“Some would see my communications with the beasts as a betrayal of the agency.

They would be right.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

With morning, Silver rose to see the full glory of the tree wolves’ den. It was not simply a cave or tunnel carved into the earth, as she had expected, but a honeycombed chamber roughly three and a half feet tall. Roots crept through the walls, and overhead the ceiling was pocked with small, flickering holes covered by something that looked very much like water. The light filtering through these holes illuminated the bodies of several late-sleeping tree wolves and flickered with the substance of liquid, sending phantoms of white light dancing on the walls. Only thrusting her fingers up into that clear surface and seeing a tiny, shimmering fish dart past overhead confirmed that it was indeed water, and that the tree wolves’ den, like so much of what she had encountered lately, was built on the most practical of magics.

Following the wolf, she wriggled out into the daylight to break her fast on a nutty bar of some kind Cara must have wrapped up in her backpack. In silence, they listened as the birds woke and the wind stirred the trees. They soaked in the fragile beauty of the frozen world, which stung Silver’s dry lips and exposed skin, and made her nose run even when she cupped her hands over her face to capture the warmth of her breath. It was not long before the last of the tree wolves had emerged, and with a noiseless glance in Silver’s direction, Zien indicated they should begin on their way – to where, Silver was not sure.

Not once in the long days that followed did she glance behind them towards the home that no longer existed. She simply walked with the wolf and often with Cea and Pelorin, through the pearl-frost of the mornings and the gray stillness of the days. As Zien had promised, the beasts spoke to her. To fill the long hours of uncomfortable silence, she asked about the Zara. When she made very human gestures, nodding, or raising a hand to stop them when their explanations strayed far from what she could understand, they simply eyed her curiously.

The wolves spoke openly, seeming unconcerned by her occasional lack of understanding. They told her first of the ghostly beasts that had come to the woods with the first telltale breath of spring, and of the unnatural grip of a relentless winter that seemed to follow in their wake, and then of the dragon eggs that had been buried deep within the earth. They told tales of stalking the borders of the human cities, tracking the death-scent of the Zara, and even of sitting high above the gaping chasm the MASO studied, trying to determine what treasure lay within. It seemed none of them had known what that treasure was at first. For a while, they had even believed the MASO might have found one of the Stones of Alti, and had hoped to steal it away.

When this topic was exhausted, Silver asked instead about their destination. Pelorin spent the better part of one afternoon spinning tales of rock-hewn caverns engraved into the mountains and their inhabitants, vast colonies of beasts that had once relinquished mastery of the skies only to the dragons. He spoke of a stone called The Dawn, which contained an unimaginable quantity of magical power, and which these great beasts protected. The name he gave to the mountains that they marched towards was one given in a distinctly foreign human tongue; the Ianal Ruvestri mountain range.

“What does it mean?” she asked him as her gaze followed his over the tops of the trees to the mountains beyond. “It is the land of the sun’s demise; a fitting place for bats to inhabit. We seek the greatest of them, the nightwings.” She did not comment on the irony of placing the stone they called ‘The Dawn’ in a place with such a name.

When she fell too long to her own thoughts, Silver began to realize that the two tree wolves would watch her for a time, glancing curiously at the wolf as if wondering what she might be thinking and unsure how to ask. Eventually, they would draw her into some lesson or other, like learning to warm dead wood with her magic until it was dry enough to catch fire, or to control a small flame that burned hot enough to slowly cook the small and distinctly disgusting chunks of meat that the wolf sometimes brought for her. Even cooked these were far from appetizing, and took so long to chew that her jaws ached by the end of each day. Silver was certain that they watched her struggle, and like the crows, laughed at her human weakness, but there was admiration in their gazes sometimes as well. The wolf claimed it was because they knew how difficult it was for her to have left her people behind, and because she had been chosen by the water spirit to carry the eggs of the dragons. Gratifying though their attention might be, she resolved to make the nutty bars last for as long as possible.

It was in these small moments amidst the frigid days of their trek that Silver found her place among the tree wolves. To them, she was unpredictable, baffling, and helpless. To her, they were both frightening and fascinating. Many times, she watched their antics in silence, but gradually, she learned to join in at times when the eleven or so beasts gathered together below the trees.

At first, it was the wolf who smoothed over her many fumbling attempts at communication, but she made an unexpected ally of the youngest of the pack, Biarn. He was a rambunctious, friendly little beast, half the size of the wolf, with eyes like rubies and a faintly spotted pelt. Amusingly, it was her fingers that seemed to fascinate him most; he tried to wriggle his toes as she did, and quickly became passably good at lifting small sticks and stones. He had much more flexibility in his digits than the wolf, for sure. Through him, she was able to learn a bit about the tree wolves’ illusory magic. Much of their work, it seemed, depended on the cooperation of the pack to form the more powerful spells. The rest depended on their understanding of the world.

