The sun was rising when Gareth opened his eyes. He didn’t feel the least bit rested, the creepy dream lingering in his mind. The starry night sky, the feeling of being watched. A shudder ran through him. He was probably still tired from the bite, which looked even worse when he checked it after he ate breakfast. It was redder now and bleeding a little. He put more salve on and a fresh bandage. Thea seemed to be watching him when he looked up, but it was hard to tell with her dark glasses.
“Has the fragment stopped glowing?” Thea asked.
Gareth glanced into his bag. “The glow is back to normal.”
Could he trust her? Maybe he wouldn’t tell her about the dream yet, and it was probably just a dream. After being attacked by wolves and wondering about the fragment’s strange glow, his worries had just followed him into sleep. That reasoning didn’t make him feel even slightly better. He and Thea continued through the forest. It was definitely colder than morning, but not cold enough yet that Gareth would need his cloak.
“You wield a sword well,” Thea said, breaking the silence.
“All Messengers who stuck around learned how to wield at least one weapon,” Gareth said. “Since the forest of Hari can be dangerous. Even more when traveling alone. I’ve only seen knights wield a sword as well as you did.”
Thea was silent for a moment. “I had a good teacher.” She said nothing more.
“Are you from Ravita, or were you traveling?” Gareth asked.
Thea stared straight ahead. “I’m from there.”
Clearly she wouldn’t be giving more answers than that. Why was she traveling with him? Gareth didn’t want to doubt he could trust her, but her reluctance to tell him anything made it only worse. She had taken an interest in the fragment when she’d seen it in Ravita, and the next morning she had decided to go with him. Did it actually mean anything? Maybe she really did just want to see the world and had seen this as a good opportunity. Maybe.
Dark clouds moved in overhead. Gareth smelled rain, but it didn’t fall until late in the day. When it fell, it poured. Gareth and Thea ran to the shelter of a large tree. This one wasn’t pine and had some large leaves unlike any Gareth had seen before. There were a few others like it nearby. The rain was cold, biting through his clothes, and even the thick cloak he had put on. At least the ground was mostly dry under the tree, the leaves thick enough to protect them from the rain.
Gareth took his flask from his bag, light spilling out of the bag as soon as he opened it. The fragment was glowing brighter than the night before. The moment he saw it, he felt it calling to him, the feeling stronger than before as well.
“Gareth?” Thea’s voice brought him back to the moment.
How long had he been staring at the fragment? Gareth closed his bag quickly and drank from his flask, trying to put the piece of stone out of his mind. He felt better with the bag closed.
“Let me see the bite,” Thea said. “It wasn’t looking good this morning.”
Gareth held out his left arm. She seemed to know what she was doing when she tended to the wound the night before. For all he knew, she was an apothecary, or apprenticed to one. Though knights of the gods also knew how to tend to wounds. Thea gently unwrapped the bandage. Gareth prepared himself to see something gross, but the skin under the bandage was hardly even broken. It wasn’t red, wasn’t bleeding, and the scab was so small he would have thought it was an old wound if he didn’t know how fresh it was.
“How did it heal that fast?” Thea asked, sounding more worried than relieved, mirroring Gareth’s feelings on the matter.
Was this somehow related to the fragment? But how could it be? He didn’t look in his bag again that night. The dream was there again, but he saw it for only a brief moment. In the morning, he still didn’t feel rested, but at least the dream hadn’t lingered. Hopefully that was a good sign. The rain had gone, the light of sunrise filtering through the leaves of the big tree. The smell of last night’s rain was nice, but the morning was a cold one. Gareth glanced into his bag, ready to close it if the stone was calling to him, but he felt nothing.
“How is the stone?” Thea asked, sounding wary.
“Back to normal,” Gareth said, spotting the dim glow among his clothes, near his water flask. “I don’t feel drawn to it how I did last night.” He looked at her and hesitated, but she should know, in case the stone could be dangerous to her as well. “I had a dream the night before last. I saw it again last night, but only briefly.” He told her about the starry darkness and the feeling of being watched.
