Journey onto the Storm (BOOK 2)

Chapter 47

ADARA

Gods, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I miss the complaining. At least it filled the silence.

They camped out at the bottom of a hill, but she heard the ocean waves in the distance. Against one tree, Fenrer whittled down his chosen block of wood and left its shavings among the grass. His knife glided with the grain towards the thumb holding it steady, careful never to strike his own skin as he stopped to examine his work. Across from him, Yuven, who rested his arms against his knees and stared at the small, empty campfire long lost of its embers. Early morning dew danced in the air, given moisture from the coast. Adara rubbed her fingers and studied the lines and angles Fenrer created with precision and focus. Each stroke, careful and firm to tear out an image unformed from the wood.

Bells tolled.

Fenrer stopped his cautious carving at the humming sound clashing with the waves and the sounds of gulls. It glittered through the air and sent a shockwave through her heart at the possibilities of what rested behind the hill.

A map never gave her the scope of what the world had to show, not inked on parchment, but close enough to see, touch, and experience in full. The truth in the fear of Prunal's residents — that though the world, infected with shadow as it was, could still be beautiful.

Adara got off her spot where she slept through the night without the visceral nightmares and the Derelict continuing to haunt her from its setting crimson dusk. On the wings of freedom at the edge of the cage Jisa opened the door for, she stretched underneath the overcast sky, pierced with the lances of light from the dawn behind it. Rise as the dawn, the Hanekan storybook spoke, and she followed it through to the end, to live and learn, to carry the truth with her to the end. "Are we ready? We're almost at Sivaport, aren't we? We're at the end of the road from Sungrove." Adara nodded at the smoothing path through the trees behind them.

Yuven glanced at Fenrer, who returned to his whittling. "It's right over the hill," Fenrer said and tilted his head upwards at another ringing toll of a bell, but his lip pursed in concentration when he nicked a large piece of wood shaving to the ground at his feet. "Go take a look. We'll be right here." He smiled at her. "Trust me, there's nothing quite like watching the ocean be set aflame by the descent of the phoenix of evenfall to make way for the sun." Another head tilt with another bell, he settled himself against his tree and continued to whittle with the flow of the wood.

Adara waited for Yuven's injected opinion, but he waved his hand at her with a huff and set the back of his head in his other hand to tangle his fingers between his feathers.

You know what? I don't miss the complaining that much. Adara turned her back on them to carry Jisa and Tara's dreams on her wings. A storybook held between them as she failed to replicate Tara's storytelling skills. Her every footstep pulsed with the harmonic bells of the sea to swallow the dissonant, groaning ones, until it disappeared with the call of Garren's oral tales to mix with 'The Dragon Knight'.

"On the cusp of a great ocean, a piercing light rises on the cliffs," Garren told her as she begged for a story without the death and grime of his chosen tales he told, when it surrounded her all the same and the glint of metal pushed against her neck with its reminder. "Throughout the air, it sings, it calls to the sons and daughters of the sea, underneath the hearth of home. We are a part of the waves, the foam that crashes against the harbor."

"Though I am the last of my kind," Tara's voice danced as Jisa leaned forward with wonder and awe, while she choked on her drained hope. "I will carry their dreams on my wings—"

One step up the hill to follow the bells.

"—I will not be alone, with their memories to carry me."