Skill: Expert Meteorologist

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The border had been close enough to taste upon his lips.

Laurus' kingdom lay beyond the black pines and the low stone markers half-buried beneath winter moss, a smear of foreign land just past the ridge where his old kingdom’s authority thinned and ended. Artavius had seen it between the tossing ears of the horse beneath him, had felt the animal’s heart hammering through his knees as it tore over frozen ground with foam on its bit and panic in every stride it made. Behind him, Aris clung hard enough to bruise, royal hands twisted in the blood-dark leather of Artavius’s coat, his breath ragged against the knight’s shoulder as he held on blindly to the man. Artavius hated that sound more than anything. He had heard Aris angry before, proud, reckless, amused, even wounded. But scared? Gods, he had never wanted to hear that from his Prince. Hold on, Artavius had told him. It was both a plea and an order, a firm demand and promise. Just hold on, and I will get you there.

Then the arrow came.

It buried itself into the horse’s side with a wet sound that made Artavius’s stomach twist before his mind fully understood it. The animal screamed, shrill and awful, legs tangling under itself as all that speed and panic suddenly became weight. The world tipped. Snow, mud, hooves, trees, Aris’s startled breath behind him. Artavius moved before thought could. He grabbed Aris and pulled him hard against his chest as they were thrown, twisting his own body beneath him so the prince would not take the worst of the fall. The impact stole the breath from him. Something cracked. His shoulder, perhaps. Ribs, certainly. For a moment, there was nothing but white-hot pain and the terrible absence of air in his lungs and Aris gasping against him, alive, alive, alive.

That was enough.

The pain could wait. Death could wait. The gods, if they had followed them this far, could wait their turn as well.

Artavius forced his body to roll and shoved Aris beneath the shelter of a fallen root. Stay down, he growled, though the words barely came through the ringing in his ears. He got to his feet because there was nothing else to do. His legs nearly buckled beneath him, but he forced them straight. The guards were already coming through the trees, torches bleeding orange through the cold and banners snapping black and gold between the trunks. Some of the guards were still wearing their human skins while others were already split and remade into that of a wolf. These were his men, once. Men who had eaten beside him, trained beside him, called him brother when the wine was strong and everyone's caste was forgotten for the hour.

Now they came for the prince and so Artavius became the thing they had always accused him of being.

The shift tore through him with a kind of violence he welcomed. Bones bent in different directions, his skin split as dark fur sprouted. Hands struck the earth as giant paws and the knight’s great black wolf-form rose from the torn remains of his blood red coat and armor with a snarl that shook blood from his teeth before he had even bitten anyone. He hit the first guard hard enough to carry him backward into another. His fangs found throats, his claws opened up bellies. Steel flashed along his flank and he answered with the full weight of his body, breaking a man beneath him as if he was a fragile bird bone. He did not fight prettily; there was no courtly honor in it. This was no ceremonial duel, no song bards would find worth singing. He fought like a door barred against a storm, like a common-born boy who had learned too young that no one moved unless he made them.

Again and again, they tried to reach Aris.

And again and again Artavius put himself between them.

His breath came hot, then wet. His vision narrowed. Snow churned beneath him, trampled into red and brown slush. Somewhere behind him, Aris was shouting his name.

Artavius!

He should not have looked, he knew you never take your eyes off your enemies. He knew, he knew, he knew and yet, he looked anyway. It was only for a heartbeat. Only to see if the prince was still there. Still alive. Still worth every ruin Artavius had made of himself. And that was when the sword entered him.

It slid under his ribs and through his gut with a pressure so deep and sickening that, for half a second, Artavius did not even understand it as pain. His body jerked around the blade. His wolf shape broke under the shock of it, skin and bone dragging him half-human again as he hit his knees in the snow. His hand closed around the steel buried in him, uselessly, like he could hold himself together if he gripped it hard enough. Blood spilled over his fingers, hot and slick, so warm it almost startled him. Warmer than the air. Warmer than the snow. Warmer than he felt inside as the cold started crawling up through him.

Fucking beast, die a thousand deaths hellion.

Someone said something above him. The guard holding the sword, maybe. An order. A curse. A prayer.

Artavius did not care.

He was looking at Aris.

The prince had crawled from the roots, face streaked with mud and blood, blind eyes wide with the awful knowledge of what was happening. Artavius never wanted to see him like that again. He was reaching for him. Of course he was. Stubborn, foolish, noble-born idiot. Still trying to come back for the man who had been born to stand in the way.

Run, Artavius tried to say.

It came out wet.

