He ran, lungs burning on the stale air inside his mask.
Light flashed all around them, and the tunnel appeared for a moment, crackling with the sound of a dozen enraged fires. Then it flickered out again.
Shouting filled the mist. Ashen made it to the first wagon and didn't slow. They'd stopped moving to look around. He panted, almost falling. More grass was growing in from the edges of the road, slower than what had sprouted up in front of him, but visibly moving.
"Move!" he shouted, the mask muffling the command. No one heard. Saphier was lowering herself off her perch atop one of the wagons.
He made it to her side as her feet hit the ground, grabbing her arm. She yelped, but he ignore it, hauling her around the side of the wagon. Jerking the door open, he thrust her inside.
"Stay." He slammed it shut in her gaping face, sprinting towards the head wagons.
The grass at the sides of the road crept steadily forward. Over the road the shield flashed and popped like thunder and lightning caught in a wild storm. Ashen's breaths came raggedly, hot against his face as the mask pushed them back into him. His lungs squeezed, heart catching inside his throat in an unswallowable lump.
Bodies milled about between the wagons in frantic chaos, nearly indistinguishable from each other in their panic and the dull colors of their protective clothes. The tubes dangling off their mouths made familiar faces buglike and horrifying in the stark shadows of the Shade.
Archers came into sight atop wagons, bows knocked.
"What's going on?"
Ashen spun to face his sister. "Saphier, get in the wagon. Now."
Her eyes narrowed above the mask. "I don't have to, or want to listen to you, Ashen. What's going on?"
"We're under attack, get inside."
The look in her eyes was more intense interest and less fear. He had enough terror for thirty people.
His whole body filled with it, shaking into his bones and covering every nook and cranny inside him till there wasn't room for anything else. Suffocating.
They were going to die here. His stomach turned. Death within the Shade, where not a drop of nature or a single seed of its hope lived.
"Attacked by what?" his sister demanded, anger hanging from the words.
Why aren't you afraid? Be afraid. Her eyes locked on his, but he could hardly see her past the sickness welling up inside him.
They'd die so easily. One of those creatures alone could wreak havoc upon them. None of them knew anything about fighting. Not real fights, not with sharpened weapons. Play acting and performance were all they knew, and against a real opponent it would be nothing. Like slaughtering children pretending at being warriors.
He blinked, and could see them, faces of the people he knew were going to die, faces he loved. They were impressed against the backs of his eyelids like brands.
A hand grabbed him, jerking hard.
Lightfingers' face blurred into his as the hand spun him around. Ashen flinched, blinking to steady his vision.
"Stay close," he instructed, voice echoing dully behind his mask, then out into the Shade. Close. Close, close, it whispered. Stay close. Close. Close. Close. The words bounced around them.
Lightfingers looked over at his sister. "Get back on one of the wagons."
His hand slid free of Ashen. "Ready weapons!" he shouted, voice slicing the chaos like a heated knife, cauterizing the sounds.
YOU ARE READING
Herald Of Shadows
FantasyA darkness rooted itself in the world long ago. Like a festering seed, it sprouted and grew, spreading over the land and across all in its path. Cities were consumed and became Islands among the deadly mists of the Shade. Then, as fast as it had beg...
