“Never heard of your shrine, ‘Anya’,” she said, her tone still skeptical but a shade less hostile. “This is no place for lost pilgrims. The Spurs Edge will swallow you whole, and the Dragon… the Spine doesn’t forgive mistakes.” She paused. “But you look half-dead on your feet. And that dog of mine hasn’t decided to tear your throat out yet, which is something.”
Marta jerked her chin toward a rough bench outside the cabin. “Sit. Drink. Then you’ll tell me true, or as true as you’re able, which way you were blundering when you stumbled onto my cookpot.”
The relief was so intense Gessa nearly sagged. Marta offered her water from a wooden dipper—cool, clean, the best Gessa had ever tasted—and a piece of tough, smoked meat that she devoured despite its strong, gamy flavor. Gessa stuck to her story, embellishing it slightly with details of a journey from a distant village, avoiding anything that might hint at Polan. Marta listened, still wary, occasionally asking a probing question that Gessa deflected as best she could.
Though Marta never fully dropped her guard, and Gessa certainly never revealed her truth, a grudging sort of understanding seemed to pass between them. Perhaps Marta saw the desperation, the genuine fear that no amount ofstorytelling could entirely conceal. Or perhaps she simply had a flicker of pity for a lone woman clearly out of her depth.
After Gessa had rested a short while, Marta unrolled a worn piece of hide on which she’d scratched a crude but effective map of the surrounding ridges and valleys.
“No bells up there I know of, girl,” she repeated, her finger tracing a path. “Only wind and rock. But if you’re set on breakin’ your neck in the Spine, follow that game trail up past the scarred oak, you’ll know it by the lightning strike. Then look for the twin peaks that look like a wolf’s fangs. The Blackwater River cuts through the valley between ‘em. It’s a wicked crossing, mind. Cross it, and keep the sun on your left shoulder in the mornings. That’ll take you deeper than sense allows. And it’s the way you claim you want to go.” She fixed Gessa with a final, knowing look. “Best hope what you’re truly seeking is worth the finding, and that what’s chasing you ain’t worse than these mountains.”
With that, and a small bundle containing a bit more dried meat and some edible roots, Marta sent her on her way, the wolf-dog watching silently until Gessa was out of the clearing.
She found the lightning-struck oak just where Marta promised, and the twin peaks guided her true. But the Blackwater River, when Gessa finally reached it after two more days of grueling travel, was more than a valley stream; it was a churning, slate-grey torrent, wide and fast, its banks steep and slick with mud. The roar of it filled the air. There was no bridge, no obvious ford. For a full day, she scouted up and down its length, her earlier optimism dimming into a grim resolve.
Finally, she found a spot where a massive, ancient pine had fallen, its trunk spanning most of the roiling water. The tip of the tree had snapped off in the current, leaving a churning, three-foot gap between the splintered wood and a jumble of slick boulders on the far side. Securing her bag tightly, whispering a prayer to any god that might listen to a runaway wife, she startedacross. Every step on the mossy, uneven trunk was a battle for balance.
The spray soaked her, the noise was deafening, and halfway across, her foot slipped. She cried out, windmilling her arms, her heart ceasing to beat, before somehow regaining her balance, her knuckles white where she gripped a jutting branch stub. The final leap was a desperate, ungraceful lunge. She landed hard on the rocks, her bad ankle twisting on the slick stone. A jolt of white-hot pain shot up her leg, and she gasped, scrambling on hands and knees to safety.
She made camp that night in a shallow cave she found overlooking the river valley, exhausted but with a renewed sense of her own capability. She had faced the Blackwater and won. Perhaps she could face whatever came next. But sleep, when it finally dragged her under, offered no respite, only a descent into suffocating horror.
The nightmare began subtly, the familiar cold dread coiling in her belly even before Polan appeared. He was there, looming in the confines of her small cave, his silhouette a deeper black against the imagined firelight she hadn’t dared build. His presence filled the space, pressing down on her, stealing the air from her lungs. She tried to scream, to move, to scramble away, but her limbs were lead, her voice trapped in her throat, a choked, silent terror.
His voice, when it came, was the silken rasp she remembered, the one that always preceded his “corrections,” laced with that terrible, feigned sorrow.
“My dearest Gessa,” he crooned, moving closer. The cloying scent of his perfume, a scent that was both sickeningly sweet and metallic, like blood, filled the cave. “Did you truly think such a small stream, such a little bit of wilderness, could keep you from me? From my loving care?”
She felt the phantom pressure of the feedback stone in her palm, cold and smooth, his larger hand enveloping hers, forcing her fingers to close around it. The remembered tingle, the insidious promise of escalating agony, began.