His hand slipped from the blade and landed in the snow. Blood steamed between his fingers. He could feel it cooling now, could feel the heat leaving him in slow, traitorous waves. His body felt too heavy and too far away all at once. His chest still tried to breathe, but every breath caught on the sword and on the broken ribs in him. The world tilted and the trees above him blurred, dark and tall like silent witnesses. Aris was screaming now, but the sound seemed very far away, buried under the thunder of Artavius’s own failing heart.

Artavius! Artavius, no! Get up, Artavius! Artavius!!

He had promised and that was the worst of it all. Not the pain he felt all over or the fear., of what would happen to Aris. Not even the cold creeping into his bones as his body emptied itself into foreign snow scared him. No, it was the promise, the oath he made. The vow he had taken before both the crown and the court and every godless noble who had thought a common man’s loyalty was a thing to be owned.

I will see you safe.

His fingers twitched once toward Aris.

He did not reach him.

And then the dark took him with blood still warm on his hands.


And then—

Breath.

Artavius woke with a violent gasp, as if the world had shoved him back into himself before death was finished grabbing him. His body lurched upright, paws tearing into frozen earth, teeth bared against enemies that were no longer there. His first breath came in sharp and wrong, full of salt and pine instead of smoke and blood. His second nearly choked him breathless. The first thing he heard was thunder.

No.

Not thunder.

Water.

The sound of it surrounded him, vast and relentless, a roaring crash that filled the air until it seemed to live inside his ribs. It rolled beneath the ground, through the stone, through the bones of the taiga itself. For one blind, panicked moment, he thought he was still falling. Still being thrown from the horse. Still striking the earth with Aris crushed safely against him.

Artavius stood beneath the dark, towering pines of a taiga forest, the trees rising around him like old sentries with frost clinging to their branches. Their roots twisted through the black soil and stone, gripping the cliffside like knuckled hands. Moss grew thick beneath his paws, wet and cold, and pale lichen clung to the rocks like old bone. The wind moved hard through the trees, pulling at his fur, carrying the scent of salt, rain, pine needles, wet stone, and something deep and green that did not belong to any land he knew.

Ahead of him, the world ended.

The land fell away in a sheer drop so sudden and brutal that one wrong step would have sent him into the churning grey ocean far below. The cliff face was jagged, black, and wet, split with veins of stone where water ran constantly down into the murk. Waterfalls spilled from the heights in pale, endless ribbons, only for the fierce wind to seize them halfway down and fling their spray back upward. Mist rose in shimmering veils, cold against his face, beading along his whiskers and clinging to the thick fur of his chest. Far below, the ocean moved like something alive. It was grey-black and restless, its murky depths foaming around hidden rocks and vanishing beneath sheets of spray. Shadows shifted beneath the surface, too long and smooth to be waves. Something pale rolled once beneath the water and was gone. Another shape cut through the depths in silence, broad-backed and serpentine, before the sea swallowed it again. There was no path down. No sane creature would want one.

Artavius stared at it, chest heaving, and for a heartbeat his mind, battered and bleeding though no wound showed, supplied him with a thought so dry it nearly made him feel like himself again. Well. That would be one way down. Then the thought fractured, and the memories came rushing back. The horse screaming. Aris’s hands in his coat. The arrow. The fall. The sword. His head swung sharply, searching the trees. His ears flattened, then rose again. Every muscle in him pulled tight beneath his dark fur. His body remembered enemies before his mind could accept their absence. The forest shifted around him, branches creaking overhead, needles whispering in the wind like low voices behind a court curtain. Every shadow looked briefly like a guard. Every flash of pale lichen became a hand. Every groan of bending wood became the pull of a blade from its sheath.

Where are they? His breath came hard through his nose. Where is he? No answer. Only the crash of waterfalls, the moaning of the wind, and the hiss of spray flung back over the cliff’s lip. There was no snow, no torches in the dark, no black-and-gold banners snapping between the pines. No guards closing in. No sword lodged deeply in his gut. No hands slick with blood. No Aris beneath the roots, staring at him with that furious, frightened defiance that had always made Artavius want to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. No Aris. The absence hit harder than the blade had.

For several long moments, Artavius could not move. He stood there with his paws planted in strange earth and his body whole, impossibly whole, while his mind remained kneeling in the snow. His belly should have been open. His blood should have been pouring between his fingers. He should have been cold. He could still feel it, that slow, creeping cold that had climbed through him as his body emptied itself out onto the frozen ground. It had started in his hands, he remembered. In the fingers curled uselessly around the sword. Then his feet and then his face. He remembered thinking, absurdly, that he was tired. Not afraid, not angry, but tired. And sorry. Gods, he had been so sorry. A small sound rose in his throat, rough and ugly, but he swallowed it before it could become anything more.

