Journey onto the Storm (BOOK 2)

Chapter 35

ADARA

—in the verdant ashes, the shadowed wings fluttered past the desolation and destruction. It screamed for salvation and burnt a spiral of orange smoke to obscure his path. Hark, the Dragon Knight, the last of his kind, the story told twofold. A promise made and kept. Wings of black scales shimmering with opalescent hues, he flew to the ends of the world, for his hope and ideal.

"For I am the last of my kind, holding their dreams upon my wings."

Tara smiled in her peripheral vision and closed the book, nothing more than a shade of history. Jisa always enjoyed the chapters of 'Dragon Knight' with her own rising ideals of the world unknown, behind the borders of Tebora where others shunned the shadowlands full of dangerous, corrupted magick. Undeterred by others thoughts, Jisa bounced right along with Tara's storytelling ability, and Adara listened closely, to carry the hopes and dreams with little sparks of defiance against the fate of all magickae in Tebora.

Tara gave her a rose when Jisa bounded off to return to the castle and her duties.

I'm going to prick my finger and bleed because of you, her complaint left a whisper on her lips, but the rose bloomed in deep reds as she thumbed the stem. I don't even have a vase for it. It's going to wilt away.

It bled not on her thumb, but her torn heart, a wilted rose drained of all its flow. Adara rubbed her fingers together as Fenrer helped Yuven pack their camp outside the confines of Wolford. Lamps hung out of the tall branches to guide them down the road through the underbrush, where the runes inside flickered for the arrival of dusk, powered by the sun when it drew its way around the world.

Don't get too close.

Blight. Tainted. Magick is a curse. Words said over and over by the Prunal residents, never knowing the truth in its beauty. It wound through the tree to tear out the shadows they thought it created — a soft, gentle light of emerald greens; a promise of duty against the dark. Her entire life, everything she loved, gone. Her power, never able to prevent the cracking of despair in her mind. Off the ground to rejoin them, she held onto the stories untold as Fenrer gazed at the distant path into the walls of Wolford, a small town hidden underneath the golden canopy. A lumber mill sat beside a branch from the main river, where the water wheel powered the building. One man pushed a log to join the pile, where a woman waved up to him with an axe in her hand.

"Fenrer," Yuven drawled at Fenrer's stillness. "What is it? Are we going to pass through or not?"

Don't get too close.

"We have to," Fenrer said. "But I wish to do something first before we ascend into the hills." Yuven's brow scrunched, but to her surprise, he said not a word to deter Fenrer from whatever he had planned. Fenrer tangled his finger around his wolf pin. "I can't help but think about what we overheard on the road," he admitted. "I wish to confirm a suspicion of mine. It should not take too much of our time, and it's on the way to getting an idea of what the roads are like through the goldwood seeing as it is storm season. We don't want to get caught in a mudslide." Fenrer smiled, brighter than the sun as he undid the pin and placed it in a pouch on his belt before fixing his hair, dragging his fingers through the dark brown locks. "Humour me, Yuven?"

"If I knew how to do that I'd have done it, but no, you don't laugh at my Ra'ik Ra'ik jokes. You don't want me to humour you; you want me to follow your random whim," Yuven shuffled with his leather armour to tug a hood over his head to hide his hair of snow, tucking his feathers deeper. "Fine, but I do not want to attract attention. We go in. Get information. Leave."

"What is the problem of following random whims, Traye? I say following the random whims has gotten things done." It set a spark alight in her throat with her snap. "We might learn something important. Hells, I might learn something important if you'd let me ask questions, but you berate me instead." Her boot dug into the dirt and longed to rip out the roots of her pain embedded in her heart. "We might be able to get stuff done in your desperate timely fashion if you stopped being a stubborn old nuglet."