The Quiet Before

The wind sighed over the battlefield. Where moments before had been fire and screams, now silence. And trees in the distance sighed, their leaves murmuring. Serena stood over the wreck breathing heavily as she tried to catch her breath. Blood covered her blade and caked over her hands and parts of her face. But her grip was steady.

She didn’t move at first. Couldn’t. Her legs were leaden; her arms were leaden. It felt like something eternal, she thought, beginning to grow inside her—not the wolf, exactly, but something icier. A part of her that’d wait in a line. To a place she could never return to.

The first to her side was Lucian. He remained silent at first. Just looked at her, the point of his sword drooping, his eyes filled with what you might almost call respect—and compassion.

“Are you alright?” he said after a beat, in a low, gentle voice.

"So I don’t know.” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I don’t feel like me.”

Lucian looked at the body at her feet. The monster’s mangled body still boiled in its own blood, the air above it pungent with the stench of burning flesh and old rot. “You were you,” he said, “as you never are.”

She didn’t believe it, but she nodded anyhow.

“We gotta go,” Kaelen shouted from a few steps away. His voice was strained but steady. He had a wound above one eye and a limp in his gait, but he held his wedding weapon as if it was part of him. “There might be more. They don’t travel alone.”

Serena nodded slowly. The others started to gather what they could. Elias gathered his hood, stared into the trees, eyes distant, still looking. No one wanted to speak much. There was killing, and killing that left a drumbeat of silence in people’s bones.

They walked a long time, deeper and deeper into the woods, among ruins conquered by the ivy and trees deformed by time and war. The further they crouched, the more frigid it seemed. As if maybe even the sun itself couldn’t get them here.

The people in group filed past a crumbling stone building on the edge of a wide clearing. Its roof had caved halfway in, and moss curled up its walls like veins. But it was shelter. They slipped inside. Kaelen checked the corners. Lucian propped an old timber against the door. Using flint, Elias sparked a fire, the flames gleaming in his sober gaze.

It was the second time she had found it, and she could almost feel it—it was stuck on a word, unable to get past it, huddled near the fire with her arms around her knees. The heat didn’t help, but her head was off somewhere else. She hardly recognized her own body—no, “her” body, someone else’s—someone else’s who was colder, faster, and angrier. The Onyx wolf was silent, but she felt it drum against her from within, another heartbeat.

Lucian sat beside her. He was a steady, grounding presence. He stretched out his arms and winced from a bruise that had burst on his ribs. “Guts out there,” he finally said.

Serena let out a soft laugh. “I was terrified.”

“But you didn’t run.”

“I didn’t have a choice.” She paused. “The wolf helped.”

Lucian looked over at her. “You let it in?”

“Not all the way. Just enough.” She stared into the fire. “I don’t know what would come out if I let it out again, if I’d be able to stop it. It wanted to keep going.”

He frowned and rested his forearms on his knees. “That’s dangerous.”

“I know.” She rubbed her hands together. But that was all I survived on.”

Lucian paused, then responded. The fire snapped between them. Elias was across the room, wiping a shallow cut on Kaelen’s shoulder with a frayed piece of cloth. No one spoke much. They all feared the worst was yet to come.

“Oh, really?” replied Serena after a beat. “You think it will take over? The wolf, I mean.”

Lucian took a long breath. “I don’t know. You have this much bottled within you. That means something.”

“I don’t know if I want to keep shoving it down.”

Lucian then gave her a sidelong glance and saw her for real. “Why?”

“Because I’m sick of being scared.” Her voice cracked. “Dancing with the echo of hands, losing the energy of from not getting the weaker line. I’m just hoping that—if I could just submit—I could be strong enough.

“You’re not weak,” he said.

“I almost died today.”

“And you also murdered two of those things. Not many can say that.”

Serena didn’t reply. She glanced down at her hands, blackened with blood. As who she was now, she had not fought. And she was worried she hadn’t hated it.

Outside, a branch snapped.

Everyone froze.

Lucian was standing, sword in hand. Kaelen reached for his bow. Serena rose slowly, the hilt of her dagger in her palm. Her heart thundered.

But there was nothing in between the trees.

“A fox,” Elias said, finally. “Or something smaller.”

Lucian sheathed his sword, resting its tip at his side. “We’re not safe here. We shouldn’t stay long.”

“We need rest,” Kaelen said. “Even a few hours.”

They agreed. But no one slept easily.

Later, as the others slept fitfully in shifts, Serena stayed up, watching the fire. The shadows crept slowly around the walls. Her thoughts wandered.

She imagined she could hear her sister. How Isolde had laughed when Serena had stumbled over her own boots. Their kitchen is warm in the winter. All gone now.

Lucian also stayed up as a sacrifice he made every night, polishing his sword. The metal glimmered in the light of their fire, red-gold.

“Can I ask you something?” Serena said softly.

He glanced up. “Of course.”

“Do you ever think we’re not going to make it?”

There was a long moment before Lucian answered. Then he said, “All the time.”

Serena blinked. She didn’t even know what answer she wanted. But not that.

He looked at her again. “But we keep going. Because we have to. Because if we don’t, they win.”

She nodded slowly. “There’s just so much more to lose, I think.”

“Maybe. But there’s something worth saving too.”

They fell quiet. The fire crackled. Serena turned her shoulders away from the crackling flames and hugged her cloak tighter around her.

“You’re different now,” he said, after a pause.

“So have you.”

He gave a small smile. “We all have. That’s what war does. That’s what surviving does.”

Serena thought about that. The old her—the one who waffled, who second-guessed—was disappearing. What she would leave behind, she did not yet know. But she was starting to see its shape.

By morning, the fire had collapsed into embers. Kaelen was first to get up, and then Elias. They moved in whispers, as though afraid to shatter the stillness that lay around them like mist.

“We need to go,” Kaelen said in a low voice. “If we reach the mountains before night, we can take the pass. It will be more difficult for the Ruins to descend on us there.”

Sore all over, Serena is standing. Lucian handed her a piece of jerky. She chewed, palatably tasting nothing. Her strength would come back. It had to.

Elias came while they were packing and walked beside her.

“What happened back there,” he said, “with the wolf? You kept it in check?”

She met his gaze. “I tried.”

“You’re not going to be able to keep this at bay forever,” he said. “Not if we’re facing what I think we’re going to be.”

“I know.”

Elias stared at her for a long time. “When the moment strikes,” he said, “you can just let it out without fear. “Just don’t forget who you were when you were doing it.

Serena said nothing. But his words stuck with her.

They exited the shelter into the pale morning light. Mist clung low to the ground. And then the world looked clean again and pure. But they all knew the truth. Darkness still followed. The ancients were still there, still waiting.

Serena walked beside Lucian, keeping pace with him. And a different beast rested within her now, not the Onyx wolf of rage, but the Onyx wolf of readiness. It and she both knew that worse was to come.

No longer just survivors.

They were a hurricane, eager to be unleashed.