Chapter - 12 The Smile She Was Always Good At

After three days, the report reached the capital: a rally of the dead sighted in the eastern mountain range, and a full garrison of border scouts unaccounted for.

Flare was on her feet just as the messenger finished reading it aloud.

“No,” her father said, before she'd even opened her mouth.

“You don't know what I was going to say.”

“I know exactly what you were going to say.” He didn't look up from the report. “You're not going.”

“That's the thing that killed Hercules. You want to just let it walk through our own mountains?”

“I want the Champion who's left to survive.” His voice stayed level. “You're not going alone, and you're not going without proper sanction. That's not a request.”

It wasn't a fight she won outright in the end. What she won instead, after two days of arguing that left both of them exhausted, was permission—conditional, hedged with restrictions she resented but couldn't refuse. She would go. She would not go alone. A party of seven, led by General Shgrove, or she wouldn't be allowed to leave the capital at all. If she did, law permitted her arrest.

She took the compromise. She had learned at least not to burn every bridge on principle.

The Frostveil Forest itself had been declared dead ground within a week of that night, both Luthain and Vesmarck agreeing—for once without argument—to seal the whole region off from travel. No aether, no wildlife, hence no reason for anyone to go near it. The Adley’s village that had once been situated nearby no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Every villager who was present that night had been found dead. Fen, Rachel, the smith Corren, and dozens of others Flare and Hercules had talked to, all of them mangled. The reports described it with a clinical restraint that did nothing to soften what Flare already knew from having seen it firsthand.

No one had confirmed what the woman actually was. Theories circulated through the war council and the temples of Talvane: a new species of undead sorceress, an ancient curse finally waking, a rogue mage who'd traded her humanity for power no one could measure. None of it was solid enough to plan against.

Flare had said nothing, in all that time, about the face beneath the mask—the tears. She turned the memory of it over some nights, unable to stop herself, and always arrived at the same conclusion: telling anyone would only complicate a hunt that needed, more than anything, to be simple. Find her. End her. Everything else could wait.

She wanted blood. She didn't bother pretending otherwise, not to herself. For Hercules. For Fen and Rachel and Eva and everyone she'd learned of in that village only to watch them all die. The rage burned in her chest like a beast with its own pulse, and she'd stopped trying to talk herself out of it weeks ago.

The party Shgrove assembled were competent, hard-eyed rangers she didn't know yet, but expected she'd come to trust. A scarred, quiet archer named Tomas; a pair of twin brothers, Josen and Peyt, who fought as a matched set and barely spoke otherwise; a young mage named Ilse who kept mostly to herself; an older tracker called Duna who'd clearly seen more winters in these mountains than anyone else in the group combined; and, closest to Shgrove's own age and clearly his second-in-command, a woman named Corra—broad-shouldered and blunt—who looked at Flare with an expression that wasn't quite distrust, but wasn't far from it either.

“Champion,” Corra said, by way of greeting.

“Just Flare's fine.”

Corra studied her.

Flare smiled the smile she was always good at.

The mountain range greeted them the same way the Frostveil Forest once had—a silence too quiet to be natural, no birds circling the high passes, no goats picking along the scree slopes where goats should have been common as weeds. Tomas noticed it first, an hour into the climb, going still mid-step with the particular alertness of a man who trusted his instincts more than his eyes.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a track. Not a dropping. Nothing living's been through here in a long time.”

Shgrove's expression didn't change, but Flare saw the way his hand drifted toward his sword hilt and stayed there.

They made camp in a defensible hollow as the light failed and stayed vigilant through the evening and deep into the night that followed, watching for the silence to break. Half a day. Then most of a night. Nothing came. No scream. No sign of the dead, or of her.

Flare, restless past the point of patience, finally closed her eyes where she sat and reached for the same sense Hercules had once taught her, on a night that already felt like it belonged to someone else's life.

There was no aether here either. None at all.

The scream came a heartbeat later, as if her own reaching for the current had somehow announced her presence to whatever fed on it, tearing through the mountain silence in a pitch that scraped straight down her spine.

The whole camp was on its feet before the sound had finished dying.

They came down out of the high passes in a shambling, decayed mass. The same kind of mindless horde Flare remembered from the village gates—dozens of them, weapons and armor rusted or rotted where they still clung to bone. She scanned the writhing crowd for the one figure that mattered, and found with a strange, unsettling absence where dread should have been, that the woman herself wasn't among them.

Where is she? Flare thought, and didn't have time to wonder further before the fight was on her.

She moved the way she always did—the way she had learned before any of it ever happened.

Alone at the front. Fast. Devastating. She tore through the leading horde in a blur of strikes that left corpses in pieces before they'd fully seen her, laughing loud and humorless.

Shgrove barked formation orders behind her that she only half-registered, too far ahead of the line to fall back into it even if she'd wanted to. She heard Corra's voice cut through the chaos, firm and commanding, directing the rangers into a defensive arc while the Champion did whatever she pleased.

It worked. That was the maddening, undeniable truth. Dead bodies scattered in front of her faster than the mountain seemed able to produce more of them. By the time the last of the horde collapsed into stillness, Flare stood at the center of a battlefield she'd cleared entirely by herself, breathing hard but essentially untouched, while the rest of the party mopped up what little remained.

Flare paid no attention to any of them. She was annoyed that the woman hadn't appeared.

“Champion,” Corra said again afterward, catching up to her at last, sword still drawn, chest heaving from a fight Flare hadn’t left her any part of. “That was—” She stopped, shook her head, and huffed a laugh. “That was something. You really are what they say.”

Flare managed a tired half-smile back.

Shgrove said nothing at all. He stood a little apart from the rest, surveying the field of scattered dead. His eyes moved from the corpses to Flare herself, lingering there long before he finally turned away.

“No sign of the woman the Champion mentioned before,” he said to the group at large, businesslike. “We hold position until dawn. Then we report back exactly what we found here.”

Flare wanted to argue for staying longer, pushing deeper into the range to track this horde down to the peaks. Maybe they would find the woman, too. She held her tongue this time, an unfamiliar instinct telling her the fight she'd just won so easily wasn't quite the victory it felt like.

Behind her, unnoticed, Shgrove's gaze found her one more time in the dark. Then he turned back to organizing the watch.