Surely Tuluna would protect her. After all, it was Tuluna’s influence that had sent her into the arms of Rune Highcrown to begin with.
Pulse throbbing with trepidation, Hanne remounted and turned east, toward her destiny.
A stink rose up, sharp with ozone and the sticky sweetness of death. From the corner of her eye, she caught a pale shape looming near the signpost, one long and many-jointed arm pointing southward.
It was here. The rancor.
Hanne screamed and jerked the reins, causing the poor nag to rear up, but when she looked again, the area around the signpost was empty and the air smelled only of wildflowers and horse sweat.
The rancor wasn’t here. Or wasn’t here anymore. It was impossible to tell.
It didn’t matter. Before she could reconsider her actions, Hanne steered the horse south. She’d been foolish to hope the rancor wouldn’t know of her disobedience. It would know.
She kicked the gelding into a gallop, heading south and around the Malstop. Never before had she been so aware of the great dome, but now its presence was a constant blot on her mind, refusing to be ignored as it shimmered with arcane energy.
And now that she knew what sorts of terrors lurked within…
If she could have made a wider berth around the Malstop, she would have, but speed was more important than her comfort. The faster she reached Ivasland and did as the rancor had bidden, the faster she could return to her real life.
All of this would be over someday, just a story she and Nadine revisited when they were old and far away from all this horror.
She hoped. (Of course, she knew better than to believe.)
After that first time, she barely stopped to sleep, pausing only when the horse flagged, because the danger of losing her stolen mount was too great. She let him rest when necessary, and tried to rest herself, but it was impossible to feel safe.
Because the rancor might come after her.
Because what she was about to do was ludicrous.
Because, impossibly, it was still dark.
It had been dark this entire time. When she’d rested before, she hadn’t slept through an entire day. No, the sky was just dark all the time now. Forever, perhaps. She’d escaped the malsite only to find the world had completely broken in her absence.
Was it an Incursion?
If so, had Nadine even made it to Brink?
Hanne pushed the horse even faster.
13.
NIGHTRENDER
You almost lost that fight, whispered the dark voice. You almost lost your prince. Then what would you have done? Gone back to sleep? Let darkness spill over Salvation?
Nightrender did her best to ignore the voice, but it was right. Prince Rune had been right. The rancor had been harder to kill, but not because it was a prince or a general. No, it had been a normal rancor, and she was simply broken.
The malsite’s age might be to blame for the difficulty in destroying it, but this rancor was just like any other, and she should not have experienced that blinding, debilitating pain while fighting it.
Worse, it had spoken of a king, which meant…What?
If only she could remember.
If only.
Nightrender stopped walking.
Somewhere in the distance, a bird chirruped—one cautious high-pitched trill. Another answered. Wildlife began to stir. She could feel eyes on her, finches and sparrows, squirrels and possums. Slowly, life crept back into this section of the forest, watching her from the safety of the trees, as Nightrender stood before the fissure, that gash carved into the world. The red-orange glow and terrible reek rose up around her.
How long before you lose everything?
Nightrender closed her eyes as her thoughts flashed back to that heart-stopping moment when Prince Rune had disappeared into the fissure, how quickly he’d been gone.
Then, there’d been an explosion of energy that knocked down everything inside the malsite. The rancor. Trees. Even her.
It had come from her.
It would have been a stomach drop for a human, or a primal scream of complete and utter devastation. But for her, it had been a real, physical blast of emotion—one that tore plants from their roots and threatened to rip holes in the sky.
The rancor had recovered first, then attacked, and she’d had no opportunity to consider what she’d done, or why. But now she surveyed the damage soberly. In all her time, there’d only been one soul she’d have destroyed the world in order to save.
One soul; many people.
She couldn’t always know her soul shard immediately. Humans were deeply complex creatures, and even if the soul was the same, the body and heart and mind were different. The person was different.
Was Prince Rune’s soul a shard of hers? It might explain the flash of recognition when they’d first met in the tower, or her terror when he’d fallen, or the surge of relief when he’d climbed up.
Royalty made for especially inconvenient soul shards, even if there was a lot to appreciate about this prince (besides the fact that he was the one person alive who seemed to like her). He genuinely cared about his kingdom, and he’d put himself in danger because he’d thought she needed help. (Perhaps she had.) He was a good person. A kind person.
She could deal with the inconvenience for someone like Rune Highcrown.
No, in truth, it was his role as Dawnbreaker that would wreck things. If he was also her soul shard—he could not be her Dawnbreaker, because Dawnbreakers died.
She couldn’t protect him and ask him to ride into battle. She would have to forgive his oath, and that was just as likely to hurt him as any physical assault.
But perhaps he wasn’t her soul shard. Perhaps her reaction to his fall had been simple fear of losing another person.
She pulled her wings tight around her and lifted her eyes to the stars. Please, she prayed to all the Numina, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was asking for.
They’re not listening anyway. The voice coiled around her heart and squeezed. They’ve never listened.
Everything was so wrong this time.
Nightrender knelt at the fissure, working through the names and faces her soul shard had worn throughout history. There’d been the horse breeder, who’d given Nightrender a new appreciation for equines. There’d been a miner, who’d kept a small shrine to the Numen of Silver in his home. And there’d been a musician, with instruments tucked away in her apartment; Nightrender had gone to her first performance and—
And what?
A star flashed out in Nightrender’s mind: the performance. She could remember going into the music hall, but then there was nothing.
“No.” Nightrender pressed her fingertips into the blackened, burned earth, but even as she struggled to hold on to these moments, these precious pieces of her history, another went, and then another, all swept away by the monster stealing her memories.