The light was blinding after so long in the dark. I could barely bring myself to squint. It felt like I would be able to see perfectly well with my eyes entirely shut, and when I did shut them, my blindness was bathed in a slight glow of orange and yellow.

I turned to where I knew Jenny was, prepared to thank her, but instead, her palm collided with my head and I reflexively sank to the ground.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she demanded. "I save your life, and you just sit there waiting to die? Oh, look at me, I'm Xera and I have arms. Look at them, they're so pretty and strong and OH YEAH, I'M GETTING EATEN ALIVE. Oh well, who cares, because I HAVE ARMS. LOOK AT MY FASCINATING ARMS!"

I opened my mouth to speak, but as I managed to open my eyes and peek at it for a half-second before the light got to be too much, I noticed her arms. She was covered in bite marks. She'd nearly been clawed apart by the shades. I looked down to see if I looked the same. The bites on me weren't as bad, but there were so many of them. Thousands, I guessed, littering my skin like I was sick and covered in blisters.

The bites were small, tiny enough that they could have been made by mice, but the shades had been about the size of people.

"Sorry," I said at last. "I was a bit surprised."

I still couldn't open my eyes enough to see her properly, but it looked like she mouthed a hiss at me before sitting down on something that looked like a log.

"Are you alright?" she whispered.

"Are you?" I shot back.

She didn't answer.

Eventually, I was able to open my eyes enough to look at our surroundings. It was a small space, a tiny pillar of light surrounded by Hunak. We were still in the forest, as the earth was covered in last year's fallen leaves. Jenny was sitting on an old fallen tree, and we were surrounded by medium-sized grass and a small shrub at the edge of the pillar. The source of the light at the heart of the pillar was a kinstone: a statue of a man long forgotten.

There were thousands of them scattered around Avengard. One of the mysteries of the world.

This one looked exactly like all the others, identical in every way: a large, burly man, one knee planted into the soil, both hands clasping the handle of a two-handed greatsword planted into the ground in front of his bare chest. His face was shaven, and quite ugly, though some people who had a greater appreciation for the fine arts claimed him to be attractive. Covering his shoulders, which he held with proper posture, were scraps of dented, battered armour. He'd been in many fights, this man, and emerged from them by having every single blade swing exclusively at the tiny pieces of armour on his shoulders rather than his bare chest or thinly-clothed legs.

Maybe everyone wanted to decapitate him, to get away from that face.

The only difference between this one and the others was a tiny chip on one of his fingers. Beyond that, he was pristine. Where they were worn, he was worn. Where they were polished, he was polished. It was the same statue, transposed over the continent.

Some elders claimed that the statues used to be different — a hair out of place there, a slight move of the index finger here, like they were moving or shifting with time, but they couldn't even agree between them what those changes were. There were some paintings of the kinstones, but only as many as there were of chicken coops. The expression could be taken quite literally in this case: if you'd seen one, you'd seen them all. Besides, any artist rendition was never perfect, and they all wanted to add their own interpretations and twists. Whether the kinstones changed with time or not was an unanswerable question.

The legend was, the statue was carved by a woman who had fallen in love with the man. But that was only one telling, and there were so many. One claim had it as a work of fiction, the perfect warrior, clad in his armour and standing guard against the enemy. Which enemy, the story didn't say. Any enemy, I supposed. Whichever one was best suited for the era.

They were old, that was obvious at a glance. But the imperial records traced their history back to long before the empire began. The earliest record I ever saw was five hundred years old, and it was of a man claiming that one of them had moved to save him from an assailant. Anything older than that lacked any verifiable credibility. One source said he had been a ritualistic sacrifice seven hundred years ago, in the great war. Another said the statues and the earth were connected, and that they'd been around for as long as the world.

Apparently, they protected against Hunak. I hadn't know that. They had some level of magic within them, that much was clear to anyone, but this had gone beyond some subtle inlaid magic. It had saved us. I wondered if there had been any legends about what kind of magic was woven into the statues. This pillar at least implied the existence of wards. I wondered which spell had been used to craft them. El, maybe?

"Weird, isn't it?" asked Jenny.

I stood and walked over to the edge of the pillar of light. I couldn't see anything beyond it. Branches from the fallen tree Jenny was sitting on shot off into the abyss, but to my eyes, it was like they just ceased to exist. The darkness was a wall. It was easier to open my eyes while looking at it, as the light came only from its reflections against the objects in my periphery. I cautiously waved my hand through it, and for a moment, my forearm stopped existing to anyone else who had only eyes. I could still feel it, but that was my only indication it still existed.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I stuck my hand back out and snapped my fingers. No sound reached back out to me. Hunak had grown more oppressive since our escape from its grasp. There was no sound at all anymore, not even muffled cries.

