The Road To Drakhar
1270 Words
They gave me a horse that hated people.
I decided she and I would get along fine.
Her name, according to the stablehand who refused to make eye contact when he handed me the reins, was Sable — a massive black mare with a scar across her left flank and a disposition that had apparently already put two packmen on the ground this week. She rolled one dark eye at me as I approached, nostrils flaring, body coiled and ready to make someone's morning miserable.
I held out my hand, palm flat, and waited.
She snorted. Stamped once. Then dropped her nose into my palm and breathed.
"Smart girl," I murmured. "You know who's not a threat."
Behind me, I heard Elder Carrow exhale like a man who had been bracing for a scene. Around him, a small cluster of pack members had gathered in the grey pre-dawn — not to say goodbye, I understood. Wolves didn't gather to say goodbye to sacrifices. They gathered to make sure the sacrifice actually left.
I didn't look at any of them.
I had made myself one promise in the dark hours before dawn, lying awake on the thin mattress I had slept on my entire life, staring at the ceiling I would never see again: I would not give Ashveil Pack the satisfaction of watching me break.
I swung up onto Sable's back, settled my small pack across my shoulders, and gathered the reins.
"The King's escort is waiting at the eastern ridge," Elder Carrow called up to me. "They'll take you the rest of the way. It's two days' ride to Drakhar Keep."
"I know where it is."
"Amara." His voice dropped. Something in it shifted — something that might have been human, once. "For what it's worth—"
"It's worth nothing, Elder." I clicked my tongue at Sable and nudged her forward. "Save it for someone who still cares what this pack thinks of them."
I rode out of Ashveil without looking back.
I refused to look back.
---
The Lycan escort was waiting exactly where Carrow had said — four soldiers at the base of the eastern ridge, mounted on horses so large they made Sable look modest. The soldiers themselves matched their mounts. Massive, silent, armored in dark leather with silver wolf-head insignia at their shoulders. Their faces were stone.
The one at the front — a scarred man with close-cropped hair and pale, watchful eyes — looked me over the way you'd assess cargo. Checking for damage. Calculating weight.
"Amara Osei?" he said.
"That's me."
"I'm Commander Reth. You'll follow my lead. You won't speak unless spoken to. You won't attempt to run." He said this last part like a man who had delivered this particular speech many times, and had learned to say it without expression. "The King does not pursue escapees himself. He sends the Hunt. You don't want to meet the Hunt."
"Noted." I kept my voice flat. "Are we riding or are we talking?"
Something shifted in Commander Reth's pale eyes. Not quite surprise. More like the careful reassessment of a man who had expected something easier.
"Riding," he said, and turned his horse north.
---
We rode in silence through the morning.
I used the time to study the landscape, because it was better than thinking about where it was taking me. The Ashveil territory fell away behind us — pine forests thinning into open highland, the sky pressing down grey and wide. The further north we went, the colder the air became, carrying with it a smell I couldn't name. Something mineral and ancient. Like stone and lightning and something else beneath both, something dark and almost sweet.
It grew stronger as the hours passed.
By midday, I noticed the trees had changed. The tall, familiar pines of Ashveil's territory had given way to something older and darker — black-barked trees I had no name for, their branches twisted into shapes that looked almost intentional, almost like reaching hands. The light came through them differently. Thinner. Like it was being filtered.
Even Sable felt it. She had been steady all morning, but now her ears were constantly moving, her pace tightening with a tension she couldn't express.
"Easy," I murmured, pressing one hand briefly to her neck. "I know."
"First time in the borderlands?" Commander Reth spoke without turning. I hadn't realized he was paying attention.
"First time north of the ridge," I said.
"You'll feel it for another day. The land here carries the King's mark. Most wolves find it..." He paused, choosing his word carefully. "Unsettling."
"I'm not most wolves."
He glanced back at me then. A proper look, not the cargo-check from before. Something more considered.
"No," he said slowly. "I don't suppose you are."
He turned forward again before I could ask him what he meant.
---
We camped that night in the shadow of a rock formation that jutted from the earth like a broken fist. The soldiers moved with efficient silence — fire built, rations distributed, watch rotation established without a single unnecessary word. They were good at this. Comfortable in the dark in a way that Ashveil wolves, with their warm packhouses and organized settlements, never quite managed.
I sat apart from them, close enough to the fire to feel its heat, far enough to make it clear I wasn't looking for conversation.
I opened my mother's journal.
She had died when I was four — fever, they said, though I had always suspected the pack's neglect had more to do with it than the fever itself. She had left almost nothing behind. This journal was the everything of her. Small, leather-covered, its pages filled with handwriting so careful it looked like she'd been afraid to waste a single stroke.
I turned to the last entry, the one I had read so many times the page had gone soft at the edges.
*My Amara,* it read. *If you are reading this then I am gone and I am sorry. There is so much I wanted to tell you that I don't know how to write. Only this: what they say you are — what they will say about you your whole life — none of it is true. You are not a curse. You are not nothing. You are the thing I prayed for, the answer the Moon gave me when I begged her for something that mattered.*
*The power in you is sleeping. Don't be afraid when it wakes.*
*Don't be afraid of what you are.*
I closed the journal.
The fire crackled. One of the soldiers turned in his sleep. Somewhere out in the black beyond the firelight, something large moved through the trees — too large for a deer, too quiet for anything ordinary — and went still.
I felt it then. That pull again. Stronger than it had ever been. Like a compass needle swinging hard toward north, except north was not a direction. North was a presence. North was something vast and waiting, somewhere ahead of me in the dark.
Something that knew I was coming.
I pressed my hand flat against the earth beneath me, the way I used to do as a child when the loneliness got too heavy and I needed to feel something solid. The ground hummed faintly against my palm. Or maybe that was just my imagination.
*Don't be afraid of what you are.*
"I'm trying, Mama," I whispered.
The fire snapped. The dark held its breath.
And somewhere far ahead, in the black fortress on the mountain, something ancient opened its eyes.
- Writer
