3.2 KiB
They made camp beneath the high arches of the entry hall, just beyond the blackened gate. The space, once carved with ancestral purpose, had become their hearth for the night. The shattered murals above whispered broken stories, and the floor—obsidian cracked by time—reflected the firelight in jagged, uncertain lines.
They dared not leave the Keep again that day.
The air was warmer here than the mountain pass, but no less heavy. Every breath seemed borrowed. The walls remembered.
Halven was the first to speak once silence had settled, the fire snapping softly between them.
“Where is Alisha?” he asked. Not a demand, not even suspicion—just quiet, pained confusion.
Weylan flinched. Eris looked down. Sari said nothing at all.
Telaryn sat apart from them, Ashmire resting across her lap like a sleeping beast. The firelight danced in her darkened eyes. She didn’t look up.
“She’s gone,” she said, voice like wind through dead leaves.
Halven pressed further, gently. “Gone how?”
Telaryn’s hand drifted over the blade’s spine. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if the words were forming themselves without her will.
“She gave me what I needed,” she said. “The bond demanded blood. Not just any blood. A life entwined with mine. That... that was the price.”
Halven closed his eyes. “So she’s dead.”
Telaryn nodded. “Yes.”
Silence again. And then—
“She’s part of me now.”
That caught them all. Even Sari looked up, frowning.
Telaryn didn’t smile, but something in her eyes glittered. Not grief. Not quite.
“She flows in my veins,” she whispered. “The Queen lives in the blade. Alisha lives in me. That moment, when the bond was sealed—” She shuddered, visibly, the kind of shiver that came not from cold but from something deeper, more intimate. “I felt her. All of her. Her warmth. Her fear. Her love.”
Her voice dipped, reverent.
“And when the blade drank... it was ecstasy. Terror. Beauty. I regret it,” she added softly, “but I would do it again.”
Weylan shifted uncomfortably. “You... you saw her? When you struck?”
Telaryn’s gaze moved to the edge of the firelight, to the deep shadows that clung like curtains in the cracks of the Keep’s stone. Her voice turned distant.
“She’s still here,” she murmured. “Sometimes I hear her. I see her. She stands just beyond the flame. She doesn’t speak. But she watches.”
She turned her head slightly, as if to glance at something just behind her. A flicker of movement stirred in the dark—illusory, perhaps. A trick of the torch. But even the others felt it, the prickling sense of presence.
Sari reached for her talisman. Eris made the sign against cursed sight. Halven only stared.
Telaryn didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.
“She loved me,” she said. “And now... she guards me.”
Halven rose to his feet, shoulders sagging. “Get some rest,” he said. “We move at dawn.”
No one argued.
Telaryn remained awake long after the others drifted into uneasy sleep. Her eyes never left the shadowed arch where the firelight failed to reach.
And somewhere, very faintly, the stone groaned—like breath through a dying flute. A sound almost like a woman’s sigh.