Chapter Nine: The Scouting Party
The seal cracked wide enough to breathe through, and for one terrible instant Talia felt something ancient and grief-soaked brush against the very edge of her mind, vast and wordless and drowning in a century of unspent sorrow.
She came back to herself gasping, Zeus pressed hard against her side, his low growl the only thing anchoring her to the training clearing instead of whatever she'd just brushed against half a world away, her whole body trembling with an echo of sorrow that wasn't entirely her own.
"Talia." Alexander's hands were on her shoulders, his voice sharp with a fear she rarely heard from him. "Talia, look at me. You went somewhere just now. Where did you go."
That was the ninth day of training. First, there was the week itself, and everything it had taught her about what she actually was.
The days since Ashvane's revelation had folded into a strange, exhausting rhythm, classes by morning, secret training in the Hollow by afternoon and evening, Isolde and Simon rotating watch duty while Talia and Alexander worked through exercises pulled from texts so old their bindings had begun to crumble at the edges. Alexander had proven, somewhat to Talia's surprise, a genuinely careful student of something he'd never been taught to expect, watching her work with a hungry, focused attention that had nothing to do with rank or legacy at all.
He had also, in the practical matter of actually handling Zeus, proven considerably more natural than either of them anticipated, learning within days to read the small shifts in posture that signaled hunger, curiosity, or the restless energy that preceded another attempt at flight. Zeus, for his part, had settled into the strange new arrangement with the easy, uncomplicated acceptance of a creature who simply understood that both of them belonged to him now, dividing his attention between them with what Talia privately suspected was a very deliberate fairness.
"You're doing the thing again," he'd told her, on the fourth evening, watching her reach absently toward Zeus without seeming to notice her own hand moving. "The bond doesn't require touch for you. I've read every account of Resonance bonding in the archive twice this week, and none of them describe a connection this immediate."
"Is that good or bad."
"I genuinely don't know yet. I suspect it's simply unprecedented, which this entire situation seems determined to be." He'd said it lightly, but something searching underneath the words told her he was cataloguing every strange new detail with the same careful attention he gave everything that mattered to him.
Isolde, for her part, had proven unexpectedly useful in ways none of them anticipated, producing, on the sixth day, a small leather journal that had belonged to her grandmother, one of the original council members who'd overseen the region's reconstruction after the Catastrophe.
"My family doesn't like discussing this era," she'd admitted, handing it over with visible reluctance. "We profited rather significantly from the reconstruction contracts afterward. I always assumed that was simply good business sense until this week, when it started looking considerably more like opportunism built on a tragedy we helped bury properly."
The journal had confirmed much of what Ashvane already suspected, and added one detail he hadn't known: the seal beneath Ashcinder Mountain required active maintenance, a binding ritual repeated every generation by whichever bond-master held the region's oldest recognized Tyrant-adjacent lineage. No ritual had been performed in over sixty years, the last practitioner having died without an obvious successor, the entire arrangement quietly forgotten by an academy that preferred believing the danger simply gone rather than merely unattended.
My mother's bloodline, Talia had realized, reading it. If Ashvane's right about the pendant, that duty may have been waiting for someone like me the entire time nobody thought to look.
She had not told Simon and Isolde about the pendant's full significance until the seventh night, sitting around a small fire in the Hollow with Zeus dozing heavily across all their feet at once, and the revelation had landed differently on each of them. Simon had gone quiet, working through the implications with visible care before finally asking whether that meant she might be, in some official sense, the very thing the academy's entire ranking system had been built to identify and had simply failed to recognize. Isolde had said nothing for a long moment, then admitted, low, that she found it easier to trust an inheritance nobody had chosen than a ranking everybody insisted was earned.
"At least nobody can accuse you of manipulating your way into this one," she'd said. "Believe me, I've spent three years listening to people suggest exactly that about my own family's Elite standing. There's a strange relief in a legacy nobody can claim you schemed for."
It was on the ninth day, deep in an exercise meant to teach her the boundaries of her own bond-sense, that she'd gone too far, reaching instinctively toward whatever pulled at her attention from the mountain's direction, and found herself, for one terrible, vertiginous moment, standing at the very edge of something ancient and awake.
"Talia." Alexander's hands were on her shoulders, his voice sharp with a fear she rarely heard from him. "Talia, look at me. You went somewhere just now. Where did you go."
"The mountain," she managed, still catching her breath, Zeus's growl finally settling into a low, protective rumble beneath her palm. "I felt it. Not fully. Just enough to know it's not just angry anymore. It's aware. It knows something's different now, something bonded and awake on this side of the mountain, and I think it's curious about what that means."
"Curious is not the word I want to hear associated with a creature that leveled three villages," Isolde said, watching from the clearing's edge, gone very pale at Talia's description.
