Chapter 10 – His Voice in the Mist
590 Words
The mist moved with purpose.
It didn’t drift like fog or flow like smoke—it stalked. Curling around broken stone, circling Lina and Ares with slow, deliberate movements, as though testing the air for weakness.
Lina stepped back, but the veil of black followed her, stretching like a shadow that had learned how to hunt.
“Ares…” she whispered.
“I see it.”
His voice cut through the humming silence—steady, controlled, the one thing that hadn’t fractured despite everything around them. He positioned himself between her and the mist, shoulders tense, eyes narrowed.
“That isn’t a shadow,” he said. “It’s something older.”
“How much older?”
He didn’t answer. His silence was answer enough.
The mist throbbed with a dull pulse, matching the cold ache still crawling up Lina’s leg from where the earlier shadow had touched her. She pressed her palm to the stone beside her, trying to steady her breathing.
“This place feels… wrong,” she said.
“It should,” Ares replied. “The Realm Between isn’t meant to be walked by anything living.”
“Are you living?”
He paused.
She felt the weight of the question in the air—felt how it tugged at something buried beneath his calm facade. For a heartbeat, the silver in his eyes flickered like a dying star.
“I exist,” he said finally. “That’s enough for now.”
Before she could push further, the mist surged—not at Ares, but at her. A tendril of smoke whipped toward her chest with a speed she couldn’t react to.
Ares didn’t hesitate.
He vanished.
Not stepped—vanished. A blink of silver light, and he was suddenly between her and the incoming strike. His arm swept through the tendril, scattering it into a thousand fragments that dissolved on the ground.
But the mist recoiled only for a second.
Then it shifted tactics.
A whisper slid through the air—soft, distant, echoing like a voice remembering how to speak.
Lina…
Her blood froze.
It wasn’t Ares’s voice.
And it wasn’t coming from the mist.
It was coming from inside the stone beneath her feet.
She stumbled away. “Did you hear that?”
Ares’s expression sharpened. “Hear what?”
“It said my name.”
The mist pulsed violently at her words, as if her speaking gave it strength. A second whisper followed—clearer, louder, filled with something that wasn’t human.
You are not complete…
Lina pressed both hands to her temples, a piercing ache splitting behind her eyes. “Ares, make it stop!”
The mist reached for her again, threads converging from every direction.
Ares grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “Listen to me. The mist can’t touch you unless you let it inside.”
“How do I stop that?!”
“Focus on my voice.”
She tried. Gods, she tried—his voice was the only thing tethering her to herself.
But the whispers grew stronger.
Come back…
Come home…
Her knees buckled.
Ares caught her, pulling her against his chest.
“Lina,” he said sharply, “stay with me.”
“I—I can’t—”
“Yes. You can. Look at me.”
She did.
And the world narrowed, the mist dimming, the whispers fading beneath the steel in his voice.
The ground trembled again.
The mist screamed.
And something answered it from far, far deeper within the Realm Between.
- Writer
