Page 137 of The First Scar
"Half a day, you said?"
Kaelen nodded once.
Maxx’s nostrils flared. "Then let's stop wasting time."
Kaelen turned from the ravine's edge, his gaze sweeping over our ragged group.
"The mill is a waypoint. We resupply, we regroup—but we don't stay." He said with finality. "Another half day's march from there to the Rupture Site. We perform the ritual as soon as we arrive."
I blinked. "That's—we barely escaped. Serenya can't even walk. And you want to—"
"The King's armies are already mobilizing." Kaelen cut me off, not unkindly. "Every hour we delay, his net tightens. We do this now, while he's still scrambling to find us, or we don't do it at all."
The King's armies. Eryndor would be with them. Leading them, maybe. The Thread-Warden, returned to his master's side like a loyal hound.
My chest burned where the Quell-Rune had been. I hoped the King’s leash was burning too.
I killed it. I didn't have room for him right now. Not with Serenya barely breathing and a ritual that might kill me waiting at the end of this road.
One day. Maybe less. And then I'd have to hold fifty heartbeats of fusion at the wound in the world itself.
Dreadscale's hand landed on my shoulder—heavy, grounding.
"You held thirty under fire," he said. "You destroyed a Quell-Rune through sheer desire and Fury." His gaze held mine. "Fifty is just twenty more. We'll work it on the march. You'll be ready."
Twenty more.He made it sound simple. But I thought of Serenya. I thought of the guards laughing about making her scream. I thought of the cell, the cold, the spider crawling over my hand while I waited to die.
I'd burned through the King's brand with nothing but rage and love.
Maybe that was enough. Maybe it had to be.
"Fine," I said. "We move."
Kaelen nodded once.
Dreadscale squeezed my shoulder, then let go.
And we walked into the mist.
We walked for hours.
The ravine gave way to scrubland, then forest—thin at first, silver birches with peeling bark, then denser growth that closed over our heads and killed the last of the light. Twigs snapped underfoot like small bones. The ground softened the deeper we went, each step punching through a crust of dead leaves into something wet and giving underneath. To our left, water trickled over rock—a bright, careless sound that belonged to a world that wasn't running from anything.
Dreadscale carried Serenya. Then Maxx. Then Dreadscale again. They traded without speaking—just a look, a nod, and the careful transfer of her weight between them. Her head lolled against whoever held her, her breathing so shallow I kept pressing my fingers to her throat just to feel the pulse.
My legs stopped feeling like legs somewhere around the third mile. They became mechanical things—lifting, falling, lifting again. The adrenaline from the dungeon had burned off, and wet sand had taken its place. Every joint. Every tendon. Grinding when I moved.
The massive water wheel outside the Old Mill groaned with every revolution—a rhythmic, dying sound that vibrated through the floorboards. Inside, the air was thick with the scent ofunwashed bodies, medicinal herbs, and the metallic tang of dried blood. Home sweet home.
The place was full. Rebels filled every corner—thirty, maybe forty, packed into a space built for sacks of flour, not soldiers. Some I recognized. The fae from the treeline was already inside, her arm being stitched by a healer near the far wall. Brannick's friend with the crooked nose sat cleaning a blade, his leg wrapped in a makeshift splint. But most of the faces were new to me—starker, more severe, wearing the roughspun grey of the border settlements. They had the look of people who'd been fighting longer than we had and expected to keep fighting longer still. A few glanced up when we entered. Most didn't. They'd seen enough battered survivors stumble through that door to know the routine.
I sat on a crate near the healer’s makeshift station, my eyes locked on Serenya.
She lay on a pallet of straw, still and drawn, a thin sheen of sweat clinging to her skin. The healer—with hands stained yellow by potent root-sap—was slathering a thick, pungent paste over the ruin of her arm. Serenya didn't move. She was too deep under Maxx's stabilizer draught to feel the burn.
But I saw it working.
The shallow gashes had already sealed during the march—skin knitting together like it couldn't stand to stay open. The deeper wounds were slower, uglier. The healer's salve hissed against exposed flesh, and Serenya's body answered, pulling from what the old healer's hands had started.