“It is the magics that shape the world around us that one must learn through careful study,” Cea growled in her throaty voice, “to move water from a river to strike a tree is simple. To heat or cool it is simple. These things require only a transfer of energy or motion - they are as intrinsic to our understanding of the world as that air is for breathing or food to be eaten. It takes no great stretch of imagination to think how heavy a pebble or stone might be. But to give water a definite shape, or to meld it with the earth, or to change it so that its smallest of elements become rearranged, requires a much deeper understanding of the thing in itself that we wish to change. We are masters of illusion. It is light that we play with, and light that we must understand.”

As they traveled deeper into the wilderness, Silver learned that there were many more mythical beasts amid the trees than she might have expected. She found that, in the early hours of the day as the fog overhead sank lower over the trees and lent the forest a ghostly pall, it would eventually begin to dissipate into heavy, low-lying clouds that took on the misty, irregular shape of tail-less rays. They swooped lazily between the trees, morphing abruptly into broad-winged serpents and smoky spiders. The wolf seemed mildly surprised to see the drifting creatures, and huffed thoughtfully when they appeared, but had little to say about them except that they were beasts of a sort, living off liquid and sunlight and rarely descending so low to the earth. Several times, she and the pack of wolves passed around foliage thick with any number of flowering plants. These the tree wolves kept well away from, although Cea assured Silver they were not dangerous, merely territorial. They looked like any other plant to her. When she also caught sight of an insect-like creature half-the size of her fist shortly afterward, the tree wolf rumbled, “They’re…I believe you’d call them herbivores.”

Silver frowned “But it looked…”

“Dangerous, yes. They are predators, and they have to hunt.”

“For plants?” she asked incredulously, but the tree wolf merely flicked her tail in annoyance and leapt into the trees. Cea did that fairly often, and eventually Silver determined that the beast simply did not like her very much. It might have been because they were not making good time with her in tow, since she could hardly keep up with the pack as it was. It might have been because no messenger had arrived from the great bats in the mountains, or because the lengthy shadows that the land cast over them each night long before sunset made the days appear ever shorter.

By the end of a week, their destination loomed frighteningly near. A palpable sense of anxiety had settled over the pack, and she was not immune to it. As they lay huddled at the base of the mountain to rest before beginning their ascent, she said as much to the wolf.

“I’m afraid, Elorian,” she whispered, “I’m afraid to lose you. It’s only been a week, but I’m afraid of any of the tree wolves getting hurt.”

She craned her head around to watch the wolf as she awaited its answer. A week had not been enough for her to grow used to its wiry strength, revealed in everything from the lay of its ears to the way its eyes disassembled everything they touched with piercing scrutiny. She was enraptured by the color of its fur, a silver so bright that when it caught a glance of sunlight, she sometimes had to blink and turn away. A subtle ferocity seemed to lie in wait at the edges of its muzzle, often in the form of a visible chink of white tooth. Even the way the wolf moved held her spellbound. Its paws barely touched the snow. The tree wolves were clumsier, at least on the ground.

But the wolf did not answer with words. It merely looked at her, and by that look its words were made clear. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“How can it be good to be afraid? Zien, Cea, Pelorin, even Biarn said that if I want my magic to work, I need to be calm.”

“Yes.” The wolf placed its head lazily on its paws, as if this matter required a great deal of deliberation. “But fear belies caution.” Silver sighed.

That was not any sort of answer at all.

Dawn broke to find the wolf’s eyes thoughtful and its teeth showing slightly, small white pins under its dark lips. White clouds erupted from its flared nostrils with every step nearer the peaks of the mountains, spreading out in the thin, fresh air and mingling with the falling snowflakes. The day was barely lighter than the night had been. Elorian’s ears swiveled this way and that, and Silver often followed their path with her eyes, heart beating a short-lived relief when the tree wolves returned to the earth lest the sparse and treacherous branches overhead betray their footing. A thick layer of ice coated even the thickest of branches, and the air was growing both colder and thinner as they progressed to a steadily higher elevation.

In time, the trees turned to towering rocks that spiraled up from the earth like a dragon’s spines, serving as the gateway to their grand destination. Gone were the trees, ever-present in the days before. The forest at their backs had become nothing more than a dark green smudge against the greater rock that encroached on the summit through the vast mountain spines, and then even that dark smudge became only so many sparse trees rooted deeply into the rocky crags. Certainly, the stones were rooted as firmly as the trees in the frigid soil.

As the incline of the land steepened, the fields of snow grew rockier in places, marking muddy banks that led into fast moving streams and rivers, twisting their ways snake-like through the rocks to drop off over mountainous ledges or flow down out of the forest. More than once they passed waterfalls that glimmered with white foam as they pounded down the mountainside, roaring their pleasure when they spilled into the algae green pools below. Sometimes the tree wolves stopped to drink, and Silver reached her hands into the glacier-cold water until her fingers were numb to cup water in her hands, then used the magic that Cea taught her to ensure that it was safe to drink.

Soon the mountains were no longer dark, looming shapes against the sky; they were instead towering structures of stone and ice that filled all eastward vision. Night was falling, and it blossomed with magnificent hues of pink and gold despite the gray skies. A golden halo settled at the backs of the mountains…and silhouetted against it, something else.

“What is that?” Silver heard herself ask. For a long moment, there was no answer, but finally, Zien came to a halt in front of them. She looked back at Silver, an inscrutable light in her lavender eyes. “Is he here?”

