Two thousand years locked in an abyss with the Starhunter and it's a wonder she functions at all. //
“And what about me?” Vidarian said quietly, releasing his elemental hold on the seridi with as close to kindness as he could summon. “A turn with her in my head and the loss of everything I loved—” a memory: Ariadel, near death, summoning the strength to turn her head away from him. Words died on his tongue, and he fought to summon them again. “How am I to be affected?”
Another rustle from behind them spared Altair from having to answer. Isri climbed over branches and fallen debris, materializing through the rain, her dark spotted feathers the perfect camouflage in the shadowed forest. Guilt flushed through Vidarian as soon as he saw her; her sanity, and the pain that radiated from her whenever they found another of her brethren, whether lost or sane. When her people had come through the gate, half had been insane, lost beyond even her powerful abilities to heal. And yet she had never wavered in their task. He hoped desperately that she had not been near enough, even with her formidable telepathic ability, to witness the weakness in his heart.
But Isri had eyes only for the captured creature. Altair thinned the sphere of his control, allowing her to approach. “She is Alar seridi,” Isri said, “storm clan. Their people were among the first to succumb.” She closed her eyes, and the wave of peace that spilled out from her, intended for the captured seridi, touched Vidarian as well, chasing away the last of his fury.
It left the guilt untouched. “Am I becoming a monster, Altair?” Vidarian asked quietly.
The gryphon's head tilted toward him, beak parted, but he did not answer.
Frustration welled in him again, threatening to ignite into anger, and Vidarian turned and strode into the forest.
He thrashed his way through low-hanging branches for twenty paces toward their rough camp before realizing there were few places he would rather not be in that moment, alone with the two other mindless seridi awaiting escort back to the gate site.
The Destiny was anchored at a clearing beyond the camp, but Altair would expect him to head there, and so he turned in the opposite direction. It happened to be uphill, and so for the next several minutes he vented his anger by striding upward, kicking rocks behind him as he went.
He made it to the top of the hill exhausted, soul-weary, and, finally, silent of mind. And so the spectacular sunset that spread itself before him struck him dumb, a sky stained red with clouds that had just deigned to part, molten light pouring into the valleys that descended all the way to the sea in the west. Something stirred within his fire sense—it reached out to the sun, recognizing something. It was as if, and so Isri had told him the seridi believed, there were not only five elements, but many arrayed beneath them, storm and sun and river and flame. This, too, was a punishment; the fire within him had come from Ariadel, and the cruelty it turned on him was a constant reminder of her absence.
This strange, hilly country was as beautiful as any he'd ever seen, incongruous with his dark thoughts. It ran through him like a river, but where it should have washed peace, instead it laid bare the desert inside him. Now it seemed as though the chaos behind the gate had hollowed him out, eaten his very will to live. The bounty of the world unfurled before him, but he felt only emptiness.
Heat brushed his thigh, and he looked down—a rounded oval glowed red through the pocket of his trousers. The stone was even warmer to the touch, and it flared as he removed it into the fast-fading light of the sun.
As he slid the sun ruby through his fingers, the pang of another memory echoed through the well of his tired mind: Ruby, smiling, trusting him with their destiny. The gate, opening onto madness, twisting the world. The slightest suggestion would bring all of it echoing back again—the empty space between worlds; Ruby's body, stained with her namesake, dying, one of the greatest captains he had ever known. And one of the truest friends.
No sentiment, she'd said. His hand clenched tight around the hot stone.
Then a voice. A familiar voice.
* Is it really all that bad? *
“Ruby?” Vidarian whispered.
Vidarian fell, landing with a jaw-rattling thump on his backside. His heart was pounding,