“I’m sorry, Aurora. What more do you want from me?”

For weeks, he’d been saying the same thing but he could repeat as many times as he wanted, scream it to the skies or write it down until his fingers bled, but the words didn’t mean a thing. He hadn’t listened the first time and it was no different the many times that Daniel repeated them. They didn’t mend the hole left behind by what happened, the ache that he felt whenever he tried to breath, almost as if, just by doing that, he was doing something wrong.

His trust was shattered, his entire life broken.

She was dead and there wasn’t anything, not a single thing, anyone could do about it no matter how much he would have given to change it. He hadn’t been wounded that night but it hurt more than any bullet, any knife, ever would have. Physical pain was something he could deal with but what he was feeling as something different, something different entirely.

He’d been watching the ground as they rode along, staring past shackle bound hands and the blanket thrown over his shoulders. One of the Dravara had given it to him but he couldn’t bring himself to thank them for it or even say a word to acknowledge he felt the weight of it.

He was done with running, done with trying to escape something he knew from the beginning would never be a reality. All of his fight, his will to run and reach the south like Silas said, had died with Elizabeth. In the days they’d been traveling, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t have a voice, he told himself, but in reality, there was just nothing to say.

“Getting close now,” the Dravara officer called back.

Beneath him, Luna snorted, hooves making familiar soft crunches beneath the weight of her body. The further east they’d gone, the colder it had gotten and the more snow seemed to be falling. It blanketed the terrain around them, smothering shrubs and tall evergreens, some of the largest he’d ever seen, alike.

He reached down to pat a hand on his horse’s neck, glancing up for the first time in a while. His mind was still fogged, stuck on the single thought of what had happened. First, he’d lost Silas and then Elizabeth but as guilty as he felt for leaving Silas behind, there was a different sort of guilt that clutched harshly at his bones.

It was his fault and even if he wanted to blame Daniel, something stopped him.

No one should have gotten hurt. He could have moved on, he thought, left the inn and left Jackson and his daughter to return to their lives. He could have disappeared entirely, the only black cloud dissipating from their lives.

“The bottleneck is up ahead,” Benjamin declared, spurring his horse into a trot.

Luna lurched forward beneath him, reins pulled along by the horse she had been tied to earlier. He didn’t say a word, only staring off into the trees as they continued down a path that led towards what he assumed was the stronghold. The land sloped upward, forming a wall on either side and, just as Benjamin had named it, the riders made their way through the bottleneck in the terrain.

The narrowing continued until it finally broke off into a pair of sharp cliffs, revealing a structure just on the other side that towered over the riders. Tall, covered with a sloping roof and guarded by men with long barreled rifle, the watchtower wasn’t the first that he’d seen on their travels through the east. Outposts, as he’d learned they were, sat outside of the stronghold itself but served the very same purpose.

Benjamin only nodded in greeting, flashing a friendly smile that made his skin crawl. But his attention was drawn elsewhere to a banner, more massive in size than it likely needed to be and marked with a crossed pair of silver swords in the center of two diagonal blue stripes, darker than the familiar blue of the rest of the flag. Rimethorn, he remembered Benjamin calling the vines earlier, climbed up the blades and wound tightly around them, spiny tendrils winding upward like thorny snakes.

Everything about the east made him shiver.

The group wandered beyond the guard tower and he caught sight of the vines again, the same blue thorns, scaling their way up the entirety of the tower itself. He looked down again, rustling the chains at his wrists and feeling a sigh rattle in his chest.

It wasn’t long after they made it beyond the tower that it came into view.

Massive, taller than the tower, stood an arched gate that served as the entrance to the stronghold that was surrounded, from what he could tell, by a wall made out of entire tree trunks. The wall, marred by wicked looking scratches and places where, despite the thickness of the barrier, parts had been chipped away, cast a shadow that when rode into, made him feel even colder.

“Welcome home,” Aldwyn hissed from beside him.

He didn’t say a word.

The gate was guarded by two horsemen, each armed with the same type of rifle as the others and watching the approaching travelers. “Back so soon?”

“Open the gates,” Benjamin called, pulling his horse to a halt, “I’m very tired and I’ll be taking the rest of this week off.”

“Can you do that, sir?” one of the guards asked as the doors, too massive to even be called that without it being an understatement, began to slowly groan open.