“What?” Silver asked. The wolf was not so easily confused.

“The Zara is not far,” the beast rumbled. Silver glanced between them, seeing the uncomfortable shiver that passed through the pack at the wolf’s words. Their alpha hissed, casting bright eyes over the mountainside.

“We are too late – those, human, are the nightwings. Rarely would they expose themselves this way.” Zien turned her gaze sharply on Silver and the wolf, raking in Biarn and Pelorin as well. “There is a lower entrance to the caverns, but to send a human alone into them would be to doom them. There is no way Silver will reach the upper entrance with us safely. Pelorin, Biarn, take her and the wolf. You,” the alpha advanced suddenly, coming abruptly close enough that Silver could feel the heat of the beast’s hot breath on her arms, “take the Stone and escape. You are charged with the safety of the dragon eggs, and I will not put them in harm’s way. You understand? We will find you when this is done. We must part ways now, as I go to find the srinn of the great bats.”

Silver nodded nervously, unsure what else to do. Evidently, she was the only one lost. Zien turned and the pack turned with her, wheeling up the mountainside with the agility of mountain goats. Now that she understood what she was seeing, Silver could make out what she had found silhouetted against the golden skies. Not birds, but hundreds upon hundreds of bats, and some of them larger than any bird.

Pelorin wasted no time in snapping his jaws to get her attention. He was leading Biarn and the wolf away from her across the icy rocks. It was not easy for her to follow, but Silver had no doubts that she would have fallen to her death if she had tried to scramble up the mountain after Zien. There were times she was certain the alpha of the tree wolves understood her abilities better than she did herself.

Even the gold overhead was fading by the time Pelorin drew them to a halt about a quarter of a mile from the gaping mouth of a fissure in the side of the mountain. In the deep mountains, the ground was a frozen wasteland, crisp with ice, leaf litter, and stark black rock that thrust from the frigid soil. Life was scarce, scattered amidst the craggy mountain rock. Her ears strained against the silence.

Only a snarl from the wolf alerted her to movement in the rocks ahead of them. Whatever she was seeing turned to stare at them, clearly surprised by the sound. For the first time in a week, her eyes met those of another human being, and Silver felt her mouth drop open. She was still more surprised when Pelorin flicked his tail familiarly at the stranger, clearly suggesting that the wolf should be at ease.

“Bek,” Silver half-hissed across the distance to the massive rocks he was currently crouched behind. He shifted and motioned something at her.

The wolf grumbled distrustfully.

“What is it doing?” Clearly, the beast was referring to Bek.

“Let’s go, wolf,” Silver said, crunching forward across the rock. Pelorin seemed to trust her judgement, as he and Biarn followed, letting her take up the lead now. Bek’s gesticulations grew more agitated as they neared, however, so she paused, staring around the empty mountainside in confusion.

“Should we turn around?” she asked of the beasts beside her. Pelorin made a sound of uncertainty.

“We have been given a task. Whatever the alpha thinks of this human, she would not want him to interfere.”

“And what exactly does she think of this human?” Silver asked, frowning. Pelorin huffed.

“He tells us of the MASO’s activities.”

That surprised her. Silver barely made one more step before Bek stopped, however, flattening himself against the rock. Now she saw why. A hulking white creature had appeared on the other side of the stone, hunched low so that they saw little more of it than a distinctly bat-like head and globular eyes. Its ears alone were as wide around as her head. It was clearly one of the nightwings.

“Is that….?” Silver began, but she trailed into silence as the creature crawled forward with the ungainly gait of its smaller cousins. Then it turned towards them, unfolding to an unexpectedly great height before raising its nose to the air like a dog trying to catch a scent. After a moment, it lowered its head, letting loose a shriek that made her clap her hands to her ears. Regardless, she understood it.

“Where is your srinn?”

Silver gulped, but it was Pelorin who stepped forward with a slight bow of his broad skull.

“My srinn has gone to fight in the name of the colony,” he rumbled.

The beast cocked its head, ears flared. Silver’s eyes trailed to Bek, who remained on the other side of the boulder, apparently unnoticed. “Forgive me,” Pelorin continued, every facet of his body language indicating that the question he asked would be unwelcome, “what brings the northern colony to the west?”

The great beast hissed more softly than before, a sound devoid of meaning, and bared his fangs. “Darkness fell, and remained. Even here, the sun lies dormant. The snow falls over the land as if it is winter when summer is close at hand. When the Zara came, they shattered what was left of our kingdom. The caverns of the north are gone, uritners. I was their srinn.”

Uritners…Silver knew the word, somehow. Beasts of the land. Creatures without wings. Pelorin bowed his head slightly. The white bat remained tense, but continued. “Two moons we have been here, welcome as we rebuild. But now, one of our kin has come from the east, swift as shadows. He claimed the Right, and fought to take this colony, disregarding the boundaries of our kind.”

“Then what is this? A contest for the Right would involve only the srinn, not the entire colony,” Pelorin growled, surprised.

