Page 188 of Sunsplitter

“You’re my family, too, Fionamara.”

She rounded on him with a scowl, as if Antal’s low words were weapons to be parried. It never lasted. Not anymore. She softened, breath fogging around a sigh.

“I know, Antlers.”

Last night, he’d asked her to marry him. She’d not given an answer, had told him to ask again once his head was clearer. Then the world had come crumbling down. It seemed an ageago, that soft morning, waking with her in his arms.

Antal begged the Void for one more soft morning, this sordid business with aedari and his father behind them.

“Keep looking,” she said. Her gaze returned to the trees. “I don’t like this.”

Neither did Antal. If the aedari had been here recently, they’d stumbled into a larger peril. Antal circled the hearth, just so Fionamara couldn’t accuse him of not being thorough.

A new scent hit his nose.

He frowned. This smell was cool, rather than hot. Antal breathed deeper, testing the notes of ozone. Hoarfrost. The sweet of midnight dahlias.

“What is it?” Fionamara asked.

Antal couldn’t breathe. He was vaguely aware of Fionamara shouting at him, the mumble of her curses as she waded through rubble to get closer, but Antal was too busy huffing a lungful of snow. The scent was so faint, he could have missed it. So familiar, he’d know it anywhere.

It smelled like Avroz.

But it was wrong. Not a trail, like someone passing through. The scent was localized. Antal brushed away a drift of snow near the hearth. Nothing. He hefted one of the stones. There was a gap underneath, a hollow amidst the crumbled masonry. And hidden inside…

The whole Plane fell still around Antal. Frozen, the beat of his phantom heart. Motionless, his tail drooped against the snow. He’d told himself this was a futile errand. They’d never find anything.

Nothing in the farthest reaches of the Void could have prepared him for that piece of daeyari antler, smooth and lacquer black.

Aedari glyphs glowed gold along its length.

Antal stared at it.

He was still staring when Fionamara reached him. She stared, too. In the cold, both their breaths billowed steam.

“Fuck me in the Void,” she said. “Is that—”

“It’s his,” Antal returned in a hush. It smelled like Avroz. The length fit the tip he’d lost.

“Holyfuck. I thought…” Fionamara’s lantern swayed, her cheeks pale as snow. “I thought we might find a trail or something. Not anantler. How in the endless Void did that get here?… Antal? Are you ok?”

He wasn’t.

Antal’s world fell apart in pieces.

“He should have thrown this into the Void,” Antal said in a hush.

All the cold that had ravaged his insides, the numb creeping up his fingers, thawed beneath a burst of heat. It galvanized his teeth, sparked like embers down his claw tips.

“Avroz went to the Contested Planes,” Antal said. “He fought an aedari.”

Fionamara hovered at his side, concern in her dark eyes.

“He lost,” Antal said, “he fled back home, not realizing the glyphs on his antler. A marker the aedari could track. He cut off the antler tip, then left.”

“That was as much as Yme knew.”

“Avroz didn’t want the aedari tracking him to the Twilit Plane,” Antal said, lower still. “But he didn’t destroy the antler. How could it have gotten here… unless he brought it?”