Thea was silent for a long moment. “Maybe it’s something that only happens at night.”
Gareth nodded, having wondered the same thing. “We should reach the village of Drift tonight. It’s in the foothills of the Acantha mountains.” He hesitated again. “We can talk about the fragment more when we reach Drift.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Thea said.
The two of them had breakfast before setting off through the forest again. When they reached Drift that night, they would see if their suspicion about the fragment was true. When night came, they would see if that truly was the only time the fragment could call to Gareth.
Gareth and Thea walked mostly in silence that day. The forest was definitely colder now, and there was even a little snow on the ground. At least the sky was clear, with no sign of further snow coming. Around midday, they reached the edge of the forest. The foothill plains of Acantha stretched ahead of them, mostly covered in snow, even with the sun. A brisk wind had picked up, so Gareth raised the hood of his cloak.
Past the plains, the mountains of Acantha towered in the distance, along with more pine forest. The sun was setting, the air even more frigid, when they reached the small village of Drift. Gareth and Thea stumbled into the inn. The blast of warm air when Gareth opened the door was the best thing he’d felt in ages. He and Thea found a table right by the fire and ate their stew in silence. Thea kept her head down, so that her hood hid her face while she ate.
By the time they were done, the sun had been down for a long while. They were the only two travelers at the inn. The innkeeper, a younger man, was cleaning the other tables. He kept glancing at Thea, frowning a little. Probably because she was clearly going out of her way to keep her face hidden.
“The fragment?” Thea asked after she had secured her scarf back over her face.
Gareth glanced into his bag. “It’s not glowing more than usual.” He thought about this. “Maybe we have to be outside?”
Thea sighed. “Worth a try, but let’s make it quick. I’m sure it’s gotten only colder out there.”
It was not only colder when they went back outside, but snowing as well. Gareth looked in his bag again, but didn’t take the journal out, not wanting it to get wet. He and Thea waited as long as they could in the snow, but the fragment didn’t glow more than usual. The two went inside, sitting back by the fire.
“Hopefully this means it failed to affect you how it did your father,” Thea said, “but if that’s true, then why?”
Gareth wanted to know that as well, but had no idea where to find answers. He had been thinking about the journal all day, about what to do if the fragment really was a danger to him. But it wasn’t glowing more than usual, and he had only had the dream briefly the night before. Maybe Thea was right and it had failed to affect him. Maybe it had been trying, but it had failed.
“I want to follow the journal to the end of my father’s journey,” Gareth said, “even if I don’t actually find out what happened. His journal doesn’t say what he found. It barely says what he found in each place he stopped, but I want to follow his trail. Maybe along the way, I’ll figure out what I want to do after.” That was what he’d been thinking about all day.
Thea nodded slowly. “I’ll continue on with you.”
He realized with surprise he had hoped she would say that. He didn’t have the dream at all that night. In the morning, the bite had entirely healed, but he felt strange. Tense and restless, which he didn’t mention to Thea, since it didn’t seem related to the fragment. The two of them had a good breakfast of stew and bread before setting out into the brisk morning. The snow had stopped, but it was still dreadfully cold out. Too soon, they were in the shade of the pine trees, where it was even colder.
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“Maybe we could send the fragment back where it came from,” Gareth said.
“You mean through the plains of Obsertus?” Thea asked.
Gareth nodded. “I’ve heard stories of pieces of Nightstone appearing and disappearing on the plains at night.”
“The stories also say people disappear on the plains,” Thea said. “And your fragment isn’t quite like those.”
“True…” Gareth said, that little bit of hope fading.
“Yours looks like it was shaped by tools,” Thea said. “You can’t see any marks from tools, but that shape isn’t like the chunks of stone people find on the plains of Obsertus.” She sighed. “And no known tools in all of Kelareth can even scratch Nightstone. We know so little about it.”