“Once the foreigner won, he turned to the wards in the inner colony, and began to unravel them. This affront cannot be forgiven, and the colony has turned on him. He is unnaturally strong. I was driven here as what remained of my colony escaped. The srinn of the west demanded I guard the rear,” the great beast turned slightly, displaying a long, ugly gash down the side of his neck and right wing. Blood oozed from the wound, matting his white fur.

“Alone?” Silver asked, shocked by the sight of the wound. She was more shocked by the reaction her voice elicited. The nightwing’s ears flared as his globular eyes grew wider still.

“A human who hears our words?” he hissed.

“She will speak for us,” Pelorin explained quickly.

“Speak to whom?” the bat screeched. “What you keep as pet is of no concern to me, but if it speaks our words, it is a danger to us all. You are not welcome here, human.”

“Our time is short,” the wolf snarled sharply, stepping up beside Pelorin. Biarn had quietly moved to hide behind Silver’s legs. “This human is one of our pack, and fights for peace between men and beasts. We are to retrieve the Stone and take it from here. This arrangement was made with the srinn of the western nightwings.”

“I know of it,” the nightwing spat, “but the Stone will not go to a human. Go and do as you must, but the human remains with me.”

“Hey now,” Silver said, pushing the wolf lightly aside with her leg so she could take a few strides in the nightwing’s direction. Realistically, getting closer to a beast that looked fully prepared to murder her felt like a terrible idea, but she was beginning to sense what the tree wolves had mentioned earlier – the Zara was near. Like an oppressive weight at the back of her mind, she could feel the chill of its presence on the mountain. Zien and the rest of the tree wolf pack were fighting somewhere above them, and she had only one real task – if she had a choice between facing down the Zara to finish that task and facing down a giant wounded bat, she would take the bat any day.

Plus, Bek was still hanging out behind the boulder, watching her with an expression of mingled suspicion and concern. She wanted to know how he had gotten there, and if she turned and walked away, she was not sure she would get that chance.

“I’m here to help you. Whatever you might think of humanity, we all need to learn to get along. I can speak with you, and that gives both of us a unique chance at not hating each other’s guts. Now, there’s a Zara after this Stone the western colony is hiding. If you let us go in there, we’ll take the Stone, and probably take a target off your back, too. If you make these guys go alone,” she gestured to the beasts behind her, “the only thing you do is lower their chance of success, because most likely one of them is going to stay with me. You’ll also be going against what the srinn of the tree wolves wants, and probably the srinn of the western nightwings. Do you really want to do that at a time like this?”

The bat looked to be about five words from biting her head off.

“You will betray us,” the nightwing hissed.

Silver folded her arms across her chest, struggling to look more confident than she was. She was pretty sure the giant bat could see her shaking, or at least hear her heart beating so fast she might as well have been running a marathon. “I won’t. And even if I tried to, the tree wolves are faster and stronger than I am. They would kill me first.”

She almost wanted to laugh at the fact that this final statement was what appeared to sway the great bat. He hunched low again, and for the first time she noticed the unexpectedly long tail that curled around from behind him, weaving a trail through the loose gravel and snow.

“It is rare that a human realizes their own weakness. I have heard rumors…is it true you carry the eggs?”

Silver smiled slightly, a challenge more than anything. “Yup.”

The nightwing regarded her in silence for a long moment. “In your tongue, I am Dusk, srinn of the north. Today, I will go with you. Come quickly, uritners. And bring the other human as well. I don’t trust it out of my sight.”

Silver nodded as the other beasts joined her, and waved to Bek. He stood slowly, clearly staring in the direction of the great white beast, which was still out of his line of sight.

“He knows you’re there!” Silver called, “We’re going in, together.” Somehow, Bek managed not to look surprised when he jogged to catch up to them, falling into stride beside her. “How in the world did you get here?” Silver asked, staring him up and down.

Somehow, Bek did not look like someone who had hiked through miles of forest to get to their current location, but he did look prepared for such a thing. Although still dressed in the MASO black, his boots were made for wear, his pants were clearly thick and peppered with pockets, and he wore a narrow backpack that she assumed was somehow spelled to carry everything he needed.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he responded. She noticed he did not look at her, but first at the nightwing they followed into the fissure, and then at the wolf beside her. Elorian was watching him with a mixture of hostility and plain distaste.

“Okay, then how are you here?”

“I knew where Zien was headed.” His casual use of the alpha of the tree wolves’ name surprised her, but if what Pelorin had said was true, she supposed it made sense. “I’ll have to explain the rest later. Suffice to say I was looking for you.”

“For the dragon eggs,” Silver amended his statement.

Bek narrowed his bronze eyes at her, but did not correct what she had said. Either way, their conversation was over. Dusk hissed at them to be silent, and Silver was too over-awed by the innate sense of hundreds of thousands of tons of rock settling over her head to do more than obey. They were just inside the fissure, surrounded on all sides by cool, hard rock that throbbed with veins of some sort of luminous stone. Faint golden light washed over them, lighting the craggy walls.

