Chapter 11: Night in the Ravines

“Night in the Ravine” pastel on paper by Chaiga T Cheska

The hours had aged the camp, carving silence between the figures gathered close to the fire’s frail light. The embers pulsed in fitful rhythm, casting wavering silhouettes against the alcove’s stone, their forms both shelter and prison as the ravines beyond surrendered to blackness. The sky, heavy and implacable, withheld its stars, save for a lone silver moon strung low and watchful, its face blurred by drifting veils of mist. A cold breath ran through the night, metallic, damp, tasting faintly of old earth and forgotten water, coiling around their ankles and seeping into their bones.

Tavik sat nearest the flame, his eyes restless, combing the shadows for meaning, his hand never straying far from the hilt at his side. Oren hunched within the circle of firelight, shrouded in his own silence, his gaze sunk deep into the embers as if searching for absolution or memory. Bran shifted, glancing at his brothers, lips parted for words that would not come, the weight of grief and secrets pressing his shoulders down. He tried once, the sound a brittle thing in the hush. “We should...” He faltered, his voice lost to the sigh of the ravine and let the sentence trail into nothing.

From the edge of the alcove, Nix sat apart, his posture unmoving, his skin laced with green runes that flickered and faded, tracing silent patterns across his arms and face. His eyes, wide and unblinking, tracked the darkness as though it bore questions only he could hear. Occasionally, he tilted his head, listening to the stone’s hum, a tremor barely perceptible, vibrating through the rock, as if the ravines themselves whispered warnings. The air pressed close, charged with threat. Something vast and patient lingered beyond their camp, watching, waiting.

The night sang with unsettling sounds: the distant scrape of talons against stone, the flutter of wings in unseen hollows, the murmured heartbeat of water far below. Each noise seemed magnified, stitched into the fabric of anxiety that bound the four together. Tavik nudged the fire, sending a spray of sparks skywards, their brief glow devoured by the blackness. He fed another branch to the flames, keeping the light alive. “We must keep watch,” he murmured, the promise thin but firm.

Oren did not reply, his fists clenched in the folds of his cloak. Bran drew his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them.

“How long?” Bran’s voice came small, carefully controlled. “Tomorrow. How long to get through these ravines?”

Oren lifted his head, pulling himself back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “If we move fast. Keep going without stopping. Maybe by nightfall.”

“A whole day.” Bran’s words were barely audible.

“We’ll manage.” Oren’s tone held more certainty than he felt. “We’ve come this far.”

Silence settled again, heavier now. Tavik’s gaze turned to Nix, whose runes pulsed slightly brighter, then dimmed again. “What do you sense out there, Nix?”

Nix’s ears twitched, angling towards sounds the others could not hear. “Movement. Not close. But circling.”

“Circling us?” Tavik’s hand closed more firmly around his knife hilt.

“The camp. The light. Curious, perhaps.” Nix’s voice was distant, his attention split between speaking and listening to whatever moved in the darkness beyond the firelight’s reach.

Oren reached forward, pushing a handful of twigs into the fire. The flames caught and rose, pushing back the darkness by inches. Minutes stretched. No one moved to sleep. The stone pressed cold against their backs, and the ravines breathed around them, alive with watching presences.

In the deepening gloom, Nix’s runes flared brighter for a moment, a silent warning. “The ravine is restless,” he said softly, voice almost lost to the night. “It knows we are here.”

Bran drew closer to Tavik, seeking the reassurance of nearness. The silence pressed in, broken only by the hiss and pop of burning wood and the wind’s low moan through unseen crevices.

The silence deepened, growing thick and ponderous, as if the night itself pressed inwards around the huddled figures. Each breath was a plume of mist, swiftly devoured by the chill; the stones at their backs turned rigid and biting, leeching warmth with predatory patience. The fire dwindled, its flames cowed and thin, leaving their faces swathed in uncanny half-light and their shadows warped and shivering along the alcove walls.

A subtle change rippled through the darkness, a hush within the hush, as if the world drew breath and dared not release it. The air grew heavier still, weighted with a presence that neither wind nor stone could name.

