The wind was sharper here, curling in eddies around the narrow spine of the sky-bridge. Below, the world was an endless sheet of boiling mist. Every so often, the Veil would surge upward like some unseen beast breathing, brushing its gray tendrils against the underside of the bridge's stones before retreating again.
Kaelen didn't look down. He'd learned early that if the drop didn't kill you, the mist would.
Orien moved ahead of him, the other man's cloak snapping in the wind. The fortress they'd escaped from was a jagged silhouette now, half-swallowed by fog, but Kaelen knew the Rune Sovereignty would not let them go so easily.
They had the shard.
He could still feel it under his skin—a heat that wasn't heat, a weight that didn't weigh anything, something that simply was. The bone shard had fused to him in a way he could neither explain nor undo. Every heartbeat made it pulse faintly, like it had its own rhythm.
"Keep up," Orien said, glancing back. His eyes caught the thin blue light of the sky and turned it into something too bright, too sharp.
Kaelen's legs were aching from the sprint, but it wasn't the pace that unsettled him. It was him.
The more time Kaelen spent in Orien's company, the more he noticed the details that didn't add up. He didn't breathe as often as most men. His shadow sometimes bent the wrong way in low light. And once, when they'd stopped to catch their breath on a cliff ledge, Kaelen could've sworn he saw a thin black mark spiraling up the side of Orien's neck—like ink, but moving.
"Where exactly are we going?" Kaelen asked, narrowing his eyes against the wind.
Orien's answer came too quickly. "Somewhere safe."
"That's not an answer."
Orien's jaw tensed. "It's the only one you're getting right now."
Something in the bridge's stones groaned beneath them. The Veil surged higher, spilling a ghost-gray haze over their boots before slithering away again. The mist smelled faintly of iron.
Kaelen shivered. "If this place is safe, why does it feel like it's going to drop us into the Veil any second?"
Orien didn't slow, didn't even glance back this time. "Because safety isn't the same as comfort."
Kaelen scowled, but kept following. He had the growing suspicion that "safe" meant something very different to Orien than it did to him.
And maybe—Kaelen thought as the shard pulsed harder—that was the problem.