Nights of Salt and Shadow (Skyelorn Chronicles #4)

Chapter 4

Parting Ways

Ash groaned against the sharp, electric pain that shot through his skull and nearly collapsed against the wall.

"Ash? You okay?" Kierran asked from below.

"Yep. Mmhmm," he lied through his teeth, turning and stumbling towards his bedroom.

While it wasn't nearly as cluttered as the Emporium under his feet, Ash's tiny bedroom still held its own sort of chaos. He preferred to think of it as personality.

Shoved directly beside his unmade bed was a giant dresser with some of the drawers missing, the top of which was cluttered with useless things that he'd never had the heart to let go of. Old seashells that gleamed odd ways under the light, worn storybooks that used to belong to his parents, burnt up relics from the ruins of the Magiran palace.

On the opposite side of the room was a small window overseeing a shadowed alleyway - the glass was covered in hairline fractures that Ash never cared to fix - and a sink that only worked half of the time, if he was lucky.

Grim as it might have seemed to the frolicking Magiran nobles, it was exactly what Ash needed, and Kierran had provided it to him for free.

Kierran. That look on his face, the worry in his voice...

Ash collapsed onto his mattress, his hand immediately darting towards one of the drawers in front of him. Nestled inside of it were three smokesticks, an absolutely pitiful sight, but when Ash grabbed one of them he still felt a wave of relief crash over his head.

It might not have looked like much — just a piece of parchment rolled around a line of packed-together roots — but any botanist worth their salt would recognize wyrmroot when they saw it. It was one of the rarest reagents in the entirety of Karvoth, let alone the known world. Wyrmroot had to be harvested under the light of the full moon by a Mage with a proclivity towards cultivation, and could only be found in the cave system hidden beneath the icy Blade mountains.

So of course it was Ash's luck that it was the only thing that kept his nightmares at bay and dulled his chronic pain.

Well, he always thought of them as nightmares, but perhaps they were more like a curse. The strangest thing was that he hadn't always had them. They came all at once when he was a child, like a nasty virus he couldn't ever shake. The clock had struck three on his fifth birthday, and the sky had turned inky black.

That's when they started.

Every time he slept, or his mind became a little too quiet, he would see horrible visions of death and destruction. He would hear screams of terror, feel sharp claws raking at his flesh, taste the bitter tang of blood.

At first his parents had believed him to be receiving messages from Volturnius and weren't sure what to do. But they quickly came to realize that their son was suffering, unable to lead a normal life, and they scoured the kingdom to find a cure for his brain sickness.

And that was the start of his reliance on wyrmroot. Even after his parents never returned from the war and the sky turned blue again, Ash continued to smoke the precious root. When Kierran found Ash and took pity on him, even the impoverished sailor did his best to hunt down the medicine, whatever the cost.

But as Ash took a slow hit off of the smokestick between his fingers, trying to savor every second, he didn't quite feel the full sense of relief that he was used to. After today, there were two smokesticks left. Two more days. And if he kept messing up his schemes like he did the day before, he'd have no way to buy more.

Ash finished smoking and stared at himself in the mirror that was sat precariously on top of the dresser. He had to admit it; he looked like shit.

He felt like shit.