No. He had no right to fall apart, not yet anyway. Not while he still did not know, not while there remained even a fool’s chance that Aris had run, that Aris had lived, that the boy had made it past the border into Laurus' arms with blood on his face and Artavius’s last order in his ears. Run. Had he? Had Aris listened for once in his life? Artavius closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. In the dark behind his lids, Aris was still reaching for him. Always reaching. Foolish, stupid, noble-bred whelp. Always coming back when he should have gone forward. Always mistaking loyalty for permission to die beside him. You were supposed to run, Artavius rasped and the sound that left him was not human.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw the flame.

It was not far from where he had woken, nestled among dark stones and wind-bent grasses, a small purple fire burned against the cold with no visible fuel source. It should not have survived there. There was no lantern, no dry timber, no visible hand that had lit it or tended it. The cliffside wind bullied everything else, the trees, the waterfalls, the ocean spray and yet the flame only curled softly in answer, violet tongues bending and rising as if breathing with the land itself. Its light painted the nearby stones in bruised lavender and soft blue shadows. Frost glittered around it but did not melt entirely. Moss grew close to its warmth, greener there than anywhere else along the cliff. It gave off heat, gentle and strange, the sort that did not roar or demand but simply waited to be noticed.

A hearth, some wounded part of him thought. No. A grave candle. No. A signal.

He stared at it longer than he meant to, his massive frame still braced and trembling with the aftershocks of death. The warmth touched his face first, then the front of his chest, easing into fur chilled damp by sea mist. It was not enough to comfort him. Nothing could have been. But it was there and that made it worse somehow. Warmth belonged to living things. To hands, to feet, to bodies still alive. Artavius looked down at himself.

He found only paws.

He stared at them as if they had betrayed him personally. They were not hands, not scarred knuckles or calloused fingers.Not hands. Not scarred fingers. Not calloused palms that had held reins and sword hilts and shield straps and Aris by the shoulder when the prince had been young and particularly determined to get himself killed. Paws. Black-furred, heavy, clawed, and planted in the damp soil of a world he did not know. His breath went still. Slowly, with a concentration that had once brought his body from man to wolf and wolf to man as naturally as drawing steel, Artavius reached inward to shift only to come up with nothing. A beat passed and he tried again.

Shift.

There was no answering pull. No familiar pain. No rearranging of bone. No heat beneath the skin. No human shape waiting beneath the fur like a door he could open.

There was absolutely nothing.

His jaw tightened until his teeth hurt. No, he breathed, though it came as little more than a growl shaped poorly around a word that no longer fit his mouth. He tried again, harder this time, and still his body did not answer him. Panic rose hot and sudden beneath his ribs, then, sharp and humiliating, clawing up through the layers of discipline he had spent a lifetime building. He pushed it down at once. Crushed it. Buried it under the old commands. Stand straight. Breathe once. Count the exits. Assess the wound. Find the prince.

There was no wound. There were no exits and the prince was gone. His composure cracked anyway. His head dipped for a moment, the way his shoulders lowered beneath the weight of something too large to carry. The purple flame flickered in the corner of his vision. Beyond it, the sea hurled itself against the cliffs again and again, senseless and tireless, as if trying to break the land apart by persistence alone. Artavius understood that more than he liked.

A memory surfaced, uninvited: Aris as a boy, knees muddy, hair full of burrs, sitting beside him behind the old falcon mews after they had both been caught where they should not have been. The prince had been furious then too, though at the time his great tragedy had only been a lecture and three days confined to his chambers. Even as a child he had treated minor inconveniences like personal declarations of war. When I am king, Aris had declared, I shall outlaw lectures.

Mm, Artavius had said, all of twelve years old and already tired and tough to impress, had only replied. A bold reform. The people will sing of it. Aris had shoved him. Artavius almost felt it now. That bigger shoulder, at the time, against his. That easy warmth of a life before oaths and prophecies destroyed them. The memory vanished beneath the crash of water and his throat tightened. He swallowed it down.

He was not dead until proven otherwise. The thought came suddenly, hard as a nail driven through wood. He was not dead until I see the body. Not dead until I know. He lifted his head. The taiga watched him in silence. Above the trees, the sky hung low and heavy, clouded in deep iron and bruised violet, with a few strange stars visible where the wind had torn gaps through the overcast. They were not the stars of his kingdom. No Hunter’s Crown. No Lady’s Lamp. No White Stag burning over the northern ridge. These stars were scattered differently, cold and unfamiliar, as if even heaven had turned its face from him and put on another mask. Perhaps that should have frightened him. It did not. Fear required room and grief had taken most of it.

