The Five Realms

Chapter 42: Beanca VII

Chapter 42: Wolf-Eyed Vigil

The fire had stopped screaming.

Its embers pulsed like heartbeats now—dull red veins breathing through blackened wood and scorched stone. Overturned kettles lay like broken teeth. Someone's blanket—Joey's, maybe—smoldered half-buried in ash, one corner still twitching in the breeze like a half-crushed moth.

Beanca crouched high in the fork of a weather-warped pine, Solin somewhere below, silent as the roots themselves.

She didn't blink.

Didn't need to.

Her ears did more work than her eyes: listening to the huff-hiss-snort rhythm of five dragons sleeping restlessly, the crackling exhale of the fire dying out, the shifting weight of booted feet in mud as the others moved about the ruined camp.

The smoke was different now—deeper than meat grease and canvas. It smelled ancient. Like stone that remembered too much.

Not from this world, her instincts whispered.

Something had crossed into their space tonight. Something real. Something deliberate.

She'd seen it through the hawk's eyes.

Not a full bond—she didn't force control. That would've been clumsy, desperate. No, she'd slipped in soft and curious, like a ripple in wind. The nightbird had glided over the campfire just moments before the flare. Its wings knew how to balance on still air. Its black eyes had spotted the cloaked figure where the treeline broke.

And the figure had looked up.

Straight at her.

Not at the hawk.

At her.

As if he saw right through the bird's skull and into the girl buried inside.

Beanca hadn't returned to her body out of fear. She'd snapped back from sheer wrongness—like stepping off a cliff she hadn't seen coming. Her breath had caught, her hands had clenched bark.

Two minutes later, the camp exploded in firelight.

She didn't react then either. Not outwardly. Solin had growled once, soft and low, and settled beside the tree's base like a mountain waiting to move.

That was hours ago now. Maybe one. Maybe four. Time bent oddly when fear disguised itself as purpose.

Below her, the camp was tense but intact. People whispered. Dragons muttered. Nothing attacked. No one screamed.

But Beanca's mind ran the loop again:

The figure.

The gaze.

The fire.

The sudden stillness after.

She could still feel the exact moment the wind stopped moving. It wasn't that it died—it withdrew. Like the trees were holding their breath.

And then the boy—not her Joey, but a boy she sometimes couldn't stop thinking about—had fired an arrow not at the enemy, but at the kettle. Brilliant, stupid, heroic. He'd missed the rope.

And Chyna, all fire and blade and fierce quiet, had finished the job.

Boom.

Then chaos.

Beanca had remained in the tree.

Watching. Processing.

Letting her heart do what it did best.