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Nara reached for Haven, but she was frightened as to what she might find amongst the piles of hounds moving around him. They formed a barrier between him and the creature of fire—and her, she realised.
Her sword glowed brightly, whether from magic or reflecting the light of the creature, she wasn’t sure. The others hadn’t been real. The wendigo and the mud creature of the forest had been illusion. She had thought this the same, but it wasn’t a creature she knew. She wondered if it was one Haven had faced during his time alone.
She had faced several herself over the years and lives. She closed her hand tighter around the sword. Haven had been right, in a way. Whatever they had faced, it was to get her back to this point. This creature and the ones before it were focused on Haven. She hoped the glow in the sword was magic and not just a reflection.
The fire monster flared, and Nara held her arm up to shield herself from the heat. Its focus was Haven now lying on the floor. He was quiet, although it was hard to tell amidst the continued barking from the hounds. His sword had slid across the floor and out of his reach.
The creature didn’t move any closer. It wanted to, raising a foot and leaning forward, but the hounds kept it at bay. Nara swung then, over the heads of the dogs and directly at the mid-section of the creature. The smell of burning filled the room, as her sword hit something solid. The creature cried out.
She had expected the sword to move through it as it had the others, but instead the flames moved along the blade, dancing over the metal, and for a moment she was lost the beauty of it. The sword moved as though on its own. The creature had taken the end of it, as though it had moved beneath the blade, and it was pushing the sharp tip of it away while maintaining a hold around the blade. Nara couldn’t see any signs of injury or blood. Not that all monsters they met bled, but it had cried out.
The flames crept closer to the handle. The heat increased within the room, it was scorching. The hounds continued to bark, and the creature before her grew taller, and broader, as though fuelled by the sound and the activity.
The flames licked at her hand, and yet she would not release her hold on the sword. She looked up into the blurry features of the monster. Whatever face it might have had was lost to the flames, yet she could see it grinning. She felt a nervousness that this was far worse than she thought it to be. Yet there was no sense of danger despite her understanding of the glowing, burning creature standing before her.
As the creature shifted, she could see that not all the flames in the room were attached to it. The door and door frame were singed, but some of the books burned on the shelves, and the shelves with them.
One of the hounds leapt at it, taking Nara and the creature by surprise. It stepped back, hitting the door, and what had been singed started to burn. The flames licked over the wood in the same way they did over its body.
But the movement meant that it had released its hold on the sword. The flames that had danced along the blade disappeared as though they were never there, although Nara could still feel the heat.
The hound snarled, something deep and dark, and Nara was reminded of the creature that had appeared as a hound in the cellar beneath the manor. The fiery creature shrunk back in size despite the burning door and shelves, and the other hounds fell into silence. They stood still, watching as the other pushed against the creature’s chest. Nara swung her sword again, and it cried out. A scraping, grating sound that made her teeth ache.
And then it was gone, as though it had been a candle flame snuffed out. The hound fell to the ground as the door and bookcase continued to burn.
The hound whined, and Nara thought she might have injured it rather than the monster when she had swung her sword. There was no sign of blood on it or the floor, although the heat in the room continued. It took her back to a very different place.
They had to get out, or they would be trapped here to burn away. Haven still lay on the floor amidst a sea of hounds. They stood around him, blocking her view, and a strange feeling swelled in her chest. Not strange—familiar. Too familiar that she had lost him, and yet she could see his legs. Could this be what death looked like in this life? She threw herself into the mass of hounds, reaching for his face.
He lay too still, too quiet, his face red. She pulled at his shirt, but the burns she was so sure had been caused by the monster were not there. He had cried out in pain, but there were no burns on his skin and no sign of the fire tree.
She fell across his chest, her tears running uncontrollably into his shirt. He remained still, but she could hear his heartbeat, if slow, beneath her ear. She sighed with relief, although the smell of smoke grew in the room. No. She looked up. That wasn’t right. She could smell the flames, the heat. When she looked back at the shelves, they were burning, the flames licking over the books and the wood, but there was no smoke.
She watched it flickering. Where before she had been so certain it was destroying or consuming what it passed over, it didn’t appear to be that way. The door and door frame were marked, scorched black in places and yet not burning away. Just as certain as she was that the world was alight, Nara was certain that it was another illusion, another vision or dream that was not her own.
It had been very real. Her sword had struck something, not passed through it as it had the wendigo or the monster of mud from the forest. Those had not appeared real enough, and she had been able to walk right through them. She hadn’t seen this creature before. She looked down at Haven, his eyes closed, his chest moving slightly beneath her hand, and she was sure he would disappear into embers at any moment.
A hound whined again. She looked up at them, their dark eyes reflecting the light of the fires. Those that burned along the shelves and the one in the fireplace.
In the silence that followed, she realised just how quiet and unnatural the world was. There was no sound of the flickering flames or the burning books, if that was what they were doing. There was no crackle to the fire in the fireplace. The hounds made no noise at all, standing like statues around them, watching.
In the unnatural space, Nara’s hand rested on Haven’s chest, and she focused on the steady movement. His sword was across the room, which seemed odd. She looked at it across the floor between the hound’s feet. One of them turned slowly as though to check what she was looking at. She wanted to drag it closer, but she didn’t want to leave Haven, and she knew it would be too heavy for her to lift.
She was struggling with her own sword. She looked around then, wondering what she had done with it. It had been in her hand when she had struck the monster. She had thought she’d caught the hound, but there was no sign of injury—and no fear, she thought, as the animals were close and level with her face.
