Chapter 24 | Part 1 | The Building

The headache started behind her left eye and spread across her forehead.

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. Maris could feel the Beacon’s rhythm in her teeth, even when she moved away from Dulint. A week ago she had been able to ignore it for a while. Now each pulse hurt.

“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 despite his size. For fifty paces he said nothing, 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 were tight. “Like something building pressure.”

“Building toward what?”

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

Balin scouted ahead, one hand near his sword. Xandor followed Maris. Whenever she slowed, she heard him come closer.

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 gently pulled her arm free. She wanted to walk without someone holding her up.

Another league brought them under trees with dark red bark. Their branches met overhead and shut out the sky. Maris shivered despite the effort of walking.

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.

She held on to Dulint and waited for the next pulse.

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