Oren rose first, his movements slow and deliberate, fingers closing around the hilt at his side. Tavik stood beside him in the same breath, their shoulders nearly touching, presenting a unified front. Together, their short swords slipped free of their sheaths with barely a whisper of steel, the blades catching the firelight in twin arcs of orange and shadow. Tavik’s free hand moved behind him, nudging Bran further back, whilst his eyes never left the darkness. Bran, however, edged closer to his brothers, seeking the reassurance of their solid presence, his own hand moving to the small knife at his belt, though he kept it sheathed.

It came then, a faint, deliberate scraping, like claws tracing ancient lore across the stone. The sound padded around the camp, seething in the silence, and every muscle tensed with animal knowing. Nix stood, as if summoned by some unspoken invocation, his runes casting a spectral glow that danced across his skin in steady warning. His ears swivelled towards the sound, tracking its movement. He lifted one hand, index finger poised, and pointed into the dense, living blackness beyond the firelight, his message plain though his lips uttered not a word.

From the gloom, two eyes caught the moon’s meagre light, low to the ground, glimmering with unnatural luminance. The beast lingered at the edge of the circle, its outline vague yet monstrous: sinewed limbs pressed close to the earth, fur bristling like marsh-grass beneath a storm, and its breath a rhythm of restrained menace. It watched, unblinking and inscrutable, whilst the fire’s glow shivered upon the mirror-brightness of its gaze.

“Remain still,” Nix murmured, scarcely above a whisper, his voice a thread pulled taut with warning. “It’s a Virehound.” The words hung between them, brittle as frost, and none dared move save for the trembling of their limbs.

The Virehound’s eyes swept the four, pausing upon each in turn, then lingered on Nix. In that instant, Nix’s ears flattened against his skull, pupils narrowing to slits. The Virehound’s own ears pressed flat to its head, a mirror of Nix’s response. Two predators, recognising what they were in each other. The communion lasted only a heartbeat, electric and absolute. Then, with a soundless grace, the Virehound withdrew, melting into shadow, its presence receding like a dream half-remembered. The silence that followed was deafening, the air cleansed yet haunted, the camp changed by what had passed and by what yet lingered beyond the rim of firelight.

For a breathless span, the silence thickened, broken only by the faint hissing of embers as they shuddered in the cold air. Oren and Bran released their held breaths in trembling waves, relief edging through exhaustion, their shoulders slumping as the invisible tension that had bound them eased. Oren’s sword lowered slowly, though he did not sheathe it yet.

But Tavik’s gaze, sharp and unyielding, lingered upon Nix, who stood rigid, runes pulsing with spectral light, eyes still wide and searching amid the shifting darkness. His ears remained pricked forward, listening, tracking. Tavik raised his free hand, palm splayed, a silent command. Oren’s mouth closed on whatever he’d been about to say. Bran froze, watching. The fire crackled softly, casting wavering shadows, but no one spoke.

They watched Nix. Watched as his breathing slowed, as the tension gradually eased from his frame. His ears relaxed degree by degree, swivelling once more towards sounds beyond the camp before settling. His runes dimmed, flickering back to their usual gentle pulse.

Only then did Nix lower himself to the ground, folding into a cross-legged posture with slow, measured grace. Tavik’s hand dropped. Oren sheathed his sword with quiet finality. Bran’s grip on his knife loosened.

The others sank down as well, circling the embers in uneasy communion, each stealing glances at the ragged edge of shadow beyond the firelight. Though the fire glowed, its promise of warmth seemed hollow, an illusion against the chill that crept from the stone.

Tavik’s eyes moved to where Nix sat, farther from the fire than before, at the alcove’s edge, where shadows gathered thickest. “You’re sitting far away.”

Nix glanced at him, then at the space between them. After a moment’s hesitation, he shifted slightly closer, though not quite joining their tight circle. The movement was small, almost reluctant.

