Page 36 of The Crown's Awakening
Teorin reaches me through the break. His hand closes around my arm, firm and immediate, and the contact anchors me in a way that feels more dangerous than anything pressing toward us. His gaze moves over me in a single sweep, taking in more than I can follow, and something in his expression shifts when he finds what he is looking for, something quieter than the rest of him, something he does not allow to remain.
“We don’t hold them,” he says. “We move.”
“Wards,” I answer, already turning with him, because I understand what direction means now.
“They’re ahead. We get the hull to touch and we cross.”
Another impact hits the ship, harder this time, the entire deck shuddering beneath us as the tilt sharpens again. I look past him then, properly this time, and the scale of what remains presses in with a clarity that feels almost detached.
There are fewer of them now. I realize with a jolt that it is not just passengers but Teorin's men who are missing. Bodies lie broken across the deck, some unmoving, others attempting to rise and failing as the ship shifts beneath them. The Threns who remain are spread too thin, their power tearing through the space in bursts that no longer control the field but only interrupt it, buying seconds that disappear almost as quickly as they are made. Along the rail, the undead continue to climb, draggingthemselves over one after another, their numbers building faster than they can be pushed back.
He sees it too.
“They’ll breach again,” Nyara says, coming up beside us, her voice edged with effort. “If they open the lower hull, this ship won’t hold.”
“Then we don’t give them the time,” Teorin replies. His attention moves across the deck as he begins issuing orders I don’t fully hear, but I feel the effect of them in the way the remaining Threns shift, tightening their positions, forcing what control they have left into something more deliberate.
The ship groans as it lurches, then begins to move again, uneven but forward, and I feel the change immediately in the way the pressure shifts beneath my feet, in the way the bodies along the rail begin to drag sideways instead of inward, their movement pulled toward the direction of motion.
“Hold the deck,” he says, to no one and everyone at once, and then, quieter, to me, “When we reach it, you go last.”
“I know.”
The answer comes easily, without hesitation.
He looks at me, and I hold his gaze long enough for him to understand that this is not something I am leaving open for discussion, not now, not when everything around us is already collapsing into something we cannot control.
Something in him shifts at that, a quiet tightening that never quite turns into resistance, because he understands what this requires and what it costs. He says nothing, and the moment passes without room for anything more.
The air changes before I see it. The cold deepens, but beneath it something else gathers, something older, something that does not belong to the sea or the storm or the bodies pressing toward us. The space ahead distorts, as though the air itself has been stretched thin across something that resists being seen directly.
“The wards,” Nyara says.
The ship slows as it reaches them, the forward motion caught and held, the hull meeting a boundary that does not yield. The impact is muted, but absolute, and the ship comes to a complete stop as though held in place by something that cannot be forced aside.
A plank drops from the side and settles against that unseen edge, bridging the space between what we are and what waits beyond it.
“Go,” Teorin says.
They move. There is no order to it, no structure, only urgency as they cross one at a time, their bodies shifting as they pass through, as though something presses against them before allowing them through.
Another follows, and then another. Behind us, the pressure builds again, and the undead begin to converge toward the same point, their movement tightening as they are drawn to the boundary with a focus that feels almost purposeful.
Talen crosses.
Nyara grips my arm once, hard enough to mean something, then releases me and moves with the others, stepping onto the plank and disappearing through the distortion without looking back.
I remain where I am.
Teorin does not move toward the plank. He moves toward me. “Now,” he says.
“Not yet.”
His expression changes briefly before control closes over it again, because there is no time left to turn it into anything else. The last of them clears the plank and the space behind us collapses. The undead surge forward all at once, their numbers spilling across the deck in a mass that erases whatever structure had held before. The remaining Threns are swallowed into it, their power breaking apart under the weight of what presses through.
Teorin steps past me and into them. His power breaks outward without restraint, tearing through the space behind me in a force that drives them back across the deck. The boards splinter beneath it, the impact cracking through everything it touches, the first line of bodies forced away from the plank just long enough to open the space we need.
It will not last. He knows it and so do I.
