Page 47 of Of Blood and Banes (The Arterian #2)

ASHFALL

M y morning starts with aches in places I didn’t realize I have. A dull fire lies within my bones. Marge must have decided after I saved the town from burning, I could take a break from training sessions last night.

As Darian and I step out onto the street of Vathstone and close the door behind us, a middle-aged woman steps out of the home beside ours.

Her eyes sweep over into our direction, then widen, her cheeks reddening by the second before she hurries down the charred cobblestone street in the opposite direction.

Oh Gods… my own cheeks flush in heat. Did she hear me screaming? All the thumps against the wall? Did she think we were ? —

Darian snickers next to me, clearly thinking the same thing. I smack his arm to quiet him, but it does little to quell his smug grin.

We gather with the rest of Sethan’s soldiers, our dragons, and our squad on the western outskirts of Vathstone. The salt air wafts over me, and I glance out at the ocean in the distance. Sethan warns the group we won’t be flying on dragon back until after we pass Ashfall. It’s too risky.

We riders mount our dragons and lead the wagons with the rest of our people. We pass over rolling hillsides, across small creeks, and through wooded areas until the land slopes down into a soft crater walled over by a gray mist. At the front of our group, A’nala and Sethan pause.

Daeja growls beneath me, and I pat her neck. “What is it?”

“Something doesn’t feel right.”

A’nala spins her head toward us, staring directly at Daeja and narrowing her eyes. I don’t need to know what she says because her expression alone conveys she wishes Daeja to silence herself.

Sethan turns in his saddle toward the several wagons behind us chattering and holds a finger to his lips. An eerie silence settles over our group, the previous muffled conversations dying out. Some of our squad members lean out of the wagons to peek at why we’ve stopped.

But there’s nothing to see. A blank, looming wall of gray that stretches from the ground to the sky, void of texture or shade. The faded path dips down a gentle slope and disappears from view.

Sethan locks eyes with me, his full lips in a tight line, before he dips his head and faces forward. A’nala and Sethan slip down into the mist, disappearing. The rest of the dragons follow suit, each fading one by one until it’s our turn. The horns on Daeja’s neck bristles as she steps through it.

A cold, otherworldly chill washes over us, and the sunlight is swallowed by the mist. Every which way I turn is a cloud of gray.

I tighten my hands around the saddle’s horns, waiting for the moment we’ll need to turn back or fly out of this thing.

A few shadowy figures slither in front of us, and the only reason I know it’s the other dragons and their riders is because of the sparks of red glimmering in the mist.

Something dark on the ground appears in the distance, and the other dragons skirt around it. As we approach, the stench of rancid flesh washes over me. Daeja’s heavy footsteps chase away the mist, blowing it out with each footfall. We get closer. And I realize it’s not just an object.

It’s the rotting corpse of a massive blue dragon. Its maw is twisted at an ungodsly angle, the eye sockets picked clean, with vicious tears ripping down across its face and throat. A dark stain spills out from beneath it, shadowing the dusty ground.

“Look away,” Daeja commands.

I squeeze my eyes shut like it’ll wipe it clear from my memory and tug my face away, holding my breath to avoid the smell.

A screech rips through the mist, disrupting every grasp I have of time and sound.

A rippling pain dragging out a buzzing in my nerves.

I clap my hands over my ears, but it’s no use.

I’m caught like a butterfly in a windstorm, unable to fight against the atrocious sound and succumbing to the torrent.

“A ripple,” Daeja’s voice cuts through the scream. She pauses midstep, tilting her head and sinking down low to the ground.

It’s close. Back when Sethan first showed us a ripple, it was miles away. But now? Now it echoes like a haunting song around us. I squint open my eyes, curling into myself as the cry pitches louder and nearly cracks my eardrums.

“ Can you tell what it’s saying, Daeja?”

“No.” She cringes as she tries to tuck her head into the side of her throat. “They’re just…screaming.”

Screaming as if stuck in a perpetual state of torture. Reliving their last moments before death, over and over, unable to ever settle into the afterlife.

I glance behind us toward the wagons, but the few faces I glimpse don’t seem to be bothered. Whipping my attention back to the other dragons, Sethan catches my gaze with a painful pinch of his features and hands gripping the sides of his head.

