Chapter 113: The Cave

Azura’s POV

The road disappeared behind us in seconds, swallowed by distance and the sound of our own footsteps hitting the dirt fast and hard.

Branches came at me from both sides as the path narrowed and I put my arm up and kept moving and did not look back because looking back was not going to help anything right now.

Liona was behind me. I could hear her breathing. Fast and controlled, the way breathing got when a person was pushing past comfortable and had decided that comfortable was not the current priority.

I did not know where I was going.

My feet were moving, and I was letting them because the alternative was stopping, and stopping was not available.

The road blurred beneath me. The trees pressed in on both sides. Somewhere behind us, there were men, and I did not know how many or how close, and I was not going to find out by slowing down.

Then I felt it.

Not a voice. Not a sound. Just a pull. Sitting in the center of my chest like someone had attached something there and was drawing it gently but firmly in a specific direction. Not asking. Not demanding. Just pulling. The way a current pulls without announcing itself.

I had felt something like this before. In the dream. In the moments right before something important happened.

"Do you even know where we are going?" Liona called from behind me. Breathing hard. Still keeping up.

"Trust me," I said. "Just follow me."

I turned off the main road without stopping. Into the trees. Away from the path entirely. Branches pulled at my coat, and roots came up from the ground at irregular intervals, like the forest was making its own decisions about whether to help or hinder and had not made up its mind yet.

Liona followed without another word.

The pull grew stronger as we moved deeper into the trees.

Not uncomfortable. Just more present. Like a sound getting louder as you walked toward its source. I pushed through a low branch and ducked under another and jumped over a root system that had broken through the surface and spread itself across the ground with complete indifference to anyone trying to pass through quickly.

Liona stayed close. I could feel her presence behind me even when I could not hear her over the sound of our movement through the undergrowth.

Then the trees ended.

Abruptly and completely, the way tree lines sometimes ended, like a decision had been made at a very specific point and everything past it was different. I stopped so suddenly that Liona almost ran into my back.

"Why did you..."

She stopped too.

In front of us was a cave.

The entrance was dark and wide, the edges of it jagged where the rock had split apart from itself over what looked like a very long time. The stone around it was grey and damp and old. Inside was darkness that did not have a visible end.

The pull was not pulling anymore.

It was humming. Sitting in my chest with a steady warmth that was pointing directly at the opening in front of us like it had been trying to bring me here all along and was satisfied that we had finally arrived.

"This is the cave from my dream," I said. Quiet. To myself as much as to her.

Liona looked at me. "The cave from what now?"

I shook my head. "Nothing. Just come."

I turned to her. "We go inside. Hide. Lose whoever is behind us in the trees."

She nodded immediately. Not hesitating. "But if we go in we need to block the entrance. So they cannot find us."

"Yes. We get inside first. Then we figure out how to close it."

"I am right behind you," she said.

I moved toward the cave entrance. The air coming out of it was cool and damp and it carried something else underneath those things, something older, something that had been sitting in that darkness for a long time and was not bothered by our arrival.

I stepped inside.

The cold of it settled around me immediately. The rock above my head was low enough that I could feel its closeness without touching it. The floor was uneven, dipping and rising in the way cave floors did when nothing had ever smoothed them out.

I turned back toward the entrance.

"Liona, come in..."

I stopped.

The grey wolf stood where Liona had been.

Lean and familiar, the color of a winter sky, those eyes looking at me with an expression that was completely Liona even in a face that was completely not.

She had shifted. Right there at the entrance, between one second and the next, and now she was standing in the clearing in wolf form with her ears forward and her gaze steady on mine.

I stared at her.

Her voice came through somewhere I could not locate exactly, that particular bond connection that wolves had with their Alpha and Luna, not quite sound and not quite feeling but something that landed in the mind with the weight of words.

And this is the first time I’m feeling

’You told me to come in with you.’ Liona’s voice came quickly in my head.

