Theron had been running for three hours when the first of the wolves found him.
He heard it before he saw it—the soft pad of paws on frozen ground, the low whine that was not quite a growl, the sound of something that had caught his scent and was deciding whether he was worth the effort of pursuit.
He did not stop. Stopping was death. His father had taught him that, along with a hundred other lessons about survival in the god-forsaken lands. Keep moving. Keep breathing. Keep the blade close and the fear closer, because fear would keep you alive when courage got you killed.
The pack was small—three, maybe four wolves, judging by the sounds. Nithgard wolves were not like the wolves of the southern realms. They were larger, leaner, their fur white as the snow they hunted in, their eyes the colour of old blood. They had learned to hunt men, in the years since the war had driven refugees into their territory, and they had learned that men were easy prey when they were alone.
Theron adjusted his grip on the blade his father had given him—a short, heavy thing, more tool than weapon, but sharp enough to cut through fur and flesh if it came to that. He hoped it would not come to that.
The lead wolf appeared at the edge of his vision, a shadow among shadows, its breath pluming in the cold air. It was watching him. Waiting.
Keep moving. Don't show fear. Don't show weakness.
He had learned these lessons at his father's knee, in a cave that smelled of smoke and old blood, while the wind howled outside and the darkness pressed against the walls like something alive. His father had been a hard teacher, impatient, prone to silences that stretched for days and explosions of rage that came from nowhere and left just as quickly.
But he had taught. He had taught everything he knew about survival, about fighting, about the things that lived in the darkness and the things that lived in men's hearts.
And now Theron was alone, running through the frozen wastes, trying to reach a pass he had only seen on a map, while wolves tracked him and something worse than wolves hunted his father.
The wolf moved closer, its head low, its teeth bared. The others were spreading out, circling, doing what wolves had done since the first pack learned to bring down the first mammoth.
Theron stopped.
He knew it was what the wolves wanted. They wanted him to stop, to turn, to run, to do anything that would give them an opening. But he also knew that if he kept running, they would simply follow until he was too tired to fight, and then they would take him down like the prey he was.
His father had taught him that, too. Sometimes the only way to survive was to stop running and make the hunters understand that the prey could bite back.
He turned to face the lead wolf, his blade held low, his body crouched. The wolf snarled, showing teeth that could snap a man's arm like a dry branch. Its packmates circled, their eyes glowing in the darkness, their hunger a physical weight in the air.
"You want to eat?" Theron asked, his voice steady despite the fear that was trying to crawl up his throat. "Come and eat."
The wolf lunged.
Theron moved, not away but into the attack, the way his father had taught him. He dropped low, felt the wolf's body pass over him, heard the snap of teeth where his throat had been a moment before. His blade came up, caught the wolf in the belly, ripped through fur and flesh and something softer.
The wolf hit the ground, its legs kicking, its blood steaming in the cold air. It was not dead—his blade was too short, his arm too weak to kill with a single blow—but it would not be hunting anything else tonight.
The other wolves stopped. They looked at their packmate, at the blood spreading across the snow, at the boy standing over it with a blade that was suddenly much more than a tool.
And then, one by one, they turned and disappeared into the darkness.
Theron stood for a long moment, his heart pounding, his hands shaking. The wounded wolf was still kicking, still trying to rise, its blood pooling beneath it in a dark stain that the cold was already turning to ice.
He should kill it. Put it out of its misery. That was what his father would do.
But his father was not here.
He turned away from the wolf and began to run again.
The pass was further than he remembered.
Or perhaps it was just that he had never run this far, this fast, with nothing but fear and the memory of his father's face to drive him forward. The map his father had given him was folded in his pocket, the landmarks marked with a charcoal stick that had smudged over the years until some of them were barely visible.
But he knew the way. He had studied the map every night for the past two winters, tracing the lines with his fingers, memorizing the shape of the mountains and the valleys and the frozen rivers that wound between them. He had dreamed of this pass, of the lands beyond it, of a world where the sky was not always grey and the ground was not always frozen and a boy could be something more than a survivor.
He had dreamed of it, and now he was running toward it, and he was afraid that he would not reach it before the darkness caught him.
