Kaelen found the wolf an hour before dawn.
It was lying in a hollow between two ridges, its legs still kicking weakly, its blood staining the snow a colour that was almost black in the grey light. The wound in its belly was ragged, poorly placed, the work of someone who knew how to hold a blade but not how to use it.
He knelt beside the wolf, and it snarled at him, its teeth bared, its eyes wild with pain and fear. He had seen that look before. On men, mostly. Men who had been broken by war, by loss, by the things they had done and the things that had been done to them.
Men like him.
He drew his blade—not the short, heavy thing he had given Theron, but the long knife he carried for hunting—and knelt beside the wolf.
"Easy," he said, and his voice was softer than it had been in years. "Easy. I'm not going to hurt you."
The wolf snarled again, but the sound was weaker now, the life bleeding out of it with every heartbeat. Kaelen reached out and touched its head, felt the coarse fur beneath his fingers, the warmth of living flesh that was slowly fading to cold.
He had killed a thousand things in his life. Men, monsters, creatures that had no name in any language he knew. He had killed them with blades and with fire, with his bare hands and with powers that should never have been given to mortal men.
But he had never killed something that was already dying.
He put the blade to the wolf's throat, and in one swift motion, ended its suffering.
The wolf's body went still, its eyes staring at nothing, its blood pooling in the snow. Kaelen sat beside it for a long moment, his hand still resting on its head, feeling the warmth fade from its fur.
This is what you've made him, he thought. A boy who can kill a wolf but not well enough to give it peace. A boy who runs from wolves and gods and everything in between. A boy who is going to die alone in the snow because his father couldn't protect him.
He stood, wiping his blade on the wolf's fur. The trail was clear enough—the blood, the tracks, the places where Theron had stumbled and nearly fallen. The boy was heading south, toward the pass, just as Kaelen had told him to.
He was also heading directly toward Sera.
Kaelen did not know how he knew this. There was no trail to follow, no sign that the third Hound had passed this way. But he could feel her, the way he had always been able to feel the presence of the Skylords and their servants. It was a part of him now, the broken thing that lived in his chest, the hunger that was always there, always waiting.
She was out there, somewhere ahead of him, moving through the darkness with the patience of something that had all the time in the world. She was waiting for Theron to tire, to slow, to make a mistake. And then she would take him, and use him, and Kaelen would find what was left of his son in a pool of blood and broken dreams.
He began to run.
The pass was a wound in the mountains, a narrow cleft between two peaks that the wind had carved over a thousand years. Theron had reached it just before dawn, his legs shaking, his lungs burning, the cold so deep in his bones that he could no longer feel his fingers or his toes.
He had not stopped to rest. He had not dared. The voice in his head—the woman who was not a woman—had been with him for the last hour of his run, whispering to him, offering him things, trying to find the crack in his walls that would let her in.
He had kept running.
Now, standing at the mouth of the pass, he could see the way through—a narrow valley between two peaks, the ground littered with boulders and scree, the wind howling through it with a sound like screaming. Beyond it, if the map was right, was the Frostfangs, and beyond the Frostfangs was the Ash Wastes, and beyond the Ash Wastes was everything else.
A world he had never seen. A world he had only dreamed of.
He was so close.
And then the wind changed.
It was subtle at first—a shift in direction, a drop in temperature that was almost imperceptible. But Theron had been raised in the wastes, had learned to read the weather the way other children learned to read books. He knew when the wind was changing, and he knew what that change meant.
Something was coming.
He turned, his blade coming up, his body already tensed to run. And then he saw her.
She was standing on a ridge to the east, silhouetted against the grey sky, her robes moving in a wind that did not touch anything else. She was smaller than the woman who had come to him in the night—slighter, more delicate, her face hidden behind a veil of shadows that seemed to shift and change with every breath.
But there was nothing delicate about the way she was looking at him.
"The son of the Shattered Oath," she said, and her voice was soft, almost gentle, like the whisper of a blade being drawn from its sheath. "I was beginning to think you would never stop running."
Theron's grip tightened on his blade. "Who are you?"
"My name is Sera." She stepped off the ridge, and for a moment, she seemed to float, her feet touching the snow without leaving a mark. "I am one of the Hounds of Thalrik. And I have been looking for you for a very long time."
