Chapter 10: Climbing the Giant
The silence after Reyes left had a new texture. It wasn’t just empty; it was expectant, like the held breath before a landslide. They’d spent hours prepping, their movements sharp and economical, but now, in the deep of the night, the energy had nowhere to go. It buzzed under Liam’s skin, a live wire of anxiety and caffeine.
The oil lamp on the nightstand guttered, making the freshly-carved sigils on the bedframe seem to writhe.Liam stared at them from his perch on the pillow. “I swear these weren’t here yesterday,” he muttered, tracing one with a tiny finger.The wood felt unnaturally warm.
“The cabin knows we’re leaving,” Kaelen said from the doorway, his voice a soft rumble.He was leaning against the frame, a massive silhouette against the faint light from the main room. His wings were partially unfurled, a sign of his own restless energy.“It prepares. It always has.”
“It could prepare a bit less creepily.” Liam paced the length of the pillow, his tail twitching.He felt caged. The meticulous inventory, the packed bags by the door—it all felt like a countdown. He needed to move, to do something with his hands that wasn’t just typing or packing.He needed to climb.
He stopped and looked at his brother. Kaelen’s violet eyes were already on him, reading the agitation in his minute movements.
“Kae?”
“Yeah, Li.”
“I need… can I use you? To climb. Just for a bit.” It wasn’t a strange request between them. It was their oldest comfort, a language of trust written in pressure and balance.
Without a word, Kaelen crossed the room.
The floorboards creaked under his weight. He blew out the oil lamp, plunging them into a darkness pierced only by the moon through the moth-eaten velvet. Then he lay face down on the wide bed, arranging a pillow under his torso to lift his back. He let out a long, slow breath, a conscious release of tension. His wings stretched partway open, the vast black membranes lying slack against the quilt. His tail, thick and powerful, draped over the side of the mattress, the tip curling idly. With one large hand, he loosened the braid in his hair, letting the long, dark strands spill across his shoulders and back.
He went completely slack, a mountain yielding.
Liam felt his own anxiety begin to drain away at the sight. This was a ritual. An offering. He scrambled off the pillow and approached his brother’s side. Placing his hands on the dense muscle of Kaelen’s flank, he began.
The first climb was always exploratory. He found a grip in the fold of Kaelen’s shirt, then hoisted himself onto the bed. He moved to the base of Kaelen’s spine, to where the powerful wings emerged from between his shoulder blades. This was the most complex terrain. Liam used the knobs of vertebrae as handholds, his bare feet finding purchase on the firm muscle.He moved slowly, deliberately, up the slope of Kaelen’s back.
He reached the first great wing joint. The skin here was softer, stretched over an architecture of bone and sinew. Liam ran his hands along it, feeling the heat radiating from within. He moved out onto the wing itself, the membrane like strong, supple leather under his feet. He walked along the main supporting finger, the structure creaking faintly with his weight, a sound like a distant ship. He crouched and pressed his palms flat against it, feeling the thrum of Kaelen’s heartbeat transmitted through the frame.
Kaelen didn’t move. He was deep in that meditative state Liam’s climbs induced. Each pinpoint pressure—a foot on a rib, a hand on a scapula—was a point of focus, grounding him in the physical reality of his brother’s safety. The delicate weight tracing his spine was a lifeline tethering him to the present, away from the dark futures Reyes’s folder had laid out.
Liam traversed to the other wing, then back to Kaelen’s shoulders. He climbed the tower of his brother’s neck, using the long strands of hair as ropes. He sat, finally, on the crown of Kaelen’s head, legs dangling over his forehead.
“The ward’s still quiet?” Liam asked, his voice small in the dark.
“Yes.” Kaelen’s answer vibrated through his skull. “Just the wind.”
Liam lay back, looking at the ceiling shadows.“I mapped the route to the coordinates.Following ridges, staying off any path. It’s… a long way.”
“We’ll make it.”
“I know.” Liam sat up again.He was calmer now, the frantic energy transmuted into a focused calm. “It’s just the waiting. I hate the waiting.”
