Chapter 133


    The Path Ahead


    Rowan stumbled forward, steps feeling as though blades were driving up from his frozen feet. The world around him was a blur of grey and white. Fog shrouded a stretch of stone pillars and twisted shadows bent and spun before his fevered gaze.


    He wasn’t sure if he’d reached Kovethra’s peak already. Wasn’t even sure if Baroc was truly there, or if any of it existed at all. He barely clung to his senses, slipping further into that cold, cruel numbness that seeped into his bones like poison. His frostbitten finger felt like foreign things attached to him.


    He’d long since lost track of time, and any sense of what warmth even meant. He could have been wading through this freezing white fog for days, or weeks, or months, or possibly just hours.


    What are you doing boy? The face of Rowan’s grandfather appeared in his mind with the question.


    “I’m… I’m lost,” Rowan croaked.


    Rowan’s eyes fluttered, barely managing to open. His vision caught the strange glow of the ferrax beside him. But he wasn’t here on this mountain top—he was there, back in the old keep at Garronforn, hearing his grandfather Bodh’s sharp voice.


    “I’m lost?” Bodh scoffed. Rowan’s voice blending with Bodh’s words in the memory. His grandfather’s eyes—stern and pitiless—bored down on Rowan even from within his mind. “Only lost if you let yourself be. There’s no road to follow up here, only the strength in your own damn legs. What’s the purpose of having ‘em if you’re ready to lie down in the snow like a beaten dog?”


    “He’s just a lad, he’s not a soldier,” Rowan heard his father’s voice. A defiance in it that Rowan didn’t remember.


    “Not yet, but he will be,” Bodh replied. “Both of them.” This was all memory now.


    “And what if I don’t want him to?” Taran retorted. “What if he wants to live something more than being another sword for Rubane? You think I want him stuck here, mindlessly serving like the rest?”


    “He has no other path,” Bodh stated, voice cold and sharp. “Neither do you. Neither do I. His duty is to serve the people of Garronforn. Always.”


    The words rang in Rowan’s head, binding him, suffocating him with an old anger he couldn’t shake. In his mind, his father’s voice grew louder, his gaze fierce.


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    “This is life to you, isn’t it?” Taran’s voice echoed as Rowan struggled to breathe, his vision blurring, seeing his father’s worn face there in the memory. “Serve and obey, call it duty, call it honour, whatever you damn please. But there’s more beyond these walls, Bodh, beyond your rules, beyond the shackles you’re so proud of.”


    “How dare you!” Bodh roared, and the intensity of it was enough to bring Rowan to his knees. “I could have had you beheaded. Had this boy shipped off to some hidden corner of Rubane where he could shame no one. My daughter’s love for you is all that stayed my hand.”


    Rowan’s body ached to surrender, to sink down and give in, but a wild pull, something deep and stubborn, forced him back.


    He blinked, vision fading, barely able to see the slope ahead. Shadowed figures moved in his periphery round the mountain top. He could just about make them out, standing in a silent circle around him, watching. They were ocelix—like Baroc—he could tell.


    Are they even real?


    His vision swam again, and he tried to reach out, but his hand fell short, sinking into the snow. No one moved, their beastial faces solemn, as if they bore witness to something sacred—or unworthy.


    Help. Help me. He thought but the words wouldn’t escape him.


    A part of him knew he had to do this alone. No one could carry him. If he wanted to keep going—if he wanted to live—he’d have to climb.


    “Not done yet,” Rowan muttered, teeth chattering.


    “Listen to me, Taran,” Bodh growled, “Rowan and Tanlor will serve. These little trips off past Nortara end now. No grandsons of mine will be rangers,” he spat. “They will train as knights in my keep and serve Boern when he becomes Duke in my place.”


    Rowan coughed violently, and saw blood on the white snow in front of him.


    It had been later. Years later that Taran had come to Rowan. A youth, old enough to hold a sword but not yet old enough to understand what it meant to hold one.


    “There is always another path,” his father had told him.


    Rowan pushed himself off his knees.


    The cold pulled at him, he felt he could see Bodh pulling him with chains down to ground, telling him he was nothing but a servant, bound to his duty.


    But there was a rebellious fire that burned through Rowan’s exhaustion, daring him to choose.


    The ferrax stood beside him, eyes amber embers against the cold white. The creature had been with him for…gods, he didn’t even know how long. Its face was a flame in his vision, the only warmth in this lifeless endless cold.


    It hadn’t abandoned him—not yet.


    Rowan took a breath that tasted like copper and ice. Pulling the last scraps of strength from somewhere deep, where the part of him that belonged to mountains and the wild places lived.


    And he took another step, boots crunching the snow.


    The ferrax moved beside him, the only thing that felt real against the blur of exhaustion.


    And so, he climbed, his world narrowing to the rhythm of his own breath, his own heartbeat, and the path before him.