Chapter 31 Chapter 31: The Ash of Blackwood
The journey to the Blackwood manor should have taken three days by horseback. In the old world, Fenris’s royal stallions could have galloped through the snow-choked passes without tiring, fueled by the ambient Lycan energy that once saturated the North.
But the magic was gone. The horses were lathered and shivering by noon of the first day, their breaths coming in heavy, ragged plumes of frost.
"We have to rest them," Fenris said, pulling on the reins of his black charger. He looked back at the small caravan—vulnerable, mortal, and slow.
I sat in the covered wagon, clutching Leo to my chest. The child was unnaturally still. He hadn't cried once since we left the Crag. He simply stared at the wooden slats of the wagon ceiling with eyes that seemed to be looking at something miles away.
"How much further?" I asked, stepping down into the knee-deep snow.
"At this pace? Two days," Fenris replied. He walked toward me, his face etched with a weariness that went beyond physical exhaustion. He reached out to touch Leo’s forehead, then flinched. "He’s cold, Nina. Cold as the stone."
"He's not sick," I whispered, shielding the boy from the biting wind. "He's... waiting. Silas said the Herald is collecting the pieces. If Leo is a piece, does that mean the Herald is a part of him?"
Fenris didn't answer. He turned his gaze toward the south, toward the valley where my childhood home lay. Even from here, the sky looked wrong. It wasn't the violet of the Void, but a sickly, translucent grey, like a cataract over the eye of the world.
The Camp of the Fallen
That night, we camped in the shadow of the 'Twin Sisters'—two jagged peaks that marked the entrance to Blackwood territory. Vane and the scouts moved with a new kind of caution. Without their heightened Lycan senses, they had to rely on flickering torches and the clumsy snapping of twigs to alert them to danger.
I sat by the fire, watching the way the flames licked the dry wood. In the old days, I could have reached out and commanded the heat. Now, I was just a woman shivering in the dark, grateful for the smell of pine smoke.
"You're thinking about the kitchen," Fenris said, sitting beside me. He offered me a tin cup of weak broth.
"I'm thinking about how much I hated that manor," I admitted. "I spent nineteen years praying for it to burn down. But not like this. Not by something that turns people into ash."
"Silas said the Herald doesn't kill," Fenris murmured, his voice low so the scouts wouldn't hear. "He reclaims. He tells them they are part of a greater whole, and then they simply... cease to be individuals. It’s not a massacre, Nina. It’s a harvest."
I looked at the broth in my cup. "If the First King is being pieced back together, what happens to us? We used the Sunder-Stone to break the cycle. If he comes back, he'll be angry."
"He won't just be angry," Fenris said, his hand finding mine. His grip was steady, the only certain thing in a world of shifting shadows. "He'll be hungry. He was a god of consumption. He wanted the fire and the moon to be one thing—him."
The First Omen
A sudden silence fell over the camp. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of the wilderness; it was the heavy, suffocating silence of a room where the air has been sucked out.
Vane stood up, her hand on the hilt of her sword. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" a scout asked.
"Exactly," Vane whispered. "The wind stopped."
She was right. The howling gale that had been battering our tents for hours had vanished. The trees stood frozen, their branches draped in snow, like mourners at a funeral.
Then, from the darkness beyond the firelight, a figure emerged.
It wasn't the Herald. It was a girl, no older than ten, wearing a tattered nightgown that was far too thin for the sub-zero temperatures. She walked with a stiff, mechanical gait, her feet bare against the frozen ground.
"Help me," she whispered. Her voice didn't sound like a child's; it sounded like a thousand voices speaking in perfect, terrifying unison.
"Stay back!" Fenris commanded, standing up and drawing his blade.
The girl stopped. She looked at Leo, who was suddenly wide awake in his cradle. The child reached out a tiny hand toward her, his silver eyes flashing with a predatory light.
"The Shard is here," the girl said, her jaw unhinging further than humanly possible. A grey, ashen smoke began to leak from her eyes and mouth. "The First King calls to his marrow. Give us the boy, and you shall be spared the merging."
"Over my dead body," Fenris hissed.
The girl smiled, and her face began to crumble. Literally. Her skin turned to grey flakes of ash, falling away to reveal nothing but a hollow framework of shadow beneath.
"That can be arranged," the voices whispered.
Across the perimeter, dozens more figures began to emerge from the trees. They were the villagers of the lower Blackwood valley—people I had known, people who had bought bread from my father’s kitchens. They were all grey. All ashen. And they were all walking toward Leo.
The Siege of Blackwood hadn't waited for us to arrive at the manor. It had come to meet us on the road.