As promised, Dusk lost no time in rushing them up through the twisting tunnel that wound through the mountainside. It could have been a relaxing tour of the cave system if not for the speed of their ascent or the gaping holes that they stumbled across. Those holes plummeted down and down into forever, and even the nightwing eyed them dubiously. By the time the stuffy air in the tunnel cooled, Silver was struggling with a stitch in her side and breathing heavily. Bek remained annoyingly unaffected, as if he hiked similar tunnels daily.

“Be cautious,” the wolf rumbled. Silver relayed the words quietly to Bek as the white nightwing ahead of them bobbed out of view. She followed – then gasped and nearly stopped, stricken senseless as the space ahead of her opened up and the broad ceiling of the cave system became visible. There was a great rustling of wings and a deafening roar, then the smell of bat a million times multiplied struck her unprepared. Deafening chaos swirled above them in flashes of brown and white, the bodies of dozens of nightwings illuminated by the luminous stones. Between the many bodies, she caught glimpses of vast expanses of black and gray and rust-brown stone, veined with whites and golds and silvers and, in some places, sickly pale mosses. Fissures in the stone opened into narrow tunnels at every side. A few of these tunnels spewed crystal clear water into the chamber, making her dry mouth itch with desire.

A cold shiver ran up her spine when she felt a predatory gaze on the side of her head. Dusk was standing directly within the dark space of one such tunnel, beady eyes piercing as she swallowed her nerves and approached. As she and the wolves drew level, the nightwing turned and began to claw his way through the tunnel. They followed.

They soon left the noise and warmth of the main cavern behind, and any modicum of safety there with it; she was now certain there was no escape for them, at least not without the nightwing’s help. There was no light here, and Silver was just glad she was not claustrophobic. The wolf remained just near enough that she felt its warmth against her skin, guiding her upward. How Bek followed, she had no idea, but she could hear from his steady footfalls that he did. On they climbed, while she whispered silent thanks for every second that the true and utter weight of the underground did not descend over them.

Dusk did not have to take them far, however, before the tunnel opened up into a small room lit far better than the tunnel or even the caverns outside. The walls seemed to be completely carved of the strange luminescent stone. Silver’s eyes were immediately drawn to a single, narrow chasm in the rock, through which a cold and uninviting breeze blew. It appeared to run all the way through the rock of the mountainside to the open sky beyond, but it was only large enough to fit a tennis ball.

The great white nightwing sat at the edge of the circular room when they entered, looking at a raised section at its center.

“I present to you The Dawn,” the nightwing whistled without looking at them. Silver murmured the words so that Bek would understand, but paused when she saw the look on his face.

“The Dawn Stone? Here?” he repeated incredulously. She stared at him, and then around the empty room. There was certainly no sign of the Stone, but she did not have the impression that was what he was trying to say. “You’re telling me you’re here for the Stone, Silver?”

“I thought you knew Zien was headed here?” she noted, casting a nervous glance in Dusks’ direction. The nightwing regarded them both in silence, hooded ears turned directly at them.

“I knew where she was headed, but not what exactly she planned to retrieve. This is a suicide mission, Silver. If the Stone is really here, it should remain here.”

“Dusk...srinn,” she added the title after a pause, “you said the Stone is here?”

“Silver, listen to me—” Bek grabbed her arm, eliciting a low, warning snarl from the wolf. Dusk was speaking already.

“It is there, in front of you, invisible and intangible at any time but dawn. This is the power that protects the Stone. It can be removed only when it can be seen. How to disentangle the wards that protect it is a secret known only to the srinn of this colony.”

“Then you have no way to remove the wards, srinn? We must wait for dawn?” Pelorin growled.

“We can’t wait. It will be hours before sunrise,” Silver said in frustration, “we just watched the sun set.”

No one in the room moved for a long moment after her outburst. They all looked instead at the spot in the center of the floor. All save the wolf, Silver realized eventually, for her dear friend remained staring with intense focus through the single hole in the wall. It was, nonetheless, Dusk who broke the silence.

“It is as you say, human...but if the Zara have come, then they have come for the Stone. We will meet them here.”

“What are you saying to them, Silver?” Bek asked her, voice cold and demanding. She shook off his arm with a glare. Biarn had stepped up to the center of the room, testing the air as if he could smell the invisible Stone. He whimpered, looking as the wolf had towards the chink in the stone wall. Dusk also turned. In the second that it took Silver to blink and follow their eyes, fire flowed into the chamber from the tennis ball-sized hole, lighting up the luminescent walls with sapphire light and causing the dust in the air to shimmer brilliantly. This was not a natural light, and it was not a natural fire. Oily flames seared across the walls, eating away at the stone. Silver knew those flames.

They were the Zara’s fire.

“Get down!” Bek shouted. The wolf howled something incomprehensible. Silver found herself on her back on the hard rock when the earth suddenly groaned and pitched beneath her. Pushing herself back up, she tried shakily to rise, but the earth beneath their feet shook violently once more. The brilliance in the room had faded as suddenly as it had appeared, but the flames remained, and so did their heat. It filled the small space, driving them all back towards the tunnel that was their sole escape. Somehow, Pelorin was directly beside her, and his throaty growl drowned out the roar of the earth.