“In the journal, my father calls it a key,” Gareth said, pulling his cloak closer against the chill of the forest.
“It’s probably not a key to Obsertus,” Thea said. “Anyone foolish enough to enter the city can. At least, there are supposedly those who have entered the city, never to return.”
Gareth thought about this. “He wrote about a door and finding answers. Maybe the key goes to a door within the city.”
How had his father known there was a door? How had he known the fragment was a key? Was it from the fragment calling to him, or from the strange dreams? He had so many questions. When night came, the two lit a fire to keep warm. It wasn’t snowing, but it was just as cold a night as the last one. Gareth felt even more restless and slept very little, but the fragment didn’t glow more than usual, and he didn’t have the dream. In the morning, he wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but they shouldn’t stay out in the cold longer than they had to.
“You look exhausted,” Thea said after breakfast. “Have you had that dream again?”
Gareth shook his head. “The fragment hasn’t glowed more either, and I don’t feel anything from it when I look at it. Do you feel anything when you look at it?” He took the journal from his bag.
Thea was silent for a moment. “I don’t feel anything from it. That glow is creepy, but I don’t feel anything else.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re a Knight of Corruption,” Gareth said, putting the journal back in his bag. When he looked at her again, she seemed to be staring at him, her eyes still not visible behind the dark glasses.
“Maybe,” Thea said, getting to her feet. She hadn’t denied it. “We need to watch out for wolves and bears. Acantha doesn’t have Red Wolves, and the wolves it does have rarely attack, but we should still watch out.”
Gareth nodded. She was definitely changing the subject, but she hadn’t denied she was a Knight of Corruption. That left the questions of why she was trying to hide it, and why she had wanted to leave Ravita.
“We should watch out for the Forveth as well, if it’s real,” Gareth said.
“Maybe there is something to the stories,” Thea said. “Maybe it’s not what the stories say exactly, but something wiped out the village of Frostberry. The third Queen of Acantha fought and died against something out there.”
“It could have been a bear,” Gareth said, but a chill ran through him. They would be passing through Frostberry when they headed for the country of Lachra.
He and Thea set off through the snowy forest again. At sunset, they reached the gate of Rime. They were just in time to enter the city before the gate closed for the night. It felt much like the cities of the gods in Hari, but Gareth saw fewer knights roaming around.
“My father didn’t write down what he found in the book of Felethian stories,” Gareth said as he and Thea set off in search of the inn.
“We’ll have to read it ourselves then,” Thea said. “What’s a Felethian?”
“They live in the north mountains of Acantha,” Gareth said. “You’ve really never heard of them?”
Thea shook her head. “Not until you mentioned them. Are they separate from the people of Acantha?”
“They are,” Gareth said. “They and the people of Acantha have been at odds for centuries. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time when they weren’t. I don’t know the whole story, but I think the Felethians were here first, and the settlers of Acantha drove them back to the mountains.”
“No wonder the Felethians don’t like them…” Thea muttered. “So a book of Felethian stories probably has older stories about this land than ones written by the Acanthans?”
“Hopefully,” Gareth said. “I don’t know if the stories would be old enough to be about Obsertus, but maybe there’s some mention of it. My father’s journal said he found a clue, but he didn’t write more than that.”
The two found the inn a moment later and hurried into the warmth. Gareth was even more restless and tense than he’d been that morning, as well as hungry. He was still hungry after he ate, as though he was hungry for something else, but what? He and Thea had found a table as close to the fire as they could get. Unlike the inn in Drift, this one was crowded. Gareth caught sight of someone wearing a dark blue cloak with the hood up, sitting on the other side of the fire. Whoever it was seemed to be staring at Gareth and Thea. The cloaked person was sitting alone.