“A ’ nala says this is why no one dares into Ashfall. The ripples are far too great here for us with magic,” Daeja’s voice is strained, as if every few words took a heavy amount of focus to form. “Those without ties to dragons and magic cannot hear it directly, but they’ll get lost in the mist.”

Which is why nobody in the wagons looked pained. They just swing their attention around them to the same colorless, blank walls.

“So then how do we know where to go?”

“A’nala says that’s our one advantage as dragons. We can see a path through the mist, but the ripples are quite…” she grunts, “...distracting.”

Sethan dismounts and walks toward Daeja and me, scanning the mist around us as he approaches.

I slide off the saddle and onto the ground, the mist scattering from my boots as I hit the dirt.

Sethan grabs me by the shoulder and leads me back to the wagons.

He scans several of them until he finds Marge and motions her out.

She hobbles off the wagon, squinting and cringing as the next wave of screams rolls over us.

The three of us break off from the group and follow Sethan deeper into the mist, A’nala and Daeja following close behind.

“This is worse than I thought it would be. We need to turn back. The wagons will slow our pace, and if we stay in this for too long, we may succumb to madness,” Sethan explains loudly over the high-pitched shrieks.

“How much farther do we have to go until we’re on the other side?” Marge asks.

Sethan tosses a look over his shoulder at A’nala, who prowls through the thick fog and sends it scurrying. Her yellow eyes are narrowed, her tail swishing behind her with feline annoyance.

“At least an hour. Probably more,” Sethan finally answers. “I don’t want to risk any of us losing our sanity. Especially since we have greenhorns when it comes to this type of raw magic.”

“Greenhorns?” I repeat.

Daeja growls, “He’s calling us novices. And last I checked, I have black horns instead of ? —”

“Then let her free it,” Marge interjects. As Sethan starts to shake his head, she takes a step toward him. “She can do it.”

Sethan’s still shaking his head. “We don’t know how many of them are on this path?—”

“You saw what she did in Vathstone. She’s more than capable of releasing them. And as you’ve said previously, we don’t have time to tip-toe around her power.”

I still as they both slide their attention to me. Marge didn’t witness me putting out the fire back in Vathstone, but I imagine she was told. Though…I flick my gaze back and forth between the two of them…since when did they start talking to each other?

Marge grabs me by the elbow and pulls my attention toward her. “Can you pinpoint where it’s coming from?”

“I—” I pause, closing my eyes. The scream rings around me, as if I were stuck in an iron bell.

The sound ricochets in confusing directions, making it almost impossible to determine where it’s coming from.

The more I strain, the more confused I become.

Slowly, I pull my hands off my ears to listen for the humming layer underneath the screaming.

As I find it, like sifting through a lake for a single rock, I snap toward the northwest and point.

Marge flashes me a proud grin. The three of us head in that direction, allowing me to lead the way. We pass by more carcasses, shattered human and dragon skulls, along with large stains in the dirt resembling the wavy pattern of old, puddled blood.

My skin explodes in goosebumps as we draw near, and somehow the screaming pitch lowers to something more manageable. As if it knows we’re coming.

I pause and hold up a hand to Marge and Sethan, signaling them to freeze.

The mist nearly sighs and sweeps out into opposite directions from a set of withered and shattered bones lying in a pool of dust. Violent gashes rake across the pieces still left whole.

The only thing still discernible is a skull.

One of the eye sockets is a cavernous expanse, busted into the skull from whatever unspeakable acts were committed against the creature.

I swallow back my queasiness, my imagination running wild at who and what could have done such a thing. Even without the evidence of flesh and blood, the bones tell a gruesome story.

A hand rests on my shoulder, and I turn to meet Marge’s gaze.

“Pull it. Channel it, and return it back to the earth,” she whispers, though her face is still contorted in discomfort.

The screaming dies down to silence, as if the trapped souls hear Marge’s words, giving me more space to focus. Only my strained breath echoes in my ears as I draw near and drop into a crouch in front of the skull.

Removing my gloves, I reach out, my fingers trembling as I rest my hand against the ancient bone. “I’m so, so sorry,” I whisper to ears no longer listening.

Closing my eyes, beyond the cold bone beneath my fingertips, I feel the familiar thunderous hum rise around me, pulling me into several directions at once. But I cut through it, solely focused on the creature left here in eternal agony.

I have the power to release it—to free it from these monstrous bindings, trapping it in its last living moments.