Chapter 19 Stranded Souls #2
Once the fire was established, he brought water from a nearby stream in a makeshift leaf cup.
He managed to get a few drops past her lips, but there was still no response.
Finally, he looked at Night, who was watching him with intelligent, waiting eyes, and gave a quiet, decisive tilt of his head toward the forest. Hunt.
Without a sound, the massive lynx melted into the shadows.
By late afternoon, Night returned, a brace of plump rabbits dangling from his mouth.
He dropped them near the fire and met Ky’s gaze.
Ky gave the lynx a single, slow nod—an unspoken acknowledgment of a partnership that transcended words.
He took them without a word, his hands moving with practiced ease as he prepared their first real meal in this strange land.
His knife and a spit fashioned from a green branch were crude tools, but the smell of roasting meat soon filled their small clearing, a scent of civilization in the deep wild.
Night watched him, ears swiveling toward the dark woods, ever the sentry.
Later that evening, the firelight danced across her face, highlighting a smudge of dirt on her cheekbone and the way her hair had matted against her forehead. It bothered him—not the dirt itself, but the indignity of it. She had fought so hard to be strong; she didn’t deserve to look like a victim.
He dampened a scrap of cloth from his own undershirt in the cool stream water.
Very gently, moving with a hesitation that was foreign to his hands, he wiped away the dirt and dried mud from her face and neck.
He spent a long time working the tangles out of her dark hair with his fingers, a patient, repetitive motion that seemed to soothe the jagged edges of his own anxiety.
When he finished, she looked peaceful. Not broken. Just resting. He let the back of his fingers linger against her cheek for a heartbeat longer than necessary, the warmth of her skin the only reassurance he had in the dark.
Two more days passed in a blur of anxious routine.
Life stripped down to its essential, desperate rhythm: keeping the fire fed against the damp, making the constant trips to the stream for water, roasting whatever small game Night dragged back to their camp, and always, the long vigils watching her for any sign of change.
He took to sharpening his knife on a flat river stone, the repetitive, scraping sound a small anchor of normalcy in the unnerving silence of Gessa’s coma.
There was none. Her pulse remained a faint, bird-wing flutter. Her skin remained cool to the touch.
On the morning of the fourth day, he knew he couldn’t wait any longer.
His mind raced, pulling up old, half-forgotten survey maps.
The Dragon’s Teeth… the old northern survey routes…
and then, the spark of memory, now a desperate beacon.
A cache. An unmanned emergency depot hidden in the foothills.
It was their only chance. A week’s journey on foot, he estimated, maybe more with her like this.
He looked down at Gessa’s pale, still face, her dark hair fanned out against the moss he’d gathered for her. He looked at the vast, alien wilderness that surrounded them. He couldn’t stay here and wait for her to fade away. He had to risk moving her. He had to get to the cache.
Steeling himself for the journey ahead, he pushed to his feet, deliberately putting his full weight on his bad leg as a grim, necessary test.
The world dissolved into a flash of sickening agony.
It wasn’t the familiar, dull throb he endured each morning; it was a fresh, vicious shriek of protest from deep within the bone, a grinding of imperfectly knit shards and a litany of fire from nerves that had never healed right.
A choked gasp tore from his throat, and he braced a hand against a rough-barked tree, his knuckles white as his vision greyed at the edges.
For a long second, the sheer, blinding force of the pain was all that existed. How? a voice of despair whispered in his mind. How can you carry her a single step, let alone for a week through this?
He ruthlessly crushed the thought. It didn’t matter how. It only mattered that he would. He drew a ragged breath, then another, forcing the pain back down into its cage through sheer, stubborn will. He looked at Gessa’s still form, at the mission laid out before him.
A memory surfaced unbidden: another campfire, years ago, on a scouting mission.
Jaedon laughing, telling a bawdy joke. His own body had been whole then, humming with an easy, painless strength he’d taken for granted.
The memory was a painful contrast to the here and now.
But as he looked at Gessa’s still form, he realized this quiet, desperate vigil held a weight and purpose none of those careless nights had ever possessed.
It wasn’t about a survey route or a distant peak; it was about her.
His purpose now was simple: protect her.
And in that clarity, a part of him he thought long dead and buried began to stir.
The years of feeling like a broken instructor started to peel away, replaced by the cold focus of the man he used to be.
For the first time in a long time, as he prepared to carry her across this hostile wilderness, he felt like an Iron Spur.
And his mission was to see her open her eyes again.