Diaspor Aspenwind's Arc

Chapter 6 of 11

Diaspor planted his boots on the moss and lifted his golden sword. Beneath his feet, a slow spiral of pale lavender light turned in the floor, sparks drifting up through it like dust through a sunbeam. He had not noticed it before. It was waking now because she had come. She stepped into her ring of stones and began to speak low words. The violet pulse of the stones brightened. Diaspor moved to charge her — and the spiral under his boots flared. The ground cracked. Black roots shot up around him, twisted and thick, lifting a great spike of amethyst with a citrine heart burning at its center. The roots caught her ritual stones and tore them sideways out of the soil. Her chant broke into a hiss. Beyond the alcove mouth, the glowing grove answered too. A willow with deep purple leaves bent low, its hanging strands brushing the ground like fingers. From between its roots a heavy shape padded out into the light. Purple scales. Yellow eyes older than the trees, older than her stones, older than any door he had ever guarded. It looked at her, not at him. The hunter stumbled back from her broken circle, her dark robes catching on the new roots. The falconbees rose in a frantic cloud, confused, their wall at the alcove mouth coming apart. The grove had been built over something, and that something was awake. Diaspor did not understand it. He only saw the gap. He ran through the broken ring, past her reaching hand, between two startled bees, and out into the wet grass beyond the willow. He did not stop running until the glow was behind him and his lungs burned. He had not killed her. He had lost his one chance at her sleeping throat, and his trap before that, and now this. But he was alive, and free, and somewhere back in the grove an old thing with yellow eyes was holding her in place. He turned north into the dark and kept moving. The hunt was not over. It had only changed shape.