Blushfire's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Blushfire knelt in the snow and wrote another name. The boy had been eleven. He had crossed the Veil chasing a dog, and Blushfire had reached the tear six minutes too late. He wiped the silver ink on his glove and closed the black leather book. The clasp bit shut like a small door. Somewhere behind him, Choji whined low in his chest, the sound a big dog makes when he has been patient too long. This was the seventh tear in the Veil this season. Blushfire was the Ember Warden of Ashen Hollow, and his oath was that no one under his protection walked alone. The book in his coat said he was losing that argument. He judged the town safe when the fires stayed lit past midnight. Lately the fires went out early. People were checking their locks again. He was supposed to be building a Shadowgate where wardens like him were not needed. Instead he was writing names. He had come out tonight to learn why. Every tear he had marked on his map opened along the same ridge. He needed to see one before it closed. He needed to know what pulled it open from the other side. Choji stopped walking. The husky's ears went flat and his tail dropped. Blushfire felt the pull through their bond before he saw it: a seam in the air between two black pines, edges peeling like wet bark. The ember markings under his sleeves warmed and began to glow. Something stepped through. It was tall as the pines. Its skull was a stag's, bleached and cracked, antlers branching into dead roots. Its ribs held a red coal where a heart should be. It did not charge. It lowered the great skull and looked at him, and the coal in its chest pulsed once, slow, like a signal. Blushfire's hand went to his blade and stopped there. Guardian's Instinct was quiet. The thing was not hunting him. It turned its head toward the tear behind it and then back to him, and he understood, the way he sometimes understood Choji: it was not the thing tearing the Veil. It was the thing holding it open so he would see. On the other side of the seam, deeper in, he saw more shapes. Small ones. Human-shaped. Standing in a line, waiting. The tear was not an accident. Something on the far side was pulling people through, and this old creature had opened a door to show him. The stag turned and walked back through the seam. The seam closed behind it. Blushfire stood alone in the snow with his hand on Choji's neck. He touched the scarf at his throat, still there, and thought of the person at home who believed he was safer than this. He opened the book to the blank page at the back and, for the first time, did not write a name. He wrote a direction.