Chapter 33: Grænsfell
“Dráfren, aen kennaen thy kin, Sae Dráfren!”
(I painted this in Procreate using the Eaglehawk brush - Chaiga T. Cheska)
The enchantment dropped from him as he ran, each step unravelling another thread of Harthos’s careful magic, like a coat shedding water, until the last of it fell away and Nix was simply himself again, moving at full speed through the dark heart of the labyrinth with the moon burning high and cold above the canopy.
He ran the way a predator runs when it is not fleeing. There was no thought to it. The labyrinth coiled and twisted around him, its passages doubling back in the dark, yet Nix did not slow at any turn. He moved by something older and more certain than thought, drawn forward by a magical signature that pressed against his ribs like a struck bell, warm, resonant, and known. Not known the way a learned thing is known. Known the way the body knows the smell of rain before the first drop falls.
The labyrinth’s lesser predators sensed him in the dark and gave way. He caught the low gleam of eyes beneath a root arch, and then the shadow was simply shadow again, its owner gone without a sound. The labyrinth opened before him and closed behind him, and the heartbeat of the place rose through the soles of his boots and into his bones, growing stronger with each stride.
Through the tether, Tavik’s presence tugged at him, anxious and insistent, shaped like questions. Nix sent nothing back. He could not yet put words to what was pulling him forward.
The moon sat brilliant to the west, its light falling in narrow columns through the canopy where the branches parted, silvering the ivy walls as he passed. The air held the cold stillness of the deep hours, the particular hush that settles over a forest when even the owl falls silent. His runes moved in their slow rhythm along his forearms, reading the dark around him, and what they told him was old, vast, and in a deep slumber.
He felt it before he saw it. The heartbeat of the labyrinth had been pressing upward through the soles of his boots, and only now, with the ivy walls rising close on either side and the passages drawing narrower, did the full understanding arrive: the labyrinth was not a mere structure. It breathed, ancient and patient, a being he recognised in the way one creature recognises another, not through language but through the quality of a presence meeting his own.
Nix came to a halt, and around him the ivy walls rose, dense and dark, barely trembling despite the absence of wind. The magical signature pressed against all his senses at once, vast, deep, and thrumming.
He stood in the silence for two full breaths, steadying himself, then tilted his head back and sent his voice upwards into the dark. The Way of Lon came to him as naturally as breathing, as it always had, the old language of MirMarnia’s creatures flowing through him without effort:
“Dráfren, aen kennaen thy kin, Sae Dráfren!”
Dragon friend, I know your kin, the Sea Dragon.
