Owning land means dealing with people. People mean complications. And I don’t do complications.
“Better alone,” I grunt to myself. “No one to lose that way. Safer, too.”
My thumb brushes a scrap of parchment. Ink lines claiming ownership of something older than the paper itself.
Then I see it.
Half-buried beneath the rubble—a crushed box and a strip of metallic foil. Too fluid. Too soft. Not human.
I scan the debris, pulse already rising.
There should be a pull. Something that sinks into bone and blood. Something that quiets what lives beneath my skin.
But there’s nothing.
Not even a flicker.
Tempest doesn’t react. No tension. No fear. She just tears at dry grass like the world hasn’t shifted under our feet.
That’s wrong.
Beneath ash and splintered wood, I uncover the rest, metal fused with stone.
A Wildblood artifact. A dampener.
The mountains have been whispering it since last night… I shouldn’t be without this thing.
Because something has changed. Something in me is more dangerous now.
It should respond. Suppress. Force everything inside me back where it belongs.
But it doesn’t do any of that. It just sits there. Cold and dead.
Hell if I know why, but I’m going to find out.
My stomach knots. Cold sweat beads along my spine. Because this thing was never meant to fail. It was built to keep me contained.
I wrap the artifact in the cloth and shove it into my saddlebag. Tempest doesn’t so much as flinch. Instead, she keeps her head low, busy between the half-filled trough and emerald grass shoots hiding in shadow.
“No startle. No protest,” I mutter.
The tattoos along my chest and arms pulse. Heat gathers beneath the skin.
And the vibration of the mountains is stronger now.
I always feel this so close to the Starborn Range.
But this… is something different. Deeper. Older. Powerful in a way language was never meant to measure.
“Mags might know,” I say under my breath. “If she’s still around.”
I swing into the saddle and guide Tempest onto a path barely worth calling one. More a game trail than anything.
Hooves scrape against cheatgrass and gravel. Scrub brush and thick manzanita bushes claw at her hide and my legs.
“Easy,” I tell her.
She flicks an ear, skin twitching.
