Chapter 66: The Bornes

Azura’s POV

Most of the warriors were already asleep.

I could hear it in the way the camp had gone quiet. The kind of quiet that only comes when people have finally stopped fighting exhaustion and let it take its toll. Slow breathing. Still bodies. Even the warrior on watch had gone from alert to barely holding his eyes open.

I was the only one still awake.

I lay on my back and stared up at the gaps in the branches above me. The feeling in my chest was still there. That same heavy wrong thing that had been sitting inside me since we made camp. I had tried to talk myself out of it for hours. It was not working.

Liona was asleep beside me. Completely gone. One hand tucked under her head, breathing like she was home in a proper bed and not in the middle of a forest that had already eaten someone’s memory. I watched her for a moment and decided not to hold it against her.

I shifted onto my side and closed my eyes.

Then something touched my hand.

I opened my eyes.

Rhydor was crouching right beside me. Close. Looking down at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Something soft. Something warm. His eyes were on mine and he was smiling. A real smile. Quiet and easy, like he had all the time in the world and no intention of going anywhere.

I forgot how to think.

I had never seen him smile like that. Not once. Not at me. Not at anyone. And for one completely stupid moment, I just lay there staring at his face as if I had never seen a face before in my life.

Then something in my head woke up.

This is not right.

He does not do this. He does not sit beside me in the dark and smile at me like that. This is not him.

I opened my mouth.

Something drove through his chest from behind.

Thick and dark, pushing through him and coming out the front, and I screamed before I could stop myself. I scrambled back across the ground with one hand, because it was holding one of my hands. But I wasn’t thinking about anything at all except getting away from what I was seeing.

Then I saw the real Rhydor.

Standing three feet back. Cold face. No smile. Eyes sharp and both hands already moving toward his axes.

The thing wearing his face turned toward me and everything it had been showing me fell away at once. What was underneath was pale and wrong and hungry, and its hand was still around mine, and I yanked my arm back so hard I felt it all the way up my shoulder.

Rhydor’s axe came down.

The head was separated from the body cleanly.

The body dropped. The head hit the ground and kept going. Jaw working. Eyes open. Still trying to find something to reach.

I sat on the ground and shook.

My scream had pulled everyone up. Warriors jolting from sleep across the camp, hands finding weapons before their eyes were fully open. Liona shot up beside me gasping, hair in her face, looking around with the expression of someone fully prepared to fight whoever had woken her.

Then she saw the eyes at the treeline.

And the white fog comes with them.

It had rolled in without any of us noticing. Low and pale, drifting between the silver trees like smoke, soft enough to see through but sitting over everything, curling around the trunks and spreading across the ground in slow quiet waves. And inside it, at the edge of the trees, were eyes. Dozens of them. Cold and flat and unblinking, spread across every direction the forest touched.

The sound Liona made was short and completely involuntary. She clapped one hand over her mouth immediately and grabbed my arm with the other one and did not make another sound after that.

I pulled her to her feet.

The Bornes, I remembered what the witch called them. They came out of the trees.

All at once. That wrong fast movement, too direct, too purposeless, like things that had forgotten how living bodies were supposed to work. The warriors met them and the camp broke into chaos. Blades swinging. Bodies moving. The sounds of a fight that had no clean edges anywhere.

Silas crossed toward Rhydor.

Rhydor spun and his elbow caught Silas across the jaw. Hard. Silas stumbled back, hit a tree trunk, caught himself, and stood there staring with an expression halfway between shock and fury.

"What the..."

"I didn’t see you." Rhydor’s voice was tight in a way I had not heard before. He pointed at the headless Borne on the ground still moving. "I saw that."

Nobody spoke for a second.

I looked at the fog drifting through the camp. At Rhydor’s face. At what he had just done to Silas without meaning to.

And I understood.

The hallucination fog.

"It’s the fog." I stood up. My legs were not fully steady but I stood. "It’s making people see things that are not there. He thought Silas was one of those things."

Rhydor looked at me, I knew he already understood what was happening.

"Which means any of us can look like one of them to someone else," I said. "We could hurt each other without knowing."

