Page 17 of Shade of Ruin

As I run, the mists come alive, shifting and moving with purpose. They quickly slide in front of me and hook around me. I have to jump several times as thin strands of it slide across the rocky path in front of me. It’s not fast, but there’s no doubt what it’s trying to do. The wall of opaque clouds is trying to catch me and swallow me up as it swallowed up Riverside.

“Damn you, Maeve!” Cole screams from where we were standing. I keep running, but I’m not making nearly the progress that I was, and as I get within the last thirty feet, I realize the boy is sitting near a corner of the mist. It’s a trap. Just like Colesaid. I can’t just leave the boy there to be swallowed up by it. His village is gone, his parents probably with it. If I don’t save him, there’s no one else that will.

Then I hear it. A soft hum. A song that I might have heard somewhere before. A voice that seems familiar. Or maybe not? I certainly can’t place it. It makes me hesitate for just a moment, and then I push the hesitation away. This is life or death, and absolutely nothing is going to keep me from reaching that little boy. I’m moving faster than any human I’ve ever seen, pouring every ounce of speed I have into my legs, but when I’m ten feet away from him, the mists roll over him, swallowing him up.

And he’s gone. No screams or shouts. No cries or begging for help. Silence.Nothing.

I scream in anger and defiance, wishing that the magic that I’d had only a few days ago was there to help me protect the boy. But nothing happens. Pure anger rises in me, like lightning in a bottle, bouncing around and making me want to break things.

The mists keep moving, angling toward me, and while I want to let the anger and disappointment inside me explode around me, there’s nothing I can do for the little boy. Cole was right. Without a doubt, this was a trap, and now it’s sprung. The mists have curled around and closed me in. Ten-foot-tall walls of mist that are impenetrable and opaque have made a circle around me. The softest, gentlest trap imaginable.

The circle tightens, slowly but surely, and there’s no escape. With the sand harpies, it had been so fast. I’d thought I was going to die in a blur of talons and wings, and I barely had time to comprehend it. Now, I’m staring at walls of mist that move slower than I run. My death lies behind them, and I have more than enough time to realize my mistake.

I couldn’t have done anything different. Maybe I’d have taken a different approach if I’d known the Nothing would move like that. I wouldn’t have walked away from that child. Never.

I feel beaten. I’m pissed because I didn’t listen to Cole. Even a few seconds’ worth of planning could have given me the chance to save the boy and myself.

That humming is the only sound in the world. It’s a soft song that feels like something out of a dream. The haunting melody calls to me and pushes me to reach for the puffy white clouds. It asks me to accept my fate. The song is beautiful and compelling.

The walls continue to close in, slowly getting closer by the second. I attempt to relax, to let the song take over. I’m not an animal, and I’m not afraid of death. I try not to think about how the bodies look after they’re found when the mists recede.

When the mist is only a few feet away from me on all sides, they pause. “Not today, bastard,” a voice says. Cole’s voice.

Then he’s above me, soaring on solid eagle wings. Tendrils of mist fly upward, creating a net as he gets closer to the ground. He rolls, his wings wrapping around him, and he pulls to the side, barreling into the tiny clearing.

He hits the ground in a roll beside me. Leaping to his feet, he’s immediately ready, and it’s a good thing, too. The walls assault him. The tendrils of mist fly at him like tentacles from a furious sea monster. Thousands of them moving nearly as fast as him.

He leaps backward and the tendrils close on empty air. “Maybe one day you’ll catch me, but not today,” he says with a wide grin on his face. For half a second, there’s a pause as he stares into the mist. The mist pauses as well, like it’s staring back at him. I’d swear that there was a person on the other side of that fog directing it.

Then he’s moving again. He turns, takes one bounding step toward me, grips my waist in his arms, picks me up, and jumps. It all happens so quickly that I barely have time to accept it, but then we’re in the air, and everything slows down again.

His leap has us flying toward the wall of mist, and a thousand tendrils reach out to grab at us. It’s during this split-secondpause that I realize that I’m not actually saved. We might both die right here, right now.

Then his wings propel us skyward, the misty tentacles left far behind on the ground. “You’re a very stupid Wyrdling,” he says through a grin. I’m hanging from his arms like a limp noodle, and he wraps his legs around mine, holding them up for me.

His muscles arestrong. Far stronger than I could have imagined before. I’m reminded of when he proved I couldn’t fight him, how he’d held me in place. My body had warmed at just his stare. This is so much more intense.

“Yes. Thank you for saving me. Again.” Then something occurs to me. “You called me Maeve.”

He doesn’t respond right away, almost like he hadn’t realized that he’d done that. “I didn’t want to confuse you. There might have been another Wyrdling around.”

I ignore his insult. “How did you know it would try to trap me?”

The wind is whipping around us as we soar over the forests that we’ve been walking through for days now. We’re so high that my stomach twists in knots at the thought of falling, yet somehow, I’m not afraid because I can’t believe that Cole would ever drop me.

“I’ve been dealing with the Nothing for a long time. It’s… persistent. Especially with me. I don’t know why, but it wants me badly. Even though it’s never actually touched me, the closer I get to it, the more power it drains from me. I don’t know how it’s doing it, but that’s probably the most dangerous part of the Nothing.”

Now that he mentions it, I feel exhausted as well. “Why do you call it the Nothing?”

Cole tightens his grip around my waist, pulling me harder against his body, and I can’t stop the shiver from crawling up my spine. I can feel so much of him. The hard muscles of hischest and legs. The…stiffnesspressing into my back. I’ve never been touched by a man like this, and while I know it’s obviously a functional way to carry someone, I can’t keep myself from enjoying it.

“Because when it comes, everything gets quiet, like it’s even absorbing the sound of the world. It leaves nothing behind except death. When it moves, no living creature ever comes out. Not squirrels or birds or even insects. It is the end of everything. The only thing saving us is that I don’t think it can get very much bigger. At least I hope it can’t.”

That’s a terrifying thought. “But it’s still swallowing villages. How’s that possible if it’s not growing?”

Cole’s chest presses against my back with every breath, and those breaths are coming more often. Like he’s getting tired. He has to readjust his grip again, and his hand slips a little higher, nearing my breast. The feelings coursing through my body are very foreign, and I feel even more lightheaded.

“It’s moving. Not growing. It swallows up a village and then it makes its way to the next. It mostly leaves the main roads clear, but I guess that’s changed. I think we should veer off our path for a while. The Nothing took a lot of power from me, and I don’t know if I’m ready to go back to Draenyth. It’s not safe for me to be there while I’m weak.”

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