Another stem circled my waist, pulling me further into the shadows, and I cried out as a thick, pulsing stalk lurched toward my face. It weaved around the back of my head, its cold and wet surface pressing hard against my nose and mouth until I could no longer draw breath.
Talon’s head snapped toward me, his eyes burning with a sapphire light even as the vines coiled across his chest in a desperate attempt to pin him. “Hold on, little flame.”
The world began to tilt on its axis, black spots dancing across my vision as the lack of oxygen began to take its toll. Through the haze of my fading consciousness, I heard his voice. “I am coming for you, my love. Hold on.”
His eyes glowed with a terrifying heat that started to shimmer around him in waves, and the air thickened until it became a hot and suffocating cage. The spirits that resided within his ink tore free, bursting from the black patterns on his skin with a piercing squeal that echoed through the trees. They swarmed around us in a furious, silver cyclone, cutting through the forest darkness.
Talon’s guttural roar ripped through the air, and as the sound left him, the spirits screamed in harmony. Their shrieks layered into a frequency so sharp it made my ears ring.
With a sweep of his hand, the thick coils binding his body split open, bursting into clouds of black dust that disintegrated into the air. The remaining tendrils thrashed wildly, recoiling in a panicked retreat as the storm of spirits pressed closer to their source.
The vines around me convulsed, their grip loosening for a heartbeat before tightening again.
I fought uselessly, my vision fading at the edges until Talon moved through the writhing mass like a god of ruin fashionedfrom shadow and light. His head tilted to the side, and the spirits followed the motion like the descent of a silver blade. The tendrils binding my wrist and ankle snapped instantly, their severed ends curling back into the undergrowth
The long stem wrapped around my face fell limp into my lap, allowing me to suck in a deep, ragged breath that burned my lungs with its coldness.
The clearing fell into an eerie stillness, save for the faint shimmer of the spirits circling Talon’s frame as they slowly began to return to his skin.
My chest heaved as I drew in sharp breaths, looking up at him as he stood at the center of the wreckage.
His body was slick with sweat, the silver storm still raging in his eyes.
My head dropped forward in exhaustion.
Talon was at my side in an instant, his hands hovering over the welts on my wrists before traveling upwards and pressing softly at my swollen lips.
“I have you,” he murmured. “I have you, little flame.”
The heavy heat of his palms slotted beneath my underarms, hauling me upward until I stood on legs that felt as though they had been forged from liquid silver.
I forced my spine straight with an effort that made my ribs protest, leaning unconsciously into the steady weight of Talon’s hand braced against the small of my back. His palm was warm and grounding, guiding me forward with quiet insistence as we left the ruined clearing behind us.
The forest still smoked in our wake.
Shredded coils of the Lurker’s vines lay scattered across the earth, their severed bodies twitching faintly where they had fallen. A sour, scorched smell clung to the air, thick enough to sting the back of my throat as we stepped over the pulsing remains and into the shadowed rise of the mountainside.
The terrain changed quickly beneath our feet.
Soft moss gave way to jagged stone, the ground lifting in uneven swells that forced us to climb rather than walk. Damp mist drifted between the trees the higher we went, clinging to my hair and skin until the world felt muffled and strangely distant.
Then the forest ended.
Ahead of us, the mountainside split open.
A jagged vertical scar carved deep into the black rock yawned between two towering slabs of stone, its edges raw and uneven, as though the mountain itself had once been torn apart and never fully healed. A faint vibration hummed from somewhere within the fissure, so low and constant it barely registered as sound at all. Instead it seemed to settle into my bones, a strange, thrumming pressure that prickled along my spine.
I slowed without meaning to.
Standing before that dark opening made my stomach tighten with a dread so thick it coated my tongue with the taste of copper. It was not merely a cave mouth or a hollow in the rock.
It felt alive.
The fissure loomed above us like the gaping maw of some ancient leviathan waiting patiently to swallow us whole.
Talon stopped at the threshold.
The mountain wind whipped fiercely across the cliff-side, but his broad frame absorbed the worst of it, his body shielding me from the biting gusts until a small pocket of warmth formed in his shadow.