Kaelen shifted, just a fraction, an invitation.Liam understood. He climbed down the familiar path of his brother’s face, over the bridge of his nose, and without breaking rhythm, Kaelen tilted his head back. The subtle opening beneath his tongue parted. Liam slipped inside, into the warm, absolute darkness of the pouch.It was the ultimate trust.The deepest sanctuary. Enclosed by strong, rhythmic muscle, lulled by the steady pulse of Kaelen’s blood, Liam felt the last edges of his worry smooth away.Here, he was weightless.Here, he was invisible. Here, he was safe.Kaelen let his head rest back on the pillow, closing his mouth. The world narrowed to the sound of his own breathing and the gentle, alive weight against his throat. They stayed like that for a long time, a giant and his heart, hidden in the silent, watchful cabin.
Then Kaelen’s eyes snapped open.A sound.Not the wind.
It was the soft, definitive snap of a tripwire breaking, fifty yards out, on the eastern perimeter.A line they’d strung themselves.
He was on his feet in a liquid, silent motion, wings flaring wide. Liam, alert to the sudden tension, was already moving, emerging from the pouch as Kaelen’s hand came up to cup him.
“What?” Liam whispered, his voice sharp.“Perimeter breach. East.” Kaelen’s voice was a ghost of sound.He moved to the bedroom window, peering through a slit in the velvet. The moonlit forest showed nothing.But the ward pendant on the deck outside was no longer still.
It was spinning wildly, erratically, as if slapped by invisible hands.
“They’re here,” Kaelen said, the words final as a tombstone closing. He looked at the packed bags by the door, then at the dark forest beyond the window.The plan was no longer a plan. It was now.“We go. To the ridges.”
He didn’t put Liam in the pouch.He placed him in the breast pocket of his shirt, buttoning the flap. He needed his brother to see, to navigate. Liam peeked over the fabric, amber eyes wide, one small hand gripping the button.
Kaelen took one last look at the sigils carving themselves deeper into the bedframe.The cabin was trying to arm itself.It was too late.
He shouldered the heavier pack, his wings folding tight against his back. With his tail, he snagged the lighter pack and slung it across his chest. He became a shadow among shadows, moving to the cabin’s rear door, away from the breached line.He paused, his hand on the latch. The wind carried a new sound—the soft crunch of careful footsteps on dry pine needles, far too many to count.
Liam met his brother’s gaze from the pocket, giving a single, fierce nod.
Kaelen opened the door, and they melted into the hungry dark.
Kaelen opened the door, and they melted into the hungry dark.The forest swallowed them whole, its familiar contours now a labyrinth of threat. Kaelen moved not with the crashing force of a lumberjack, but with the silent, fluid grace of a predator, every footfall meticulously placed on damp moss and bare stone.
Liam clung to the pocket fabric, his small body jostled with each ground-eating stride. “East?” he whispered, his voice barely stirring the air.
“They’ll expect us west, toward the roads.” Kaelen’s answer was a breath. His wings remained tightly folded, but his tail lashed once, a silent counterbalance as he vaulted a fallen log slick with fungus. The world was a mosaic of grey shadows and deeper black, but his eyes, wide and reflective, parsed every shifting shape.
He didn’t run blindly. He followed a ghost of a path only he remembered, one their father had shown him, a deer trail that skirted the soggy hollow where sound carried. The air grew cold and sharp, smelling of damp spruce and disturbed earth. From far behind, back near the cabin, a single, low whistle pierced the night.It wasn’t a bird.
Liam felt the powerful flinch that traveled through Kaelen’s chest. “They’re signaling.”
“I know.” Kaelen’s pace increased, a dangerous acceleration on the uneven ground. His injured leg protested with a hot, piercing throb he acknowledged and dismissed. Branches whipped past, close enough for Liam to feel the wind of them. They were a blur of noise and motion, a desperate bid for distance.
After an hour of brutal, silent travel, Kaelen slowed at the base of a granite escarpment. The trees thinned here, giving way to scree and stubborn lichen. He put a hand against the cold rock, his breathing a controlled, deep rasp.The pouch beneath his jaw pulsed with heat.
