Dom Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 4 of 14

They walked through the night and found the hidden shrine at dawn. The golden stairs were dull now, dark with soot. The wanderer stopped at the bottom step. A small white-furred satyr stood at the top, watching them with calm round eyes, as if it had been waiting a long time. Dom climbed past it. The altar at the shrine's heart stood split in two, gray and lifeless. The ground around it had been clawed up. Scorch marks fanned out across the broken floor like burned wings. Whatever healing had lived here was gone. Dom knelt at the crack. Something pale lay wedged in the dirt below. He worked it free with his fingers. A small journal, older than Renni's, its cover painted with travelers crossing between worlds, the moth-stag drawn at the center of each. The satyr trotted down and nosed a second thing loose from the rubble. A heavy scroll, cracked like dried cement. Dom turned it over. The carving showed a woman driving a blade into a beast inside a healing coffin. Renni. Her last act, sealed under the floor she had broken. The wanderer spoke from the stairs. "She buried this for someone." Dom opened the older journal. The pages named the moth-stag by a word he did not know, and listed two riders. Always two. He felt the cold of it settle in his chest. Renni had not failed alone. She had been the first half of a pair that never finished. Dom closed the book and stood. The satyr pressed against his leg, then turned and walked into the trees. He followed, the wanderer behind him, both journals heavy in his coat. The shrine would not heal anything again. But it had given him the last thing Renni had left to give — a map, and a warning, and the shape of what came next.