Chapter forty-six
The Wake
-Maris-
After what felt like an endless journey through the underbrush, the temple revealed itself like a secret half-buried in stone and shadow, swallowed by vines the color of dried blood. At its center, as the vision had shown, stood a tree not towering, but wide-limbed and luminous. Its bark shimmered faintly with silver veins. The entire dead forest was bowing before it.
Maris’s sigil pulsed wildly.
She took a step forward, barely breathing. “It’s here. I can feel the pull.”
Alarik flanked her, faelight and sword drawn, scanning the perimeter.
Serenya moved closer to her. She rolled her shoulder blades, “Let’s get this over with.”
Maris stepped toward the altar that lay broken beneath the tree’s roots. It was half-sunken into the ground rejected by time itself.
She reached outward, letting her fingertips grasp the stones edge.
The world shuddered, forcing her to pull her reach back.
A sound like stone cracking beneath oceans tore through the sky. The tree lit from within — lines of fire racing up its bark like molten veins.
The wind howled and the skies darkened.
“No,” Alarik said sharply, grabbing Maris and pushing her behind him. “They’re here.”
The Veil ripped from above with a deafening boom.
“They sent these to protect it?” Serenya hissed, blades already drawn.
“No,” Maris breathed. “Not to protect it. But to end me.”
Veilspawn shrieked through the fractured shadows above the Hollow’s temple, their forms misshapen by divine cruelty, limbs too long, mouths where no mouth should be. Their screeches split the air like serrated knives. Alarik and Serneya formed a line in front of Maris.
Kastor the wielder moved first.
The warrior’s voice rang out in the old tongue, and the very ground trembled beneath his boots. Magic rooted in stone and time surged from his body, thick stone walls burst from the ground, forming jagged barriers between the creatures and the group. His halberd gleamed with rune-etched sigils that flared to life, slicing clean through the limbs of two terrors that tried to leap over the barricade.
Vireth wasn’t far behind, lithe and silver-eyed. She summoned a shroud of mist so thick and cold it hissed when it met flesh. Her magic was elemental, airy and precise — she move like death with each flick of her blade. She twisted between the veilspawn with preternatural speed, dispatching one after another with a soft-spoken incantation and a single, perfect thrust of her sword.
Even so, it was not enough.
They kept coming. The terrors poured through the broken seams of the Veil like water through a cracked dam.
She saw it before she could scream in warning — a terror moved swiftly straight at Alarik.
He didn’t hesitate. Faelight exploded from his palm. A blinding white blaze knocked the creature back into stone, cracking its skull into black mist. Two more took its place in the assault. His sword struck one impaling it through its torso. The other turned to ash before his magic.
Twenty.
Fifty.
One-hundred.
Maris lost count.
They kept coming from the Veil each more tantalizing than the last.
