When the great iron-bound gate of Luminis slammed shut behind him, Kaelen fell to his knees in the mud and dust outside the walls. He stayed there for a long moment with the coarse fabric of his simple tunic scratching against his skin and the meager weight of the loaf of bread and the half-full waterskin thumping against his back.
He forced himself to his feet with his legs trembling. Before him lay the Whispering Marches. It was not a forest, at least not in any sense he understood. It was twisted with skeletal trees clawing at a sky.
He stumbled forward with his bare feet already sinking into the sucking mud. Each step was an effort and a battle against a landscape that seemed actively hostile. Vines thick as his arm and covered in thorns like sharks' teeth snagged at his clothes, tearing the fabric.
"Ashen," he muttered, and the word sounded like a curse on his tongue.
He could still see the Arch-Scryer's face. He could still feel his father's gaze, cold and hard as flint.
"You are no son of mine," Lord Valerius's voice echoed in his mind. "An Ashen has no place in the House of Valerius. You are a stain. A failure!"
"I heard you the first time," Kaelen whispered to the uncaring trees. He tripped over a gnarled root, catching himself against the bark of a tree that felt unnervingly warm to the touch. He recoiled with his hand stinging.
But he pushed on, driven only by desperate instinct. The sun began to dip below the horizon, and panic began to prick at the edges of his resolve. He needed shelter. He needed fire. He needed anything other than this suffocating and open vulnerability.
He soon found a small mercy in a hollowed-out log large enough to crawl inside. It smelled terribly bad, but it was a barrier, however flimsy, against the encroaching dark.
With trembling hands, he gathered dry twigs and leaves using the flint and steel that by some small miracle he'd had in his pocket. It took him an eternity with his fingers clumsy and numb, but finally, a tiny flame flickered to life. It was a pathetic sputtering thing casting more shadows than light, but it was something.
He broke off a piece of the bread. It was stale and hard as a rock. He gnawed on it with the dry crumbs scratching his throat and washed it down with a sip of water.
The gnawing hunger in his belly eased but was replaced by a deeper emptiness. Exhaustion settled over him with his muscles aching and his mind lost in failure and fear.
He huddled in the log with his back pressed against the damp wood and tried to sleep. But the Marches would not allow it. The forest came alive in its damned way.
A low rustling began not of wind through leaves but of something dry and brittle dragging itself through the undergrowth. Then came the howls, long and mournful, answered by others from different directions.
And beneath it all, a sound that made the hairs on his arms stand on end: a deep rhythmic thumping.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It sounded like a giant's heartbeat shaking the very ground he lay on.
"Gods, what is this place?" he whispered. He pulled his knees to his chest, making himself as small as possible. The fire was dying, the flames shrinking to little more than glowing embers.
He thought of Lyren. He pictured his brother's face as the guards had dragged him from the hall, the perfect triumphant smile. Lyren, whose magic had always manifested as a brilliant sapphire flame even before going before the Font. Lyren, who now had everything.
"Don't worry Kaelen" Lyren had said to him the night before the ceremony. "Even if you are Ashen, Father will find a place for you. A quiet, unimportant place, of course. Perhaps managing the stables."
"You knew, didn't you?" Kaelen choked out with tears of rage and desperation stinging his eyes. "You always wanted this. Me out here rotting."
A twig snapped close by. Too close.
Kaelen froze with his breath catching in his throat, and he strained his ears with his heart hammering against his ribs. The thumping had stopped. The howls had faded, but an unnerving silence had fallen more terrifying than the noise it replaced.
He stared into the darkness beyond the dying glow of his fire, but he saw nothing. He held his breath listening and waiting.
Then he saw it. A flicker of light in the gloom. Another. And another. Pairs of them low to the ground, reflecting the moonlight that speared through the canopy. They were eyes. And they were circling him.
His blood ran cold. He knew the stories. Every child of the nobility was taught about the horrors of the Marches tales to scare them into honing their magic.
Glimmerfangs!
They were wolf-like but faster and smarter. Their teeth and claws were made of a natural crystal sharp enough to shear through steel and glowing with a faint light.
A low growl rumbled from the darkness to his left, and it was answered by another guttural snarl from his right. They were communicating, coordinating and hunting.
He was trapped. His body was locked in a prison of pure terror. He wanted to scream, to run, or to fight, but his limbs wouldn't obey. His muscles were stone. His throat was constricted, with air refusing to pass. He could feel their presence pressing in on him.
One of the shapes detached itself from the shadows. It was sleeker and larger than the others. The alpha. It padded forward silently, its paws making no sound on the leaf litter, and it stopped just at the edge of the firelight.
It lowered its head, and for the first time, he saw them clearly. Its crystal teeth, gleaming in the moonlight, were bared in a silent threat.
"No," he whimpered with the sound barely escaping his lips. "Please…"
The alpha didn't listen. It didn't care. It crouched low, its powerful hind legs bunching. Kaelen could see the muscles ripple beneath its hide. He could feel the world narrow down to this single inevitable moment. He was going to die. Here alone forgotten. An Ashen boy devoured by the monsters in the dark.
The Glimmerfang lunged.
It was impossibly fast, and the air split with its silent passage. Its crystalline fangs were aimed directly at his throat.
In that final heart-stopping instant, his fear shattered its paralysis. It found its voice. A scream tore itself from his lungs... not a plea or a word but an instinctual sound of terror.
It was the sound of a life about to be extinguished, a final desperate protest against the encroaching void.
The moment his voice escaped, the world fractured.
His vision warped with reality, bending like heated glass. The Glimmerfang, a creature of flesh and fang, just a heartbeat ago, was gone. In its place, hurtling towards him was a magnificent, terrifying constellation of green-white light. Every muscle, every bone, every drop of blood in the beast was a thread in a brilliant living weave of energy.
He could see its life force, a fierce pulsing core of fire that fueled its lunge. The crystalline teeth were no longer just fangs; they were focal points of this energy, glowing with deadly intensity.
The world around him was no longer just trees and mud. He saw everything as a similar though fainter light. The ancient trees had slow, deep rivers of energy flowing through them, and the very air shimmered with the same fire.
He saw the path of the Glimmerfang's attack, and he understood its hunger, its ferocity and its life... all in an instant!
And as the constellation of the beast was about to collide with the faint flickering light that was himself, he instinctively reached out. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't think a command.
He reached out with a part of his very being he never knew existed, a sense that had just been born in his scream of terror. He reached out with his mind and, for the first time since the Awakening Font had declared him empty, he pushed back…