“Storms don’t come here. Not like this. It’s a curse, that’s what it is.”
“Everything’s a curse to you,” Joran snaps back, but the words are thin, without fire. He’s afraid too.
The younger Zmaj is on his feet, wings twitching hard enough to rattle the air. His gaze rakes the sky as I do, unsettled, searching for something neither of us can name.
“The desert doesn’t like this,” he mutters, half to himself. “It hides the suns. Nothing good comes when the suns hide.”
His words scrape at the raw edge of my nerves. I hug my arms around myself, staring at the horizon. The light is different—flat, colorless. Shadows fall where they shouldn’t, stretching too long, twisting against the canyon walls. Even the air tastes wrong, carrying a faint tang of dust, metallic and dry.
And then I notice the scarred warrior.
He stands apart from the rest of us, nothing unusual in that. But he’s not stirring or muttering. Just… watching. His lochaber strapped across his back, his body still as stone, his gaze fixed far down the canyon. The scars ridging his hide catch the strange gray light, pale against dark crimson, as if the sky itself wants to etch him sharper.
He doesn’t look back, doesn’t need to. His silence pulls more weight than their bickering ever could. When Joran curses, when Harlan mutters prayers, even when the younger Zmaj’s wings flare, they all glance his way in the end. Waiting. As though the answer lies in whether or not he moves.
I can’t look away. The trap of it gnaws at me—that I’ve spent so much time resenting the others, feeling pressed in by their needs, their complaints, the way they made me small. I never asked their names until yesterday. I never cared. They were just obstacles to push against. Shadows on the edges of my anger.
But him? He doesn’t blur. Hasn’t once. He fills the space around him without a word, makes every choice feel sharper just by existing. Yet I don’t know his name either.
My belly growls, loud enough to sting my pride. Hunger burns through me like acid, twisting deep. It would be easy to fall back into self-absorption, to fixate only on my own hollow ache, not just in my belly but in my soul. His steadiness pulls me out of that. It’s not comfort, not exactly. More like a rope tied to something beneath my ribs, yanking me forward whether I want it or not.
The wind picks up, carrying grit into my hair, across my face. I taste it on my tongue—bitter and dry. Dark clouds are rolling across the sky, thickening until the suns are faint blurs. Harlan crosses himself, muttering louder.
“It’s bad luck. Worse than bad luck. Should’ve stayed in the tunnels.”
“You’d rather burn or rot underground than choke here?” Joran swears at him, words breaking into a cough. “You’d have been buried by the quakes.”
The younger Zmaj whips his wings wide, the motion sharp, impatient.
“Enough,” he snaps, his voice rough with exhaustion. “Storm or no, we walk.”
I glance once more at the scarred warrior. He hasn’t moved, but the moment his gaze flicks toward the canyon’s mouth, I know—storm or not, he’s going forward. And where he goes, I will follow.
We break camp in silence. No one bothers arguing. There’s not much to gather—fraying blankets and waterskins that are light in our hands. Even the fire refused to last through the night, the embers cold and useless.
The overcast sky presses low, flattening the world into dull gray. It’s weird and kind of freaking me out. Tajss doesn’t wear colors like this. I keep glancing up, half-expecting the clouds to tear and vanish, for the twin suns to blaze again. They don’t. The gray holds, heavy and unnatural, dimming the canyon into a shadow of itself.
Harlan hunches his shoulders as we walk, lips moving in a constant mutter. His words are too soft to catch, but the cadence is steady, like a chant to ward off evil. Joran lags at first, then stumbles forward in uneven bursts, his curses spilling louder with every step. Hunger has made him meaner, his eyes dartingat the scarred warrior’s back as though almost daring to lay blame where he knows it can’t stick.
The younger Zmaj walks with restless tension, wings twitching like he wants to launch himself above the canyon and escape the weight of the sky. Every scrape of grit underfoot makes his head snap toward it, eyes narrowing. He’s on edge, and it’s crawling into my own skin.
I stay close to the scarred warrior.
He doesn’t set a fast pace, but it’s relentless—no pause, no slack, no stumble. His stride eats the canyon floor, his broad shoulders never bowing. The lochaber rides loose across his back as if he expects to need it at any moment.
The others may curse or mutter, but they follow all the same. Even when their eyes flick to me, sharp with doubt, their feet fall into his rhythm. It’s unconscious, automatic. He doesn’t command with words. He doesn’t need to.
Dust lifts in faint curls with every step, carried by a wind that whistles thin through the canyon walls. Grit stings my cheeks, catches in my teeth. I spit it out, but it’s no use. The taste of the storm is heavy in the air.
My arm throbs beneath the bandage, every pulse sending a sting up to my shoulder. I press a hand against it when the ache flares too hard, hiding the motion from the others. They’d call it weakness. He notices, though—I feel his glance slide toward me for the briefest heartbeat before he turns forward again.
Somehow, that’s enough to steady me.
The canyon stretches on, endless walls of red stone darkened by the sky. Strange plants cling to the cracks, spindly stalks tippedwith faintly glowing flowers that flicker in the gloom. Joran spits at one, snarling something about “witch plants.” The glow fades where his spit lands, the stalk curling in on itself like it heard him.
A shiver runs down my spine. Tajss feels more alive in ways it hasn’t before.
“Storm’s coming,” the younger Zmaj mutters, wings snapping wide before folding again. “The desert’s warning us.”
