Book One – Chapter 14

Perhaps he had deemed her unworthy, a calculation made in the raw chaos of survival. Perhaps he would have abandoned the voltera, his familiar, and even the golem too, had known about the orichs. Perhaps he had simply lost Barbarthara in this madness of battle. Perhaps he had intended to return for her later. Perhaps, in his final moments, he had not thought of her at all.

Whatever his plan had been or would have been, Barbarthara would never know. In the aftermath of a battle, decisions always crystallised into deliberate intensions, revealed reasonable strategy, or stood as glaring mistakes. Hindsight gave you time to look back, and to look around for all that had been invisible in the storm of blood and snow, for all you could not have realised or reasoned in the moments between life and death, between the present and the unknowable future.

Facing this future, with her roots newly nourished by bitter sustenance, the fragments of Barbarthara’s scattered memories began to align with a clarity that was both cruel and deceptive. Salgier had tried to save everyone. And in doing so, he had saved no one. Ahrasik and Sahir lay frozen. M, sealed within the golem, would not rise again. Only Barbarthara remained.

Survival was all that mattered now, be it for her own good or to pass on all she had learned about the Shaira. She could not afford hesitation. If she stayed on the mountain, she would freeze and starve. The only path forward led down, into the swamps below, those forgotten lands she had been taken from so long ago that her memory of them had become all but a blur, warped and fractured. There was nothing now but the mountain’s inner confines and the vast, uncharted unknown beyond it. She recalled little of the world below, save for vague, distorted echoes. The clumsy, malleable runt was her only hope of reaching it.