Butterfly Reign - SilentTeyz

39

Jared stirs with a ghost of a touch on his collarbone and a worry he can't pin to a

source or a reason. There was something – a dream, a fleeting thought, like a word about to be spoken – that has him fighting through sleep for long enough to notice that the wagon's no longer moving.

He cracks his eyes open to a blanket discarded on the bench, cold like it's been there for a long time. He can't see Theseus anywhere – which means his mind finds him in many different places: twisted at the bottom of a canyon, curled up under a bush of nightshade, by a river with long deep gashes along his arms, water red and murky.

, Jared thinks as he ducks under the canvas cover and jumps to a patch of well-trodden snow. He goes past the purple-eyed youth Theseus took for a servant, who curses as he fights to calm his rearing stallion, and heads for the guardsmen crowding around something out of his sight.

"What's all the noise about?" he asks, but the need for an answer outlives itself once the men part to reveal a field of snow, dotted with small dark lumps. At first he thinks they're rocks... but rocks don't have feathers, and they don't smell like rotting fresh. Jared's stomach curdles as he realizes that the field is full of decomposing songbirds.

"We've stopped to water the horses," Wisp says. His face betrays nothing, but his voice rings with tension. "Nothing was amiss for a while. And then they just... fell. Dropped out of the sky, all of them."

"How long ago?" Jared crouches to get a closer look at a tiny gray sparrow shriveled in the snow. Fat green flies crawl all over its body and feast on putrid black juice oozing from the sockets. He glances at Wisp when he takes a beat too long to answer –

"Just now," the captain says, and a shiver lances up Jared's spine.

It's dangerous." Frankly, Jared has no way of knowing how true that is, but he doesn't want his son anywhere an animal that's passed to an unknown cause. "Where's Theseus?"

The last question he's addressed to the guardsmen, but Purpled must have gotten ahold of his mount because it's his voice that replies first, "he went there, up the hill," as he waves at a chain of fresh footprints trekking through the snow. Wisp moves forward like he's going to follow after, but Jared blocks his way.

"I'll bring him. Get ready to leave," he orders as he hands him Fundy, still pouty over his broken stick. Without a shred of doubt, Wisp would catch up to Theseus sooner than he will... but Jared's afraid that if he doesn't see his brother right now, that anxious thing born in the venous fumes of his confession might drive him mad.

Jared swore to change when Theseus gave him another chance to mend their bond. However, he hadn't known beforehand that it would mean that he'll have to be

The track winding between splintered boulders leads him to a cliffside, whittled flat and bare by the currents. Heavy clouds roll and billow into shapes like a charging vanguard, hanging so low they seem to swallow the mountains and cascade into the valley. Crow's Keep, far too high to drown in the murk, seems to ride the crest of a great black wave. Seven black towers rise over Theseus' head like palisades on an obsidian crown.

Pebbles skittering under Jared's shoes announce his arrival. Theseus sitting in the roots of an old tree, parched and gnarly with age, moves to greet him... at least Jared thinks so, until he realizes that it's the massive gray wolfdog slinking out from behind his shoulder, silent as a mourner. Bumps of gooseflesh jitter over his skin being under her pale yellow gaze, but the relief of seeing his brother snuffs out the dreadful prickle in his stomach.

"There you are. Wisp's packing up the camp, so let's make haste and join the others."

He's met with silence and the wail of wind, blowing in many different voices like through the pipes on an organ. Theseus sits so still that Jared questions if he's heard him at all.