Zach Brenner's Arc

Chapter 84 of 86

The airship set them down at the cabin by the river. Zach carried the rolled map inside and set it on the table. His twins slept upstairs, brought home from the castle that morning. He should have felt only relief. Instead the parchment sat there like a stone. Three cursed lands marked on it. A burning sky. A stone plague. Children eaten by shadow. He had no way to know which was real, or which needed him first. Raven came in from checking on the children. She still wore her travel leathers, her black cat ears twitching at the sound of the river outside. Five years of marriage had taught her to read his silence. She looked at the map, then at his face. "You've been staring at that thing since Myst," she said. She pulled a chair close and sat. "Say it." "I can't choose blind," Zach said. "Armin drew these from a thousand years of watching. But watching isn't proof. A burning city could already be ash. The shadow plague could be a rumor." He pressed his palms flat on the table. "If I fly across the sea for the wrong one, families die while I'm gone. And I leave my own kids for nothing." Raven studied the marks. Then she stood and crossed to his pack. She drew out a strip of gray cloth Armin had pressed into her hand at the tower. "He gave me this before we left," she said. "His people watched the world with the fog. He said the cloth still holds a thread of it. Lay it on the map. Where a curse still breathes, the fog answers." Zach spread the cloth over the parchment. Nothing moved. Then, slowly, the gray thread darkened over one mark and one mark only—the shadow plague on the far shore. The other two lay dead and pale. The cloth had told him what was real and what was already gone. "The children," Zach said quietly. "The one still breathing is the one eating children in their sleep." He looked up at Raven. His jaw was tight. "The burning city is finished. The stone plague too late or false. But that one is happening now." Raven set her hand over his. "Then you have your proof," she said. "You don't have to guess anymore." Zach rolled the map with the dark thread marked inside it. The paralysis was gone. He knew, at last, where the true crisis lay. But knowing brought its own weight. The living curse sat across an ocean he had never crossed. And his twins slept upstairs, home for one night before their father had to leave again. "I know where to go," he said. "Now I have to tell them I'm going."