Page 65 of A Warrior's Fate

Once again, Isla stopped herself from thinking down that route. Stopped her anger from festering.

A new distraction.

With a sigh, she pulled the marker out of her pocket, not keen on leaving it anywhere out of her sight. The wood had the slightest give under her touch as she held it between her fingers, the relic having spent so long in the soaking wet pockets of her coat. It was by some miracle that she hadn’t dropped it last night.

She noted how pieces of the dirt, once embedded so thickly in the ridges, had begun to loosen. Isla used her nail to dig it away, realizing too late she may have been compromising the integrity of a timeless artifact.

Her eyes narrowed on it as she excavated a prominent ridge cast upon perfectly by a beam of sunlight, as if whatever deity was calling down from above was validating her attention.

“No way,” she breathed, a fire stoked in her eyes as more grime gave way.

Isla continued furiously, brushing and picking and digging until under her nails were stained with dirt, and as she looked down upon what she’d unearthed, she choked on her breath and nearly dropped the ball off the ledge.

Her stare shifted slowly to the forest in the distance, where the trees danced with the softest sway in the early morning breeze. Their faint rustle like the song of something wicked beckoning her to pass its thicket-laden gates yet again.

Isla held the marker up to the light, turning it over several times, poking and prodding at it to ensure she was seeing what she believed she was. Her stomach twisted as she brought it so close to her face to examine it that she could almost smell the rotting earth it had risen from.

Symbols.

There were so many symbols.

Etchings of foreign letters that she didn’t understand, but some she’d seen…dwelling in a mix of many other curves and claw marks.

Carved in a message left for her mate.

CHAPTER 17

Isla traced her finger along the marker’s edges—six consecutive symbols at the top, three below that, and one big mark beneath those, three tick marks cut between by a bisecting line. That large singular marking was the one she recognized most. That she swore she’d seen sketched into the tree’s bark last night.

Which meant…well, she didn’t know what it meant.

She also wasn’t positive that it was true.

In the grand scheme of things, after all she’d gone through and all she’d seen, Isla didn’t necessarily trust her own judgment. She was so desperate for a resolution, for any type of sense, that easily she could’ve been creating something grand and revolutionary out of absolutely nothing.

Her eyes darted between the forest, what she could make of the top of the Wall, and back to the relic resting in her palm.

First of all, what was this?

Of the several known dialects in their ancient history—native to each original pack before the Common was developed with the rise of Io to centralize the continent, then the realm, to aid in the relations of the world—none used an alphabet like this. That creation was over a millennium ago. But the Ares Pass wasn’t so old that it predated those primeval records…was it?

No.

No, Lukas had mentioned Io. That the in-power Imperial Alpha held issue with the pass’s existence. With the alphas—the brothers—of Deimos and Phobos budding their own empire. Challenging him.

But exactly how long ago was that?

Isla tangled her fingers in her hair.

What was she supposed to do with this? What if she was wrong?

She shot another dejected look at the woodland in the distance.

Kai had asked her to keep herself contained for a few hours. It had been over that now, the pastels of dawn giving way to the clear blue of morning. He had to be beyond Deimos’s borders by now. In Mavec, in his “not-a-palace”. But the murderer of his father and brother…

She shouldn’t do it. Shouldn’t risk herself when she could still feel the glimmer of the bond between them, though it waned. Shouldn’t go back into those woods.

Not alone, at least.

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