He took one step toward the purple flame, then another. His paws sank slightly into the wet earth. The warmth grew stronger, curling along his chest and under his chin. Close up, the flame made no sound. No crackle. No snap of burning wood. Only a soft, steady glow, as if it were less a fire and more a promise pretending to be one. A promise. The word struck something raw. There was an old rumor to this place, though Artavius had no way of knowing how he knew it. Perhaps the land whispered it. Perhaps death had dragged it through him when it brought him here. Perhaps some cruel god had a taste for symbolism. This cliff, this wind-torn edge above the deadly sea, had once been a meeting place for lovers who could not meet elsewhere. Star-crossed fools had come here, they said. They had sworn to return. Sworn to find one another. Sworn that not even family, war, distance, or death would keep them apart.

A place of promise to meet again. Artavius stared into the purple flame until his eyes burned. How very poetic, he muttered, hoarse and bitter. I am sure someone found that amusing. The flame gave no answer. Of course it didn’t. He was alive again in a foreign world, trapped in a shape that would not release him, bereft of the one life he had sworn to protect, and now the universe had seen it fit to deposit him at a shrine to impossible reunions. There were jokes too cruel even for him.

Aris, if you live, I will find you.

The thought came not as hope, exactly. Artavius did not trust hope. Hope was a soft-handed thing that had never held a line. No, this was something older and harder. Duty, perhaps. Madness, perhaps. The stubborn refusal of a man too ruined to know when the war was over.

If you are taken, I will follow.

He turned his head toward the forest, toward the scents he did not know. Strange wolves moved somewhere beyond the trees. Distant. Faint. Living. The world was not empty, then. It had rules he did not understand. Borders he had not learned. Dangers waiting beneath leaves and below murky waves. Good. Let there be dangers. Let there be roads. Let there be something to do with the grief before it hollowed him completely.

If you are dead—

His jaw worked once. The ocean struck the cliffs below with a sound like a war drum.

If you are dead, I will make them answer.

Artavius stepped away from the purple flame, though some part of him wanted to remain near its warmth. That, too, irritated him. Even now, even here, the homemaker in him recognized a hearth and wished to guard it. A ridiculous instinct. A soft one. He should have been thinking of pursuit, survival, direction. Instead, some bone-deep part of him had already noticed which stones blocked the wind best, where the ground was driest, and where a body could rest without rolling too close to the cliff’s edge. He huffed once, humorless. Dead a moment and already minding the house. The words fell flat into the wind, but they steadied him. A little.

He looked back only once toward the place where he had woken. The moss was flattened there, but there was no blood. No mark of battle. No sign that a knight had died with a sword through his belly and woken as a wolf at the edge of a foreign sea. Only the flame. Only the cliff. Only the promise. Artavius stood for one long moment beneath the alien sky, black fur damp with mist, pale eyes cold and exhausted and terribly awake. Then he turned from the ocean and faced the taiga.

He did not know this world. He did not know why he had been brought to it. He did not know whether mercy had saved him, or he was being punished by the Gods for daring to love a man above his station. But if this place was truly made for promises to meet again, then let it remember him. Let the cliffs remember. Let the sea below remember. Let the strange violet flame burn witness. He had failed once. He would not fail again. The giant black wolf stepped forward, hoping beyond hope that he would find his peace.

---

She ranged east because the scent of pine was strongest that way; it wasn't worth it to go too far in case Vi needed to rest, and so movement would be slow. She wanted to keep to the other woman's pace. If they did stop to rest, it would be as long as necessary, and she would insist they cluster together as often as possible - especially as the wind picked up and began to stir chunks of ice across their path.

Once they reached the tree line Mahina did a cursory investigation out of habit. It would be a good idea to get some warm meat in to their bellies (more for Vi's sake) but Mahina wasn't keen on abandoning the woman so soon after her near-drowning. She still held her own questions about this place. Better to stick together even if they were strangers to one-another - or so she figured.

There was enough shelter among these trees to prevent the worst of the wind from reaching them, and they could make a decent camp here among the ferns and fallen trees. Mahina finally took a moment to breathe and - not quite relax but, settle - when the sound of a distant voice competed with the shrieking wind. For a beat or two it was all Mahina could hear - and she knew that voice.

Did you hear that? She looked to Vi, having risen immediately to-attention on her feet. There was an intensity to Mahina now that could not be denied. I know that voice. My captain - my friend, she's another valkyrja. I think she's up the mountain. The urge to leave Vi behind and start climbing was hellishly strong, but it wasn't something she'd truly entertain.