I started down the nearest slope, so calm I was almost gliding.
***
It didn’t take me long to find one.
I followed the sound of grinding stone to a mountain path, up which a titan lumbered, churning up dust clouds. He was smallish for his kind but still towered over me by a good fifteen feet. He was human-shaped in the way that wild wolves are dog-shaped: some similarities, but one was clearly more ancient and powerful than the other. He had two legs, two arms, a head, a torso, but instead of flesh, he was made of stone and pebbles and plates of shale. Every time he moved, he rained rocks, and his joints ground against each other like jostling boulders.
He was perfect.
I ran toward him the second I saw him, sprinting across the rocks at breakneck speed. He heard me coming and turned around to look, blinking his small, sunken eyes in confusion. I leapt the last few feet and attacked him with such a hard roundhouse kick that he crashed to his knees with a grunt.
The impact knocked the wind out of me. If a human who wasn’t a demigod sentinel had done something as foolish as I just had, she would have shattered every bone in her leg. I slammed to the ground shoulder-first and lay there for a moment, gulping down air, my leg throbbing with pain, before unsteadily climbing back to my feet. The titan was still on his knees, watching me. I couldn’t read his expression. His face was a shifting mass of rock, his mouth a thin slit.
“Did you just crawl out of your pit?” I said, speaking haltingly in the harsh Ghorlock tongue. “You’re filthy.”
He looked down at himself with those unreadable sunken eyes.His limbs were caked in dried mud and frosted with dust. Given that and his size, I wondered if he might in fact be a child, freshly formed in the steaming mud pits where all stone titans were born.
“I thought they didn’t let puny newborns like you climb this high,” I continued, still in my fighting stance, though my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t even tell if I was afraid. I buzzed, I thrummed. I was hot and aching, feverish. I was going to die.
“You’d better hope your elders don’t see you,” I said, “or else they might throw you down the mountain. You’d fall to pieces, and then you’d have to wait there for someone to wander by and hope they cared enough to stop and help rebuild you. If there was anything left to rebuild, that is. Maybe you’d simply be dust after a drop like that. You certainly don’t look strong enough to—”
He moved fast. That had always surprised me—how quickly they could travel given their bulk. One swipe of his arm was all it took. His fist hit my stomach and I went flying. I hit a cliffside so hard that my vision flashed white. And then I was on the ground in a heap, gasping, tasting blood, my ears ringing. The world spun and spun, and the titan began to trudge away.
“Foolish,” he rasped in Ghorlock. He waved back at me in disgust. “A human and a fool.”
The delirious thought came to me that he was very funny, that I wanted to laugh. Then the world went black.
***
Rain woke me—a cold, stinging rain. I was floating through the air, which reassured me that I was dead and being transported through channels ofaelumto the Great Dominion, birthplace of the gods and final resting place of the dead.Aelum: the basis of all magical life.
“Yes,” came a voice from somewhere above me, “that is indeed the definition. I’m glad to hear that you’ve still got use of yourbrain.”
The voice jarred me. I forced open my eyes, and a flash of lightning afforded me a glimpse of a familiar spectacled face.
“Gareth?” I croaked.
“At your service,” he replied. “Don’t worry, we’re almost out of the rain. There’s a cave not far from where I found you.”
His voice was cheerful, as if we were on a pleasant stroll. But his arms shook around me, and he was breathing hard.
“Are you dead too?” I asked.
He choked out a sad burst of laughter. “You’re not dead, Mara. You’re alive. And I need you to stay with me, all right? I’m not equipped to defend myself against Freyda should you die in my care.”
“Freyda’s here?”
“She is, and she’s very angry and very wet. I told her to wait for us in the cave. We’re almost there, darling. Stay with me.”
His voice began to fade. My eyes drifted shut.
Do you hear me?His voice floated through the darkness.Stay with me, Mara. Please.
***
When I next awoke, I lay shivering on a blanket. The ground was hard but smooth, and I was in a shallow hollow of stone, like a giant thumbprint. Several yards away from me, the mouth of a cave framed a dark world of wind and rain. My head ached so sharply it felt like someone was screwing knives into my skull. But the world looked a bit more solid, my vision less hazy. I was still alive.
As I lay there, my eyes filled with tears, and I was too tired to keep them from falling.
