Chapter 40: Runes and Retribution
The dream began not with images, but with sensation.
A bone-deep chill, leaching up from the frozen ground, through the soles of my boots, and into the marrow of my legs. It was a cold that had nothing to do with temperature; it was the absence of warmth, of life, of hope. I was walking. My boots—my real boots, the scuffed leather ones—crunched with a sickening, rhythmic finality on fallen snow that stretched in an unbroken sheet between endless, silent trees.
The forest was monochrome. Black trunks, white snow, grey sky bleeding into twilight. No wind stirred the bare branches. No creature called. The only sound was my own breath, ragged and too loud, and the crushing of my footsteps. I was alone, and the silence was a physical weight, pressing down, squeezing my lungs.
I looked up.
She stood between two skeletal oaks, as if she had grown from the shadows they cast. Purple hair, stark and violent against the pallor, fell in a sleek curtain around a face of porcelain sharpness. Clarissa. Ren’s mother. The Cold One.
Her smile was wrong. It stretched her lips too wide, pulling them taut over her teeth, a parody of welcome that didn’t touch her smokey grey eyes. Those eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, absorbing. She was surrounded by shadows that weren’t cast by anything, pools of darkness that swirled and licked at the hem of her gown like obedient hounds.
She stared. Just stared. Her gaze was a drill, boring past my eyes, into the core of me where my fire slept. I couldn’t move. My feet were rooted, the cold shooting up into my hips, my spine.
Then, with a languid, almost graceful motion, she lifted her arm. From the coalescing darkness in her hand, a scythe formed. A single, cruel blade of solidified shadow, dripping whispers of void.
I had no time to react.
The shadow blade cut through the air without a sound. It struck across my chest.
The impact wasn’t immediate. For a fractured second, I saw the spray—a violent arc of my own blood, shocking crimson against the sterile white snow. Then the pain arrived. It wasn’t a cut; it was an explosion of agony, a white-hot rupture that cleaved my world in two. My ribs shattered. My lungs collapsed. My heart stuttered.
I screamed. The sound was swallowed by the greedy silence.
I looked down. The blood was a living thing, seeping through the fabric of my hoodie dress, spreading in a dark, warm stain that melted the snow beneath me. The red on white was obscene. My legs gave way. The cold ground rushed up.
Arisa! Arisa! ARISA, WAKE UP!
The voice was distant, muffled, underwater. Someone was shaking my shoulders, but my body was lead, my consciousness trapped under layers of ice and pain. I was drowning in the dream, the cold filling my mouth, my nostrils. I fought, clawing mentally toward the surface of the waking world, but it was like swimming through glue.
A sharp, stinging sensation cracked across my left cheek.
My eyes snapped open.
I was on the stone floor of the watchtower, my bedroll tangled around my legs. Ren knelt across from me, his hand just returning to his side. The slap still burned on my skin. Aria was at my right, her face pale, violet eyes wide with a fear I’d never seen in them before. Hannah and Alex lingered behind her, packed and ready, their expressions taut.
I groaned, bringing a hand up to my throbbing cheek. My head pounded in time with the phantom agony in my chest. The dream-chill lingered in my bones, a deep, residual tremor. “What happened?”
“You wouldn’t wake up,” Aria said, her voice low and strained. “No matter what we did. We called you, shook you… Ren finally…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. “It’s time to go, Arisa.”
I blinked, the real world rushing in—the ash smell of last night’s fire, the grey dawn light at the windows, the full packs on everyone’s backs. I’d overslept catastrophically. A bolt of shame shot through me. I scrambled up, my movements clumsy, and quickly gathered my things, stuffing my bedroll and tightening the straps on my scythe harness. My hands were unsteady.
The difficulty of waking up clung to me, a sticky, mental residue. It hadn’t felt like normal sleep. It had felt like being pulled under.
