He knelt there for another second, the panic threatening to swamp him. Useless. Panic was useless. He closed his eyes, took one harsh, steadying breath, and ruthlessly shoved the fear down. He forced the years of Iron Spur training to the surface, letting the cold, clear discipline settle over him like a cloak.
The expert took over. He had to get his bearings. He forced himself to his feet and analyzed his surroundings. The sun was too low, too far west for mid-afternoon. The trees weretwisted, pale-barked things dripping with a thick moss he didn’t recognize. He reached out with his senses, probing the local Ley Lines. They felt sluggish and wrong, distorted by the chaotic nature of their arrival. But beneath the distortion, there was a faint, familiar hum, a signature he hadn’t felt in years, not since his survey missions in the far north. A cold dread settled in his gut. If these were the lines he thought they were... Then his eyes found a break in the canopy, and far in the distance, a familiar silhouette against the sky. The jagged peaks of the Dragon’s Teeth.
But that was impossible. They were a week’s hard ride north of the Academy.
The scale of what she did hit him with the force of a physical blow. It defied every known principle of Wayfinding, every law he had ever learned or taught. This shouldn’t be possible, a part of his mind, the part that was the disciplined expert, screamed at him. Hundreds of miles. She hadn’t opened a tunnel. She had ripped a wound in the world and flung them through it.
Now that the physical shock was receding, the emotional horror of the confrontation rushed in. The pieces slammed together in his mind. The feedback stone. Her terror. Her breakdown. It wasn’t just cruelty. It was methodical, practiced torture.
The fear was still there, a cold sweat on the back of his neck. Her power felt too much like the force that had taken Dawn—chaotic, hungry, overwhelming. Every instinct in his broken body screamed at him to recoil, to hate the source of that chaos.
But he forced the instructor’s logic over the survivor’s panic.
This wasn’t the Silver Maw. This wasn’t a senseless accident. She hadn’t lost control; she had spent it. She had looked at a monster and chosen to tear the world apart rather than let him take her.
He couldn’t be angry. You don’t blame a trapped wolf for chewing through its own leg to escape the trap, even if the blood makes you sick.
The pragmatist clawed its way back to the surface. Survival. First, shelter. He carefully gathered Gessa into his arms, surprised at how light she was, and carried her to the base of a low, rocky overhang. He laid her down gently. The air was already growing cooler, the shadows lengthening. His hands felt clumsy as he gathered fallen branches, the motions rusty after years spent within Academy walls.
The wood was damp, the air heavy with moisture. Using the flint from his belt pouch, he struck a spark into a bit of moss he’d found, but it was too saturated and fizzled out instantly. He tried again, a curse hissing through his teeth as another spark died. Frustration warred with the encroaching chill. He was about to give in to it, to the cold misery of a fireless night, when a harsher, colder voice—the voice of his first training instructor—cut through his self-pity.Think, Spur. Don’t just act.
He shoved himself back to his feet, ignoring the protest from his leg. Surface wood was useless. He needed a source of dry, resinous fuel. His eyes scanned the surrounding trees until he found what he was looking for: a dead, but still standing, pine limb, protected from the worst of the damp by the canopy above. He hacked it down with his knife, the motion jarring his arm but satisfyingly effective.
Working with methodical precision, he used the tip of his blade to shave away the wet outer layers, getting to the dry, pitch-scented heartwood within. He didn’t just gather kindling; hemadeit, carving thin, feathery curls from the wood that would catch a spark a hundred times better than any damp moss. It was slow, painstaking work. His hands, softened by years at the Academy, cramped around the knife handle, but the muscle memory was there, buried but not gone.
He built a small, deliberate platform of twigs to keep his tinder off the damp ground. Then, shielding it with his body, he struck the flint again. This time, the spark landed on the feathery wood shavings and held. A tiny, orange ember glowed. He hunched over it, blowing a gentle, steady stream of air, nursing the fragile heat, protecting it from the oppressive damp. The ember grew, caught a curl, and then, with a softwhoosh, a tiny, determined flame flickered to life.
He fed it meticulously, twig by twig, until it was strong enough to consume the larger branches. He sat back on his haunches, the warmth on his face a relief. The orange light pushed back the encroaching darkness and the unsettling noises of the forest seemed to retreat from its circle. It was more than a fire; it was a flicker of defiance, a statement that he was not yet defeated. It was the first real victory against the overwhelming chaos of their situation.
The fire held the physical cold at bay, but the first night was a long misery of a different sort. Before settling in, he scraped together a thick mattress of dry leaves and moss, not trusting the fire alone to guard against the chilling damp of the earth. He laid Gessa upon it, then settled in close behind her, molding his body to her back.
A quiet look to Night was all it took; the massive lynx understood and curled his great, warm body against her front, sandwiching her between them in a living cocoon of protection. The firelight cast flickering shadows, but it could not dispel the deeper darkness of Ky’s fear as he huddled close, listening to the high-pitched clicks from the canopy and the mournful cries of distant creatures. He did not sleep. He watched her, his hand resting on her ribs to feel the shallow, yet steady, rise and fall. Her stillness felt less like sleep and more like an absence.
The next day brought a grey, unforgiving light, and Gessa still had not stirred. The fire had died, and a damp chill wassettling back into their small camp. Ky rebuilt it with methodical efficiency, his hands moving with a confidence he hadn’t felt in years. He didn’t need the frantic attempts of the first night; the rhythm of survival was coming back to him, muscle memory waking up after a long slumber.
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 hadnever 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.
