Chapter 9
Alina
The Rooted Marches, Nightfall
The Marches breathe.
They flex and hum and shift beneath my boots like a living thing, and the scientist in me is screaming—in a good way.
“This fault line,” I say, crouching to press my palm against the ground. “It’s shallow, but wide. Like a stress fracture. How long has it been active?”
Dagan stands a few feet away, big and still as the cliff face at his back. His wings are tucked tight, just a hint of obsidian and storm feathers visible at his shoulders.
“It woke three cycles ago,” he rumbles. “When the first quakes began on your side. It is one of many.”
I close my eyes.
The rock under my hand hums. Not just with seismic activity, but with… feeling.
Like the earth has a pulse. A voice. A personality.
I’ve always “read” ground better than most—could look at a cross-section on a monitor and feel where a crack would propagate.
But this is different.
Nightfall is different.
Here, the ground reads back.
“There’s another weak node to the northeast,” I murmur. “Not big yet. But it will be.”
“How do you know?” he asks.
I open my eyes and look up at him.
“Because the stress vectors are all pointing that way. And because your land is basically yelling at me about it.”
One corner of his mouth twitches, which is Dagan-speak for impressed.
“You’re amazing, Oona. My powers are becoming yours much more rapidly than the other mates.”
I nod my head, but I don’t respond. What does one say to that anyway?
Gee, thanks for the power boost?
“I thought I was supposed to give you a magical boon? The others talked about one,” I mention, but Dagan merely grumbles his response.
We’re walking a stretch of the Marches he called the Stepped Vale—terraced fields cut into green-brown hills, bordered by low stone walls. Farmers in earth-toned clothes move like ants in the distance, sowing seeds in neat rows.
Beyond them, quarries bite into the earth in silver-gray crescents, scaffolds clinging to cliff faces.
Above it all, The Barrow looms behind us, carved into the cliff like some gothic mountain palace, its windows glowing faintly gold in the afternoon light.
It’s ridiculously beautiful.
So is the guy glowering at me like I personally offended gravity.
“Stay within the inner ward,” he says for the third time as I stand and dust my hands off. “The ground is unpredictable near the bleed points. If one opens beneath you?—”
