by Helen Scott
"Why?"
"It is a name for royalty, not a soldier, although the meaning is befitting of both."
I waited for him to continue, but it seemed that he was happy to leave it at that. "Are you going to tell me what it means?"
"Destroyer of peace, or if you want it even more gloomy, destroyer of worlds."
"Wow. I can see why you prefer Niall. Do you know what that means?"
"Cloud."
"So your parents were very gloomy on the first name and very fluffy on the second name. Interesting choices."
"My parents rescued me. I was abandoned as a small child, and they took me in and raised me."
"So you don't know your birth parents?" I asked, the image of Dres in my head looking so similar to the man that was sitting behind me.
"I do not, but I don't think I am related to your Dresden. We are too similar in age by your memories, if we were related we would have to be twins almost."
"Stranger things have happened." It was all I said, but I couldn't help but piece different memories together in my mind to compare how they looked. The similarities were too striking for me to think they were anything other than related. Maybe they were cousins, or second cousins, or something similar? Or maybe the technology in Hyperborea was much more advanced than it seemed from where we had landed and they were clones or doppelgangers of each other.
Maybe I did need sleep. Clones and doppelgangers? Lord knows that was probably about as far from the truth as possible. The truth was that these men I'd been running around with hadn't shared as much with me about their worlds as Niall had, and he had kidnapped me for crying out loud. I had learned about Atlantis from spending time there, I knew little of El Dorado, and even less of Agartha, and now, thanks to this stranger I knew more about Hyperborea than any of the other realms. It wasn't that I thought the guys were intentionally keeping things from me. My guess was that they had been away from home for a long time and didn't want to give me any false information, especially if El Dorado was in the middle of selecting a new ruler. Who knows what else may have changed?
I wanted to interrogate Niall, to find out everything I could about him and this world, but between the warmth of him at my back and the steady motion of the horse I couldn't fight it any longer and I let my eyes drift shut. I listened to the regular beat of the horse's hooves, of Niall's heart and his breathing, and let it all just float me away into a soft doze.
6
Niall
Tessa snuggled back against me in her sleep, trying to burrow into my warmth. It must be hard for a woman like her to leave her world and come here. Her scent wafted up to me, it was soft and delicate, yet warm and cozy all at the same time.
I shoved that line of thinking away. This woman wasn't even from Hyperborea, let alone of the same station as myself. She shouldn't hold my interest, and yet... There was something about her that I found fascinating. It wasn't just how she wasn't fearful of me, or the way she spoke her mind without worrying about the consequences, but the way she moved and thought and expressed herself. It was all so different from the women that the founding families trotted out at court.
Whoever her warrior was, Dresden, he was lucky that he'd never had to navigate the intricacies of finding a partner at court. The men that were traveling with her must have been origin world warriors sent to look for the Key. No one had ever mentioned that it might be a person; the common thought was that it was a literal key. Of course, no one knew what it would open or do, just that we had to have it.
I sighed, my mind filled with juxtaposing thoughts as I looked down at the small woman who was propped up between my arms. She seemed like she was barely even there, just a passing thought, and yet, if what I gathered from her memories was correct, she was the one who could save us all. How can so much rest on one person?
The sky had darkened and was edging toward the blackness of night faster than I was comfortable with. I nudged Falcon over to the line of trees we had been skirting for the last two hours. I shook my wings out as we got close and pulled up off my horse, taking Tessa with me. My hands slipped under her legs and pulled her up so I had her cradled against me as I gently lowered us to the ground, folding my wings behind me.
Falcon had already found a nice patch of grass to nibble on, and I wasn't worried about him going off, so once I'd used my ability to manipulate the very air that surrounded us to get the bags off his saddle I let him wander where he chose. The mats unrolled with a flick of my wrist, and there were enough twigs and fallen branches around that I could start a fire once I'd set Tessa down.
Without meaning to I dipped into her thoughts, finding her dreaming of puppies and a place called Hawaii. It made me smile, her dreams were wholesome and light which was not what I expected from the Key to saving the four worlds. It was almost as though my intrusion shifted things though because as soon as I'd had the thought her dreams shifted and twisted, becoming dark.
Fear sparked through her mind as I saw a portal to another world open in front of her and the puppies became vicious attack dogs that were guarding it, preventing her from going through, but just as she was about to give up, the four men I'd seen in her mind came through the portal and the attack dogs slaughtered them all. Horror and grief filled her mind and as I set her down on the mat I shook her awake.
As soon as her eyes flicked open she sucked in a great, shuddering gasp of air and threw her arms around my neck, sobbing into my shoulder. I lightly wrapped my arms around her and patted her back. I didn't know if it was the right thing to do since I was unused to comforting people who were visibly upset, but it was what I remembered my adoptive mother doing to me as a child, so I figured it was a good bet.
The more I patted and made soothing noises the more she calmed down, and the more relieved I became. When she pulled away I looked down, and our gazes clashed just in time for me to realize that she had forgotten who she was with.
"Sorry, I forgot..."
