Chapter 24 | Part 1 | The Building

The headache started behind her left eye and spread like a crack in thin ice.

Maris pressed two fingers against the socket, hard enough to see colors. The pain didn’t ease. It hadn’t eased in three days. Not with Xandor’s tea, not with rest, not with the cold compresses Balin kept offering her with a worried look he thought he was hiding. The boy had gotten better at many things since Stonehold. Hiding concern wasn’t one of them.

They walked. North, always north. The Beacon in Dulint’s pack had settled into a rhythm she could feel in the roots of her teeth, a low vibration that sat beneath hearing, beneath touch, lodged somewhere in the architecture of her bones. It had been tolerable a week ago. Now it was a second pulse competing with her own heartbeat, and the two rhythms never quite aligned.

“You’re favoring your right side,” Eldric said from ahead. He didn’t turn around. The man had eyes in the back of his skull, or ears that could hear a person’s gait change by half a step. Probably both.

“My left foot’s asleep.”

“Your left foot’s been asleep since yesterday.”

She didn’t answer that. He was right. The numbness had started in her toes and crept upward to her ankle, and she’d told herself it was the cold, the boots, the terrain. She told herself many things. Fewer of them were holding up.

Dulint fell back to walk beside her. The dwarf moved quietly for someone built like a root cellar, and he said nothing for fifty paces, just matched her stride. She appreciated the silence. Most people filled silence with reassurances that made things worse.

“The pulse changed this morning,” he said. Not a question.

“Faster. And there’s a new frequency underneath it. Lower. Almost subsonic.” She rubbed the back of her neck where the muscles had knotted into stone. “Like something building pressure.”

“Building toward what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part that scares me.”

Ahead, Balin scouted the trail with his hand on his sword hilt, a habit he’d picked up from Eldric. Behind, Xandor moved through the underbrush with the distracted grace of someone listening to sounds no one else could hear. The druid had been watching her more closely these past two days, his observations less medical and more wary. As though she were a kettle on a stove and he was trying to judge the moment before the whistle.

They crossed a frozen stream, the ice thick enough to hold but webbed with fractures that groaned under their weight. Maris’s reflection in the exposed patches of dark water looked like someone she hadn’t met. Hollow cheeks. Bruised crescents beneath both eyes. The capillaries in her left eye had burst two nights ago, painting the white a mottled red that hadn’t faded. She looked damaged. She felt worse than she looked.

The Beacon pulsed. Stronger.

She stumbled. Dulint’s hand caught her elbow, steadied her, and she tasted copper at the back of her throat. Not blood, not yet. The precursor to blood. Her body’s warning system that something was about to give.

“We should stop,” Dulint said.

“We stopped yesterday. And the day before. If we stop every time I stumble we’ll winter here.”

“Better than carrying you.”

She pulled her arm free, gently, because the gesture wasn’t about rejecting help. It was about maintaining the fiction that she didn’t need it. The fiction was threadbare but it was all she had.

They walked another league. The forest thickened around them, pines giving way to something older, darker. Bark the color of old blood, branches that interlocked overhead until the sky became a rumor. The temperature dropped. Maris’s breath came in thin white plumes and each exhalation carried a faint tremor she couldn’t control.

The Beacon pulsed again and this time she felt it in her spine. A bolt of pressure that traveled from the base of her skull to her tailbone, and with it came a flash. Not a vision. Not yet. A flash of dark water. A hand reaching. Gone before she could focus.

“Something’s happening to him,” she whispered.

Dulint looked at her.

“The drowning man.” She stopped walking. The words came out flat, clinical, the voice she used when the alternative was screaming. “Something is happening to him right now. The signal isn’t building toward a vision. It’s building toward something he’s experiencing. I can feel the pressure from both sides.”

“Both sides?”

“The Beacon and him. Like two hands pressing against the same wall.” She touched her temple. Her fingers came away clean but the copper taste was stronger. “The wall is getting thinner.”

Xandor had stopped behind them. He said nothing but his expression had changed, gone tight and calculating in a way that reminded Maris that the druid was old enough to have seen things the rest of them treated as theory.

“How thin?” Xandor asked.

“I don’t know. Days. Hours. I can’t tell.”

They stood in the dark forest and the Beacon pulsed and the pressure built and Maris held herself rigid because movement felt dangerous now, as though any sudden shift might crack whatever barrier still separated her mind from his.

Balin had come back down the trail, sensing the stop. “What’s wrong?”

Maris looked at him. At Dulint. At the pack where the Beacon’s glow leaked through canvas in steady, rhythmic surges.

She grabbed Dulint’s arm. Her fingers dug into the leather of his bracer with a strength that surprised them both.

“Something terrible is happening to him,” she said. “Right now. I can feel it building. And when it hits, it’s going to pull me in.”

The Beacon pulsed. Louder. Closer.

The wall between them was thinning, and Maris could feel the flood pressing against the other side.

End of Chapter 24.1 —> 24.2: The Clear Sight: The Fall