Chapter Text
It was a ripple that first whispered of danger. The master felt it—a tremble in the foul-smelling magic coursing down the mountainside.
Killian!
He held up a fist, and the company creaked to a halt. Steam rose from the nostrils of man and horse alike. Heads jerked about, leather harnesses and spear hafts jostling. His mare, herself a part of the gloom and barely visible beneath him, shifted with unease and pricked her ears. A strange keening sounded, not far off.
“My lord, we are found!” a man cried out.
The master swung round and began to bark orders. The company tightened. Wagons rumbled to its center, and spears bristled out along its rim. Lanterns bloomed amid the footsoldiers.
“My lord! My lord Axias!” The call slurred through the murk, and ahead his knight commander came galloping out of the freezing mist. He was not an easily-shaken man, but his eyes were wide in the torchlight. “It’s blocked, sire—the pass ahead is barricaded!”
So it would happen here. The master loosened the sword in his sheath and flung back his cloak.
“Tight together, now!” he shouted. “We move forward to the hunting post, and steady. Courage! You are men of Axias.”
The company creaked forward. Archers crouched on the wagon tops, straining to see beyond the torch-glow. Snapping branches cracked high above them, along the banks of the open ravine. One archer let loose a red-plumed arrow. A shriek sounded, followed by a dense, leafy thrashing in the undergrowth.
Killian, Killian... come no further!
The master tasted them in the air: their damp, mouldering stench in the tangled foliage of the mountain pass. He choked on it, false and familiar. But the arid mist melted, suddenly, into the sweet clover air of a southern midsummer. They were closing in.
Killian, run!
Perfume. Warmth. The soft tinkling of glass bells that hung in the shrine-tree of the spring garden. And if there were screams about him, the bells drowned them.
“Run, Killian,” he muttered. “Run, you sick bastard.”
Golden hair flooded over his shoulders (and his shoulders were thin and boyish again, clad in fine velvet and his mother’s long hair). Dimly, the master was aware of tumult below him—of furred, evil shapes darting in, teeth and claws bright in the torchlight. Leonard, Corbis, and the others fought, he knew, as they must. His mare screamed and tossed her head at his stillness, his lethargy.
Far away the master heard the distant howl of the overgrown sabre-wolves that claimed this part of the Dragon Valley. They, too, would be here soon. He must fight, fight now, to hold open the pass, thrust past the barricade, and find the safety of the hunting post. He must leave blood in his wake, as a warning, for he was lord of this land and…
Yet the master sighed into the golden hair and midsummer warmth. A few moments more. It was long since he felt so loved. And when foul claws raked across his ribs, he felt the wound only his due.