LOGINTylerShe had appeared in my dream. I had spent most of the night thinking about it, turning the memory over in my mind, and I was still struggling to make sense of it as the grey light of morning spread across the campsite.I saddled the horses while the others slowly stirred to life around me.Maya had entered my dream the same way she had entered Draken’s dreams, not invited, not summoned, and certainly not controlled. She had appeared, moving through the landscape of my mind as though she had every right to be there.I doubted Draken’s dreams were as bleak as my recurring nightmares. He had his perfect galleries, his carefully arranged flowers, and his cold, controlled world.I had dead trees and an abandoned pack house. And seven years of loss that had drained the colour from the sky and left everything I had once loved to wither in silence.Maya had seen all of it. She had followed me through that desolate forest, witnessed the ruins of my past, and cried. I had seen the tears o
MayaI knew immediately that this was not Draken’s dream.There was no candlelight, no cold galleries, no perfectly arranged flowers, and no evidence of a man who had spent centuries shaping his world into something that obeyed his every preference.This place had not been arranged by anyone. It simply existed, the way grief existed without design or permission, settling into the spaces people left unguarded until it became impossible to distinguish the pain from the person carrying it. I stood at the edge of a forest and stared into its depths.Every tree was dead.Not fallen. Not rotten. Dead.They stood upright, stripped of everything that made them living things. There were no leaves, no bark, only pale wood exposed beneath, resembling bones left to bleach beneath an unforgiving sky. They stretched as far as I could see, row after row of lifeless trunks, silent, grey, and utterly still. Above them, the sky was the colour of old ash.I had walked through several dreamspaces, and ea
DrakenI found Argos at the creek just before dawn. He sat on a rock at the water’s edge, his boots off and his feet submerged in the cold water. The moment he heard the approaching hoofbeats, he sprang to his feet so quickly that he nearly slipped into the creek. He looked at me as though he had been dreading this moment for three days while simultaneously praying for it to arrive.I stopped my horse at the bank and looked down at him.He was dusty, his eyes hollowed with exhaustion, his boots clutched in one hand. A long scratch ran along his jaw, the wound badly scabbed over. He had spent three days walking through an unfamiliar forest, and the ordeal showed in every line of his face.“My lord.” He bowed.I nodded, gesturing for him to speak.He began his report with the efficiency of a man who had rehearsed the story countless times and finally concluded that brevity was his best chance of survival. One moment, he had been on the ridge, watching two horses move along the trail. Th
MayaHaving Kai there was both a relief and a complication.He was my brother, and I had missed him more than I wanted to admit. But Kai had a particular quality to his presence that was loud, certain, and slightly too much. Still, having him around made the camp feel less exposed than it had during the nine nights I’d spent on the road.The complication was that my ribs needed salve, my ankle needed attention, and both injuries were beginning to demand it with increasing urgency. And Kai had been watching Tyler like a wolf that hadn’t decided yet whether something was a threat. I didn’t particularly want to find out what would happen when those two things finally collided.Tyler had found a good campsite; it was sheltered and defensible, with a shallow stream nearby and clear sightlines in every direction. He had the fire going before most of the others had finished tending to the horses. And he crouched beside it, feeding the flames with the same quiet efficiency I’d watched for ni
KaiI didn’t like him.That was my first thought as I stood on the trail, my hand still resting on the hilt of my sword, watching Tyler Kingston look at my sister in a way that made my wolf sit up and take notice.My second thought was that not liking him was going to be a problem.He was clearly very good at what he did, we were clearly in his territory, and Maya was clearly not going anywhere without him.He was not what I had pictured.Nine days of tracking had built a version of Tyler Kingston in my head. A rogue lean, rough, and opportunistic. The kind of man who took jobs other men wouldn’t touch because he had nothing left to lose.That version made sense to me. It was the version I knew how to handle.But this version was different. He was large and controlled, moving with the quiet authority of a man who had once commanded significant respect and still expected it on some wordless, animal level that my wolf recognized immediately and did not particularly enjoy recognizing.An
MayaI stayed approximately five minutes at the tree line before I couldn’t stand it anymore. Immediately, I swung my leg over the horse’s neck and slid down, taking care to land on my good foot. I turned and passed the reins to Valeria.She placed a hand on my wrist, and her expression made it perfectly clear that I had been told to stay hidden and obey the instruction. I agreed with her principle but in practice, I could hear voices on the trail.Tyler’s voice was low and controlled, and then another voice reached me. My heart stopped.Kai.I was already moving before I had even decided to move. Valeria’s hand fell away as my feet carried me through the undergrowth toward the trail. My bound ribs made every step a negotiation, and my swollen ankle put me on the losing end of it. I came through the tree line and stopped.Tyler was standing with his back against the birch tree, and a young boy stood a few steps away from him, staring at the ground with an unusual amount of concentrati