"Why?"
She tilted her head, and behind her veil, Theron could see the glint of eyes that were the colour of old bruises. "Because your father took something from my master. Something that belongs to the Skylords. And he has been hiding it for five years, in a place where we cannot reach."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"No. I don't suppose you do." She took a step toward him, and the snow beneath her feet turned to mist, rising up around her like a shroud. "Your father has kept many secrets from you. The truth of what he was. The truth of what he did. The truth of what he carries inside him."
She took another step, and Theron felt the cold intensify, felt something reaching for him, trying to find its way into his mind.
"But you know something, don't you? You've seen the marks on his chest. You've heard him screaming in the night. You know that he is dying, that the thing inside him is eating him alive, and that there is nothing you can do to stop it."
"I know that he's not going to die." Theron's voice was steady, even though his hands were shaking. "I know that he's going to find me. And when he does, he's going to kill you."
Sera laughed. It was a soft sound, almost musical, and it made the hair on the back of Theron's neck stand on end.
"You believe that, don't you? You believe that your father is the monster they say he is. The God-Killer. The Shattered Oath. The man who burned a legion of his own soldiers to win a war that no one wanted."
"He's not—"
"He sacrificed them, boy. His own men. The Ironhearts, they called themselves. His friends. His brothers. He burned them alive on the plains of Valtherion, and when the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of them but ash and bone."
She was closer now, close enough that Theron could see the shadows moving beneath her veil, could see the shape of her face, the curve of her lips, the darkness that lived in her eyes.
"He did it for power. For glory. For the favor of a goddess who threw him away the moment he became inconvenient. And now he is dying, and there is nothing he can do to save himself, and nothing you can do to save him."
"That's not true." But Theron's voice was shaking now, the certainty he had carried for so long beginning to crack. "He's not—he wouldn't—"
"Wouldn't what? Kill? Destroy? Burn?" Sera reached out, and her hand was pale, almost translucent, the fingers long and delicate and cold as the grave. "He has killed more men than you will ever meet, little one. He has destroyed cities that stood for a thousand years. He has burned the world to ashes and called it justice. And now he wants to kill the Skylords themselves, because he cannot accept that the only person responsible for his suffering is himself."
She touched his face, and her fingers were like ice, like death, like something that had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
"Let me help you," she said, and her voice was soft, gentle, full of a kindness that was more terrifying than any cruelty. "Let me show you the truth. Let me take away the pain. All you have to do is tell me where he is going. Tell me where he is taking the Echo, and I will make it all go away."
Theron looked at her. Looked at the shadows and the cold and the hunger that was hiding behind her eyes. And for a moment, just a moment, he wanted to say yes. He wanted to let go of the fear and the pain and the weight of five years of running. He wanted to be free.
But then he heard his father's voice, not screaming in the night, not shouting in rage, but speaking to him in the quiet moments, when the fire was burning low and the darkness was pressing against the walls of their cave.
"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.
Sera's smile faltered. "No?"
"You want to know where he's going. You want to know what he's planning. And I'm not going to tell you. Because whatever he is, whatever he's done, he's still my father. And I'm not going to let you use me to hurt him."
For a moment, Sera just looked at him, her head tilted, her eyes unreadable. And then she laughed again, and this time there was nothing musical about it.
"Oh, little one," she said. "You think you have a choice?"
She reached for him, her hand closing around his throat, and Theron felt the cold flood into him, felt the darkness pressing against his mind, trying to find the cracks in his walls, trying to find the secrets he had been keeping since he was six years old.
He tried to fight. Tried to raise his blade, to push her away, to do anything. But his body was no longer his own. His arms hung at his sides, his fingers slack, his blade falling from his grip to land in the snow with a soft thud.
"Show me," Sera whispered, and her voice was in his head now, echoing through the corridors of his mind, looking for the doors he had locked so carefully. "Show me where he is going. Show me what he is planning. Show me—"
She stopped.
Theron felt her presence recoil, felt something in her that might have been fear. And then he heard the sound that had haunted his nightmares for five years.
The sound of his father's voice.
"Take your hands off my son."