Cal's world revolved around putting one foot in front of the other. Everything beyond the five feet of mud and root-laced trail in front of him on the Trace existed as a distraction.
Each Stamina channel in his spirit burned. The stasis elixir held his damaged pathways in place, bracing the cracks before they could widen and preventing the cascading erosion that would have killed him. It did nothing for the sensation of walking with a body full of cracked glass. Every step sent a tremor through him, and each tremor translated into a fresh surge of searing pain that started in his feet and raced outward.
He'd stopped trying to count steps to distract himself after the first hour. Numbers required a portion of his mind that he couldn't spare. All of it, every scrap of focus he possessed, was committed to the singular task of forward motion. [Ignore Pain] and [Pain Tolerance] were the only things keeping him on his feet.
So he walked. And he endured.
Hours bled together. The light shifted through imperceptible degrees as Aurum crawled across the winter sky, invisible behind the perpetual overcast. At some point Cinder joined it, and then rain began to fall: a fine mist that beaded on every surface.
Ahead and to the right, Selara led at an easy pace, a hand loose on Flamewright's hilt. She hadn't spoken since they'd set out. All business.
A sentiment upheld by Kamari and his team, who surrounded Cal and followed the noblewoman. They were good. All of them. Competent, well-coordinated. And Cal was a stone around their necks. Every professional adjustment they made to account for his slower pace, every time the formation compressed slightly because he'd fallen half a step behind, reminded him he was the weakest link.
Good. He leaned on the helplessness to power his strides. Remember this. This is what it feels like to need saving. I'm never going to feel this way again, nor will anyone I hold dear.
They reached the Deadfall dungeon clearing a few hours past second dusk.
Tents went up quickly: Kamari and his team had their camp assembled in minutes, a semicircle of oiled canvas facing a central fire pit. Bryon gathered wood while Senna cast a cantrip, and soon a small fire crackled against the cold.
Cal lowered himself to the ground beside the fire with all the grace of a collapsing building. The act of sit-falling sent a fresh surge of agony through his channels, and he hunched forward, elbows on his knees, breathing through his teeth until the worst of it subsided.
Through the haze, he became aware of movement where the clearing met the trees. Two figures had emerged from the Ordo cabin, and Selara was already walking toward them.
Cal watched through half-lidded eyes as she crossed the clearing, the sentries straightening at her approach. She stopped a few yards short and spoke in a voice too low for Cal to catch. One of the sentries glanced over her shoulder at the group by the fire, then back to Selara and nodded once. Then both sentries returned to their cabin, while Selara headed back to the camp.
The night closed in.
Rain turned to freezing drizzle that crusted the tent canvas with a thin shell of ice and ticked against the fabric. Cal lay in his bedroll, unable to sleep, the pain a companion that refused to be ignored. Warmth from the fire stopped short of the interior. Chill seeped up through the ground cloth, settling alongside the spiritual fire in a paradox of sensation that made his body feel simultaneously frozen and ablaze.
Morning arrived without ceremony, and the camp came down as fast as it had gone up. The drizzle had stopped, but the cold had deepened overnight, and every breath Cal drew came out in a thin plume of vapor.
They skirted the dungeon's reality shard to the west, following its curved barrier into the rarely explored forest beyond. The trees grew closer together, their trunks and canopy denser. The undergrowth thickened, and Selara began cutting through some sections to make it easier for Cal to travel.
The pain only got worse, and his world contracted further. The forest, the mission: all of it receded behind the haze of pain and locomotion. Left foot. Right foot.
Don't fall.
"Do you need to be carried, lad?"
The voice came from nowhere. Cal blinked, the words taking a full second to travel from his ears to his brain and assemble themselves into meaning. He turned his head and found Kamari beside him, closer than before, the big man's gravelly baritone pitched low for privacy.
The refusal tangled with images he couldn't suppress. Gavin on his knees. Mira in Leo's arms. Even the sound of the baker asking for separate rooms.
He shook his head jerkily.
This is part of my penance. I can at least do this much.
Kamari watched him a moment longer, then nodded and fell back to his position.
The second day ground on.