Through the tether that bound them, the connection forged on the cliff’s face, Tavik felt something shift. Not fear, precisely. Not mistrust. But a new wariness in Nix towards them, a distance that had not been there before. Nix was sensing something, questioning something, and whatever conclusions he was drawing made him pull back even as he shuffled forward. The knowledge sat uneasily in Tavik’s chest. He opened his mouth, the question forming on his tongue, then caught himself. Nix’s ears swivelled, just slightly. Those sharp, inhuman ears that heard every breath, every whisper. Tavik closed his mouth and said nothing. Kept his face neutral. Let the moment pass.

Oren noticed the exchange, or rather, the lack of it. He glanced between Tavik and Nix, something unspoken passing across his features. His own question died unasked. Not here. Not now. Not with those keen ears tracking every sound in the darkness.

Tavik fed another branch to the flames, watching the bark catch and curl. The fire rose higher, casting dancing light across the alcove walls. None of them moved to sleep. The intention was clear; without being spoken, they would sit through the night, keep watch together, wait for dawn to release them from the ravines’ grip. The stone was too cold, the darkness too alive with threat, the memory of the Virehound’s eyes too fresh for any of them to close their eyes willingly.

Minutes became an hour. The moon climbed higher, casting its pale light across the narrow strip of sky visible between the towering walls. The ravines groaned and settled around them, stone shifting against stone in the deep places, ancient conversations held in a language none of them could speak.

Oren pushed more kindling into the fire, keeping the flames steady, their only defence against the watching darkness. The light held firm, a small circle of safety in the vast unknowing of the ravines.

Bran’s head began to droop, exhaustion finally overwhelming fear. His eyes closed once, snapped open, closed again. He swayed where he sat, fighting sleep, losing. His weight tilted sideways. He tried to right himself, swayed again, and finally came to rest against Oren’s shoulder, his breathing evening into the deeper rhythm of sleep.

Oren glanced down at his youngest brother, saw the dark circles beneath Bran’s eyes, the way his face had finally relaxed. He remained still, letting Bran lean against him, a solid anchor in the uncertain night.

Tavik met Oren’s eyes across the fire. Neither spoke. The understanding passed between them without words: let Bran sleep. Someone should, at least.

Nix sat apart, his posture unmoving, his runes casting faint green light across the stone. His eyes remained open, watchful, scanning the darkness even as his consciousness drifted inward.

Through the threads that connected all living things, he could see the glowing lines that bound him to the brothers, could trace their patterns whilst still maintaining his vigil over the camp. The threads were tangled. Knotted in ways that made no sense, twisted around themselves in patterns he had never encountered before. The discord settled deeper in his chest as understanding crept cold through his thoughts.

The memory he had been trying to push aside at the calling of the name, Aurelian, resurfaced again. Memory flooded through him, and he was back in the high tree in the Sentinel Forest, witnessing his older brother, Simi, strike Ulfgar down. The shocking transformation of his mother Lisera as her stolen constellations were returned to her which gave her back her true form, but the words she had said quietly that only Nix heard, that Simi had missed, that Nix had not shared in any retelling, was how Lisera had quietly looked around as if searching for someone within the trees and whispered, “My brother, Aurelian, where are you?”

It had been such a mournful sound coming from the fierce form of his newly transformed bestial mother. Then it hadn’t made sense, because Nix had not known his mother had any family, but now, sitting by the fire, in the company of Oren, Tavik and Bran, Nix felt himself grow cold with fear at the idea that his deadly Lightweaver mother from Tioria had a brother. What drove the fear even deeper was that the threads from his friends beside him told another story: their paternal threads were not severed, which told Nix that whoever Aurelian was, he was very much alive.

His friends were most definitely not half-human, but, confusingly, they looked human. If this Aurelian that Lisera had called for was the same as the name Oren had revealed as his father’s true name, then why did these three brothers look nothing like a Tiorian Lightweaver, or did the elvish line dominate?

Nix glanced at Oren and Tavik and wondered not for the first time this night, when they would come into their true heritage, and when that happened, would they turn on him and become dangerous like his mother in her true form.

The fire burned steadily. The moon traced its path across the sky. And four figures sat in the ravines’ depths, bound by threads they could not name, waiting for dawn to show them the path forward or reveal what other tests the ancient places had prepared.

From somewhere in the ravines, a stone clattered loose, tumbling into darkness.