Chapter 22 | Part 4

Dulint found Balin at the watch point, sitting on a flat rock with his sword across his knees, staring at the forest.

Cold air came down from the Frostgard passes. The others slept among the roots: Eldric with his weapon close, Xandor with his pack for a pillow. Maris lay on her side, taking shallow breaths.

Dulint sat beside his nephew and said nothing for a long time.

They’d done this before, in another life. Sitting together on the wall above the lower mines in Stonehold, watching the torchlight flicker against the cavern ceiling, talking about nothing important. Balin had been different then. Bright-eyed. Full of questions about the surface, about adventure, about the kinds of stories that made hardship sound like entertainment.

That boy was gone. This one held a sword with practiced ease and scanned treelines the way Eldric did: not for beauty, but for threats.

“You should sleep,” Balin said.

“Can’t.”

“Me neither.” The young dwarf shifted the sword on his knees. “I keep hearing things. Probably nothing. But after the Frost Giant, after the message, I hear things that aren’t there.”

“That’s normal.”

“Eldric said the same. He said it fades.” A pause. “Does it?”

Dulint thought about the mines. About the cave-ins he’d survived, the shafts that collapsed, the times he’d been buried under tonnes of stone and dug his way out with broken fingers. The sound of cracking rock still woke him some nights, decades later.

“Not entirely,” he said. “But you learn which sounds matter.”

Balin shifted to give him more room on the rock. Neither spoke for a while.

“Uncle.” Balin’s voice dropped. “You’re different since Stonehold.”

“Everybody changes.”

“Not like this. You were solid. You were the one who held things together, who made the hard calls, who told everyone it would be all right.” He turned to look at Dulint. “You stopped saying that. You stopped making it sound like you believed it.”

“Maybe I stopped believing it.”

“Why?”

Dulint looked at his nephew. Because a seer told me I would fail, and now I’m afraid to choose anything. He had rehearsed telling him often enough.

“There’s something I should tell you,” Dulint said.

Balin waited. Patient. Trusting.

“In Stonehold, before we left. I went to see the seer. The old woman in the upper quarter, the one everyone pretends they don’t visit.” His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs. “She told me—”

A branch snapped.

Both dwarves were on their feet in an instant, Balin’s sword raised, Dulint’s hand on the axe at his belt. The sound had come from the treeline, thirty paces east, where the shadows were thickest.

Silence.

Then movement. Not one source. Multiple. Shifting between the trees with a precision that didn’t belong to animals. Quick, controlled, deliberate.

The new hunters.

“Run.” Dulint’s whisper came out as a rasp. “Balin, run. Wake the others. Now.”

Balin hesitated for one heartbeat, looking at his uncle’s face. Whatever he saw there was enough. He turned and sprinted for the camp.

Dulint stood at the watch point, axe in hand, watching the shadows move. They were testing the perimeter. Probing. Identifying positions before committing. The same professional patience that had killed the Frost Giant and left a message carved in flesh.

He counted the movement sources. Three, maybe four. Not enough to overwhelm five fighters. Enough to force movement, to flush them from the position, to drive them in a specific direction.

Eldric appeared beside him, sword drawn, eyes already reading the forest. “How many?”

“Three or four.”

“Moving or static?”

“Probing. They’re not attacking. They’re pushing.”

Eldric understood immediately. “They want us to run east. Into the open. Where they have the advantage.” He looked over his shoulder. “We go south instead. Into the thicker forest. Lose them in the trees.”

They woke Maris and Xandor and broke camp in under two minutes. Maris swayed on her feet but moved without complaint. Xandor shouldered his pack with the efficiency of someone who’d been run out of places before.

They ran south. Branches struck their faces and roots caught their boots. Dulint heard movement behind them whenever they slowed.

They ran for an hour. Two. The shadows fell behind, or seemed to, fading into the darkness until the forest was quiet again.

Dulint leaned against a tree, gasping, his old lungs burning. Balin collapsed beside him, and in the pre-dawn grey, the young dwarf’s face was a mask of exhaustion and something worse.

“What were you going to tell me?” Balin asked. “Before they came.”

Dulint looked at his nephew. At the trust still visible behind the fear. At the boy who’d grown up so fast and was still growing, still hardening, still becoming something that the mines of Stonehold hadn’t prepared either of them for.

“Later,” he said. “When it’s safe.”

He knew it would never be safe enough.

End of Chapter 22.4 —> 22.5: The Fracture: The Compromise