He ran.

Which was probably not the smartest thing to do, all things considered. Even discounting the wolves still prowling the darkness, there remained the blood knight and his mount, and a forest once more alive with the giants that had dominated them before humanity took to building cities and villages and ships that ate up timber the way starvation emptied tables and cabinets. 

But the knight wasn’t after his horse. He wasn’t chasing down the drimgair or any other creature that called the shadows home and would have answered Eli’s call for help the moment the thought entered his head. He was after Eli. 

Athairólthain, he is yours.

The blood knight’s last words echoed in his head as he darted between two massive oaks. Athairólthain. If truth resided in any of the legends, his chances of escape had just turned paper-thin narrow. Eli had heard the stories as a child, but as he grew into a teen, those myths were told less and less frequently, replaced by tales of knights and dragons, and by the time he had entered his twenties, of the empire, both as villain and savior. How many children today had heard about the serpent who devoured worlds, the one who slithered in the dark and answered the calls of those who suffered, who would just as easily deliver justice when justice would not lift its hand as it would wreak havoc upon the earth to allow for all to start again? 

Athairólthain brought healing just as often as she brought destruction.

His lungs ached. His heart raced. And all the while, he could sense the drimgair running through the night alongside him, fending off the wolves as they dove into the shadows and tried to corner him. 

Give them armor of dark, he thought, and shelter their hearts from the dreams of nightmares.

As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t speak the words, but Eli knew it would be enough. Any help at all, anything he could give, he wanted to. 

Every muscle seemed to burn now. Eli slid across a patch of mud, nearly losing his footing entirely. He reached out, dragging his palm across a tree trunk to steady himself, scraping skin off in the process. It stung, but not as badly as his chest did now.

He tripped again.

This time, he stumbled several steps forward and almost landed face-first in the dirt.

Eli swallowed. It hurt, his throat no more than a tract of desert, and every breath he gulped down only desiccated it further. All around him, the shadows hung heavy and thick, a convoluted mess of nature, magic, and death. 

“Bring me but...a star’s breath...show me the world,” he panted. His whole body trembled. 

From the darkness, a pale light flickered, silver and clean. Eli glanced around him and saw nothing. No rocks. No roots. Just leaves and moss and bits of bark and branches too small to interfere with his stride. He licked his dry lips and exhaled heavily. 

The blood knight no longer galloped after him, but he could still hear the horse moving, crushing forest litter beneath its hooves. As far as he could tell, they proceeded at a steady walk. Searching. Though too dark to tell where it ended, the wall of trees had also stopped building itself. It brought a strange quiet to the forest. Even as Eli knew it was the same quiet that had inhabited it before the knight had sprung his chase, he could not help feeling unnerved by it. No different than the silence that settled over the battlefield, with neither side certain if it was the end or merely a lull before the worst hit. 

Had the knight lost track of him?

He had no desire to find out. Eli took off at a run again, his every movement still cloaked in silence. This time, he angled sharply to the right. There was a road not far from here, an offshoot of the one that led into Syehnäki, and beyond that, a swift-running stream that fed into a river three miles from the city. If he could just make it to the water, he could put their war of shadows into a stalemate.

His foot caught on something again. Eli dropped to a knee and barely managed to stifle the cry that had tried to rip itself out of him. Pain coiled around his ankle. Not sharp enough to stop him but enough to remind him he was only human. Too human. Fingers digging into the dirt, he attempted to push himself back onto his feet again, only to find his left leg snared. 

It hit him then. 

The absolute silence. 

Different from before. Not just the forest but the shadows now, too. Everything but the blood knight and his horse had fallen into a quiet so deep it could not be trusted. 

Eli pulled at his leg once more and found something tugging back against him. 

His heart jumped against his ribs. And then, he laughed. 

“You do exist,” he said, his voice raw from the efforts of his attempted escape. “Well, come on, then. Show yourself.”

All around him, the shadows writhed. Thick black coils drifted up to the forest’s floor like flotsam after a ship’s demise. They buoyed there, bobbing up and down, and filled the space around Eli. He could reach out in either direction and still not grasp anything beyond the giant serpent. When he finally looked down at his leg, he met a pair of bright amethyst eyes and a mouth clamped around his foot, two sinister fangs slicing down on either side as the snake lifted its head from the shadows. 

