“Dread feeders,” Kairen spat on the ground, his mouth twisting with rage. “They feed upon your fear, your despair. Creatures of darkmagic that infiltrate your dreams and manipulate them to satiate their hunger.”
“Goddess, I hope we neverrun into them again.” Rena whispered, arms hugging around her waist, her body trembling.
No one slept again that night.
All of us sat quietly around the fire, cleaning our bodies and belongings of the black goo left behind. No one spoke another word until the faint light of dawn broke over the horizon.
Chapter Thirty Nine
The smell was atrocious, bad enough to set all of our nerves on end.
It clung to everything–our torn tents, our clothes, our skin. No matter how many times we wiped down our bodies or Roan used his blessed magic to try and wash it away, it remained. None of us said much as we packed what little hadn’t been destroyed. Some of my herbs had been spared, but not nearly enough.
By the time the sky began to lighten and daylight filtered weakly through the dense canopy, we were moving again.
The forest practically swallowed us whole.
Snow crunched beneath our boots too loud in the silence that had fallen over us. No one spoke of what they saw in their night terrors and none asked. What was there to say?
Kairen took the lead, but not alone. Bran stayed just off his shoulder, eyes sweeping the trees in case something lunged from the shadows—his fathers sword resting against his shoulder though his grip hadn’t loosened on it for hours now. Rena and I followed, pressed close as Roan took the rear. The formation was tighter than usual, none of the casualplayfulness we’d had at the start of our quest. A system that was designed more from instinct than instruction. No gaps, no stragglers.
I kept my daggers out.
The weight of them felt heavier, hours of gripping them too tightly finally weighing down on my tired muscles. My hands hadn’t stopped trembling since the fight.
“Keep up.” Kairen’s voice cut through the quiet, low and tense.
My head snapped up, grey eyes narrowing on his back. “We are.”
He didn’t turn around as he said, "You're dragging.”
Rena gave a low sigh, “We’re tired, Kai. Maybe we should take a break.”
“We’re all tired, but we keep moving. We don’t stop until the sun goes down, I want to cover as much ground as possible. Put as much space between us and those—” His words cut off sharply, his head shaking.
Irritation flashed through me, sharp and hot. My chest burning with it.
Bran, ever the peace maker, let out a quiet breath. “Guys, come on. Let’s save the anger for when something is actively trying to kill us again, okay?”
Roan snorted from behind me, “Pretending like we’re all okay right now, isn’t helping anything either.”
“No one is pretending anything.” Kairen’s voice was flat, final. An edge of something sharper lingered in it though, flames dancing across his knuckles. His control was slipping, his own exhaustion and fear shining through for a brief moment. “But stopping too soon isn’t going to do any good either, we keep going.”
We all fell silent once more.
A hand brushed against the small of my back. My body tensed as he leaned forward, voice quiet. “How you holding up?”
My head turned to catch his gaze and for half a second it wasn’t him that I saw. Burnt flesh. Blistered skin. Shadows spilling from lips that I had already memorized the feel of against my own. My breath hitched, stomach twisting as I turned to face forward once more.
“I’m okay, you?” My voice came too tense, tight. A lie. He’d know it immediately.
He was silent for a long moment before he spoke again, rougher, “Bullshit. None of us are. You need Rena to check out your shoulder? You keep rubbing it.”
It throbbed viciously from my fall during the fight, but the pain was the only thing currently keeping me from breaking.
My head shook and he didn’t speak again. The only sound was the crunching of our boots in the snow once more.
It took a week to reach where the wild wood met the base of the towering northern mountains, the jagged peaks so high they were lost among the clouds high above.