“The Zara are trying to break the wards by destroying the circuits in the stone of the mountain itself, Silver. That fire came from outside. If they succeed, we must take the Stone and run.”

“Wait, what?” she demanded.

“Biarn and I know the way out of here. Prepare yourself. Those flames…” Pelorin snarled.

“Biarn,” Silver said, casting around for the pup, but he was already beside her, as was the wolf. Bek crouched beside them both, eyeing the wolf worriedly, since it still glared suspiciously in his direction. For an instant, his eyes met hers. He knew what Silver was thinking.

Again, the mountain shook. There were cracks forming in the walls now, cracks that gleamed with an eerie, ghostly light independent of the Zara’s fire. Figures appeared around them, characters in a language she did not recognize. There was a buzzing in the air, a barely detectable scent of ozone.

Then the magic dropped like a shroud from the center of the room, and the Stone was there, sitting utterly still. It was somewhat unremarkable. About the size of her palm, its facets smooth but not polished, it might as well have been nothing but a massive chunk of raw crystal, striated and creased with rod-like growth that made it broader in the middle than at either end. It was also, unmistakably, the same honey-gold color as the morning sunlight.

Silver scrambled up and leapt forward, snatching the Stone and turning to run. As promised, the three wolves waited for her, and also wheeled around to run.

“This is insanity,” Bek yelled, pounding down the dark tunnel behind her. She could hear Dusk behind him, scrambling through the narrow space. In the distance, thunder split the heavens. The curious hush that followed was met by another roar from deep within the heart of the mountain, causing fear to run like ice through Silver’s veins. The roar of stone, or of the Zara? She was not sure. She only knew one thing…

There was no turning back.

Down, down they pelted through the darkness, the intermittent roar of thunder and the crash of breaking stone overhead no longer differentiable. Her world narrowed to a series of serpentine stone walls banded in the occasional flash of glowing stone that silhouetted the ghostly form of the wolf at her side and the tree wolves ahead of them both. When the world was not crashing down around them, all sound but that of their footsteps faded, until the beat of her heart was like thunder as well.

Somehow, she never had the chance to worry that the tunnel would open up before them, and they plummet to their doom through a rift in the stone, or that a dead end would loom before them and they be trapped forever in a stony grave – at least, not until finally just such a thing happened. They had found the great open chamber at the heart of the nightwings’ caverns. It was rapidly emptying of its inhabitants now, as stone shook loose from overhead and came crashing down to earth. The path she, Bek, and the wolves had used to enter the mountain was sealed behind tons of rock and crystal. Silver skidded to an abrupt halt, staring at the impassable rubble.

“What now?” she asked of Pelorin. The darker beast looked back at her, and then at something over her head. She read in his glance what they needed to do. No words were necessary, not for any of them, as they turned as one to rush after the great white nightwing, who had taken wing towards a massive opening in the side of the cavern. His voice carried back to them, its meaning none other than that they should follow.

Suddenly, there was a sharp crack and the wall of nightwings above them scattered. Silver jumped out of the way just as one of the massive stalactites on the ceiling came crashing to the stony floor. It sent shards of glowing rock skittering across the ground. The wolf swerved to the other side, barking a warning. Then the five of them were pouring out into the open night, their feet crunching into two-foot thick snow as the wind hurled sleet against them. Within seconds, any doubts Silver might have had as to what was happening outside of the mighty caverns were dispelled.

Beneath the pure white light of the moon, she could see clots of the massive nightwings filling the skies. Dark tendrils encroached against the stony crags and mountainous snow drifts beneath them, and writhing shapes rose up from the shadows, jaws agape in silent screams, talons splayed and ebony fangs flashing with every forked blast of lightning. Crimson eyes speckled the pools of molten darkness, gleaming lethally as the shadows consumed the mountain and the snow, the sky, the trees, the beasts that rose to fend them off, and all else. Everything. Those that fought them tooth and nail found themselves fighting phantoms, overwhelmed by a foe that burned to the touch and seeped through the earth like water.

It was a scene straight from her darkest nightmares.

“Don’t stare, keep moving!” Bek shouted behind her, pressing her forward. In the next instant, Silver stopped just in time to avoid the smashing wings of a nightwing that plummeted into the snow feet from them. Her gaze flew upward, inevitably, to see a creature not so different from the shadow beasts encircled by the nightwings. It was one of their kind, its fur darker than the night and wings splayed to block out the moon. She felt its eyes shift towards the creature it had clearly just knocked from the skies, and then ducked at Pelorin’s howl of warning, pressing her eyelids shut. Through her closed eyelids, the world flashed with the illusory light of the tree wolves. It was so bright that when the wolf knocked against her to get her up, she still opened her eyes to bright spots that flickered in and out of her vision. But she did not pause; she fled with the others close beside her amid the angry screeches of the blinded bats.

“This is impossible,” she observed as they reached the cover of the trees and stopped to catch their breath – the wolf seemed satisfied that no shadow beast was about to catch them unawares. Fixing Bek with an incredulous stare, she gestured madly at the mountain. “There isn’t just one Zara; there have to be several dozen of them. The MASO seriously had no idea? And Pelorin, Biarn,” she said, turning towards the two tree wolves, “Where on earth are we headed? Is Zien even still alive?”