The sky was beginning to lighten, the perpetual twilight of Nithgard giving way to the pale grey of false dawn. He had been running for most of the night, and his body was beginning to fail him—his legs heavy, his lungs burning, the cold seeping through his layers of fur and leather until he could feel it in his bones.
He had to rest. Just for a moment. Just long enough to catch his breath, to let his legs stop shaking, to—
The sound stopped him cold.
It was not a wolf. It was not the wind, or the creak of ice, or any of the thousand sounds that had become familiar over five years of hiding in the wastes.
It was a voice.
"Little one. So far from home."
Theron spun, his blade coming up, his heart hammering against his ribs. There was nothing there. Just the grey light and the snow and the endless, empty sky.
"So afraid. So alone. But you are not alone, little one. You have never been alone."
He knew that voice. He had heard it before, in dreams that he had tried to forget, in the space between sleeping and waking when the walls between worlds grew thin.
"No," he said. "You're not real. You're not here."
"Am I not? Or have you simply been pretending that I do not exist?"
The air in front of him shimmered, and a figure stepped out of the light.
She was tall, taller than his father, her body wrapped in robes that seemed to be made of shadow and starlight. Her face was beautiful in the way that a glacier was beautiful—cold, ancient, utterly without mercy. Her hair was white, not with age but with something else, something that had been bleached by centuries of walking through places where the sun never reached.
And her eyes—her eyes were the colour of the sky just before a storm, and they were looking at him with an expression that might have been kindness, or might have been hunger.
"Who are you?" Theron asked, and was ashamed of how small his voice sounded.
The figure smiled. It was not a comforting smile.
"I am the one who has been watching you," she said. "The one who has been waiting. The one who will help you, if you let me."
"I don't need your help."
"Don't you?" She gestured at the frozen waste around them, at the blood drying on his blade, at the exhaustion that was trying to drag him down. "Your father is dying. You know this. You have known it for years. The thing inside him is eating him alive, and there is nothing you can do to stop it."
"He's not dying. He's—"
"He is killing himself, little one. Every day, every hour, every moment that he holds that power inside him, it consumes a little more of what he was. And when it has taken everything, there will be nothing left but the hunger."
Theron wanted to deny it. Wanted to shout that she was wrong, that his father was strong, that he would survive because he had always survived.
But he had seen the marks on his father's chest. Had seen the way they glowed in the darkness, the way his father's face twisted when he thought no one was watching. Had heard the screams in the night, muffled by distance and stone, that went on for hours before they finally stopped.
"You know what he is becoming," the woman said. "You know that there is only one way to save him."
"And what's that?"
"Give him what he wants. Give him the means to finish what he started. The Echo of the First Pact—the weapon that can kill gods. Help him find it, help him use it, and perhaps... perhaps when the Skylords are dead, the thing inside him will die as well."
"How do you know about the Echo?"
The woman's smile widened. "I know many things, little one. I know that your father is looking for it. I know that he will find it, with or without your help. And I know that when he does, he will need someone to remind him of what he is fighting for."
She stepped closer, and Theron felt the cold intensify, felt something reaching for him, something that wanted to crawl inside his mind and make a home there.
"Let me help you," she said. "Let me give you the strength to save him. All you have to do is say yes."
Theron looked at her. Looked at the beauty and the cold and the hunger hiding behind her eyes. And he remembered something his father had said, in one of the rare moments when the silence had broken and the words had come pouring out like blood from a wound.
"The Skylords will promise you anything. They will offer you power, and wisdom, and the answers to every question you have ever asked. But it's all lies, Theron. Every word of it. Because the only thing they truly want is to own you."
"No," he said.
The woman's smile faltered. "No?"
"You're one of them. One of the Skylords. Or something like them. I don't know what you are, but I know you want something from me. And I know that if I let you in, you'll take everything I have and leave me with nothing."
The cold retreated. The light faded. And for a moment, the woman's face was not beautiful at all.
"You are your father's son," she said, and there was something in her voice that might have been respect. "That is a pity. He would have been easier to break, if you had been weaker."
She was gone.
Theron stood alone in the grey light, his heart pounding, his breath coming in gasps. The blade was still in his hand, his knuckles white around the grip.
He looked down at the map in his pocket, at the pass that was still miles away, at the journey that stretched out before him.
And he began to run again.