“You need to fly,” Liam murmured, his face peeking over the pocket’s edge.“Not until we clear the tree line. They’ll have acoustics.” Kaelen tilted his head, listening. The forest below was a symphony of normal night sounds, which was somehow worse. It meant their pursuers were as quiet as they were.“The ridge is another mile up this rock.”
“I can climb it. You can follow.” Liam was already shimmying out of the pocket, his tiny hands finding immediate purchase in the pitted granite.“It’ll be faster. They won’t expect you to go straight up.”
Kaelen gave a single, tense nod. His trust was absolute and instantaneous.Liam vanished into the shadows of the rock face, a miniature spider moving with shocking speed. Kaelen watched for a second, then began his own ascent, using wings and tail for balance, his powerful fingers cracking into holds Liam could never manage. They climbed in parallel, two creatures of the stone, the only sound the occasional skitter of dislodged pebbles.
The forest fell away beneath them, a sea of whispering black.The air grew thinner, colder. Liam reached the summit first, a dark notch against the swiftly lightening sky. He turned, amber eyes scanning the treetops below.He saw no movement, no flash of unnatural light.Just the silent, watchful woods.
Kaelen hauled himself over the ledge a minute later, his wings flaring wide for a moment to steady himself. In the predawn gloom, Liam could see the strain around his brother’s eyes, the sheen of sweat on his temples. The leg was a line of tight pain in his posture.“Now,” Liam said.Kaelen didn’t hesitate. He scooped Liam into his hand and then, in one smooth motion, brought him to the opening beneath his tongue. Liam slipped inside the warm, confined space without a word.It was not for comfort now. It was for aerodynamics and concealment. Kaelen took three running steps to the cliff’s edge and threw himself into the void.The world dropped away. The first, powerful downstroke was a thunderclap of muscle and membrane that drove the air from Kaelen’s own lungs. He caught the rushing wind, angling north, following the spine of the ridge. He flew low, using the terrain as cover, his shadow a fleeting blot over ferns and stone. The cold air screamed past, a tonic and a torture.
He flew until his shoulders burned and the horizon bled from indigo to a pale, watery violet. He flew until the coordinates in his head matched the landscape below—a high, barren plateau of wind-stunted pine and jagged basalt columns. Only then did he seek a landing, his wings beating a slow, heavy rhythm as he descended into a shallow bowl of gravel, shielded from sight.His feet touched earth. He staggered once, the bad leg buckling momentarily, before he locked his knees and stood, chest heaving. The first rays of sun crested the distant peaks, painting the rocks in harsh, long shadows. He tilted his head back, and Liam emerged, blinking in the sudden, brilliant dawn.
They make the ridge by dawn and walk the remaining kilometres.Liam took up roost on Kaelen’s shoulder once his brother landed.
“Anything?” Kaelen’s voice was rough from the wind.
Liam, perched on the broad shelf of Kaelen’s shoulder, his small hands wrapped in the collar of his brother’s shirt, scanned the vast, silent plateau.“Nothing moving. Not even a bird.” The emptiness was profound, a void of sound that felt heavy and intentional. “The station should be just over that rise.”
Kaelen adjusted the packs and began to walk, his stride a labored, determined grind.The flight had cost him.Every step was measured. Liam watched the tight line of his brother’s jaw, felt the slight hitch in his gait.
“You’re a terrible landing gear,” Liam offered, his tone deliberately light.
“You’re a terrible navigational system,” Kaelen rumbled back, not missing a beat. “Took us a whole extra minute to get here.”
“Altitude suggestions from the passenger are advisory only.” Liam smiled faintly. He leaned his head against Kaelen’s neck, the steady pulse a comforting metronome against his cheek.The brutal climb, the frantic flight, it all hung on them like a dusty cloak. They walked on, two small shapes in a vast, silent landscape, the abandoned fire watch station their only destination in the widening light. Its strange, promised quiet waited for them just ahead.
Its strange, promised quiet waited for them just ahead.
The fire watch station wasn’t a building so much as a scar on the plateau. Weathered silver siding peeled away from its frame in jagged curls.Two windows, like vacant eyes, stared blindly south toward the forests they’d fled. A skeletal radio tower, stripped of wires, leaned precariously against its side. The air here was different. Thinner, colder, and utterly devoid of the low hum of magic that permeated their cabin.It was a silence that felt surgical.