Bek made no reply, simply stared out over the scene unfolding behind them with the numb expression of someone who feels they may have escaped something so terrible it lay beyond even the reaches of their imagination. She wondered if, looking in a mirror, she would see the same expression on her own face.

“Be calm, human,” Pelorin said more gently than she might have expected, “this is beyond any of our expectations.”

“That’s the best advice you have? Be calm? Don’t worry that the demon that murdered my family is no longer alone; now there are a bunch of them. How do we kill these things? Tell me that. Tell me what powers they have besides the ability to disappear into the shadows and breathe fire. Tell me how long we run before they kill us, too!”

Pelorin growled low in his throat, baring his pearly fangs at her. But the wolf stepped between them, watching her with eyes as calm as the seas on a day without wind, a day without tides, a day as unnatural as the one in which she found herself.

“You fear now because you do not understand, Silver. There is only life. We fight to live. Always. So does our alpha, our srinn. So must you. In an instant, we live or die, this is true. But without knowing our fate, each instant we must hold to one truth alone; whether we will live or whether we will die, it cannot change whether we fight. We must. It is all we can do. Know this and you will be calm, because only one path lies before you.”

They stared at each other for a moment that felt like eternity. Silver was sure the wolf was speaking to her very soul. Slowly, she shifted her gaze to Pelorin, and to the pup that stood beside him. Frightened, but defiant. She understood the look now that she so often saw in the eyes of the beasts – that steely strength came not from the fact that they did not comprehend death, but from how fully they comprehended life. There was no room for questions. No philosophy. A simple, pragmatic, straightforward reality.

“None of us can stand up against even one of the Zara,” Bek was looking back at them all, the only one among them who could not possibly have understood any of their conversation. She wondered how she could ever share the mentality of the beasts with another human.

“Where will Zien know to look for us, Pelorin?” she asked. The tree wolf began to turn as if to answer her, but something Biarn had done caught Silver’s attention. Maybe it was the way the pup’s ruby eyes widened, or the way he suddenly squared himself. His eyes dropped to her and their gazes met seconds before the flailing limb of a tree slammed into her chest. It was as big around as her legs, and it threw her back through the snow with the force of a slow-moving car. There was nothing she could do to keep the Dawn Stone from flying out of her hands – she could not even stop the air from rushing out of her lungs with an audible whoosh when she hit the ground. Instant pain flooded her back and ribs.

Coughing and struggling to force air back into her lungs, she lay there for a moment, staring at the snow-laden canopy overhead. There were several seconds where she was too dazed to do more than try to figure out what had happened and why. Biarn had smashed a tree into her using the tree wolves’ unique magic. There had to be a reason for that, maybe something that he had seen behind her. Somehow, she had managed to land just sideways enough to avoid smashing the eggs in the pack on her back, or so she hoped. She could still move, albeit not without sending shivers of pain up and down her spine.

Then her reeling mind became aware that the din of battle had found them in the trees.

Muscles stiffening with sudden panic, she rolled to her stomach and scrabbled at the nearest tree until she managed to pull herself upright and twist around enough to see the scene behind her. It was nothing like she could have expected. Tree limbs whipped through the air, crackling and roaring as their bark twisted and splintered. She knew the tree wolves had to be controlling them, but her view of Pelorin and Biarn was completely blocked by the hulking ebony shape of a nightwing. It stood directly where she had been a moment ago, wings raised, saurian tail hissing through the snow as it turned its fangs against the flailing trees. Wood shattered between its vice-like jaws.

Silver tried to push herself away from the tree she balanced against, and instantly regretted it. Burning pain flared across her left side, nearly knocking her off her feet. Reaching back, she touched the tips of her fingers to her bruised flesh. There was blood, without a doubt. How much, she had no idea. Probably not enough to kill her. Enough to scare the crap out of her.

The black nightwing shifted, and for an instant she caught sight of Elorian. The wolf was snarling and snapping at the nightwing’s thin wing membranes.

Help them.

More heat rushed through her now, but it was in her head as well as her back. Silver felt herself sink fuzzily back down towards the ground, still leaning heavily against the tree. Her head was spinning, but it cleared a little when she finally reached ground level again. Biarn was on the ground, too. She saw him through a gap in the nightwing’s movements. Pelorin stood over him. Bek was beside the tree wolf, yelling something. She could not hear it over the nightwing’s screeching cries.

The world shuddered. Her heart was racing against her ribcage, beating across her chest and lungs. It was not enough to get her back on her feet.

Please.

She hardly knew what she was begging for, much less to whom. Whether to get her on her feet, or to keep the nightwing from landing a lethal blow on the wolf, or that Biarn was still alive, or that the nightwing would not turn to see her where she was, weak and powerless. It occurred to her after a long moment of confusion that she could use her magic. For a solid minute, she wrestled with herself, trying to focus, trying to clear her mind, trying to be calm. She finally gave up, going the route that had ended disastrously for her in the MASO instead. Wracking up every ounce of her anger, fear, and panic, she closed her eyes and sought out that silver gate at the center of her heart.

