Chapter 60: The Fog Woman

Azura’s POV

This place was not anywhere I had ever been, that was the first thing that hit me. Not the fog, though the fog was everywhere, thick and white and pressing in from every direction until the world was nothing but a few feet of visible ground and pale light coming from nowhere in particular.

Not the silence, even though the silence was the kind that felt permanent, like sound had never existed here to begin with.

The first thing that hit me was the simple and disorienting fact that I did not know this place. Not the ground beneath my feet. Not the quality of the light. Not the air, which had no smell at all, no earth or trees or wind, just nothing. I had never been here before and I had no idea how I had gotten here.

I turned slowly, looking for something to hold onto with my eyes.

Nothing. Just white fog in every direction, and that pale sourceless light, and the ground that felt solid but looked like it went on forever.

I did not know where I was. I did not know how I had come to be standing here. I did not know what this place was or whether it had a name or whether anyone had ever stood in it before me.

But then I saw her.

She was standing in the fog perhaps twenty feet away, perfectly still, watching me with an expression I could not fully make out from this distance.

A woman. Not old, not young, somewhere between the two in a way that made it impossible to place her. She wore a white gown that fell straight to the ground and did not move even though something in the air around her seemed to be shifting.

Her hair was white.

All of it, white from root to end, the kind of white that was not from age but from something else entirely, something that had always been that way. And running through the front of it, straight and clean, was a little streak of black hair cutting through all that white like a brush stroke.

I knew her.

The recognition landed in my chest before my mind caught up with it, sitting there with a weight that said this was not the first time I had seen this face. I had seen her before. I knew that with a certainty that had no explanation attached to it, just the solid undeniable fact of it sitting inside me.

She was speaking.

Her lips were moving, forming words one after another, and I could see the shape of sentences, the rise and fall of something she clearly believed was important.

I could not hear a single sound coming out of her mouth.

I stepped toward her. "What? I cannot hear you."

Her lips kept moving.

"I cannot hear you," I said again, louder this time, the frustration already climbing before I could stop it. "What is the point of this? You are clearly trying to tell me something and I cannot hear a single word you are saying. This is the second time something like this has happened and I am still standing here hearing nothing. Speak up. Please. Just speak up."

She kept talking. Silent and steady, like she could not hear me either or simply could not change whatever this was.

I started walking toward her.

She moved back.

Not with steps. Her feet did not move. Her body did not shift or turn or lean. She simply was further away than she had been a moment before, like the space between us had expanded quietly without consulting either of us about it.

I took another step forward.

She moved back again, like before. No walking, no movement at all. Just suddenly further.

I stopped.

"What is this?" The frustration in my voice was real now, sharp and tired at the same time. "Why do you keep moving away? I am trying to get closer so I can hear you. I am trying to reach you. Why does the distance keep changing?"

She looked at me for a long moment. Her lips were still now. She was just looking at me, and whatever was in her expression was something I could not read from a distance that would not close.

Then she lifted her hand and pointed.

I looked at where she was pointing.

She was pointing at my chest.

At my pendant.

I looked down, and as I did, the pendant began to glow. Not the faint pulse I had seen it produce before in moments of strong feeling. This was fuller and steadier, a warm gold light pushing outward from the metal in slow even waves, turning the white fog around me soft and golden, changing the color of everything within reach.

I stared at it.

And then I saw something I had never seen before.

Inside the pendant, visible through the glow like something that had been sitting there patiently in the dark waiting for this exact quality of light to reveal it, was a scale.

Small and perfect, catching the gold light and returning it in pieces, sitting at the absolute center of the teardrop milky stone, like it had always been the point of the whole thing.

My breath left me.

Genevieve had told me. She had said there was a scale inside the pendant, something that could not be seen with ordinary eyes. When she had shown it to Liona and I we saw nothing.

She had been very clear about it. You needed something beyond ordinary sight to see what was inside this pendant.

I was watching it.

Clearly and completely, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like I could not imagine how I had ever looked at this pendant and seen only metal.

The glow pulsed once more, warm and steady against my skin, and I reached up toward it without thinking.

And woke up.

****

The camp was already moving.

I sat up fast, my hand going immediately to the pendant, closing around it, and looking down at it the way you look at something you need to confirm is real.

It sat against my chest exactly as it always had. Dull silver, ordinary, and giving nothing away. No glow. No scale visible anywhere inside it. Just a pendant hanging on a chain.

I held it in my fingers and sat there.

What was that?

"Sleepyhead."

I looked up. Liona was crouching in front of me, already dressed and put together, looking unreasonably clean for someone who had spent the night on the ground in the middle of nowhere after a battle.