The terrain worsened steadily, the gentle slopes of the deep Virethane giving way to rocky ground split by gullies and choked with fallen timber. Twice, Cal caught his boot on a hidden root and pitched forward, bracing himself on tree trunks with his left hand while his right clawed uselessly at bark. Each near-fall sent a spike of agony through his body that left him gasping, clinging to whatever he'd grabbed until the tremors subsided.
He was running on grit and willpower now, a primal urge that kept his legs moving through sheer stubbornness.
The clank of steel brought his attention back to his surroundings.
Selara had stopped ten yards ahead, one gauntleted fist raised for a halt.
"We're close." She turned to face the group, and Cal saw that her grey eyes had hardened into polished steel. "When I scouted this area, I killed the guardian that had claimed the Blossom's clearing. That was three days ago. Something else has almost certainly moved in by now. Stay quiet, and stay alert."
Weapons were drawn, and they pressed forward.
Silence arrived in increments, so gradual that Cal didn't notice it at first. The steady ticking of rainfall off the canopy, the backdrop of every hour he had spent in the Virethane, slowed, then stopped. Trees here were ancient; their trunks wide as some houses, their roots emerging from the earth in great twisted ridges that rose to waist height before plunging back down. The canopy soared higher and higher overhead, so far above that the individual branches were lost.
Birdsong had ceased. The chittering of insects and the rustle of small animals in the underbrush were gone. It was almost oppressive.
Even through the pain, Cal felt it. A primitive alarm that bypassed his shuttered spiritual senses and spoke directly to the lizard brain buried in his thick skull. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His heartrate, already elevated from exertion and pain, kicked higher.
No one spoke. The silence forbade it. But they all felt it, as hands shifted on weapons and eyes refused to rest in one spot for long.
They crept through the primordial quiet for what felt like hours, but couldn't have been more than thirty minutes. The trees thinned gradually, the natural pillars spreading apart, and light strengthened ahead: an opening in the woods. A clearing.
Cal saw the boulders first.
They jutted from the forest floor in a chaotic sprawl, grey-brown granite slabs piled against and atop one another in a formation that looked like a giant's discarded game of blocks. The clearing itself was roughly circular, perhaps eighty yards across, and the boulders filled most of it, rising in an uneven mound toward the center where a single massive stone sat at the apex like a throne.
And there, on the highest point of the highest boulder, impossibly delicate against the ancient rocks, a flower grew from a crack in the granite.
It was small. Smaller than Cal had expected: it looked like a violet daisy, no larger than his palm. Its stem was thin and straw-pale, rising from a tuft of dark green leaves that clung to the rock's surface. By any objective measure, it was unremarkable. A wildflower. Something you'd step over on a hiking trail without a second glance.
But the light.
A rich shaft of sunlight had punched through the winter sky and the ancient canopy above, falling through the gap in the trees to illuminate the Blossom in a narrow column of gold. The beam highlighted the petals against the rain-soaked Virethane, making the splash of color something to behold.
Selara studied the clearing for a long moment, then turned to the group.
"Stay here and don't try to help. Just protect Cal."
Hefting her sword, she stalked forward as flashes of energy appeared around her, the magic sinking into weapon and armor alike.
Her movement through the boulder field was careful, each foot placed deftly on mossy stone. She wove between the lower slabs, her armored form diminishing as she advanced toward the central mound, Flamewright held in front of her. Ten yards in. Twenty.
Then she vanished.
One moment she was there, the next, a streak of silver and steel blurred across Cal's vision so fast that his mind couldn't track it. The sound arrived a fraction later: a concussive crack that split the air, followed instantly by the shriek of metal impacting something hard.
She'd struck a boulder at the base of the Blossom's throne and hopped back. The boulder shuddered.
Then it rose.
The stone-grey surface rippled outward from the point of impact like disturbed water, and where the ripple passed, color bled through. Deep crimson, the dark red of cooling lava, spreading across the "rock" in expanding patches that ate the grey camouflage. The thing unfolded. What Cal had taken for a natural formation, a slab leaning against the central mound, heaved upward as limbs separated from the mass. A thick, muscular neck extended, armored in overlapping scales the size of a dinner plate. A wedge-shaped head swung toward Selara, and two eyes like furnace vents fixed on her, burning orange-gold.