The Dravara officer ignored him, kicking his horse into a trot again. “I don’t know. But as chief officer, I don’t know many who’ll stop me.”

Neither of the guards responded with anything more than a nod and a chuckle. The party followed him wordlessly, trailing behind as they made their way beyond the gates and into the courtyard. He didn’t look up, not seeing a point in knowing where they were going, until Daniel cleared his throat beside him.

“Aurora…”

He glanced towards the voice, not meeting his eyes and instead raising his attention to the most impressive building he’d ever see. The fortress was shaped into a five pointed star, stone walls more massive than any he’d ever seen, extended up towards the heavens much in the way a cathedral, even if the building was far from that, would have been built. Four towers, each ensnared in a net of rimethorn vines, reared up from the courtyard to where they were connected by a walkway, from what he could tell, on either side.

It was, in his eyes, the most horrifying structure he’d ever seen.

“What is that?” Daniel muttered.

“The keep,” one of the Dravara answered flatly. “You won’t see much of it.”

But strangest and perhaps most disturbing of all, the keep was left unguarded.

His attention fell away briefly to the other building, wooden unlike the entirely stone behemoth in front of him, and caught sight of exactly what he’d expect. An armory, from what he could tell, living quarters, stables, and an infirmary, among other buildings, were all tucked back against the walls of the stronghold.

From the doors of the keep, he caught sight of a figure moving towards them, a boy, not much older than him, and watched as he came to a stop as Benjamin dismounted stiffly.

“She’s asking for you, sir.”

“How?”

The boy pointed to where a woman was striding across the courtyard towards the keep, a young girl, curly haired and stumbling over her own booted feet, followed close behind.

“Miss, excuse me? You dropped this!”

She stopped then, eyes flashing down to the girl and swiftly snatching whatever the girl held out, muttering something Aurora was too far away to hear before she disappeared behind two massive doors.

“Who’s that?” Daniel asked.

“Rowena,” Aldwyn mumbled. “You’ll meet her soon enough. Don’t know who the younger one is.”

“Take these two to Alexandra to be assessed,” Benjamin said after a moment. “I’m needed elsewhere. Keep a close eye,” he paused, glancing between them, “on the both of them.”

Silently, he looked up as the Dravara officer looked up at him, eyes narrowing into a glare. Daniel stared down at the ground, not saying a word with his shoulders slumped and arms pulled tightly against his chest in the cold.

“Yes, sir.”

“Welcome to the Dravara, boys. Get used to the place and, if you can, learn to like it here,” he paused again, sighing. “You’re going to be here for a long time.”

~ ~ ~ ~

“I certainly don’t see why he’s any different. He’s just the same, just as...dull, as the rest you bring me, Benjamin.”

He nodded his head, not saying a word in answer even if, despite his response, he disagreed. He walked over to the edge of the walkway, leaning down across the railing and staring down from his perch at the courtyard far below them. Snow was falling, gently drifting toward in small clouds of white crystals that would soon blanket the stronghold if he knew anything about how quickly the weather could turn.

“What is it?”

“He’s different from the rest,” Benjamin replied simply. “There’s something…odd about him. Strong but more in the sense that breaking him is going to be difficult.”

“We’ve dealt with obstinacy before. I thought you said he’s already broken.”

Benjamin shook his head.

“It won’t last. He’ll be furious once this…wears off.”

“You’re saying that like moving past the death of a loved one is like getting over an illness, highly insensitive, don’t you think?”

He huffed, looking back when he heard a chuckle and then the crunch of snow underfoot as they stepped up to his side. Her eyes had always been unsettling, too blue, too bright for the paleness of her face that seemed almost to rival the color of the snow around them. Benjamin shivered, suddenly feeling cold. “Apologies.”

He’d known her since she was a child and even if she was the most powerful, even above him in rank, he couldn’t help but think of that often. She still seemed too young, despite the fact she was older than many who came to the Dravara, to be running things or even be in a place where even the strongest were plagued with nightmares about what lurked just outside the walls.

A smile crossed her face, red lined lips perking as her attention moved back down over the stronghold. Ravvenscar was the name that few dared to question the orders of even when her father had been in her place. She was, despite the fair share of ghastly people, the most respected, as she called it, but Benjamin sided more with the fact she was feared.

He sighed, reaching up to rub over the place in his shoulder where a bullet had punched through only a few weeks earlier.