"Then come in," I said. "We do not have time for this, Liona. Come inside."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she moved. Not toward the entrance. Toward the wall of rock beside it.

She hit it with her shoulder.

The sound of it was solid and immediate and completely wrong for what I had expected to happen. Stone shifted. Dust came down from the rock above the entrance in a thin pale curtain.

"What... Are you blind?" I stepped toward the opening. "Come inside. The entrance is right there. What are you..."

She hit it again.

More rocks this time. The cascade of them coming loose from above the entrance, falling across the opening, beginning to stack against each other in the particular way rocks stacked when gravity, mass, and proximity made the decision for them.

And that was when I understood what she was doing.

"No." I moved fast. "Liona, stop. Come inside right now."

She hit the wall a third time.

The rocks came down in a rush. Not slowly. All at once, the way things that had been balanced finally stopped being balanced, a whole section of the stone above the entrance giving up and coming down and filling the opening with a sound that was loud and final and left no ambiguity about what had just happened.

I was inside.

She was outside.

I pressed both hands against the rocks in front of me. They did not move. They had settled with the kind of weight that did not care about my hands or my urgency or anything else I had to offer. I pressed harder. Nothing.

"Liona." My voice came out louder than I meant it to. "Open this. Right now. Open it."

Silence from the other side.

Then, from somewhere very close to the rocks on the outside, the sound of something shifting. The scrape of movement. Then a hand. I could feel it somehow, that particular awareness, pressing against the stone on the other side of where my hands were.

Her voice came through the rock in a way that should not have been possible but was.

"Thank you." Quiet. Completely steady. "For coming into my life. For making my youth worth remembering. For always having my back no matter what."

Something in my chest cracked open.

"Stop talking nonsense." My voice was not steady. "As your Luna, I command you to open this. Please. Right now."

"Do you really think hiding in there would keep us both safe?" A pause. "They would have found us. Both of us. You know that."

"Liona." I pressed my forehead against the cold rock. "Please. Do not do whatever you are thinking. It is stupid. Please do not."

A soft sound came through. Almost a laugh. Almost.

"I have always wanted to do something that matters," she said. "Something real. Something that counts."

"You have always done things that matter." The words were breaking as they came out. I could not stop them from breaking. "Every single day. Please. Please do not do this."

Uncontrollable warm liquids fell from my eyes, " If you do this I won’t forgive."

Silence for a moment.

"If anything happens," she said. Her voice was softer now. Still steady underneath the softness. "I want you to build a statue of me. In the pack house. Right in the main hall where everyone has to walk past it."

A sound came out of me that was not a laugh and was not a sob but was somewhere between both of them.

"Keep your voice down," she said gently. "Or you will waste everything I am doing out here."

I heard it.

The shift was happening on the other side of the rocks. The particular sound of bones and weight and form rearranging themselves into something else. Then the soft landing of four paws on the ground outside.

Then she howled.

Loud and long and completely deliberate, filling the clearing outside the cave and pushing up into the trees above it and traveling in every direction at once. Not a sound of distress. Not a sound of fear. A sound that said I am here and I am choosing to be heard and I know exactly what I am doing.

Then she ran. Her paws on the ground, fast and getting faster, moving away from the cave entrance and away from me.

Voices from the trees. Men’s voices. Movement. The sound of people who had been searching and had just been given exactly what they needed to find what they were looking for.

They found it.

I heard them change direction. Heard them follow. Heard the sounds of pursuit moving through the trees and getting further away and further and further until the forest swallowed all of it and there was nothing left but silence.

I pressed my hand flat against the cold rock in front of me and sobbed badly, while trying to keep my voice down.

On the other side of it, the clearing was empty now.

She was gone.

The cave was quiet around me. The darkness behind me was deep and old and patient. The pull in my chest was still there, steady and warm, pointing further into the dark the way it had been pointing since before I understood what it was pointing toward.

I kept my hand against the rock. I stayed there for a long moment.

Then I turned.

The darkness waited.

I walked into it.