The flightless drake was enormous. Crouched among the boulders it had been indistinguishable from but unfurled to its full height, it dwarfed the stones around it. Its body was a barrel of corded muscle and scaled armor, low-slung and powerfully built, with four thick legs that ended in jet-black talons gouging furrows in the granite as it found its footing. Vestigial wing-stubs jutted from its shoulders, useless for flight but ridged with bone spurs that gave its silhouette a jagged profile. Its torso alone was the length of a transit bus, and the neck and tail doubled that.
Then it roared, and the sound was deeper than any animal had a right to produce: a subsonic detonation that vibrated in his sternum and sent his guts sloshing. The surrounding boulders rattled against each other, and loose pebbles danced across the stone. Bryon flinched. Even Kamari took a half-step back before catching himself.
The veteran leader quickly tapped his chest, followed by a flick of his fingers left and right. Unslinging his shield, he held the center while his team immediately contracted into a crescent of bodies between Cal and the forest clearing.
Selara stood ten yards from the drake on a flat boulder, and Flamewright came alive in lines of molten amber. Heat distortions bent the air along the cutting edge, and the scent rolled across the clearing: the smell of a forge primed for work.
Faint lines of fire danced across the inscriptions on Selara's armor, blinking into visibility before sinking back into the steel, each one leaving a faint after-image of fiery light.
The drake charged.
Tons of scale and fury launched forward with an acceleration that defied its mass, claws chewing rock as it closed the distance in one bounding stride. Its jaws gaped, revealing a throat that glowed the deep orange of banked coals, and the air in front of it ignited.
The fire came in a torrent: a pressurized eruption of superheated air and liquid flame that turned the clearing into a furnace. Boulders in the stream's path blackened instantly, their surfaces cracking and popping as thermal shock shattered the stone. It reached Cal and the team even at their distance, a scalding wave that dried the moisture on his face and forced him to throw up an arm against the blast.
Selara met it head-on. She swept Flamewright in a wide arc, and the air in front of her split open. A crescent of bright orange fire leapt from the blade's path, surging forward to meet the drake's deluge in a collision that produced a concussion that set his teeth aching. The two fires crashed together and twisted, the drake's wild blaze collapsing into Flamewright's defined edge as if drawn by a magnet. For one moment, Selara seemed to gather the creature's own flames, pulling them into the vortex of her magic. Then she swung her sword again.
The stolen fire, compressed and refined, blasted back at the drake in a concentrated lance that landed square on its chest. The creature staggered, its talons gouging trenches. The boulders nearest the point of impact glowed cherry-red, their surfaces softening and running in sluggish rivulets.
The drake recovered quickly, clearly unhurt by the magical fire. It roared its fury and lowered its head to charge again, this time keeping its mouth shut, relying on heft and speed and those jet-black claws.
Selara met the charge. The collision was catastrophic. Flamewright caught the drake's descending foreclaw in a parry that sent a shockwave tearing through the clearing, blasting loose stones outward in a hail that cracked against the surrounding boulders. The sound pealed like thunder. Selara held her ground, and then twisted, redirecting the drake's momentum beyond her as her sword came up in a rising slash that carved a furrow through the scales of its neck.
The beast howled. It lashed sideways with its skull, a battering ram of bone and scale that caught Selara in the shoulder and launched her thirty yards through the air. She hit a boulder, cratered it, and was on her feet before the dust settled, Flamewright already singing its rising hum as she charged back in.
Then the fight sped back up to speeds his eyes couldn't track. One moment they were visible: two forces of nature locked in a grinding exchange among the boulders. The next, the drake wheeled and crashed through the treeline to the right, and Selara followed, a streak of silver and orange that vanished into the forest with a boom of displaced air. The sounds of a natural disaster followed: the splintering crack of ancient trunks snapping like kindling, the earthshaking thuds of massive bodies colliding with the ground. The intermittent roar of flame and beast, and the screech of steel on scale.
Cal stood behind the defensive line of Kamari's team, trembling and useless, listening to a war he couldn't see.
A particularly violent impact shook the ground beneath his feet. The jolt traveled up through his boots and into his legs, managing to sting every damaged channel in his spirit. Cal gritted his teeth and maintained his vigil.
The crashing in the forest reached a crescendo.
