‘And you?’ he asked, carefully, as if her name might vanish like mist if he spoke too quickly.
Her smile deepened.
‘I’m Adara.’
…
Ash crouched low, his golden eyes fixed on his outstretched hand as he examined the ground beneath him. The memory of the dream clung to him like a shadow, unwelcome and persistent. He tried to shake it from his thoughts, but it lingered all the same.
The wolverian and wyverian forces remained stranded in the Kingdom of Magic, a shattered realm abandoned by its creators. They had spent the first week camped beneath the crumbling wall, hoping vainly that the gods might yet descend to deliver them.
But Ash had known better.
The gods would not come. They never did.
At last, he had convinced the others to move inland, to leave behind false hope and instead seek the scattered towns, to begin learning how to survive in a kingdom steeped in decay.
‘What do you think?’ Adriana asked, crouching beside him.
He turned to look at the wyverian warrior. Her short black hair was windswept, the horns that curled from her head stark against her dark armour which she still insisted on wearing, despite his repeated assurances that, for now, it was unnecessary.
‘The witches used magic for everything,’ she added, glancing around. ‘Even the growing of food.’
‘The soil here is g-good,’ Ash replied quietly. ‘We could g-grow crops.’
Adriana nodded and gestured for a few nearby wolverians to join them, beckoning them to inspect the land.
‘We destroyed this place,’ she said with a bitter snort, ‘and now we’ll be the ones to breathe life back into it. Funny, isn’t it, how fate plays her games?’
‘Curious, indeed,’ Ash murmured as he rose, his gaze sweeping across the landscape, the long-forsaken kingdom of the witches.
The skies were thick with ash-grey clouds, and near the border of the Kingdom of Fauna, it rained endlessly. Much of the terrain had become marshland, but towards the east, forests still lingered with remnants of older, wilder magic.
In the distance, a structure rose from the dead earth, its silhouette fractured yet standing.
It looked like a strange marriage between temple and fortress, with shattered spires that marked it unmistakably asone of the arcane witch towers, spun through countless old tales.
‘We can’t stay here forever,’ Adriana said, falling into step beside him as they walked across the field of brittle, withered grass. ‘We need a plan, something to break through the wall.’
Ash stopped and turned to face her, his expression unreadable.
‘We c-cannot break through m-magic,’ he said flatly. ‘We must wait.’
‘We cannot wait around.’
Ash stepped forward, the distance between them vanishing in a breath. His voice, when he spoke, was sharp-edged. ‘Then why do you not do s-something, Adriana?’
He saw the way her body stiffened, her face tightening under the weight of old grief.
‘We made a promise, long ago,’ she said. ‘Keir and I swore never to intervene. Only to watch.’
Ash gave a humourless snort. ‘Then be silent andwatch.’
Without waiting for a reply, he turned and marched on, leaving Adriana behind, her mouth parted in disbelief, her dark eyes blazing with restrained fury.
Curious, isn’t it, how grief can tip the mind into madness? We seldom speak of it, rarely pause to consider just how dangerous sorrow can be to the soul. We convince ourselves that time will tame it, that with patience, grief will still, soften, settle into silence. But silence is not absence. Just because we do not name our grief, do not speak of the ache wrapped tightly around our hearts, does not mean it has faded. No. The trouble with grief is that it festers in the dark. It spreads like rot. And when it finally reaches the mind… that is when the true danger begins.
You begin to hear its voice. You see their face again. What once were fleeting dreams, desperate attempts to glimpse a lost loved one, twist into something else. Something darker. A distortion of reality. You begin to forget where the dream ends and waking begins.