“It wounds me to see you so determined to stray, my love. This is only because I care for you so deeply. You force my hand, you see, to bring you back to the peace you so stubbornly resist.”
His face loomed over hers, eyes glittering with that cold, possessive light that had always stripped her bare. And then, a fresh wave of horror washed over her as two more figures materialized in the dim, oppressive light of the dream-cave, standing just behind him, their faces etched with a familiar, placid disapproval. Her parents. Her mother wrung her hands, her expression one of pained resignation.
“Gessa, dear,” she said, her voice thin and distant. “You must listen to Polan. He only wants what is best for you. It’s for your own good.”
Her father nodded, his face stern, unyielding. “Your husband is a patient man, Gessa. Too patient, perhaps. This… willfulness… must be guided from you. For the sake of our house, for your own salvation.”
Their words, the ultimate betrayal, struck her with the force of a physical blow, shattering the last vestiges of any imagined sanctuary. There was no one. No escape, not even in the deepest recesses of her own mind.
Polan smiled then, a slow, terrible curving of his lips. “You see, my heart? Everyone agrees. It is all for love. For your own good.” He reached for her, not with a hand, but with a wave of crushing despair, a suffocating blanket of his total control, endorsed by those who should have protected her, that smothered her very soul.
She woke with a tearing, silent scream, thrashing violently against her thin blanket, her heart trying to hammer its wayout of her chest. For a disoriented, terrifying moment, the oppressive weight from the dream remained, pressing down on her, Polan’s perfume thick and cloying in the air of the small cave, her parents’ placid, condemning faces hovering just beyond her vision.He’s here! They’re all here! He found me!But then, as raw panic gave way to a dawning, even more chilling horror, she realized the suffocating pressure wasn’t Polan, nor her parents’ judgment. It was her.
The air in the cave was thick, alive, crackling with an immense, uncontainable power that was erupting from her core like a breached dam. Her skin prickled with a thousand burning needles, the scent of peppermint so intense it was acrid, searing her nostrils, and the hematite against her chest blazed with an unbearable heat before turning to ice, then heat again, a frantic, painful pulsing.
Waves of raw, alien power surged through her, no longer just thrumming but tearing at her from the inside out, as if a hostile entity had taken root within her and sought to burst free. Outside the cave, the wind howled, a tormented, elemental cry, and the ancient trees around the cave mouth groaned and splintered as if under a giant’s fist. The very rock of the cave seemed to vibrate with a discordant hum, and flashes of blinding blue-white light pulsed behind her eyelids, each one a fresh jolt of agony.
This is it,the thought was a shard of ice in her mind.This is not just ‘uncontrolled.’ This is a monster. My monster. It will kill me. It will tear me apart and leave nothing behind.
She curled into a desperate, tight ball, her teeth chattering uncontrollably, clutching the pulsing hematite with a grip that threatened to shatter her own bones. She squeezed her eyes shut against the searing light, no longer praying, but simply enduring, a tiny, helpless speck against the cataclysm her own being had unleashed. It felt like an eternity, every muscle lockedin a violent tremor, the surges of power ripping through her like a barrage of invisible lightning, each one threatening to extinguish her.
Slowly, agonizingly, the internal tempest began to subside, the violent surges lessening into ragged, shuddering waves, then finally into a deep, exhausted thrumming. The wind outside gradually died down, leaving an eerie, ringing silence. Gessa lay trembling for a long time, soaked in a cold sweat, every fiber of her being screaming with a fatigue that went bone deep.
The experience had been far worse than the first eruption; this time, she had felt the raw, destructive potential of her Wild Blood, the terrifying proximity to self-annihilation. The Iron Spurs were no longer just a sanctuary from Polan; they were her only hope of surviving herself. The fear was a living thing now, a constant companion, urging her onward with a new, desperate ferocity. She had to reach them. She had to learn control, or this power would destroy her.
The final leg of her journey to the Iron Spur Academy was undertaken in a haze of grim determination. The nightmare and the subsequent magical storm had cast a dark pall over everything, stripping away her fleeting moments of joy.
Every unusual sound, every shadow, now felt like a direct threat—either Kestrel, drawn by some lingering trace of her uncontrolled magic, or another eruption from within. The Spurs Edge foothills gave way to steeper, more treacherous slopes as she climbed into the lower reaches of the Dragon’s Spine. The air grew thinner, colder, and the trails, where they existed at all, were goat paths. Leaning heavily on a makeshift staff of pine, her ankle ached constantly, a dull counterpoint to the fear that gnawed at her.