"It's fine. You were having a nightmare, I just thought you might want to wake up from it."
"Thanks," Tessa murmured before looking away from me. Her eyes roamed our surroundings and she looked back at me a moment later. "We're stopping?"
I nodded. "It's a three-day ride to the palace, and that's if we don't have to take a side track to get around any fighting. You'll want to stretch, unless you ride a lot on your home world."
"Good idea," she said as I pushed off the ground and tucked my wings the rest of the way back in.
I went in search of the twigs and branches I'd seen a few moments ago, before I'd made the mistake of looking at her mind. It was just such a habit as it was primarily how I communicated with my troops, but I needed to remember boundaries with Tessa, and although there was a part of myself that wished to get to know her, to know more about her life and her world, I could not allow that to happen. She had a role to play, as did I, and those two roles were not compatible.
With my arms loaded with the scraps of wood I could find on the edge of the forest, I set about making us a fire. By the time the flames had turned into the makings of a small fire I knew I would need to find a lot more wood.
"Tessa? Would you mind helping me look for firewood?" I asked.
"You don't think I'm going to take your horse and run off?" she asked with one eyebrow raised at me.
"You can try to take Falcon, but I doubt you would succeed." I chuckled. She frowned so I explained, "I broke him myself, raised him from a colt and trained him. He is known for having a temper with anyone other than the stable hand that he knows and myself. You're welcome to try though." I waved over to where Falcon was happily stuffing himself. The grass at the bottom of the valley was his favorite, which was partially why I'd stopped here and not pushed further. I might act cold, but out of everything in this world, he held a special place in my heart.
I knew he wouldn't take her, was so confident in the fact that he was mine, and mine alone, that I turned back to the forest and went in search of wood. A l
ittle ways in, past the edge of the forest, there were some downed branches, probably from our last storm, which was a few weeks ago. I spun a wheel of air up and cut them down to manageable pieces, before carrying them back to the fire. I got two logs seated in the flames when I realized that it was much too quiet.
When I turned Falcon was nowhere to be seen. My stomach dropped and my wings flared out as though I was under attack even though I couldn't sense anyone in the area. It took my brain a second to catch up with itself. I couldn't sense anyone. As in no one. As in Tessa was gone.
Fuck.
Dropping the rest of the wood I pushed the air under my wings and launched myself into the sky, climbing higher and higher as I looked for my horse and the woman who had been a thorn in my side for as long as I'd had her in my custody. The higher I pushed myself the colder the air got and the harder it became to breathe. It was why we only flew at the lower levels. We were the kingdom beyond the north wind, and that meant beyond the reasonable levels of cold.
I leveled out and quickly began scanning the area, searching for the brown and red hair that had drawn my attention in the first place. There was nothing. I circled around again and again, confident that even if she'd taken Falcon, been able to ride him, she wouldn't have made it far.
Panic rolled through my veins at the thought of losing her, at her being exposed to some of the lesser family members that were known to pray on the weak and desperate. That's when I saw it, a flash of gray through the trees. Just enough to get my attention.
It was when I saw something else as well. There was a skirmish happening ahead, and Tessa and Falcon were riding straight into it.
I tucked my wings toward my body and dove down toward them, trying get to them as fast as I could. The problem was I'd flown so high that reaching them took longer than it took for them to reach the skirmish. Even though Falcon was a war horse, he wasn't used to his rider. The clang of swords and gusts of air combined with the lightning that came out of nowhere had him wheeling around and had him rearing up on his hind legs.
Tessa fell, her ass smacking onto the ground in a way that looked painful even from where I was, which was still too damn far away. She must have made some kind of noise because the soldiers on the side of the skirmish closest to her turned and found exactly what I was hoping to avoid, a stranded woman.
Falcon was gone, probably returning to camp like the good boy he was, but that wasn't going to help Tessa. Two of them reached her before I did and scooped her up despite her protests and struggling. Seeing the way she squirmed and writhed in their arms and bit and kicked them, I was glad, for a moment, that she'd been unconscious when I picked her up. Guilt overrode everything a second later though as I realized this is how she would have reacted to me if she'd been awake.
Her saying that she'd been kidnapped and being angry with me and scared of me all at the same time suddenly made much more sense. From my point of view, she'd been a woman unconscious in a field next to a destroyed cabin and in an area where there had been a slew of murders. Seeing it from her perspective was much different though.
As I closed in on their position I flared my wings so I could land without breaking anything and took off at a dead sprint to cover the last few feet between us. Without pausing to ask questions I grabbed the guy not holding Tessa and yanked on his shoulder, spinning him around until he was facing me before I threw a punch that was hard enough to knock him out in one hit. His body crumpled to the ground and his buddy unceremoniously dumped Tessa to the ground as he turned to face me.
A whip of wind came toward me and would have hurt had I not been trained by the best. I deflected it and cast my own whip out, but unlike most mine never came from where people expected, since there was an extra twist to it. It cracked across the back of his head and sent him sprawling into the dirt unconscious, just like his friend.
