It was impossible to see through the fog.
It pressed against him from every direction. Thick, cold, and absolute. So dense that Caelan could barely make out his own hands when he held them before his face. His bare feet found the ground one step at a time, the wet rock slick and biting beneath him, and he moved slowly, carefully.
"Caelan."
He stopped.
The voice came from somewhere ahead of him, or behind him, or perhaps from nowhere at all. Sound moved strangely here. It always did. The fog swallowed it whole and spat it back in pieces, and so the voice seemed to rise from every direction at once, sourceless, like something that had been waiting a long time for him to finally hear it.
He turned his head. Waited.
Then came a growl.
It was deep and guttural, the kind of sound that did not belong to anything small, or anything merciful. It came from behind him, he was certain of that. So he ran.
His feet screamed against the rock. He didn't care. The fog blurred past him in sheets of white and grey, formless and endless, and somewhere behind him the growl rose into something worse, something hungry and purposeful, and still his name kept coming to him from all directions, slipping between his ragged breaths.
Caelan. Caelan.
He ran until his lungs burned and his legs threatened to buckle, until the ground beneath him changed from solid stone to something less certain, crumbling at the edges. Then, slowly, the fog began to thin.
He didn't slow his pace until the world opened up around him and he found himself standing at the edge of a cliff, the fog peeling back to reveal a sky bruised black and violet with storm, and beneath it, stretching outward in every direction, flat and lightless and profoundly wrong, an endless sea of black water.
He had never seen a sea that colour. Like ink. It lay perfectly still despite the churning sky above it, undisturbed by wind or wave.
He barely had time to register any of it before he saw the hand.
A palm. White-knuckled. Fingers clawing at the lip of the cliff.
"Caelan...please."
He knew that voice. He would know it forever.
He dropped to his knees and scrambled to the edge, stones scraping his palms raw. His heart was already breaking before his eyes had finished seeing what hung below him. His brother dangled in the void, fingers straining. The black water laid impossibly far beneath him.
"Leander." The name came out of him like something torn loose. "I have you, I have you. Give me your hand."
He reached down. His fingertips brushed the air an inch above his brother's.
Leander raised his face.
Caelan went still.
The eyes that looked up at him were not his brother's eyes. They were pale and flat and entirely empty. The flesh of his throat had been torn open, and the tears on his cheeks had long since dried to salt.
"You could have saved me." Leander's free hand found his wrist. The grip was iron. "You could have prevented all of this."
Caelan opened his mouth to answer. To apologise. To argue, to beg, he didn't know which, but the world gave way beneath him.
He screamed as they fell together, the cliff face rushing past in a smear of grey and black, and below him the sea rose up to meet them. He watched his brother sink into the dark water without a sound, without a ripple, swallowed completely, and then the surface sealed itself over him like a wound closing.
Like it had never been disturbed at all.
The water filled his vision. Cold radiated upward from it. Close now, so close...
Caelan.
He jolted upright.
The scream died in his throat, strangled there, and for three long seconds he simply sat and stared at the canvas wall of the tent in front of him and breathed, and breathed, and waited for his heart to settle back into something resembling a rhythm.
His shirt was soaked through. His hands were shaking.
Slowly, the world rebuilt itself around him. The thin bar of morning light cutting through the tent's entrance. The distant canopy of the Kelmoran woods beyond it, the treetops green in the early hour. The sounds, wind through branches, the distant hollow knock of a woodpecker, the soft creak of the world waking. He focused on each of them the way his mother had taught him, years ago, after the nightmares had first begun. Name what is real, she had said, pressing her hand to his chest. Find it, and hold onto it.
His tent. The woods. The cold morning air carrying the smell of pine and dead fire.
Leander was not here.
Leander was not anywhere.
Caelan pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and held them there until the pressure became the only thing he could feel. Three years. It had been three years, and still the dream returned for him like a debt that refused to be settled. He knew it would never stop.
He lowered his hands. Exhaled slowly through his nose.
Caelan rose, ducked through the tent's entrance, and stepped out into the pale grey of early morning. The encampment was quiet around him, the fire had burned down to ash and cold ember during the night, the stones around it dark. He walked past it, moving further from the camp until he found the stream, thin and quick over smooth stone, fed by one of the mountain springs higher up. He crouched and cupped the water in both hands, and pressed it against his face. The cold was immediate and vicious and exactly what he needed. He did it again.
Caelan sat back on his heels and looked up.
Beyond the treeline, the cliffs rose in sharp silhouette against the brightening sky, the mountain peaks above them still capped in the blue-grey of retreating night. He would be up there soon enough. Caelan studied the ridge lines the way his mentor had taught him to study any terrain, noting the breaks, the ledges, the places where the rock changed character and became unpredictable. Another problem to carry, once the sun climbed a little higher.
But that was the nature of this life. There was always another problem waiting.
He rose, rolled his shoulders against the ache that had settled there during the night, and cast one last glance across the clearing. The trees stood patient and indifferent around him, keeping whatever moved between them to themselves.
Caelan and his mentor had not come all this way to stand by a stream and watch the sun rise over the mountains after all.
They had come to hunt.