Chapter 68 Chapter 68

Chapter 68 Chapter 68

Twilight's POV

I knew better.

That's the thing that was going to sit with me for a long time after this. I stood at the edge of that stone circle with everything in me saying stop, don't, turn around, and I walked forward anyway.

Not because I was brave. Not because I had some plan I was confident in. I walked forward because the markings on the egg matched the ones on my skin and I had spent eighteen years with no answers and zero patience left for waiting on them.

That's all it was. Pure stubbornness dressed up as something more noble.

Isla touched my arm before I crossed between the stones.

She didn't grab me. Didn't try to pull me back. She knew better than that and honestly I loved her for it even if I would never have said loved out loud, not here, not anywhere that could be heard. What we were to each other didn't have a name that was safe to use in Aretia or anywhere inside Aretia's reach. The mate pull that had first hit me in that camp, the burning on my neck the moment I looked at her, the way my whole body had reoriented itself like a compass finding north, all of that was supposed to be impossible. Was illegal. Was the kind of thing that got people stripped of rank and thrown back into places like the camp or worse.

So I didn't say it. I didn't look at her too long. I just felt her hand on my arm and let it mean what it meant and then I stepped into the circle.

Nothing happened when I crossed. No resistance, no hum of old magic, no warning. The stones just stood there being stones and the altar just sat there in the center waiting. That should have told me something. Places that held things like this didn't leave the door open unless they wanted you to walk through it.

I walked to the altar and pulled the cloth back.

The egg was dark in a way that had nothing to do with color. It was the kind of dark that felt like a direction, like falling. The markings on the shell moved the way mine did sometimes when Ryaknorg was close, slow and deliberate, like breathing. Like a heartbeat that wasn't quite in rhythm with anything living.

I heard Devonye say my name somewhere behind me.

I put my hand on it.

The first second was nothing. Cold shell under my palm, wind across the open ground, the distant sound of something moving through the trees at the edge of the clearing. I waited for the warmth that came when my markings activated, that familiar pull that meant Ryaknorg was answering, the vines on my arms lighting up the way they did when something old was recognizing something old in return.

The warmth didn't come.

What came was cold. The kind of cold that starts in your hand and moves up your arm before you can track it, spreading across your chest and settling there like a stone. I watched the markings on my forearms shift from their usual color to something else, something darker, the same empty dark as the egg itself, and I understood in that moment that it wasn't lighting up. It was being drained. Whatever was on the other side of that shell was taking something from me and the connection I had to Ryaknorg was exactly what it was eating.

I tried to lift my hand.

I could not lift my hand.

My palm was pressed flat to the shell and it wasn't moving and my wrist wasn't moving and nothing I told my arm to do was happening. I stood there in the body I had trained every day of my life to be dangerous and I could not move a single finger.

"Twilight." Isla's voice cut through the fog in my head.

She was closer than she should have been, she had crossed into the circle while I was focused on the egg and I hadn't noticed. "Let go of it."

"I'm trying." I said. The words came out flat and too slow. Something was pressing on my chest. On my lungs.

The egg cracked.

Not from the top. Not the way something breaking free cracks a shell from the inside out. It split sideways, one clean violent line right through the middle, and the sound of it hit like a physical thing. Not a sound you heard. A sound you felt in your ribs and your back and the spaces behind your eyes. Devonye made a sound behind me and I heard her hit the ground and I still couldn't turn around to look.

Black smoke came out of the crack.

It moved wrong. Smoke goes up, it disperses, it follows air. This moved like it had already decided where it was going. It poured down the sides of the altar and spread across the stone beneath it and the ground beyond that and then my hand was free and I stumbled backward and Isla caught me and we stood there for the exact amount of time it took both of us to understand that we were looking at something we had no category for.

It rose.

It pulled itself up from the ground like it was remembering how to have a shape. Wings first, just the suggestion of them, then the long dark line of a neck too thick to belong to anything small, and then the eyes. Two places in the smoke where the dark went deeper than everywhere else.

Looking at them made something in the back of my skull pull in a direction away from them.

It looked at me and I felt it look at me the way you feel a blade touch your skin before it cuts. Just the pressure of the attention. Just the weight of something ancient deciding what you were.

It opened its mouth and the sound that came out of it I am never going to describe properly. It wasn't a roar. It was something that lived below where sound usually lives. I felt it in my teeth.

"Run." I shouted.

Isla was already moving. Devonye was already up somehow, already clearing the outer ring of stones at a speed that she usually reserved for situations where someone was on fire. I ran after them and behind me the sound came again, twice as loud, the stones throwing it back at us so it hit from two directions at once, and the ground under my feet shook once and then again and I did not look back.

I did not look back.

I already knew what was rising out of that circle. Seeing it wasn't going to help anything. What was going to help was distance and not dying and figuring out what we had just let out of something that had been keeping it locked for a very long time.

I ran and the shadow of it fell across all three of us from above and I ran faster.

The trees swallowed us and we kept moving anyway, branches catching at arms and shoulders and I ducked under one and vaulted a root and my side was burning from the run but the burn was good, it meant I was still moving and I kept focusing on that.

Devonye pulled left and I followed her and Isla was behind me and I knew she was behind me without looking because I could feel her the way I had been able to feel her since the camp. That was the mate bond doing what mate bonds did. Making me aware of her the way you're aware of your own heartbeat, not always in the front of your mind but always there, always registering. In Aretia that kind of awareness between two women was grounds for trial. In the camp it had been grounds for separation, for punishment, for the kind of quiet violence that left no marks you could point to.

Here in these trees with something massive circling above us it just meant I knew she was alive and keeping pace and that was the only thing about any of this that wasn't terrible.

We ran for another ten minutes before Devonye slowed and then stopped and held up her hand and we all stopped with her, breathing hard, listening.

Wind in the trees. Our own breathing. Nothing else.

The shadow was gone from above the canopy but that didn't mean it was gone. Things that big didn't disappear. They went somewhere.

"Tell me you're okay." Isla said.

She was beside me before I finished processing that she had moved, her hand on my jaw tilting my face toward her, checking my eyes the way she did when she thought I'd taken damage I wasn't admitting to. I let her do it because stopping her would have required lying about why and I was too tired to lie right now.

"I'm okay." I said.

"Your arms."

I looked down. The markings were still wrong.

Still dark in the way the egg had been dark and not in the way they were supposed to be. I tried to reach for Ryaknorg and felt the wall that hadn't been there this morning and felt my stomach drop.

"I know." I said. "I know. I'm working on it."

She didn't say anything else about it. She dropped her hand from my face slowly, the kind of slow that said she wanted to leave it there longer but knew the reasons she couldn't, and I turned away before I said something I wasn't supposed to say.

"We need to figure out what that thing is."

Devonye said. "And we need to figure out where she went."

"One problem." I said, still not looking at Isla. "We start with one problem and we work outward."

Above us, too high to see but close enough to feel, something moved against the sky. Patient. Waiting.

Always waiting.