Another sentence sits on my tongue, one too private to bite out.Whatever was between us is as dead as the daughter I once carried for him.
“You lie!” Daniel shouts. Vann punches him in the gut, and a cold hush falls over the crowd.
I meet Faol’s gaze.
“Do what you will with him. I don’t want to see him again.”
I don’t wait to see what happens next.
I turn. I slam the door shut. I press my back against the stone, gripping the edges of my gown.
The emotions come fast and sharp, pelting me like frozen rain. I wait for the sadness, the agony, to smother the fire insideme.
But it doesn’t.
Instead, I crawl across the room, reach for my bottle of mead, and take a long swig.
Then another.
The clock tower chimes a slow, beautiful tune, marking two in the morning. This day has been a million years long. I need to sleep. I need to rest. Tomorrow, there will be plenty of work.
I lean against my chair, eyes on the loom, trying to steady my pulse.
A faint sound slithers behind me.
I stiffen, then turn. The shadows seem darker now.
“Hello?” my voice is quiet.
The sound grows louder. Then—pain strikes. A sharp, electric bloom of agony moves across my ankle.
The world lurches, and everything goes black.
Chapter 5
VANN
The next day…
The crunch of bone sounds through the crisp early evening air as I stomp down on a vaimpír’s chest. Blackened blood oozes from the gaping wound, its shattered ribs jutting through rotted flesh.
A bright light shines from the Fuegorra in my chest, warmth passing over my skin and mending the minor hurt. The scent of decay lingers, thick and cloying against the fresh bite of the wind.
I curl my lip, surveying the dozen monster corpses strewn across the snow near the forest at the base of the Enduar Mountains. The towering peaks loom behind us, their jagged silhouettes cutting into the twilight sky. The trees are deep green, much like the color of moss, and their branches are heavy with frost.
There are seven other enduar hunters with me, but I only know a few like Ner’Feon and Ra’Salore. The former is a fellow council member, appointed leader of the ocean-risen—a group of five hundred enduar soldiers that had been lost after the Great War when the sea devoured many of our great cities. By the hand of Grutabela and Endu, these men did not perish, but adapted.
Trapped beneath the waves, they stayed in bubble-like coloniessustained by the magic of the Ardorflame temples. Much like the one in Enduvida, these temples are connected to the center of the earth, where Endu is said to live.
They are gruff. Having spent decades hungering for the surface, they observe several of our more brutal past traditions. Some don’t like the reminder of how sharp us trolls used to be. I think we are stronger for remembering it through them.
Ra’Salore combines his surname and full first name as the old traditions dictated, but he has lived in the caves as long as I have. He’s a decent swordsman, but his real talent lies in stone bending. I brought him here to help start a fire after we finished eradicating the pests, and he stands away from the fighting, honing his concentration on a ball of magma he brought from the city’s depths. He’s young, incredibly tall, and has already mated to a human, becoming the adoptive father of her twin daughters.
I like them both well enough, but I find myself hesitant to let more people into my circle. Resentment comes from once having a small, tight-knit community that has transitioned a rapidly flourishing city, and it is impossible for me to learn everyone and their names.
As the king’s advisor, I shouldn’t even be here. My place is surveying growth, and I don’t like being outside.
But sometimes, it helps to pick up my cleaver and sink it into something that isn’t a stuffed bag on a pell. The act of doing what I do best,killing, is a welcome reprieve from moments like yesterday’s meeting. I almost couldn’t move from the excruciating chill weighing my insides.