"Maybe pull your hand back in," she reminded me.

Her words chilled my spine, and I scooped my arm back into the light. There were still shades out there who could have pulled me in.

"I can't save you like that again," she said. "That took a lot out of me. Seriously, a lot. I'm not very good at magic."

I looked her dead in the eye. "You saved me," I said, squinting at her. "That makes you as good as the best, in my books."

She frowned and stood up, walking over to me. "Stop moving for a moment," she said, pulling me down to her height and placing her fingers over my eyes.

"Breathe," she ordered. Her fingers were warm and familiar, her voice calming. I wanted to sink into those fingers like they were Lyana's arms. "Ashran."

A soft pulse hit my face, gently enough that it didn't hurt, but hard enough that I felt it push my eyes a little into their sockets. Even through my eyelids, I could see an overwhelming burst of blue light.

"Okay," she said. "Open."

I opened my eyes reluctantly, but when I did, there was no pain at all. I didn't have to squint. My vision was entirely restored.

I looked Jenny up and down. "Right," I said with a mocking tone that I hoped she took in a good light. "Not very good at magic."

Jenny nearly collapsed, falling into my arms out of sheer exhaustion. The spell she'd just used on me was a sliver barely qualifying as magic, and she'd still collapsed. I let her fall into me, hoping she wouldn't try to stand.

She pushed herself out of my arms, gave me a halfhearted smile, and stumbled back over to the trunk to sit down. "Not that it matters," she said, letting her legs give out from under her when she was near enough to the tree to fall into it. "We're trapped here for however long it takes for Hunak to wear off."

"That's okay," I said, sighing. My lungs felt like they were about to collapse. "I just need to stop breathing for a moment."

"Should I be worried?"

"It's just stress," I said.

It was just me.

Whatever pitiful excuse for a Kindred was still holding me together.

What a disgrace.

I couldn't save Eskir.

I couldn't save the horses.

I couldn't even save one.

Jenny had saved me, at the cost of leaving her barely able to stay standing. I tried to find some manner of comfort in her voice, but her accent alone didn't bring me the warmth I wanted, so I searched her eyes for another hint of home. She returned the glance with something, maybe a faint hostility. But there was something there. Respect, maybe. Possibly familiarity.

I leaned against the trunk and tried to nurse my wounds. I didn't have much of anything to treat them with, so I picked at a few of them absentmindedly, switching between the bites when I'd either made them one of them worse or it got too painful to continue.

It was easier to think about my fingers peeling away small pieces of flesh than Eskir.

When we first noticed the light begin to fade, both of us looked at the kinstone, alarmed. It took a moment to realise that it was the setting sun.

"It should still protect us from Hunak," I said.

"This is taking too fucking long," snapped Jenny. "How long can a spell last?"

I don't think either of us slept that night. Our worries of Hunak breaking through the barrier when night fell and there was no light to save us abated when we could still see the barrier in the moonlight. It wasn't just keeping out the darkness, it was keeping out all the unpleasantness that came with it, including those things that lurked in its sea.

Thirst hit us hard. You never really think about how much you drink until you haven't had a sip all day. A strange notion had me tempted to lick away my own sweat, just to retain some manner of moisture. By the time the sun rose again at noon of the next day, my mouth hurt and my lips were tearing from the dryness, and my breath stank. There was a metallic tang in my mouth, and I would have begged Jenny for the spit in her mouth if she'd had any to spare. I may have asked her for some, I can't quite remember. Neither of us were in our right minds, as dehydrated as we were.

"Fuuuuucckkkk," I heard Jenny groan. Her voice cracked and broke from her parched tongue.

"I'm trying not to cough," I complained. If we were any further gone, we'd be delirious and drunk from dehydration.

"No," she said, interrupting the thought. "There's literally no better time than now. We're about to die of thirst, and you still talk like that. Do you never swear, Xera?"

I blinked. "Swear?"

"Curse. Say bad words. You know, swear!"

"I know what swearing is."

"Well?"

I looked over at her. "I was taught to speak properly."

She gave a wry half-smile, unconvinced. "However you speak is properly."

"Why do you swear?"

"Pfff," she breathed, then coughed. "Ah fuck, now I'm going to cough again. No, I swear because I don't have a reason not to anymore. Life's too short to worry about that shit. What's your excuse?"

"No," I said. "It's too long."

A branch on the tree, opposite of either of us, snapped. I jumped to my feet, my first curling and ready to take out Stoneguard. Jenny looked alert, but she hardly moved. The thirst had gotten to her too much to react. Not to mention, she wasn't trained.

Another branch snapped, the wall of darkness rippled in announcement, and through it, a man stumbled out into the light.