Page 122 of Cursed Shadows 4

The arrows look something like weeds sprouted out from the cracks of the rocks, smearing across the plateau.

Twigs crunch behind him.

Daxeel looks over his shoulder, face tight, and his lashes lowered. He watches Rune stomp through the bloody puddles and past the smears of crimson and black sprayed up the tree trunks.

Daxeel peels away from the treeline.

Silent, a shadow, he advances.

Rune pauses—and stands over a litalf corpse. One of three within eyesight.

But he takes an interest in this one. A limp corpse lying facedown in a crimson puddle.

A strand of yellow hair falls into Rune’s face as he studies the body at his boots, the rest piled up with a firm-knotted ribbon. He tilts his head, a heartbeat passes—

Then he boots out at the corpse’s side. The gold threaded seams of his armour glisten with the movement, glisten like the hunger in his sharp yellow eyes.

Daxeel knows the look to be of the hunt, of instinct clawing to the surface.

The corpse is flipped through the air, swirling until it cracks into the frozen trunk of a tree, then crumples to the dirt. The dead litalf lands on his back, mouth parted and slack.

Instantly, Daxeel understands Rune’s interest in it—and why Rune has turned his chin to his shoulder, looking over at Daxeel.

Daxeel advances. His prowling steps are near-silent in the whistling winds of the mountain. But his stare doesn’t stray from the face of the litalf—

A face without eyes.

Gouged clean out of his head.

Not with a blade, not a clean cut, this attack was desperate, panicked, messy. It was the fight of an amateur.

What Daxeel sees, what they both see as they look down at the torn-out eyes is self-defence.

Rune’s murmur agrees, “Gouged out by fingers.”

Shadows lick around Daxeel’s boots as he reaches the corpse. Dropping to a crouch, his forearms rest on his knees and he studies the torn flesh within the eye sockets. His gaze cuts, quick, to the litalf’s neck, crushed as though trampled on, and then finally to the scratched and ripped flesh at the corpse’s hands.

Nari.

He knows it.

Knows it as well as he knows his own self.

The litalf must have gotten a hold on her from behind, and she scratched at his grip before realising that the litalf’s eyes were her best chance to escape. She must have torn out his eyes with her own hands, then fled.

The killing blow to this litalf was the boot to the neck. Whether intentional or mere trampling, he doesn’t know.

But he doesn’t care, either.

Nari got away.

That’s what matters.

Now, he just has to find her.

Daxeel lifts his chin to the cold breeze.

His lashes flutter shut as his chest fills with a deep, focused inhale.

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