Chapter 13 | Part 2

The creature spoke first.

It happened during the night rest—the period when the caravan stopped and the guards rotated through their watches. Drusniel was awake, as always, counting stars that weren’t there through the gaps in his cage’s canopy.

“You’re not afraid.”

The voice was rough, like something unused to speaking, but the words were clear. Common tongue, accented strangely.

Drusniel turned his head. The creature—he should probably stop thinking of it as that—was pressed against the bars of its cage, closer than before. The red markings on its face seemed darker in the twilight, more like wounds than paint.

“Should I be?”

“Everyone else is.” The creature’s head tilted at an angle that was slightly wrong, as if the neck could bend in ways necks shouldn’t. “The guards. The other cargo. They smell like fear when they look at me.”

“I’m not everyone else.”

“No.” Those strange eyes studied him. “You crossed the nightmare sea. Alone. In a boat that shouldn’t have floated.” A pause. “I know things. Sometimes. Things I shouldn’t.”

Drusniel felt something cold move through him. “What do you know about my crossing?”

“Water that was alive. Darkness that thought. Something in the deep that watched you.” The creature’s voice was matter-of-fact. “You made a bargain. Didn’t you?”

The debt pulsed in Drusniel’s chest—silent, patient, impossible to ignore now that it had been named.

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know how I know.” The creature’s jaw tightened, frustration plain on its borrowed face. “Things come to me. Images. Feelings. Sometimes words. I learned to stop asking where they came from.”

Interesting. Drusniel filed that away. Knowledge without source. Information appearing unbidden. Either the creature was lying—possible but unlikely, given its apparent confusion—or something was feeding it data.

“Do you have a name?”

“Elion.” The word came quickly, definitively. “That’s mine. Everything else—what I am, where I came from—I don’t remember. But the name is mine.”

“Drusniel.”

Elion repeated it slowly, tasting the syllables. “Drus-ni-el. That’s a real name. Old. Means something, doesn’t it?”

“It means ‘shadow’s edge’ in the old tongue.” Drusniel hadn’t thought about his name’s meaning in years. “My mother chose it.”

“Shadow’s edge.” Elion’s lips twitched again—that almost-smile. “Fitting. You’re standing on one now. The edge between what you were and what you’re becoming.”

“Is that something you know, or something you’re guessing?”

“Both. Neither.” Elion pulled back slightly, and Drusniel noticed the movement was too fluid, too boneless. Wrong in ways that were hard to define. “I told you. Things come to me. I don’t always understand them.”

The guards were changing shifts nearby. Drusniel heard the low murmur of their conversation, the clink of weapons being handed off. He had maybe two more minutes before attention returned to the cages.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “In a slaver’s cage.”

“Because I was caught.” Elion’s voice went flat. “Because I was careless. Because I forgot that freedom isn’t something you keep—it’s something you fight for every day, and I stopped fighting.”

“You were free before.”

“I was free for three years. Before that…” The creature—Elion—went still. “Cages. Different cages, different masters, but always cages. Since I can remember. The first freedom I ever had, I won with blood. The second time, someone else paid the price.” His eyes met Drusniel’s. “There won’t be a third time. Not like this.”

“You’re planning something.”

“I’m waiting for something.” Elion’s head tilted again. “I’ve been waiting since they threw me in here. Waiting for… I don’t know. A chance. A sign. Someone who doesn’t smell like fear.”

The guards’ conversation was getting closer. Drusniel had seconds.

“What would you do,” he asked quietly, “if someone opened your cage?”

Elion’s smile was sudden and sharp and not entirely human.

“Walk free.”

End of Chapter 13.2 —> 13.3: The One Who Walks Free: The Choice