When he tried to turn himself over, with a gentle nudge of his foot to ask the snake for compliance, he instead found himself staring at the serpent’s tail. 

“You know, I’d just like to get a little more comfortable before we do this.” He wiggled his fingertips against the dirt and cautiously began to write. “Should I take that as a no?”

From the beyond, a pr—

Another head bobbed to the surface before his face. Eli found himself staring into a second set of eyes, as purple as all the other heräkuom, and noted the way his small bulb of starlight glinted off the black scales lining the snake’s head. 

“So, there’s two of you.”

He wanted to laugh, but the sound buried itself inside his chest. The serpent flicked its tongue centimeters from his face, and as Eli watched the flash of pink whip across the air, he felt the weight of the snake’s tail as it curled around his wrist and forced his hand up from the ground.

“Did you think there was only one?”

Eli dropped his forehead to the dirt, and this time, he did laugh. Low and mirthless. He took in a breath, the air scented thickly with cedar and pine and the sweet decay of leaf litter spread across the forest floor. 

“That’s what all the stories said,” Eli answered.

Somewhere behind him, the blood knight dismounted. The snakes continued to writhe around him, sliding their bodies along his, under him, over him. With both his arms now ensnared, he could only lie there and work to steady his breathing.

Never in his life had he considered this a potential ending he might face. 

“The stories always speak of Athairólthain as both healer and destroyer. Why has it never occurred to any of you that there might be more than one?”

The blood knight dropped to a squat on his right side. Eli turned his head and found it pillowed by one of the snake’s coils, putting the knight into full view. 

“Because we all have the capacity for good and evil. Athairólthain is no different. It’s not a novel concept as far as myths and the like go,” Eli said. Up close like this, under the shimmer of his starlit lamp, he could see the knight’s features far more clearly. There could be no mistaking the man’s heritage as a blood knight. Not with eyes so green you’d think them the pinnacle of life. There were other bloodlines with green eyes, of course, but far more muted in color, always with a touch of gray or blue. Never as bright and pure as this. Eli let out a small laugh. “You’re way too pretty to be a master of death."

“And you’re way too clever to be playing with shadows in a world that shuns them.”

“Says the man galavanting around on a death mare and locking all the dark’s doors. Is that why you were taking your time back there while I was out here running for my life?”

The corner of the knight’s mouth twitched. Eli could see he wanted to laugh as well, but he shook his head instead. His eyes danced with amusement, though. 

“You weren’t expecting me, were you?”

“Does anyone ever expect a blood knight these days?

“Perhaps not.”

“Sore subject?”

“An old one.”

“Why did you think I wasn’t expecting you?”

The blood knight reached out and ran the tip of his index finger along the body of the nearest snake. “You were thinking you’d get someone familiar with the shadows. But not me.”

Eli lifted an eyebrow. He started to smile again.

“Why do you work for the empire, knight?”

Silence. The blood knight’s finger stopped moving. His mouth pulled to a rigid line, and something like pain flashed within his eyes. Then, the man smiled, a gesture so full of defeat that even Eli, bound as he was by his own fresh losses, felt the weight of it against his heart. 

Of course. Why would a blood knight ever willingly serve the empire? 

The knight exhaled, and all traces of emotion slipped out with it. Tipping his head to the side, he lifted his hand and slid two fingers beneath Eli’s chin. His touch gentle, his fingertips warm. All of that information sat in direct opposition to the expression the knight now wore. He lifted Eli’s head off the snake’s body and met his gaze directly. 

“Where is the dragon egg?” 

Eli grinned shamelessly. “Sorry to disappoint you, my dear knight, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

This time, when the blood knight smiled, there was a tightness to it that Eli wanted desperately to break. 

The knight leaned in, close enough that his lips brushed against Eli’s ear, and murmured, “That’s rather unfortunate. Because your magic feels the exact same as the sort I encountered just a few days ago.”