Below the Peak (Sola)(101)

Nara rushed to the boy’s side. She lifted the tunic and assessed him. Relief and grief washed over her as she took in his recoloring skin with no trace of the infection. Nara almost chocked when she looked at his side where the wound had been and found no traces. Her eyes flitted to his young face. His eyes moved behind closed lids before opening slowly, unfocused.

Nara released a breath and glanced at Finn. “Thank you” she truly meant it. She had seen death, had taken lives too, but she had never feared to lose a life as the boy had made her feel. There was something unexplainable in him that reminded her so much of Ingrid. A vibrant life ahead that shouldn’t be extinguished too soon by death.

“I am tired” Wúlf mumbled, his eyes closing again. He felt the human woman draw the covers over his body. “Then sleep, get some rest,” she said in that comforting, gentle voice of hers. Rest the word sang over him. He needed rest. His breathing became long. “My heart is tired” he mumbled again. He no longer felt sick, the poison that had been crawling in his veins was gone thanks to the elf man, but his chest felt heavy. His mind and spirit ready to surrender to peace. He was prepared to go. He opened his eyes one last time and found the human woman’s eyes and held them with his own. “Thank you for everything. You tried” he began, feeling sorry as the space between her brows wrinkled, picking up the sadness in his voice and bitter sweet curl of his mouth. “But I need to go” Wúlf sighed, closing his eyes once more… “My father waits” …and forever. The woman’s desperate pleas for him to not die faded into nothingness, not strong enough to convince his spirit. Maybe one day, they’d meet, his soul mused. Perhaps in the otherworld.





Chapter Forty-eight


“Cannot sleep?” Nara asked in a strange tone.

“No” Calemir’s voice was low in the dark.

Nara drummed her fingers lightly on the mattress. “Neither can I.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Calemir asked, keeping his eyes closed.

Nara bit the inside of her cheek, pausing her drumming. “I will if you share too.” She said, before thinking twice about it.

He shifted beside her, rolling onto his back, folding his hands behind his head. He rumbled “Sure.”

Nara also flipped on her back too, folded her hands over the grey coverlet below her chest. Although they were a several inches apart, she could feel his body heat. She licked her dry lips and muttered. “I see him when I sleep.”

“The boy.”

“Yes.”

It’s been over four days since the passing of the boy. On the same day, on the same evening, they buried him near the red tree. She was disappointed that she had never asked his name, and thus failed to give him proper farewell prayers. When she had returned to her room after the short burial, she and Izza got rid of the linens and the mattress that had been soiled with the infected blood just to be on the cautionary side and avoid risking of her being infected or catching a disease. As a result, she found herself sleeping again in Calemir’s room while she waited for a new mattress to be brought.

Her skin shivered with the next words. “Sometimes I dream about him, I see the child dying at the hands of the creatures, and I can’t do anything about it” she licked her dry lips again. “and other times I am among the creatures, and I’m not only killing him but also killing my sister.”

Her breath left her lungs in an anxious whisper as the silence grew larger by the second. She had shared too much. Nara grimaced. She was starting to regret talking about her nightmares until he spoke. “His death wasn’t your fault. His spirit had given up already long before Finn healed him” Calemir paused then added. “In the end, he chose to die.”

Nara swallowed hard, sadness laced in her voice. “He was just so young.” She closed her eyes for a second and blinked the emotions away before opening them. “He deserved to live after enduring so much suffering. He should have lived.”

Calemir continued to look at the ceiling and made a vague response.

Nara sighed and added “Despite that, meeting him opened my eyes. It showed me the malice that lives in the hearts of many of my people. The power of our kingdom has corrupted our minds and robbed us pure compassion for another.”

Nara cocked her head and glanced at what she could make of his side profile in the dark. “Enough of my rambling. What is it that bothers you?”

“It’s nothing of importance” Calemir stated nonchalantly.

“It is alright if you don’t want to tell me,” Nara said this with good will and not to make him feel any sort of guilt. But still, as if he felt some sort of duty to keep his end of the deal he spoke. “There’s something around. I do not know what it is, but I feel it in the air.”

“This feeling, is it good or bad?”

Calemir worked his jaw. “Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. It is a strange feeling that tells me something is upon us.”

“Maybe it is something good” Nara muttered in a hopeful tone.

“Maybe” Calemir repeated.

Slowly her eyes drifted to a close.





Chapter forty-nine


Kalil Kingdom


Nikolas strode tensely to his father’s sleeping quarters. His face quickly grew tight when he stepped inside the room and found the queen and the General standing by the bed nursing his very ill father. He swallowed hard as he gazed at the king who sat on the bed, pillows supporting his back and head. His father was becoming nothing but a shell. A thin shell of a body as he withered slowly in death. Nikolas shifted his steely gaze at the definition of evil itself. Anger burned in his chest as he glared at Dagny. Nikolas didn’t believe a lick what the royal doctors interpreted of the sickness his father had. Fever Nikolas scoffed in his mind. No fever made a man’s hair fall like dry leaves in autumn, ate a man’s flesh and bones to a weightless sack. His father was being poisoned by the damn woman. Nikolas' stomach knotted as his suspicions grew dark. He felt it in his gut the woman was doing more than poisoning him.