“No wards,” Liam murmured, his eyes scanning the structure’s edges. “Just decay.”
“Reyes said it was forgotten.” Kaelen’s voice was gravel. He shifted his weight off his bad leg, a minute adjustment Liam felt through his perch. “Feels it.”
They approached slowly, not out of stealth but from sheer exhaustion.Every instinct screamed against entering another enclosed space, but the rising sun offered no cover. They needed walls, however fragile. The door was a slab of weather-beaten oak, hanging crooked on rusted hinges.Kaelen didn’t touch it. He used his tail to push it open, the metal screaming a protest that echoed across the empty plateau.The interior gloom swallowed the dawn. Dust motes, stirred by the door’s movement, swirled in the thin bar of light. The main room held a rusted wood stove, a collapsed chair, and a desk bolted to the wall, its surface littered with rodent droppings and yellowed paper. The air was thick with the smell of dry rot, mildew, and something else—a metallic tang, like old blood and ozone.“Charming,” Liam said, his nose wrinkling. “No sign of recent squatting, at least. Unless you count the mice.”
Kaelen’s wings tightened against his back, a reflexive shield. His violet eyes adjusted faster than Liam’s, picking out details in the dark.A map, frozen in time, pinned to one wall.A tin cup on the floor. A black stain spreading from the stovepipe hole in the ceiling. It felt less like a refuge and more like a tomb they were choosing to enter.
“We need to secure it,” Kaelen said, the lumberjack in him surfacing through the fatigue. “Check every room.”
“I’ll take the high ground.” Liam scrambled up Kaelen’s arm, using his shoulder as a launchpad to leap onto a crossbeam running the length of the ceiling. From there, he had a panoramic view of the single room.“Clear from above. Just lots of cobwebs and disappointment.”
Kaelen moved with a pained deliberation, his bootfalls heavy on the plank flooring. He ignored the main room, his focus on a narrow door in the back wall. It was slightly ajar.His tail snaked ahead, curling around the edge to pull it fully open. Darkness yawned beyond.“Bunk room,” Liam called from his perch, peering into the black rectangle. “Two beds, by the look of the frames. Smells worse in there.”
Kaelen stood at the threshold, his head nearly brushing the top of the doorframe. He paused, listening, extending every non-human sense.No skittering, no breathing but their own. Just that dense, waiting silence.
“I’m going in,” he said, more to himself than to Liam.
He took a final breath of the marginally cleaner air from the main room and stepped across the threshold.
KAELEN GETS INSIDE AND LOCATES THE BUNK ROOM
The space was tighter, colder. Two iron bed frames, stripped bare, were bolted to opposite walls.A small, grime-encrusted porthole window let in a feeble, grey light. The metallic smell was stronger here, pooled in the corners of the room. His eyes swept over the empty canvas mattress platforms, the rust weeping from the bed bolts, the dust-furred floor.
Something glinted, half-under one of the frames.
He took a heavy step forward, his tail lifting behind him for balance. Crouching was agony for his leg; he dropped to one knee instead, the old wood groaning under his weight.He reached a hand under the iron bedframe.
His fingers closed around cold metal.He pulled it out.
It was a silver pendant, identical to the one that had spun on their deck.The chain was snapped. The metal was tarnished almost black, but the intricate runes were unmistakable. It lay inert in his palm, a dead thing.From the doorway, Liam’s sharp intake of breath was audible. “That’s… one of ours.”
“Yeah.” Kaelen’s voice was flat. He stared at the dead ward.Someone else had been here, someone like them, seeking the same forgotten shelter. The pendant hadn’t saved them.The silence in the bunk room was no longer empty. It was full of questions, and none of the answers were good. He closed his fist around the cold silver, the broken chain biting into his palm.This was their safe house now. This room, with its ghosts and its warning. He stayed kneeling, mapping the exit routes in his head, feeling the weight of Liam’s gaze from the doorway, the weight of the dead metal in his hand.