t have the time—or the trail—for debate.
One by one, we removed their tack and packs, smoothing their necks, whispering old words into twitching ears.
Alaric tied blessing knots into each mane, not bridle this time—loose and worn, but deliberate. Elyrien superstition. A ward against wolves and worse.
I pressed my forehead against the horse’s flank for a moment. She huffed warm breath into my shoulder and turned, disappearing into the trees with the rest.
We watched them go, hooves muffled in moss and pine needles.
Then we turned to the cliffs.
If the trail held.
If we did.
There had been talk of circling the ridge entirely, following the river low and looping around the far side of the vale.
But time wasn’t a luxury we had. The southern pass had succumbed to the rain's fury, leaving the northern route as their only hope of crossing the treacherous Wildervale Mountains before the inevitable deluge transformed everything into an impassable swamp. It was Alaric who’d first spotted the old stair-cut ascent leading upward, a route chiseled into the side of the cliffs, half-lost to time and lichen.
With every upward step, the world opened to a terrifying duality: one side plunged into an abyss of mist and nothingness, while the other clawed skyward in a defiant wall of jagged rock and rain-slick shale.
We moved into a single file. Steadying my boots with each movement.
Up ahead, Alaric’s armor clanked faintly in the distance.
Gideon walked ahead, humming something tuneless to break the silence. Jasira followed close behind him, one hand gripping the back of his belt for balance, her other hand braced lightly against the cliff whenever possible. It wasn’t fear, just practicality. The ledge didn’t allow for pride.
She was quiet and focused. Every step counted.
Wyn followed behind me, her breath shallow and her eyes distant. She had spoken little since we had left the forest floor. She was paler than usual, though she tried to hide it. I turned back to watch the way her fingers trembled as she adjusted her cloak.
“You’re cold,” I breathed.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure it’s only the cold.”
We stopped to catch our breath beneath a rocky outcropping.
The rain had started again, fine and silver-like threads unraveling from the sky.
Wyn pressed her back against the unyielding stone, forcing herself to slow the frantic pace of her breathing.
A whisper of fear could be seen in her eyes as they drifted to the twisted pine silhouettes half-eaten by fog.
“Something’s wrong with this place,” she whispered. “Even the animals won’t look at us.”
“It’s Wildervale,” I said. “Wrong is its natural state.”
She hesitated, then looked up at me. “Do you know what it used to be?”
I blinked. “Only stories.”
She leaned her head back against the stone and let the rain speckle her cheeks. “I found a book once. Hidden in the castle library. Dusty and half-eaten by moths. It said that this valley was once sacred. Before the wars, before the gods turned on each other.”
My brow creased in thought. “Sacred how?”
“All the gods lived here. Or so the myths said. Each one had a temple: fire, wind, earth, water, light, and dark. Their magic flowed together, balanced, and whole. Wildervale was once different from its twisted state. People revered it. The heart of their realm.”
She peered back into the swirling mist, her eyes clouded with unspoken worries. “Vireya, the goddess of flame, believed she was above the others. Brighter. Purer. She began the war. And when it ended…the rest of them left. Or died. And Wildervale rotted in their absence.”
I knelt beside her, listening more carefully now.
She looked down at her hands. “The trees warped. The winds grew strange. People stopped returning from pilgrimages. And now all that’s left are ruins and curses.”
I glanced at the curling mist, its slow crawl over the trees. “And we’re the lucky fools walking through it.”
She gave me a weak smile. “You’re not afraid?”
I hesitated, then said, “Fear’s not the enemy. It’s what you do with it.”
A faint color flushed her cheeks. Before she could reply, Alaric signaled our departure.
We continued the climb in silence. The trail narrowed further as we ascended, only a ribbon of stone cutting across the ridge.
Mist clung to our boots, and the wind rose.
It was soft at first, then sharp enough to bite through our cloaks.
The drop beside us grew more treacherous with every step, a chasm of fog and crag where even echoes dared not linger.
Jasira pulled her hood tighter and muttered something about cursed air.
Gideon tried to break the tension with a joke about cliffside taverns.
Alaric glanced behind us more often than ahead, hand near his sword hilt.
The guards exchanged wary looks, their fingers brushing the charms they wore beneath their collars.
Wyn said nothing more, but I could feel the unease rolling off her like static. Whatever weight she carried from the forest, it hadn’t eased here.
And neither had mine.
We rounded a jagged bend where the wind howled louder, funneling between the stone like a living thing. The ridge ahead sharpened into a ledge no wider than two paces. On the left, cloudless sky dominated the horizon. On the right, a steep rise of wet rock, jagged as shattered glass.
Wyn’s steps grew increasingly hesitant. I saw it in the way her shoulders hunched inward, how her hand clutched the edge of her cloak like a lifeline. Her breath came quickly and shallow, the kind that preceded panic.
I’d seen it before in new recruits facing their first real drop. That brittle, wide-eyed silence. When their bodies betrayed the effort to seem composed.
She was trying to be brave. Pretending.
But the tremble in her fingers gave her away.
I slowed my pace as far as possible without breaking the line. I couldn’t reach her—not without endangering the others—but I turned just enough to catch her eye over my shoulder.
“Princess,” I whispered, not wanting to startle her. “Wyn. Look at me.”
She reluctantly did. Her eyes widened, caught between the terror of falling and the shame of revealing her fear.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Something you know. Something interesting. Doesn’t matter what.”
She frowned. Then, after a moment, she said, “Nightbloom asters only open when the moon is full. They close again before sunrise, no matter what.”
Her voice steadied slightly with each word, her steps evening out.
I nodded. “Good. Another.”
“Um…bees don’t like the color red. They prefer blues and purples.”
Her tone was firmer now, less breathless. And the panic had eased from her posture.
“Keep going.”
She did.
The ridge curved again, widening a bit as it arced around a jut of stone. I felt the shift in the air before I saw it, like something sucked the wind backward into the mountain’s lungs. My hand went instinctively to the hilt on my belt.
And then I heard it.
A sharp gasp.
I turned in time to see Corren, two paces behind us, frozen in place. Something was wrong. His body had gone rigid. And then I saw the shape behind him. A shadow uncoiled from the stone, tall and lean and too close.
A blade arced forward, slicing across Corren’s throat with terrifying silence.
No crying, no chance to move. Just the wet gurgling snap of breath and blood.
He fell to his knees first, clutching at his neck as a spray of red fanned across the stone.
For a heartbeat, he knelt there, shaking, eyes wide with shock, before his body crumpled and pitched sideways off the cliff’s edge, vanishing into the mist below.
Wyn let out a terrifying gasp, a raw, involuntary sound, as if the air itself was trying to escape her lungs in sheer panic.
The shadow straightened itself.
Riven.
His silhouette emerged from the mist. Dark leather, scarred hands, a long blade still dripping red. His eyes flickered with something not wholly human, something cold and lit from within.
Lark shouted, panic flaring across his features.
He rushed forward, sword raised, but he didn’t see that Riven was ready.
A dagger flashed and drove deep into his abdomen with a sickening crunch.
Blood poured instantly, soaking the front of his tunic in a grotesque bloom.
He gasped, a high, broken sound, and staggered back a step, then another.
His sword slipped from his grip. He looked down, hands trembling as they pressed uselessly to the wound.
More blood welled up between his fingers.
Then his knees buckled, and he collapsed beside Corren’s still-warm trail, gasping like a fish on dry stone.
Gideon was already moving, blade drawn and angled low. “We’ve got company!” he barked. Alaric raised his sword.
“Hold the edge!” I shouted. “He’s driving us toward the drop.” I grasped Wyn’s hand in mine.