Gareth looked away, but that cloak… He had seen a cloak that color in Votum, a color of cloak he had never seen before. This couldn’t be the same person, could it? A sigh escaped him. He must be truly exhausted if he was thinking someone would have followed them all the way from Votum based on the color of a cloak. Maybe dark blue cloaks were a new thing that was suddenly popular. He and Thea each got a room, how they had in Drift.
Gareth lay awake, staring at the moonlight across the ceiling. The fragment wasn’t glowing more than usual, and he felt nothing from it. Despite not having that strange dream, Gareth could barely sleep and was soaked with sweat in the morning. He washed before going downstairs, but by the time he sat across from Thea at a table, he was sweaty again. Was this because of the fragment, or something else? The Red Wolf bite was entirely gone.
“Maybe I should carry the journal for a while,” Thea said.
Gareth shook his head. He still didn’t know her motives for traveling with him, even if it was getting harder to doubt her the longer they traveled together.
“You have little reason to trust me,” Thea said calmly.
“I’m not sure whatever is happening has to do with the fragment,” Gareth said, but what else could it be?
He and Thea ate in silence before leaving for the library. It was a big stone building near the center of Rime. The inside was almost as cold as it had been outside. Candles gave dim light, but there were very few windows. The two set off in search of the book of Felethian stories. Gareth hoped there wouldn’t be many of them. His worries of finding a whole row of them were, thankfully, unfounded. The only book of Felethian stories was a cracked leather volume with yellowed pages.
Gareth and Thea found a table among the shelves. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone else in the library. Thea pulled a chair around next to his and the two looked through the book together. There was a brief account of the third Queen of Acantha, Mireld, leaving Rime to fight the Forveth alone. She hadn’t wanted to endanger any others. The Forveth had wiped out the village of Frostberry. Mireld had never returned, but her sword was found in the lost village, along with blood in the snow. That had been one hundred ninety-eight years ago.
“Maybe the Forveth is real…” Thea said quietly.
Gareth really hoped it wasn’t, but reading about it in this ancient looking book made him doubt his conviction that it was just a story. The mention of Obsertus was even more brief than that of Mireld. The book had been translated from the Felethian language, but it was easy enough to understand. The plains of Obsertus should be avoided, and the city was a cursed place that would never be cleansed.
“Should the key ever be found,” Thea read quietly, “it would be the doom of the world.”
A heavy silence fell over the two of them. Gareth looked through the book for further mention of Obsertus, but found nothing other than a description of the key. He closed the book gently and set it on the table.
“Your father referred to the fragment as a key,” Thea said.
Gareth nodded. “I don’t know how this would be a clue for my father to do anything other than toss the fragment into the sea, but maybe he was so drawn to it he couldn’t do it. At least it’s not the same shape as the key the book describes.”
“There is that,” Thea said, but she sounded no more assured than he was.
The fragment attached to the journal wasn’t the right shape to be this key that would doom the world, but that made it only more confusing. How had Gareth’s father seen this as a clue? Gareth and Thea searched, but found no other books of Felethian stories in the library. It was getting late when they left the library, already so chilled through the night air made little difference.
“Where did he go next?” Thea asked.
“Well…” Gareth hesitated. “He passed through Frostberry on his way to Lachra. He went to Pineseed in Lachra, where he had a revelation. He didn’t write what the revelation was.”
“A revelation?” Thea shuddered, but it may have been from the cold.
“That does sound strange,” Gareth said. “Even more with everything else in the journal.”
The two stood in silence a moment longer.
“To Frostberry then,” Thea said, setting off.
Gareth followed her back to the inn. They had come this far already, they might as well see it through. Especially since the fragment had stopped calling to Gareth. The two stayed at the inn for the night, leaving Rime in the morning. Gareth was even more sweaty, restless, and hungry by morning, but he said nothing about it. Was following the journal the right choice? Did he really want to see this through, or did he just not know what else to do with his life now that he was no longer a Messenger? He tried to ignore these thoughts, but that only drew attention to the strange crunching in the snow off among the trees. Were they being followed, or was it just another traveler?