She should be afraid. There had been a level of fear with the creature of fire. She understood it was a danger, that it wasn’t something she could walk through as she had the other creatures. Yet there was no pull, even sitting in a room that was burning and with Haven closer to death than he had been in this life. There was nothing from the stones in the pouch that this was the end for either of them, and yet she understood that.
Perhaps not this moment, but she knew this was the last life. Perhaps that was why the stones were not telling her anything, because they understood that she knew what was to come. Lord Orman had been in the room, but he was no longer there. Was this some game of his?
Haven groaned, and Nara pulled her hand back quickly, hoping she wasn’t leaning on him. He blinked his eyes open. Sighing, she hoped she wouldn’t cry again. She seemed to cry too often in these later lives. She had been strong and brave before, taking on creatures without thought. Glancing around, she wondered what else was to come, but she could still smell the flames. And the heat in the room, even with the door open, was becoming overwhelming.
Haven slowly raised an arm and patted at his chest. He sucked in another large breath, then turned and took her in, his gaze moving around the hounds still standing over him. “Was it an illusion?” he asked, his brow furrowed. “Smoke?”
“It is burning, but like the fire tree, without consuming. It is unnatural,” Nara whispered.
“They are all unnatural,” he said, groaning again as he tried to sit up. He gave up and lay back, his hand feeling about for the sword that wasn’t there.
“Had you seen it before?” Nara asked.
“I thought it one of yours,” he said, his hand still rubbing over his chest.
“There are no burns,” she reassured him, leaning over him. He put his hand to her face, slipped it around her neck, and pulled her gently down to kiss him. “It was real, but there are no burns,” she added when he let her go, his hand slipping away.
One of the hounds made a noise, not a bark but something in the back of its throat, as though to alert them to something else. It had already been a long night, and Nara wondered if the sun would ever rise again.
A woman appeared in the doorway. Her dress showed her to be slender, and although Nara couldn’t make out her face in the haze of the flames still working around the room, she knew it was not her sister. Her long hair moved around her shoulders as though shifted by a breeze. Nara worried it might catch in the flames licking around the door.
Another illusion, she thought as the image moved into the room, unaffected by the flames. The woman appeared more hurried when she saw them, racing into the room and leaning over Haven. “We need to leave,” she said, her voice familiar, yet Nara couldn’t place the woman at all. “Help him up,” she continued as she turned for the sword lying across the room.
The hounds watched her, but they didn’t move, nor did they indicate she was a threat.
“It touched you,” she said, Haven’s sword in her hand, and Nara wondered at the strength she had to lift it. Nara had struggled at the best of times, and yet this woman held it now with the ease Haven usually did.
“Is it heavy?” Nara asked. The woman blinked slowly and then looked down at the sword.
“Sunshine,” Haven murmured, but Nara couldn’t take her eyes from the woman before her.
“Help him,” the woman demanded, and Nara scooped her arm behind his shoulders to help him sit up.
He shuddered as he drew in a breath, as though it might have hurt him, but there was no sign of the burns she was sure the monster had inflicted.
The woman moved hurriedly to the door, looking beyond it, not appearing to be worried by the flames that still licked around it. The heat was overwhelming; Nara was sure it would burn them all. One of the hounds padded quickly towards the woman, standing by her side and looking with her.
Nara wondered what they might be looking for. There was no sign of Father or Wren. Even if they had been woken by the monsters or the noise in the library, Nara doubted they would come to find out what was going on. The woman’s hand moved over the door frame, and Haven groaned as Nara finally got him sitting up. She tried to get beneath his arm to lift him.
Haven was not helping her at all. It was as though she was trying to lift his dead weight. The image of him losing his head and toppling slowly to the ground flashed as though she was reliving it. She cried out as she finally got him to his feet, and he closed his arms around her.
They stood for too long locked in an awkward embrace. Nara could feel his heart beating rapidly in her ear. His breathing was just as rapid, raspy as though it hurt him to breathe. In a way it was a reassurance that they were alive—they had to be to feel such pain. As they stood together, Nara watched the back of the woman at the door, the sword in her hand touched to the floor beside her, her other hand on the door frame. The flames licked over her hand as they did the wood.
“Who are you?” Nara asked, her voice barely a whisper in the odd silence that had settled on the room. Or had it already been that way? Nara wondered then if they were even still in the manor, in the library that she thought she knew. Perhaps the whole world around them was an illusion and they were somewhere else entirely.
The woman didn’t answer or turn back to them. The hounds around them nudged gently as Nara tried to guide Haven to the doorway. She turned him to the side, and he cried out again when she put her arm around his chest. She lifted her hand away, but he pushed it back to his chest.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered.
He shook his head. Beads of sweat formed along his brow line, and she wondered then at the rough, scratchy beard that appeared so much like it had at the end of their last life. Shouldn’t it be shorter or neater, as it had been in the first life? She couldn’t see his neck, and that worried her. She stopped again, putting her hand to his throat beneath his beard. She could feel the slow, difficult swallow, yet there were no signs of burns or damage to his neck.
“What was that creature?” she asked. Had she already asked that? Did they know it? It knew them, or at least it knew Haven, and that seemed to make it more of a concern than the creatures that usually came after them. No, it was them who went after the monsters.
“Must it have a name to be defeated?” the woman asked, turning back from the door. Nara thought she could see something familiar in this woman, in her golden eyes that seemed to reflect the light of the fire around her as it flared and then went out.
“Did we defeat it?” Nara asked, looking back at Haven and the effort it took him to walk towards the door. They weren’t going to make it very far.
The woman sighed, frustration clear on her face as she waved them forward. Her long hair fluttered about her shoulders, and Nara was reminded of the fire tree. She wondered how close they were to it, or if this was the only semblance of its flickering, flaming leaves they would ever see again.