Page 75 of The Cruel Dawn
“I hear you.” I pet each horse’s head and slip an extra sheen of protection over them. “But something’s here that I need to see. We won’t stay long.”
Zephar had come with me because I wanted to establish another town like Gasho, with its aqueducts and centers of learning, and its reverence of…me. “I’ve been here before,” I say. I may not have destroyed this place but… The last time I walked these soft dirt paths, there’d been cooing doves and other creatures filling the air with lively noise.
Something growls in the clearing ahead.
“Burnu,” Separi whispers.
“Not again,” says Philia.
Jadon and I had fought burnu—creatures that resemble both wolf and man—and we’d killed two of the four who had attacked us. Veril used his staff, Warruin, to kill the third. The one who’d escaped had a blue zigzag scar on his forehead.
The survivor, Zigzag, now prowls the clearing across from us. His white coat gleams as bright as his razor-sharp teeth. Clouds of icy air escape from his mouth.
“I want to try,” Philia insists, reaching for her bow.
“Maybe not this beast,” Separi says.
“Get ready, then,” I say to the redhead, choosing this time to draw Fury.
The burnu bares his claws.
Separi pulls her staff from the horse’s pack. Ascendance, forged of twisted gray metal and topped with a burst of light, already glows violet.
Philia nocks an arrow.
“Ready?” I ask her.
“Do I have a choice?” she quips.
“You always have a choice in what you do with your body,” I say.
Philia purses her lips and nods. “I choose to fight.”
We step into the clearing. I creep toward Zigzag and stop several paces away from him. “I remember you.”
Zigzag growls at me and howls at the sky.
“Stand at my side,” I whisper to Philia. “Let him come to you.”
The burnu paces, wary of what I might do with a proper weapon this time. He remembers that, last time, a Renrian exploded one of his friends with a staff like Separi’s.
My amulet glows and weighs heavily around my neck.
Zigzag draws closer, racing at us, bounding across the glen.
Separi’s staff crackles as the creature’s stench closes in on us.
“Now,” I tell Philia.
She lets loose, and the air whistles, and the arrow bounces off the burnu’s thigh like a thorn against a boulder.
The creature swipes his paw at her.
Philia jumps back, crying out in pain as his smallest claw slides across her leg, tearing through her breeches and the skin underneath. She clutches at her thigh with one hand, barely hanging on to the bow with the other.
Separi pushes the burnu back with her staff, pressing her advantage, Ascendence at the ready.
“Let Philia shoot!” I shout to the Renrian.