“You did get that looked at, didn’t you? I’d hate to have to find another officer to take your place. They’re difficult to come across, ones as loyal as you are.”

“I did,” he replied, dropping his arm back to his side. “Doesn’t mean it feels any better.”

She smiled again, eyes dropping to the courtyard. “What did you say his name was?”

“Aurora,” Benjamin replied, “and Daniel is the other one. Wouldn’t recommend putting them together for some time. There was some…”

He trailed off, unsure of how to continue.

“Difficulty?” she suggested. “I heard about the girl. It’s tragic, really it’s. Does her family know?”

“She doesn’t have any,” Benjamin replied, tapping a gloved hand on the stone railing.

The woman frowned. “Still a horrible thing to happen to the poor girl.”

Benjamin didn’t say anything.

“You were talking about Aurora,” she cut in softly when he fell silent.

“He’s dangerous.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked, smiling again. “He doesn’t seem so bad.”

“He helped Aldwyn-“

“Oh, yes, I heard about that too. I would have thought you were going to mention him shooting the boy. You’re talking about someone being dangerous and yet-“

Benjamin raised his hand.

“No, that’s what worried me.”

“I don’t see why that makes him dangerous. If anything, it only means that he has some remorse for his actions. Funny, I usually think a lack of such a thing makes someone dangerous. Am I wrong?”

The Dravara officer shook his head, not saying anything at first and only thinking about the question. Dangerous, he thought, wasn’t enough to describe him. He was, in some ways, the most dangerous person he’d ever come across. But it wasn’t because of what happened, the death of the girl or anything even related to her.

“Do you think he will try to escape? They tend to do that, the problematic ones, as you know.”

“I don’t think he sees a point in it. He doesn’t have anywhere to go even if he got out. If he wanted to, he could have escaped when we were bringing him here but he didn’t.”

She frowned, seeming unsatisfied. “Well, I was half hoping you would say he would.”

“Why, are you looking to meet your match?”

“Oh, of course not. I don’t like when things get out of control, as you know.”

“He isn’t going to be like the rest.”

“We shall see, won’t we?”

He was quiet again, shrugging his shoulders and then wincing. “Hope it’s worth the trouble of getting him here. I’m too old for this.”

She laughed, coming up beside him again. His eyes fell down over her cloak, watching the fur that twitched in the wind as if, even if it was impossible, that the beast was still alive. He reminded himself, upon gazing down at the hole in the wolf’s head that it was long dead.

“He reminds me of-“

“I don’t see it.” Her eyes narrowed when she looked up again, lips curled up into a discontented sneer. “Just how many times have we dealt with those who refuse to break?”

“I know what you’re going to say. They always-“

“They know what’s best for them. They will know when to give in and once they do, things become so much easier, don’t they? Aurora will do the same if he cares at all for his own wellbeing-“

“There might be a problem there. I’m afraid he doesn’t.”

“He will, with any luck,” she said, ignoring his comment, “become something more than a runaway who has already taken someone’s life. What a weight that must be.”

“Yes-“

“For now, he’s no different than the rest and you will treat him just the same as any others. We wouldn’t want him thinking we’re afraid of him, would we?”

“Of course not.”

“Am I understood then?”

“Understood completely,” he answered stiffly, turning and staring away from her.

He stopped, hearing her clear her throat. She could have scolded him for walking away before she dismissed him but such a thing seemed petty, almost childish. While Benjamin had been a friend of her father’s and was more than twice her age, he was still under her command.

“You know he will,” she said smoothly. “He should be the least of your worries. They’ve become more active. You know what I’m talking about but I’m afraid they are getting,” she paused, “bolder than they have been.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Everything is under control. I’ll make sure that they don’t do any harm,” he answered.

“Good,” she chirped, heels clicking over the stone as she took a step forward, “and, please try not to worry about the runaways.”

He only nodded, sighing heavily and hoping she didn’t notice that his tone, though level like before, became almost disappointed. “I know. Aurora will give in.”

Rowena only smiled when he glanced back over his shoulder, eyes they focusing out on the stronghold with arms braced out in front of her.

“Carry on then. Ten years, I believe, is a very long time to serve. It will either be submit or live a somewhat,” she stopped, “tortured life for a decade. For his sake, I truly hope he chooses to give in.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 13