Page 341 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

“But you did—you led him away from Adrastos for a time.”

“Sure, but before I could get back to him, he knocked me through the windows.”

I nodded, glancing up and seeing only blank sky beyond the trees.

“He’s playing with us—you, specifically. Why is that?”

Mags’ eyes went round as she shook her head. “He nearly killed me. Called me every name in the book. Ate Portia. He’s just a tormentor.”

“Tormentors are sickly beasts that fill children’s heads with nightmares—that drive people to madness, to suicide. That is no tormentor.”

“Well, classify him however you’d like. He’s still evil.”

“Sure,” I allowed. “Evil and playing with you. It said as much when we were trapped in the brambles.”

She stopped so abruptly that I jerked my gaze behind her, looking for a threat and finding none.

“Mags?”

Pursing her lips, she shook her head, blinking away whatever thought brought her up short. “We’re running out of time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“I just, um… I have… a bad feeling, Aren.”

“Our people need us.”

She gave me a jerky nod. “What if there’s nothing left of the world we know? What if it’s gone? Things down there were… barbaric and getting worse by the day. It’s been weeks. How do we know if there’s anything left worth fighting for?”

“Because you still draw breath,” I said, pointing toward our companions. “Because they do. As long as one wholehearted fool is willing to defend what’s good with abandon, what we love of humanity cannot die. It will inevitably change. Evolve with the heartache of losses we were never built to sustain. Souls were not designed for this hatred. This violence. We fatigue because it’s wrong, the burden of resistance heavy. But where hope survives, darkness cannot prosper.”

“And you believe light will triumph? How are you so… certain? Still? After everything.”

“It has to. Hope in the face of great evil is in itself an act of rebellion, and love is a far greater motivator than fear has ever been. Cling to it, Mags. We fight for our people. No matter what we face, we must forge ahead.”

“We forge ahead,” she agreed, but her eyes drifted toward the sky.

Hand in hand, I led her down yet another steep decline, praying we could outlast the beast sure to bait us, and the terrain attempting to swallow us wholly. I prayed then—for our families Earthside, for their wisdom and guidance, and that they might find what they needed so they’d be ready for us when we finally opened Grayshell’s gate.

Freya

166:08:13:07

“Another one?” Cyrus’ drawl told me exactly what I’d find when I looked up.

For weeks now, cats followed Lana and me everywhere. Like I was some inept Noah with a nonexistent ark, they kept showing up in fucking pairs—a black-and-white duo most often, but there were tabbies and those feisty little orange fuckers, all arriving in droves. Four had now appointed themselves sentinels of the Luminark library. One was a fat little fucker fond of licking its butthole directly on whatever book I was reading.

It didn’t seem to prefer the research over the stack of books Cyrus had gradually deposited in my room over the last few months. Both were apparently perfect places for routine nether-region maintenance, but my personal favorite was when he plopped down directly on The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire and made biscuits beside Cyrus’ notation: Plot twist, Rome never fell, it simply evolved. Current US gov. = new-age Roman forum.

A year ago, I would’ve thought his endless underlining of humanity’s tragic patterns—annotated simply ‘sounds familiar’ or ‘Idk wtf to do with this information’—cynical at best. But now, given the state of the world, it seemed my little historian had pretty decent pattern recognition.

I found Cyrus’ need to argue with men who died centuries ago—or draw parallels to their words—oddly endearing, if I was honest. So did the butthole licker. Or at least, I took his biscuits as a paw of approval.

Currently, he was sprawled across a stack of Paladin grimoires translated out of Umbrithan. And he’d brought a friend.

“Apparently,” I lamented, not looking up from yet another book on yet another faction of Bellpost in a fool’s attempt to understand our enemy. My eyes ached; anything more than six inches away blurred when I tried to focus, and I’d about lost track of what the fuck I was rifling through these pages for. Pages that were ripped from under my limp fingers by a shadow wielder with a death wish.

I snapped my head up, about to snarl a wholehearted ‘fuck off,’ but when I opened my mouth, a breadstick was promptly shoved inside it.