We moved out into the grim morning, the return route to the Academy stretching ahead through the frozen marshes. The relief of having no extra orders for the day was a small, cold comfort, immediately overshadowed by the memory of Clarissa’s smile. Why was I dreaming of her? Why now?
The first three hordes we encountered were manageable, but they set the tone. They were persistent, emerging from shadows we’d cleared days before, their numbers just a few more than usual. Nuisance attacks, but relentless.
Our fighting was functional, but the edge was gone. The precision drilled into us at the Academy had been sanded down by sheer fatigue. Hannah’s arrows still flew true, but a half-second slower. Alex’s swordplay was aggressive but lacked its usual fluid economy of motion. Ren and Aria were solid, immutable rocks in the chaos, but even I could see the extra breath Ren took between combos, the microscopic delay in Aria’s ward-pulses.
I moved like I was still half in the dream. My scythe felt alien in my hands, its weight all wrong. Every swing demanded too much thought. The heavenly fire within me was a subdued, anxious ember, as if hiding from the memory of those smokey grey eyes.
The fourth horde emerged not from the treeline, but from the ground itself, shadows boiling up from a frozen stream bed as we crossed it. They were on us before we could form a proper perimeter.
Chaos.
A scrabbling, four-limbed shadow beast with too many jaws got past my guard. I sidestepped its lunge, but my exhausted legs betrayed me. I slipped on the ice-rimed rock.
The world tilted.
A second beast, a hulking brute of coalesced darkness, saw the opening. It didn’t strike with a claw. It simply rammed me, a full-body tackle of solid, chilling negation.
I was airborne for a terrifying moment. Then my back connected with the trunk of a frost-heave pine.
The impact was a detonation of pure, breath-stealing agony. Something cracked in my back—a rib, maybe my spine, I couldn’t tell. The air blasted from my lungs in a wet, choked gasp. I slid down the rough bark and crumpled onto the frozen roots.
I tried to inhale. A searing pain lanced through my chest. I coughed, and a spray of hot, metallic blood splattered the snow between my hands. The world swam, sounds distorting—the clash of blades, Hannah’s shout, a bestial roar.
Through blurring vision, I saw Ren’s head snap toward me, his mouth open, his voice a raw shout lost in the tinnitus filling my ears. “ARISA—!”
I didn’t see what hit him. I didn’t see the shadow that descended between us.
A wave of darkness, deeper than the pain, surged up from the base of my skull and swallowed everything.
A wave of darkness, deeper than the pain, surged up from the base of my skull and swallowed everything.
I gasped, and forced my eyes open a second later. The world was a blur of stark sunlight and frantic movement. I tried to draw breath to speak, but my chest was a ruined bellows, grating and useless. I spat, and a thick rope of blood splattered the ice between Aria’s knees. She was cradling my head, her face shattered with a terror I had only ever seen in reflections after my own worst nightmares.
“I… can’t… move,” I rasped. Each syllable was a shard of glass dragged up my throat. My chest felt heavier, a crushing slab of stone settling deeper with every failed attempt to breathe. The bright halo of the sun behind Aria’s head began to dim, a creeping darkness bleeding in from the edges of my vision. I fought it, my mind screaming at limbs that were just distant, frozen meat. I was choking, drowning on the copper tide filling my mouth. This is the end. I am so scared.
I heard Ren finishing off the rest of the shadow beasts in a furious burst of anger nearby. His grunts were raw, broken things, punctuated by wet, tearing impacts. I turned my eyes away from Aria’s frantic gaze, up towards the searing brightness of the sun. If this was it, let it be the last thing. Not their terrified faces watching me die. The light and the high clouds began to swim and morph together.
“Damn it, Kashikoi!” a new voice cut through the murk. Xenon’s.
“Get away from her!” Aria’s voice was a frantic shield. I heard a scuffle, the sound of someone being pushed aside. “I can help her,” Xenon said, his voice closer now, decisive.