"You are the last one awake," she said.

"I was thinking," I said.

"You were sleeping."

"I was thinking in my sleep." I let go of the pendant and looked around properly. The camp was in full motion, warriors rolling bedrolls and packing supplies, the fire already cold and covered over. Everyone moved with the efficiency of people who wanted to get moving and were not waiting on anyone.

I turned to look at her, "How is your leg?"

She moved it slightly, testing, and the small wince that crossed her face told me everything before she controlled it. "Manageable. Yours?"

I shifted my own leg carefully. The hip pulled with a deep familiar ache, the joint still holding its complaint from yesterday, but it held my weight when I tested it. "Same," I said. "Manageable."

She helped me up and I stood carefully, putting weight on it in stages.

I looked around the camp and found Rhydor near the edge of the clearing with Axel, both of them looking at something between them, speaking low. He was fully dressed, his brown hair tied back, carrying himself like a man who had slept well and felt perfectly fine.

Except I watched him move his left arm to gesture at something and I saw it. The smallest hesitation. His shoulder was taking the motion a fraction slower than the rest of him, a tightening so brief and controlled that it was barely there at all.

He was still in pain, and he was just extremely good at not showing it.

"Where did you wash up?" I asked Liona.

She pointed toward the trees at the back of the clearing. "River just through there. Not far, it’s cold but clean."

I grabbed my travel pack and spare clothes. "Back soon."

The river was narrow, quick, and cold enough to chase everything out of my head for a few minutes. I washed fast, dressed, pulled my hair back, and walked back into camp feeling more like myself than I had since waking up.

Rhydor was no longer with Axel.

He was standing with his horse near the tree line, checking the saddle straps with his back half turned to the camp. Torin and Silas were nowhere I could see. Several warriors were missing too.

"Where are the rest?" I asked Liona, glancing around.

"Hunting," she said from where she was sitting, not looking up from the book open in her lap. I genuinely had no idea where she had found a book out here and I had made peace with not knowing.

"Fresh meat for the morning meal. They went a while ago." She added, still reading.

I looked at Rhydor standing with his horse.

And finally, I walked over to him.

He did not look up when I stopped beside him. Just kept his attention on the saddle straps with the focus of a man who found them very interesting.

"Good morning," I said.

Nothing.

I waited. "How is your shoulder?"

"Fine," he said. Flat. No feeling in it. Still not looking at me.

I looked at his shoulder and then at his face. "If it is getting worse you should do something about it instead of pretending it is nothing. That wound is not healing normally and you know that better than anyone."

He stopped what he was doing.

He turned his head and looked at me properly for the first time since I had walked over.

"Did I ask for your opinion?" His voice was completely even. Not raised. Not angry. Just final, the way a door closes is final. "Learn to mind your business."

I had walked across this camp to check on him. I had done it because last night I had sat beside him and cleaned a wound he would not let anyone else near and wrapped it with my own hands. And this was what I got for it.

"If the situation is getting worse," I said, keeping my own voice steady, "then someone needs to say something because you clearly will not."

"Check upon yourself first," he said, and his eyes dropped briefly and deliberately to the slight favoring of my right side that I had been working very hard to hide. "Before you concern yourself with others."

My jaw tightened so hard I felt it in my back teeth.

I turned and walked away.

"Jerk," I said, at exactly the volume of someone who means to be heard but will not admit it.

I did not look back.

I was three steps away when I looked up and stopped walking.

Torin and Silas were coming through the trees at the far edge of the clearing. Five warriors walked behind them, two of them carrying a large animal between them on a thick branch, the meat from the morning hunt. They were moving at a steady pace and everything about the return looked normal.

Except their faces.

Torin was not smiling. That alone was enough to make me look twice because Torin smiled the way other people breathed, automatically and constantly, even in bad situations. There was nothing on his face right now except a careful, controlled stillness.

His eyes were moving around the camp, checking it, the way eyes move when something out there has made a person want to confirm that what is in here is still safe.

Silas looked the same. Measured and quiet, holding something back, waiting until he could speak to Rhydor directly before he said whatever it was.

Two of the warriors behind them were walking too close together, shoulders almost touching, the kind of closeness that happens without thinking when the space around you has recently felt like it had something in it.

They had seen something out there in those trees.

Something that had not followed them back, but had made the walk back feel longer than the walk out.

Torin’s eyes found mine across the clearing and held for just a second before he looked toward Rhydor.

My hand found the pendant without me telling it to.

It was warm against my palm.

Like listening to something.