Page 101 of The Silent Mountain
His creature clearly took her. There is still a hint of her presence in this area–she was here.Her frown grows.Favian, I should easily be able to trace Alana, but I can’t. It means that a powerful deity is blocking our connection to her.
But we would know if she or Elio were hurt, wouldn’t we?I ask, barely able to contain my anxiety.
We would definitely know,she reassures me.
“And now…” I mutter more to myself than to anyone else. “What now?”
“Did Favia tell you which deity is targeting us?” Stefan asks.
“No, she just knows that it’s a powerful one.” I furrow my brows. “Stefan, did we manage to catch one of the birds?”
“Two actually,” he says.
I nod grimly, tossing the feather to the ground. “Good, because I now know what we are going to do.”
thirty-two
The Truth
*ALANA*
ElioandIwalkmostly in silence, both of us scared to startle any enemies. I try not to think about Lorelai, hoping she made it out of there alive, but something inside me tells me that the chances are quite slim. I don’t know her well, but I know she has saved my life. Maybe it wasn’t the best decision to bring us here, but I am sure she had no other options at that moment, and without her, I would probably be dead by now.
I am not sure how long we have been walking. An hour, maybe even two. This underground path is much longer than I anticipated, meaning the island is much bigger too.
“How can this path be so long?” I whisper, not able to hold my thoughts back any longer.
“No idea,” Elio mutters. “I have been wondering the same. I mean, we have no records of a bigger island, and we can’t be too far away from the shore either.”
“It has to be enchanted,” I say quietly. “It probably looks small and unimportant from the outside.”
“If only we had known,” Elio says. “It’s… usually us dragons have a very good sense for the mystical side of things, more so than other shifters.”
“You mean, you can spot mysterious natural occurrences or read them?”
“No,” Elio explains. “Sorry, I worded it wrong. There are other shifters and the fae, who can read nature much better than we do, but we have a sixth sense for things that are enchanted or cursed. Had we been at our full power, we would have never missed this island.”
“But you did, because you are still so few in number and are only growing now,” I conclude. “Right, Favian told me that only he can currently fly a huge distance over the ocean.”
“My brother has to shoulder everything at the moment,” Elio says, sounding sad. “There are tasks no one can help him with. Back in the day, my father had his siblings and his powerful advisors. Favian only has Stefan.”
“But he doesn’t trust him,” I conclude.
“Exactly.”
“Do you trust Stefan?”
“I don’t know,” Elio admits. “Some things are weird. Where was he during the years of war? Favian knows about every other clan member, what they did, where they hid, what happened to their family, but Stefan is a mystery. He is loyal to the king, you know, so he should have either tried to save Favian from his capture, or found and protected me.”
“Favian said something similar to me,” I admit.
“It’s just… shady.”
“But he has been a good support to Favian, so far,” I point out.
“That’s what’s so confusing. He puts Favian over everything, as he should. As the king’s advisor, his focus is on the king, not necessarily on the clan members, and Stefan fulfills his tasks to the fullest. It’s so weird…” He pauses. “The reasons don’t matter. The fact is that we dragons have only just started to recover our strength and weren’t able to spot all the mysteries that have been brooding in the darkness.”
I tap my bottom lip with my fingertip while thinking about what Elio said. “Maybe that’s why whatever evil is haunting the dragons has chosen this time to attack. They must know that the dragons have started to slowly rebuild the kingdom again. Every day they get stronger.”