"Most importantly, they don’t die," I added, pointing at the beheaded one, who was still looking for what to bite.

The camp went a different kind of still.

Torin looked at the fog. Then, at Silas, still holding his jaw. Then at Rhydor.

"So what do we do?"

Axel was already moving. He bent down, pulled a rope from his pack, and held it up.

"Everyone ties this around their wrist. We stay connected. If something comes at you and it has the rope it is one of us. If it does not have the rope it is fair game."

"And since they don’t die, we slow them down," he said standing up.

Nobody argued.

The rope went around wrists fast because the Bornes were not stopping, and the fog was getting thicker at the edges, and there was no time to think too carefully about anything. Rhydor. Silas. Axel. Torin. Liona. The warriors and I. We were all connected. Corvin took the rope without being asked, tied it, picked up his sword, and stood with the others like nothing had ever been taken from him. His body knew what to do even when his mind was somewhere else entirely.

They fought.

The warriors moved as one group now, connected by the rope, cutting legs and arms and keeping the Bornes from closing in. It was not clean but it worked. The Borne went down and kept dragging, but without legs, they could not reach anyone fast enough.

I stayed back with Liona and held the burning branch I had grabbed from the fire’s edge and watched and hated that watching was all I could do.

Then a Borne came from the left.

Moving toward Rhydor’s blind side while he was handling two in front of him. Nobody else was close enough. I did not think about it. I swung the branch with everything I had and hit it across the side of its head.

It was not impressive. It was not skilled. It was just everything I had behind a piece of wood.

The Borne stumbled sideways.

Rhydor turned and finished it.

Then he looked at me. One second. Just one. His eyes went from the branch in my hand to my face and back again. Then he turned back to the fight without a single word.

But he had looked. Which made me blush a little.

Then another Borne grabbed the rope from behind.

Not biting. Grabbing. Pulling at it, Silas moved fast, dropping his dagger to cut its hand before it could drag someone down. The blade came down and missed the hand completely and cut the rope instead. Clean through. The section connecting Rhydor and me to the rest of the group snapped and fell.

For one second nothing changed.

Then the mist moved in.

Fast and thick, pouring into the gap where the rope had been, and I blinked and two Silas were standing in front of me. Same face. Same build. Same everything. Both were looking back at me, and I had no idea which one was real.

I grabbed Rhydor’s arm.

"I see two Silases."

He looked where I was looking.

"So do I."

From somewhere in the mist Torin shouted something. His voice was coming from a direction that kept shifting and I could not lock onto it. Liona made a sharp sound beside me, but when I looked, she was not there. A warrior near us swung at something and I could not tell if what he was swinging at was real or not.

Rhydor stepped in front of me.

"Hold my hand." He held his out. "Do not let go."

I took it.

He moved toward the fire, grabbed a torch from the edge of it, and held it up. The nearest Borne stopped moving toward us. Flinched back from the flame. Actually flinched, pulling away from the heat like it burned something deeper than skin.

Rhydor pushed the torch forward.

The Bornes stepped back.

He pushed again. It retreated further.

He turned his head toward the camp and raised his voice.

"They are afraid of fire. Use it. Grab anything burning and push them back. Stay on the rope and do not attack anyone connected to it."

Then lower, just for me.

"We have to go."

"We cannot leave them."

"If we stay they will see us as those things." His hand tightened around mine. "We will get each other killed."

I looked back into the mist. I could hear Liona somewhere in there. Torin. The warriors. All of them were fighting inside a fog that was showing them things that were not real, and I could not help any of them by staying.

I hated that he was right.

We moved.

Torch out in front, the Bornes parting from the flame as we pushed through them, moving away from camp, moving away from everyone. Some of the Borne peeled off from the group and followed us. Rhydor turned and drove the torch into the face of the nearest one, and it stumbled back, and the others with it retreated from the light.

He pulled me forward, and we kept moving until the sounds of the fight were behind us, and then muffled and then swallowed by the mist entirely.

Then there was nothing.

Just the two of us. Just the torch. Just the white mist sitting around us on every side like the forest had closed a door behind us.

And somewhere back in that white our people were fighting alone.