At first, she thought it was not working. Her mind was abuzz with pain and adrenaline, and she was sure the nightwing was inching back towards her through the snow. Then the sounds of battle began to fade around her, a deeper black pressing in as a single source of light drowned out the others. When exactly she reached her destination, she was not sure, but she stood before the silvery gates now. They sparkled in front of her, beautiful, ornate, ethereal.

Wrapping her fingers through the delicate silver whorls of the gate, Silver shook it, throwing her body weight against it again and again. The metal sang as it shook, a sound like bell chimes, the tinkle of glass. That was when she noticed the chains that held the gates closed. There was nothing she could do about those chains.

Silver opened her eyes when she sensed the nightwing had turned to fix its stare on her. She saw the expression on its shadowed face. Surprise. Rage. A terrible and powerful yearning. She knew those eyes. She knew this beast. But her mind did not comprehend what her heart already knew.

She was staring at the Zara.

Before she could even begin to understand what was happening, something plummeted from the open sky, ramming into the shadow beast’s back and sending the demon writhing to the earth. It clung to tufts of white fur, roaring its fury.

Dusk!

Silver found herself transfixed by the raging battle that ensued. White on black, the two nightwings became instantly entangled. Dusk sank half-foot fangs into the dark creature’s webbed wing membrane. The white nightwing’s snarl turned to a grimace of pain as his opponent caught hold of his leg and raked through fur and flesh. The air was filled with the sound of their snapping jaws. Silver shuddered, then, because the moonlight revealed bone through the black nightwing’s rotting flesh. She could see its skull, its eyes twin points of crimson fire in empty sockets.

It was slowly becoming more demon than beast.

Screeching angrily, Dusk finally managed to disentangle himself, launching into the air with a powerful downsweep of thirty-foot wings. He was evidently trying to escape the wrathful swat of the Zara-nightwing’s tail, and could not have anticipated the five jagged spines that shot up through the thick fur of the beast’s flesh as if it were a cat unsheathing its claws. Dusk barely evaded, and his success might have been due to Pelorin’s harried cry. It was a sound different from anything Silver had heard yet, a string of strange sounds rumbled through clenched jaws. The earth began to tremble beneath them, and with a great crack like a gunshot and the moan of something unused to motion, the trees around them bent sharply inward. They formed a cage around the Zara-turned-nightwing, wrapping their branches like talons around the beast’s ghostly flesh. It writhed and slashed furiously. Where its talons found purchase, they rent the branches to shreds. Where the wood touched the beast’s flesh, she saw it wither and gray, shriveling slowly.

The Zara continued to scream and struggle, but to no avail. Silver could see the outline of a skeleton now, stark against its black wing membranes and chest. The bone was receding, melting away. It was no longer possible to make out fur or flesh. But the phantom’s eyes…its eyes turned slowly, so slowly that she could have counted the heartbeats in between.

That abysmal gaze always returned to her in the end.

Always.

She hated that she was powerless against it. No matter what she did to compose herself, her fear of the creature was unsurpassable. It was like a cold vice in her stomach, squeezing the air from her lungs. Her skin was cold as ice, her breath frost in the air before her, and her body shivered uncontrollably. Only her gaze did not waver. The snow fell between them, but it had slowed to a crawl, and the flakes appeared to her blurred and insubstantial. She could smell the dark scales of the beast, the slight odor drifting through the air towards her as a barely identifiable scent. She met the Zara’s gaze…

And hatred stirred within her. Hatred for a thing that had taken everything away from her. Hatred of a higher power merely because it was so much greater than her own. It was a dizzying, exhilarating, terrible sensation. To this creature, she was beyond nothing.

Her fingers dug deeper into the snow, grasping desperately for anything that she could hold onto. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that blood stained the snow around her. All of it was her own. This beast had done that to her, but she was too far beyond words to accuse the Zara of anything. She simply stared, and all of her rage was in that stare.

With a roar, the Zara broke free, rising like smoke from the body of the nightwing. Dusk dove again, but the shadows rose up from the trees, knocking Silver’s would-be savior away. The Zara’s gaze did not break with hers. It was standing now, not a nightwing, but some other beast that had shed the shell of life. Liquid, ghostly movements closed the distance between them. Glittering ebony talons and fangs were the only part of the shadows that were not intangible, not shifting like smoke or fire or some strange combination of the two. That and the Zara’s bloodthirsty eyes.

The beast of shadows should have killed her. Silver knew it. And the wolf was right. In that instant, she understood that there was only one path in front of her…live or die, she would never go quietly. But what she wanted and what she was capable of were very different things. It was all she could do to struggle to her feet, one arm wrapped desperately around the tree at her back, as the Zara passed her by. Incredulous, she turned to watch the beast collect the Dawn Stone from where it had fallen in the snow, thrown from her hand when the tree wolf saved her life.

It looked back at her then. Or at least, she thought it did, at first, until she realized Elorian stood directly beside her, snarling and snapping at the beast. As the wolf had promised, they also knew each other. There was no question of it now.

Only the question of what it meant.