"Curious might be the only reason it hasn't done anything yet," Talia said, working through the thought even as she spoke it aloud. "It's been alone in there for a hundred years. Grief-maddened, Ashvane said, not simply violent. Maybe some part of it is still capable of recognizing kinship when it senses it, instead of only rage."
"That's an enormous assumption to build a rescue plan around," Alexander said, though something in his tone suggested he wanted to believe her regardless.
"It's the only assumption that gives us a plan at all," Talia said. "Every other option involves either abandoning three proctors or provoking a century of grief into becoming something worse. I'd rather try kindness first and be wrong than never offer it at all."
The proctor scouting party's failure to return that same evening made the theoretical considerably more urgent. Three senior proctors, dispatched at dawn to assess the mountain's stability from a safe distance, had missed their scheduled check-in by six hours, and by the time Ashvane summoned the group to his study, his composure had worn thinner than Talia had ever seen it.
"I cannot in good conscience send another party up that mountain blind," he said, pacing behind his desk in a way that told Talia exactly how frightened he actually was beneath the careful headmaster's voice. "But I also cannot leave three of my proctors unaccounted for while the council debates procedure. And I strongly suspect, from everything you've described feeling this week, Talia, that you may be the only person within a hundred miles capable of approaching that mountain without simply provoking the very violence we're trying to prevent."
"You want me to go up there."
"I want you to understand that I would never ask a sixteen year old to walk toward a century-old catastrophe if I saw any other viable option remaining to me." Ashvane's voice cracked, just slightly, the weight of it finally showing through. "I do not see one. I am sorry for that more than I know how to properly say."
"What about the council," Alexander asked. "Surely they have proper response teams for exactly this kind of emergency."
"The council's proper response teams are three days' ride away, and the last time this region faced a Tyrant emergency, their proper response burned four villages to the ground trying to contain something that only wanted to grieve in peace." Ashvane's bitterness surprised all of them, old and deeply held. "I would rather trust a bond built on choice than a battalion built on fear. That may be foolish of me. I no longer particularly care whether it is."
Talia looked at Zeus, considerably larger now than the trembling hatchling who'd fit against her chest only nine days earlier, his amber eyes steady and unafraid in a way that settled something anxious in her own chest.
"We'll go tonight," she said. "Before the council finishes debating procedure and decides for us instead."
"I'm coming," Alexander said immediately, no hesitation in it at all.
"So am I," Isolde added, already reaching for her grandmother's journal as though it might yet prove useful. "I didn't spend a week reading about my family's complicity in this disaster just to sit safely in a dormitory while the rest of you fix it."
Simon looked between all of them, something equal parts terrified and determined settling over his face. "I'm bringing snacks. Someone has to think practically while the rest of you have main character feelings about ancient grief-monsters." He hesitated a moment, then added, quieter, "Also I'm not letting any of you walk toward a century-old catastrophe without me. We share a crib story. We share this too."
They left an hour after curfew, the four of them and Zeus slipping through the same forest path that led to the Hollow before veering north, toward the dark, looming silhouette of Ashcinder Mountain, its jagged peak lit faintly from within by something that was not quite fire and not quite anything Talia had a name for yet.
The walk took the better part of two hours, the forest thinning gradually into bare, rocky foothills that showed no obvious sign of the century-old devastation the history masters described, nature having long since reclaimed what violence had once scorched bare. Simon kept up a low, nervous stream of commentary for the first hour, cataloguing every unfamiliar sound in the underbrush with increasing alarm, until Isolde finally threatened to feed him to whatever made the next noise if he didn't quiet down, at which point he subsided into a tense, watchful silence that suited the mountain's growing shadow considerably better.
Zeus grew steadily more agitated the closer they came, wings half spread even while walking, his low chuffing calls carrying farther into the dark than any of them found comfortable, and Talia found herself matching his agitation almost exactly, some invisible thread between them pulled taut enough now that she could feel, faintly, an answering pull from somewhere deep within the mountain itself.
It knows we're coming, she thought, quickening her pace despite every instinct urging caution instead. Whatever's in there, it's already felt us approaching.
The seal, when they finally reached the mountain's base near midnight, was not the ancient stone monument Talia had expected from the old texts. It was a vast, spiderwebbed crack running the length of an entire cliff face, glowing faint amber along each fracture line, and through it, distant but unmistakable, came the low, grieving sound of something enormous, finally, after a hundred years of silence, beginning to weep.
Nobody spoke. Even Simon's nervous commentary had finally run dry, all four of them standing frozen at the tree line, staring up at a wound in the mountainside that looked, in the pale moonlight, less like a prison and more like a century-old scar that had simply never been given the chance to properly heal.
Zeus took one hesitant step forward, then another, drawn toward the crack with an expression Talia had never seen on him before, something that looked, unmistakably, like recognition, his tail low and his head tilted in the exact posture he used when listening for her voice across a crowded room.