Page 124 of Cursed Shadows 4

The warmth of his breaths cloud at his face.

His shoulders slump. He lowers his lashes and his eyes shut on the prickled sensation climbing through his insides, a thorned warmth laced with anxiety.

Nari might be safe with his brothers—

But he will only feel the strength of reassurance when he has her in his own arms.

Rune kneels at the deflated boulder.

His cat eyes gleam as he studies the bloody sun sketch.

Carefully, he dances his gloved fingers around the edges of the bloody sunrays, the same peculiar way Dare has always drawn them, like arrowheads surrounding a block circle.

A frown starts to furrow Rune’s brow.

“What?” Daxeel takes a step closer. “What do you see?”

“Dare stopped mid-battle to mark this,” Rune murmurs. “For us. We’re the only ones who will recognise it as a clue to find Dare.”

Dare sensed how close they were, and left them the clue to follow, an indication that he is alive—and the sun particularly means Nari is alive. Or at least she was when he drew this, his own understanding of love. The sun in the dark.

“But it’s messy,” Rune says. “Smudged and rushed.”

Daxeel only thinks his answer, ‘And Dare is too much of a perfectionist to draw his dreamy sun any other way.’

It’s the same sun he’s been sketching since their younger years in the barracks. He would scratch it into walls, carve it into tables at shifty taverns, dream it every other night, paint it onto his hand when his mind drifted from him.

Never, not once, was he careless in how he drew it.

“They didn’t escape.” Rune looks over his shoulder at Daxeel, a grim twist to his mouth. “They were chased.”

Daxeel’s gaze drops to the forest floor.

He reads the blood and the bodies like language inked onto parchment. If he finds something, interprets something that he missed, he might be able to learn more about where they have gone.

“If she’s close,” Rune starts, the hope whispering his voice, “you will feel her, right?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t sense her.”

Rune pushes up from the boulder and advances in two long strides. “Try.”

Jaw clenched tight, Daxeel’s tone is unforgiving, “I don’t know what this mountain has done, but I can only feel flickers of her sometimes. Her scent is… a whisper—then it’s gone. Not enough to track her on.”

Rune rolls his tongue against the inside of his cheek. His mind whirls behind the yellow of his eyes, those black strokes for irises glistening as he looks over the blood and broken branches and disturbed snow piles.

Brow knitting together, he growls his words out, “So we track the chase.”

Daxeel observes the spot between the trees, where the leaves have crunched and twigs are snapped. A few fae ran through there—and they weren’t soft footed about it, either.

The track is too obvious.

The fae are too light on their feet.

These tracks were left intentionally.

“Looks like they ran in the direction of—” Rune doesn’t get the chance to say it, the word that thrums Daxeel’s chest with ice-cold panic.

Daxeel’s voice is a rumble of dread, “The crevasse.”

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