He was leaning over me, blocking the sun. I coughed, a wet, helpless convulsion that brought up more blood. The agony was just breathing. “Hang on,” he commanded, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me. His hands pressed flat against the ruin of my chest, not with clinical precision, but with a shocking, immediate heat.
Slowly, a bizarre and specific awareness returned. I could move my eyes again. I dragged them from the sky, down to his face. There were no shadows in his eyes, no mocking gleam. He was just… Xenon. His features were strained with a concentration that looked like pain. As the impossible, squeezing pressure in my lungs began to loosen—just a fraction—I saw the panic in his beautiful brown eyes. They were the warm, worried brown of a chestnut, not the cold obsidian from my dream of the forest.
I could feel my fingers. A slight twitch. My toes wiggled inside my boots. Sensation returned in a slow, tingling flood, and with it, a cold, damp awareness in my pelvic area. The cloth of my leggings was wet. I had lost control. Heat flush of humiliation warred with the icy dread of paralysis. I started to shiver violently.
“Hang on,” Xenon whispered again, but his voice was thinner. The vibrant tan of his skin was leaching away, a sickly pallor taking its place. The connection between his hands and my chest hummed with a transfer I could feel but not name. It wasn't warmth. It was substance.
“Xenon,” I croaked. My voice was a little stronger, the choking clear. “Xenon, stop. I think I’m okay now. You can stop.” He didn’t react, his eyes squeezed shut, that awful paleness deepening. “Stop! Xenon! STOP!”
Finally, strength surged back into my arms. I reached up and grasped his shoulders, shaking him. His eyes flew open. A thin trickle of blood leaked from his left nostrel, tracing a path to his lip.
He swayed, the connection breaking as he snatched his hands back from my chest. I waited for the old fear of him to slam into me, the ingrained revulsion from his obsession, from the way he looked at me like a puzzle to be solved. It didn’t come. There was only the ghost of his borrowed strength in my veins and the vivid, terrifying memory of his panic-stricken eyes.
I stared at him.
“What did you do?” Aria demanded, pulling me closer, her hands checking the now-whole but blood-soaked fabric over my sternum.
Xenon wiped the blood from his nose with the back of a shaky hand. He wouldn’t look at her. His gaze was locked on me, intense and searching. “I stabilized her. That’s all.” His voice was sandpaper.
“Since when do you have healing as an ability?” Ren’s voice was dangerously quiet. He stood a few feet away, splattered in black ichor, his sword still in hand. The last of the beasts were dissolving around him. He was looking at Xenon like he was a new, unknown threat.
Xenon pushed himself to his feet, stumbling slightly. “Since never. It’s not healing. It’s… transference. Temporary.” He finally broke his stare from me, meeting Ren’s hardened gaze. “She was seconds from system shock. You’d rather I let your squadmate die on the frost?”
Ren said nothing, his knuckles white on his hilt. The air crackled between them, thick with things unsaid.
“Can you stand?” Aria asked me, her voice soft but urgent.
I nodded, the movement sending a wave of dizziness, but no sharp pain. Using her shoulder, I got to my feet. My legs held. The dampness on my leggings was a cold, shameful secret. Hannah hurried over, pulling a lightweight blanket from her pack and draping it around my hips with a tactful, wordless efficiency. I wanted to sink into the ground.
“We need to move,” Alex said, her usual humor absent, her eyes scanning the silent woods. “That was a big noise. More might be drawn.”
“The Academy,” Ren stated, not a suggestion but an order. His eyes flicked from Xenon to me, a storm brewing behind them. “Now.”
Xenon gave a curt nod, though he looked unsteady. Without another word, he turned and began walking ahead, clearing a path. We fell into formation behind him, a ragged, silent procession. I walked, carried by muscles that felt borrowed, my mind replaying the feeling of his hands on me, the leak of blood from his nose, the sheer, unguarded terror in his eyes when he thought I was gone.
He had saved me. And the cost had bled out of him. I stared at the back of his red jacket, my own fear of him now a confused, tangled knot in my gut where the crushing pain had been.