What am I doing here?
Walking beside the Lord of Earth.
Counting cracks.
Blessing seeds.
Trying very hard not to fall irrevocably in love with the way his magic unfurls every time someone presses a little pouch of hope into his hands and asks him, with more faith than any church I’ve ever seen, to help it grow.
Yeah.
Too late.
But the more we walk and repair, the more I see something is not right beneath the surface.
The hurt in Nightfall runs deep. Like its fissures.
“It’s like playing whack-a-mole,” I mutter under my breath after the fifth site. “Only if the mole wins, everyone falls into a hell pit.”
“You use strange metaphors,” he says. “But the sentiment is not wrong.”
We crest another rise, and I freeze.
Below us, the hillside drops into a broad, bowl-shaped hollow. A cluster of low stone buildings sits at its center—a waystation for the people here, from the looks of it. A few carts are parked out front. People move between them, small as ants at this distance.
Cracks spider-web the slope above the settlement.
Fresh ones.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up.
“Dagan.” My voice comes out thin. “Those fractures—were they there before?”
He steps up beside me, his hand automatically going to the small of my back like he can’t not touch me.
His eyes narrow. “No.”
Even as he says it, the ground gives a low, ominous groan.
I feel it in my teeth.
“Fuck,” I breathe. “We have to get them out of there.”
“The wards around the settlement should?—”
As if in answer, a boulder the size of a car breaks loose from the upper slope and begins to roll.
It takes an agonizing half-second to start moving, stone grinding over stone.
Then it picks up speed.
“Dagan!”
“I see it,” he snarls, wings flaring half-open.
He’s fast, but the rock is faster. And Dagan’s instinct isn’t to shield the buildings—it’s to plant himself between them and the fall, which is noble and also utterly terrifying because if that thing hits him, I don’t care how Demon he is, he’s going to feel it?—
“Oona, stay?—”
