Chapter 007

Blood or the Sea. Salt is salt.

Harker was cold.

The wet was an afterthought, and at a distant third was a foggy curiosity. Why was his stomach so warm?

Vision came next, swimming up from faded depths into a cloying night. Hazy and wavering, light still filtered through from some unnamable source, enough to recognize that he dangled from a lip of too narrow stone. What remained of his sweater was tangled around his arm and the eager grasp of jagged roots, the thick threads caught enough that it was half supporting his weight.

My…my bag…

It was just ahead, the side split open and his food and supplies scattered across the wet shale. Most had fallen over the edge and into utter shadow beyond. Harker tugged vainly at his tangled arm but there was no strength there. A deep enervation sapped him to the core, replacing his meager might with a looseness he couldn’t shake.

Restricted breathing. Lancing pain across midsection. Left ankle stiff, swollen—he flexed his foot and gritted his teeth against a hot swell of agony. Broken.

Worse, his left arm and side were a firestorm. They burned exactly where the warmest of the wet was pouring from him. Blood loss. Loss of coordination. He flexed the toes of his right foot. But at least I haven’t lost my boots.

There was a roar.

Harker’s heart hammered, and he fought to hear anything else above the rush of his pulse. He swallowed, clearing something deep in his ears, and the roar pushed up at him from over the ledge. It wasn’t an Illwrought.

It was water.

The deluge hadn’t stopped. Rivers poured off of the sides of the canyon all around him, arcing off wind-smoothed boulders and down into the depths of the Drop. Over the lip of his little ledge, Harker couldn’t see the bottom, but from the sound of it, the chasm was filling fast.

The distant sound of white caps atop sharpened stone churned him to action. He tugged at his tangled arm, freeing it with a sharp jerk. The ledge pulled at him, the Drop all but growling hungrily, but Harker dug his fingers into the thin layer of soil, clinging as tenaciously as any ragged root.

The wounds on his left throbbed. His muscles weren’t ready to be used like this, and more warmth fled from him, along with a sickly scent that was disturbingly familiar.

The hound that got Mari…

Her wound had smelled exactly the same.

The Illwrought had got him good before they’d fallen. Its claws had severed something deep in his arm and Harker could do little more than clench his fist. His right arm grasped onto thick-rooted weeds he didn’t recognize, and he pulled himself closer to the cliff face. It cost him breath and no little amount of blood, but he was entirely atop the ledge now. From there, he could—

The roar changed. It deepened into a hoarse rattle…and huffing breaths.

The Illwrought! Where is it? He couldn’t make anything out through the dark and rain. The light was too dim to make out—The light?

Harker glanced upward to the sky, expecting the moon or stars, but the storm clouds still occluded the heavens. Instead, the light emanated from ahead, just down the thin ledge, where a crevice broke into deeper stone. The light came from there. It was pale, tinged with an amber hue that limned his right arm he’d stretched ahead.

There was…a sound. It was quieter than the swelling river or the huffing of the nearby beast, and yet more piercing than both. It was as familiar as a song from a childhood memory. It was the salted comfort of hot broth and the rainfall on the ten thousand straws of a thatched roof.

It sounded like home.

Harker stretched out, digging his fingers into the thin soil as his booted foot pushed against whatever he could manage. Right arm. Right foot. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d started moving. His head was too fuzzy, yet he plied every bit of strength he could muster as his mind latched onto logic.

Get out of the rain and the cold. Warm up. Get a wall behind my back. Survive.

Between one push and the next, time slipped loose. Harker’s jaw ached where it had bashed into the rock ledge but he didn’t remember it. He blinked, but it was too slow. He was soaked to the bone and he stopped feeling the blood seeping from his side.

Not like this. He pulled himself forward again. Survive.

The tunnel was before him. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders, but Harker wriggled himself through. Every inch was a stretch of agony. Twice he got caught, hips caught on protruding stones. Harker twisted himself with a dogged strength until he slipped free, his lips bitten through and bloody as he emerged into a low-roofed cavern.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author’s preferred platform and support their work!

Stone slanted above, crushed against one another into a ceiling marred by a deep crevice. The light was brighter here. Amber had turned a more brilliant yellow, emanating as if from the very rocks themselves—rocks that were covered in fungus, dirt, and roots that almost hid the signs of architecture. Cut blocks, cornices, and the same blobby shapes he’d seen thousands of times.

Harker blinked, a shiver accompanying blurred vision. It’s just like my home.

The yellow light sharpened. It glimmered gold, deepened by steady, foaming beats. It thickened, waves that rolled over Harker’s face.

What is it? Sea-touched stone?

The sound of waves crashed over him. He’d never heard its like before, but it spoke to something inside of him. A memory he couldn’t recall, baked into his very bones. It smelled of salt and damp, sounded of ceaseless roaring and trickling streams. It conjured images of dark waves and swirling foam beneath an endless star-flecked sky.

The Infinite Sea? He glanced up again. The golden glow had coalesced into a point of brilliance. The crevice welled with it before spilling outward, spreading liquid gold across the ceiling in strident ripples.

Teeth sank into his right heel.

Harker hollered, back seized in knots and he twisted around to see the Illwrought. It had squeezed its shoulders through the tunnel, but he was far more concerned with its jaws. The Illwrought snarled, savaging his boot and hauling him closer.