My five guardians

Chapter 6. A Quiet Night.

Thaeren’s camp wasn’t much to speak of.

A sheet tied between two trees that gave the illusion of a roof, a circle of stones where a fire had burned hours ago, two bundles of supplies arranged with methodical precision. Indira looked it all over with the gaze of someone who had slept in worse places and had learned not to judge.

“Sit down.” Thaeren had already opened one of the bundles and was taking things out with movements that were neither hurried nor hesitant. “Both of you.”

Conall didn't sit down. He leaned against a tree with his arms crossed, his expression betraying discomfort and a desire not to be there, but he stayed with them, nonetheless.

“Your side,” Thaeren said, looking at him without raising his voice. “If you don’t clean it tonight, you won’t be able to move properly tomorrow. And if you can’t move properly, you’re a problem for everyone”

A brief silence.

Conall sat down.

Indira watched Thaeren work; his movements had the precision of someone experienced, and she wondered how many times he had performed healing before. His hands moved confidently over the wounds on Conall’s side, cleaning them and applying something that smelled of bitter bark and green grass, making no more contact than necessary and never taking his eyes off the task at hand.

Conall gazed toward the forest throughout the entire process, pretending that it didn’t hurt at all—perhaps normal for someone trained to fight, she thought.

“You’re lucky the claws didn’t dig any deeper.” Thaeren tied the bandage with a precise knot. “Infected bears can’t control their strength. If it had connected properly, we’d be having a different conversation.”

“It didn’t connect properly.” Conall’s voice was flat.

“No.” Thaeren gathered his supplies without haste. He sighed at Conall’s attitude before turning to look at Indira.

The blue eyes turned toward Indira for a moment. She looked away first, as always, out of habit, and then berated herself for doing so. Why was it that only that gaze made her look away, when Thaeren’s hazel eyes didn’t make her feel uncomfortable at all?

She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her back against a thick root, and looked at her hands in the darkness. There were no blue lights now. Just skin darkened by the sun and small scars from years of gathering herbs among brambles—hands that looked perfectly ordinary on the outside but that tonight had sent a bear running, a bear that had been on the verge of killing Conall.

She thought about that. About how easy it would have been to lose him. About how quickly it had all happened.

About how much he had meant to her. She kept that last thought to herself without dwelling on it too much.

“You should eat while I tend to you,” said Thaeren, who unceremoniously handed her some stale bread and a strip of jerky—she didn’t ask what kind—while he examined her head and carefully touched some of her strands of hair caked with dried blood. “When we’re done, I hope you’ll be able to rest.” “We’re moving early tomorrow.”

“Where to?” she asked.

“East. There’s a pass between the hills that skirts two contaminated zones without entering either one.” A pause. “My master documented it. He said it was the safest route if I ever needed to move with someone who drew energy.”

Indira looked at him.

“So, your master actually made an escape route for me, before I even existed?”

“For someone like you.” Thaeren corrected her with that calmness of his that wasn’t condescension but precision. “He’d been waiting a long time for someone like you to appear. He was a very methodical man.”

Conall spoke from his tree without shifting position.

“What if the path isn’t safe anymore? The zones are expanding. What your master documented might not apply.”

“It might.” Thaeren didn’t dismiss the possibility. “That’s why I’m taking notes.”

The two men looked at each other for a moment; their expressions seemed to say they didn’t know each other well enough to start a fight, but they had just confirmed that they could do so with ease.

Indira ate in silence and let the tension resolve itself; she had more on her mind than the battle over who was in charge between the two of them.

It took Thaeren longer than he expected to tend to each of Indira’s wounds. When he finished cleaning her head, he moved on to the marks on her arms, checked the wounds on her legs, and almost forgot to examine her torso, where she had even more injuries.

She didn’t fall asleep right away.

She lay beneath the canvas with her eyes open, gazing at the branches above her, listening to Thaeren’s steady breathing—he slept with the same efficiency with which he did everything else—and to Conall’s absolute silence; he remained awake somewhere along the perimeter, though she couldn’t see him.

The blue lights came slowly.

She remembered them in that empty space where she had been; there, they were the only thing visible, present all the time around her. Here they were small, flickering, seeping through the roots in the ground like water seeking cracks. But tonight they had a direction. They weren’t circling her, but moving northward with an insistence that wasn’t urgent but wasn’t casual either.

Indira followed them with her eyes without moving.

There was something in that direction. Something pulsing at a frequency she felt in her chest more than in her ears, like a distant drum, like the heartbeat of something too vast to have a name yet.

She slowly reached out toward one of the lights. She drew closer, brushed her fingers against it, and for a moment—just a moment—Indira saw something that wasn’t the forest above her but a distant place, trees she didn’t recognize, a sky that was the wrong color, and at the center of it all, a darkness that seemed to make every ray of light nearby vanish.

She withdrew her hand.

The lights continued moving northward, patiently, without haste.

"Not yet," they seemed to say. "But soon."

She closed her eyes and wasn't sure exactly when she fell asleep.

Aldric found the clearing at dawn.

His guards had followed him for hours, tracking with the trained efficiency of seasoned shapeshifters, and when they reached the spot where the earth still bore the memory of what had happened, one of them stopped and pointed without saying a word.

The signs of the fight were clear. The tainted bear they had encountered earlier—and which had taken the combined strength of them all to bring down—had also been here; this was evident in the way the young trees along the perimeter had been scraped and the earth churned up. But someone else had been here as well. At least two people. And something had happened that had driven the bear back.

Aldric crouched down next to one of the roots on the ground and touched it with two fingers.

It was warm. It bore the usual signs of contamination found in those areas; however, this didn’t quite add up with the bear’s behavior, yet it resonated with something he had been reading for years in the records of the village elders—a theory that, until tonight, he had considered to be just that.

He stood up slowly.

His guards looked at him, waiting for instructions. He looked back at them with that calmness unique to him.

“Return to the village.” His voice left no room for questions. “I’ll go on alone.” His guards looked at each other in confusion, but they had learned to obey their leader, so they simply bowed their heads and turned to leave that place that only made them feel desperate.

Aldric moved forward, driven by confusion and curiosity.