I looked over at Tessa and made sure she was okay before I did anything else. She appeared a little shaken up and extremely pissed off, but I couldn't see any injuries which made something in my chest loosen. We didn't have time to chat though because our little interaction with the two soldiers had drawn the attention of others.
They looked like they were members of the Stormhaven family, judging by their armor and its colors. They shouldn't be in this region at all, let alone fighting with members of the Eaglewood family. There were two things I needed to do, the first was keep Tessa safe, the second was to find out what the hell was going on.
7
Tessa
I was kidnapped from my kidnapper. Who the hell does that kind of thing happen to? Oh, yeah. Me. Seriously, my life was going along just fine, and now I was watching my kidnapper save my life by knocking out, or possibly even killing, the two men that had been attempting to take me.
Niall wasn't running. He didn't even look scared as I watched a group of the soldiers that had been at the top of the hill come charging toward us. The contrast between him and Dres was like night and day sometimes and then others it was like picking which shade of navy I liked better. Their physical appearance was strikingly similar and their behavior was alike enough that I'd noticed, but where Dres was willing to compromise, or to soften himself a little so he wasn't hard and rigid like Kai, Niall was the opposite. The man had a spine of steel. He wasn't even flinching as the other soldiers came close and lashed out with their own powers.
I pulled myself back against a couple of the trees and watched as Niall moved like a dancer. Sure, I'd seen my guys fight and they were majestic as fuck, and maybe this was because these guys were all Hyperborea warriors and the fighting style was much more fluid, but they looked like there should be music playing.
Their clothing and armor ruffled in the gusts of wind while their wings were spread and they seemed to glide past each other, if someone can glide with rage. Either way it was oddly aggressive yet beautiful to watch.
Sometimes the air that they were manipulating was visible, sometimes it wasn't. My guess was that it depended how much particulate the air they were manipulating contained. I wasn't sure what it was that made Niall's more difficult to see, maybe he was just more adept at moving the air? Either way, it certainly seemed to help him out, as he was able to surprise his opponents.
"Niall! Behind you!" I yelled as one of their men had crept around him.
It was a mistake to call out like that.
And judging from the glare he threw me, Niall knew it was as well.
The group split into two, three people were attacking Niall, while two came after me. I turned and sprinted into the forest. They could track me easily enough with their mind reading capabilities, so long as theirs were powerful enough, but I couldn't just stand there and get caught. Again.
I wound my way around some trees and forced myself to keep moving even though all I wanted to do was stop and hide. Once I was deep enough in the forest that I wasn't sure they'd be able to see me with a direct line of sight, I started searching.
My best friend in high school had been a huge pulpy horror movie fan, everything from Friday the 13th to Scream and Halloween to The Ring, and we’d watched it all together. My one question when the girls were getting chased in the woods was why didn't they ever try and hide? They always looked back and tripped over a root, or worse, their own feet.
There was no way I was going to be that girl in the horror movie. As soon as I found a tree with a low enough branch I hauled myself up. I moved higher and higher until there was no way someone would see me just by looking at the tree.
I didn't want to stay put for long though, especially knowing they could be listening to my thoughts, so I took note of what was around the forest floor landscape wise and decided I'd try to use that against them. Once the picture was crystal clear in my head I moved back the way I'd come, except the whole time I was thinking of the tree with the thick trunk, which had been a couple over from the one I'd climbed and imagined myself hiding there.
Crossing from tree branch to tree branch was terri
fying. My heart was pounding in my throat the whole time and I was struggling to get air into my lungs, almost like I was on a rollercoaster that had just gone down the steep hill. I made sure to only move to branches I could reach easily with my feet and that had other branches above them that I could grab on to, but it wasn't easy.
Finally, I'd made my way back to where I could see the area that I thought was where I'd entered the forest, but it wasn't. Or maybe it was? It was hard to tell without getting closer, but I didn't want anyone to see me in the trees. I was lucky that they were packed so closely that I could move between them, so I didn't want to risk that luck on being seen at the last moment.
I moved along the edge of the forest until I saw the downed soldiers. They were lying there in pools of the clothing and armor that they'd been wearing. It turned out there was a lot more fabric to their outfits than initially met the eye. Blues and purples were framed by the green grass and red blood that had been spilled on it.
The only problem was that I didn't see Niall anywhere. My heart clenched in fear at the thought that he'd been captured or worse, killed. I couldn't risk exposing myself until I knew one way or another what was going on, so I rested my back up against the trunk of the tree and decided to wait. The whole time I was still picturing the large tree trunk and the small dip in the ground, I could see behind it that is where I would have hidden if I was in a horror movie. Good thing I wasn't.
Voices sounded from just a few feet away and I froze, my breath not even escaping my lungs as I tried to pinpoint where the noise was coming from without moving. The two men who had started to chase me appeared to be walking up from somewhere further down than I was positioned. As soon as they saw the bodies on the ground their words cut off and they went on high alert. Evidently they'd thought their companions would still be standing when they got back, and they most definitely were not.
