Of Truth and Beasts

Ghassan feared whatever Wynn might find and remove from this place. He had to learn her true purpose at any price. As he fell, he had no time to regret leaving the old elf to such a death.

Wynn did not yet know that the wraith had followed her. It had not killed her, so it could only be using her for the same purpose as Ghassan sought. If her search had anything to do with something left behind by enemy forces, the wraith could not be allowed to reach it first.

Ghassan had to survive, just as Chuillyon had said.

His shoulder clipped the shaft’s wall.

He tumbled as his body careened off the jagged walls. A rock protrusion ripped his sleeve. Even dazed, he knew he could hit bottom at any moment, and he forced his mind to focus amid vertigo.

Ghassan closed his eyes, seeing only the shaped sigils igniting in his thoughts. With air rushing past and ripping at his clothing, he pushed against the shaft’s walls with his will, trying to slow his rapid descent. But all he felt and heard were bits of stone breaking when he collided with the walls, and he barely heard clothing and skin tear as he plummeted through the darkness.

Chapter 25

Wynn looked into the creature’s face. Her attempt to ignite the sun crystal had failed, though she’d done everything right.

Shade’s snarling suddenly ceased.

An ache grew in Wynn’s head as she saw the creature fixate on the dog.

A cacophony, like a thousand leaves, began blowing about inside Wynn’s skull. It grew to a deafening pitch until she whimpered and dropped to her knees. She clutched Shade tightly. She couldn’t even save the dog, only hold her and wait to die.

Shade’s memory-words rose in Wynn’s thoughts above the scratch of leaf-wings.

—Fay-born—

The creature’s head swung toward Wynn. What was Shade trying to tell her?

The roar in Wynn’s mind drowned out everything else. All she saw were great black eyes within a reptilian face boring into her until everything went dark. 

There was only blackness.

Wynn’s chest hurt and then began to burn, as if she’d held her breath too long but couldn’t let it out. She sensed motion but her limbs wouldn’t move. It was so familiar, but amid growing panic to breathe, she couldn’t remember why.

Blackness faded, but only a little.

She exhaled hard and couldn’t stop shaking as she gasped, unaware of where she was. Every muscle in her body clenched and wouldn’t release. Something pulled at her thoughts, but it wasn’t the crackle of leaf-wings.

It was monotonous and endless, like a wind shrieking inside her head. Words rose out of it in fragmented whispers.

... they come ... liars, deceivers ... assassins, murders everywhere ...

The wind inside her skull seemed made of even more than those words, so many whispers that she only caught these broken pieces. Her own thoughts were drowned by the gale, as the first thing she saw was a dim hearth.

Orange-red coals within it barely lit the space where she stood. She stood surrounded by plain stone walls, in a room without a single piece of furniture. Its empty state heightened her awareness until her focus snapped sharply to the left.

She hadn’t even thought of turning, but she did.

... trust no one ... not ever ...

At those whispers out of the gale, Wynn looked to an archway in the room’s left wall. It was nothing but another portal into blackness, for the hearth’s dim light didn’t penetrate the space beyond. She wanted to back away, to find any path out of here, but ...

“Vra’ feilulákè ... bhâyil tu-thé?”

Not a word of that cry made sense, though it rushed from her own mouth with a frantic urgency pushing toward rage. But it wasn’t her voice that she’d heard.

Wynn’s fear mounted.

She was lost inside a memory. But whose? Was Shade doing this? She focused hard, trying to see the world she last remembered—the rough tunnel, the winged reptile, or Shade.

None of this came to her.

Where was she? Who was she? Without answers, she wrestled with what she’d heard to hold off the fear-fed whispers trying to drown her reason.

The first word had been vocative, masculine—she knew the language! She’d been speaking Dwarvish, but either she hadn’t heard it right or she didn’t know the dialect. She couldn’t recognize the word’s root. Only the suffix “-ulákè” barely made sense.

It meant “like” or “alike.”

“Vra’ feilulákè! Bhâyil tu-thé?”

Wynn’s throat turned raw as she repeated the deep shout. A rustle of leaf-wings rose in her mind. Not many, just one this time, like when she’d listened in on Chap as he’d communed with his kin. The first words she’d uttered repeated in her head, this time in every language she knew: Brother-of-like-flesh ... are you here?