Then the drake burst back into the clearing.
It shot through the trees like a ballista bolt, its body cratering a path through the smaller stones before slamming into the central mound with enough force to crack the massive boulder. The creature lay stunned, flanks heaving, its scales breached and weeping dark blood in a dozen places.
Selara dropped from the canopy.
She fell like a meteor, Flamewright blazing in both hands, the blade trailing a comet's tail of fire that lit the clearing like a second sun. A rising shriek of super-heated air filled the space, and the heat preceding her warped the light.
She drove the sword through the drake's left eye.
Flamewright stabbed through the orbital socket, punched through the dense bone of the skull, and buried itself to the crossguard in the creature's brain. The beast's remaining eye bulged, its orange-gold iris boiling away to white before the organ ruptured with a wet pop. The drake convulsed once, a full-body spasm that cracked two more boulders and sent a final, shuddering tremor through the clearing. Then it went still.
Selara knelt astride its skull, one knee braced against the ruined eye socket, both hands on Flamewright's grip. She stayed there for multiple breaths, her shoulders heaving. Then she wrenched the blade free and stepped off the corpse.
She was a wreck. Half of her left ear was gone, sheared away cleanly, the wound cauterized by whatever attack left it. Her pauldrons were cracked and dented, the left one hanging at an angle that suggested the strap beneath had snapped. Scorch marks blackened the armor over her abdomen, and she favored her right leg as she turned to face the group.
But she was alive. She was victorious.
Cal stared at the Blossom. It still glowed on its fractured boulder, untouched, indifferent to the carnage below. The shaft of sunlight still found it, still set its petals blazing. The sight of it filtered through the pain and the fear and the fog he had lived under since the ambush, reaching something that he'd forgotten how to feel.
Relief.
It swept through him all at once, so suddenly that his eyes teared. The spiritual fire in his channels quieted to a manageable throb, as if even his damaged pathways recognized that salvation was fifty yards away. The iron band around his lungs loosened, and he drew the first full breath he'd taken since leaving Deadfall.
It's over. I'm going to be okay.
He looked at Selara. She was walking toward them now, Flamewright resting across one shoulder, her stride uneven but confident. Blood matted the silver-blonde hair on the left side of her head, and her armor scraped and clinked with each step. But she was upright, and she was coming back, and Cal felt a smile pull at the corners of his mouth.
"Everyone alright over there?" Selara called cheerfully across the clearing.
Kamari sheathed his sword and raised a hand. "Aye, we're safe! Well fought!"
Selara nodded, adjusting Flamewright's weight on her shoulder. She was close enough now that Cal could see the exhaustion in her eyes, the way she was breathing through her mouth, and the fine tremor in her sword arm that she was doing a poor job of hiding. She gave the group a wan smile that deepened the lines around her eyes.
"That one was stronger than the first guardian. A nasty surprise." She wiped a streak of blood from her jaw with the back of her gauntlet. "I wonder if it is new to the area, maybe driven from—"
She froze.
The words died in her throat. Her grey eyes bugged out, blown open to the extreme.
Kamari dropped his hand back to his sword hilt. "Lady Selara?"
She didn't answer. Didn't move. Flamewright on her shoulder, she stood perfectly still, her mouth slightly open, her widened eyes staring at nothing. Her entire body had locked mid-step.
Then Cal saw the blood. A thin line of it leaked from the corner of her mouth. It ran a slow path down her chin, collecting in the hollow of her jaw before dropping to the scarred steel of her gorget.
A delicate red line materialized across her throat that ran from beneath her left ear to beneath her right. For one suspended moment, it was just a line.
Then it widened.
Selara's body fell. It dropped straight down, knees buckling, like a puppet with its strings cut. Flamewright clattered against stone, the armored weight of her collapse echoing through the silent clearing.
Her head didn't fall.
It hung in the air, suspended, her silver-blonde hair drifting on a slight breeze.
A whistle began to drift through the clearing’s sudden hush. It was a looping melody - just a few notes in a simple scale. The sound was utterly casual, more appropriate for a quiet street on a peaceful afternoon.
Cal knew that tune. He'd heard it once before, floating through the alley behind The Golden Mortar on the day everything had changed.