Love Between Two Worlds - Chapter 4

 

Chapter 4 — Elarion

(Rewritten)

The first thing Amelia noticed was the silence.

Not the ordinary kind — not the hush of an empty room or a house asleep. This was older than that. The sort of silence that felt like it had existed before anyone had bothered inventing sound at all.

One moment she'd been standing in the west corridor with Adrian's hand locked around hers. The next, the cold stone under her feet was gone, replaced by something soft and yielding that gave slightly with every step, like the forest floor itself was still deciding whether to hold her weight.

She stopped breathing without meaning to.

Mist curled lazily around her ankles. The air carried rain, and pine, and something sweeter underneath that she couldn't place — something that smelled almost like memory.

She looked up.

The sky wasn't dark blue. It wasn't the deep purple of a storm rolling in at dusk.

It was violet. Genuinely, impossibly violet, the color of something that had never once considered being any other shade. Two pale moons hung low over the treetops, one noticeably larger than the other, both far too bright to belong to any sky she knew.

"Oh my God," she breathed.

Adrian let go of her hand.

She felt the absence of it immediately — more than she wanted to admit.

"Where are we?"

He was already turning in a slow circle, reading the tree line the way a sailor reads weather.

"Elarion."

The word landed differently here than it had in the study. Heavier. As if the world itself had leaned in slightly to hear its own name spoken.

She looked back the way they'd come.

The door was simply gone. In its place stood a wall of black trees, ancient and enormous, their trunks twisted together like fingers laced in prayer, their upper branches lost entirely in the mist.

Her stomach folded in on itself.

"Where's the door?"

"It doesn't stay open."

"You told me I could come back."

"I told you they couldn't follow you without your permission." His voice was careful, measured, the voice of a man choosing his words after already choosing them wrong once. "That isn't the same thing."

"No," she said. "It really isn't."

Something close to guilt crossed his face. "I should have explained that."

"Yes. You should have."

He didn't argue the point. She crossed her arms and waited.

"Start explaining."

His eyes cut toward the trees instead of answering. "Not here."

"Why not?"

"Because we're being watched."

She scanned the forest. Nothing moved. Not a branch, not a shadow.

"I don't see anyone."

"You wouldn't." The flatness in his voice did nothing to reassure her. He stepped closer, lowering his voice as though the trees themselves might be listening. "Elarion isn't like your world, Amelia. Some things here can see you perfectly well without ever letting themselves be seen."

"Wonderful," she muttered.

And then, unexpectedly, he almost smiled — a brief flicker, gone almost before it arrived, but real while it lasted. It changed his whole face for that half-second, softened something in him she hadn't known was there to soften.

She noticed.

She immediately wished she hadn't.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"You were staring."

"I wasn't."

"You were."

She looked away, toward the trees, toward anywhere that wasn't his face. "I was checking whether you were actually capable of smiling."

One eyebrow lifted. "And your findings?"

"Inconclusive."

A short, quiet laugh escaped him — the first she'd heard from him, low and a little rusty, like something that hadn't been used in a while. For one unguarded moment, the fear coiled in her chest loosened its grip.

Then a horn sounded, distant and sharp, and his smile vanished as though it had never existed.

He turned toward the eastern horizon. "We need to move."

"Who was that?"

"The Royal Guard."

"Royal." She said the word like it tasted strange. "As in—royalty?"

"Yes."

"Are they dangerous?"

"To me?" He considered it a beat too long. "Possibly."

"And to me?"

His eyes came back to hers, and there was no hesitation this time.

"Definitely."

"You're really not selling this place well."

"I wasn't trying to."

They started walking. Adrian moved fast, but he slowed whenever the ground turned uneven, always without seeming to notice he was doing it, always keeping himself angled between Amelia and the deeper dark of the trees.

After several minutes of nothing but their own footsteps, she broke the quiet.

"You said my grandmother came here."

"She did."

"How?"

"Through the door."

"When?"

"Many years ago."

"How many?"

He hesitated, and the hesitation itself told her the number would matter.

"Thirty-two."

She stopped walking. "Thirty-two years ago?"

"Yes."

"My grandmother would have been twenty-eight."

"Twenty-nine," he said, without pause.

"You remember her exact age?"

"I remember a great deal about Eleanor."

Something in the way he said her name — plain, unadorned, like a name he'd said a thousand times before — made Amelia look at him differently.

"How long did you know her?"

He didn't answer right away.

"Long enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you right now."

She exhaled, half a laugh, half frustration. "You really do enjoy being mysterious."

"No." He glanced at her, and for a moment the careful distance in his voice dropped away entirely. "I enjoy keeping people alive. The mystery is just what's left over when I don't have time to explain."

She didn't have a response ready for that.

The forest changed before she needed one.

The mist pulled back all at once, retreating like something startled. Every faint birdlike sound in the canopy above them simply stopped.

Adrian went rigid. Amelia nearly walked into his back.

"What happened?"

He lifted one finger — wait — and she held her breath along with the forest.

Then she heard it. Hooves. Many of them, and close, coming fast from somewhere ahead through the trees.

Adrian's hand found the hilt of his blade.

"Stay behind me."

"Is it the Royal Guard?" she whispered.

"No."

The sound swelled, and shapes began resolving out of the tree line — five riders in dark armor that drank the violet moonlight rather than reflecting it, each carrying a spear too long for a man to wield gracefully and yet somehow they did, silver sigils painted across visored helmets.

The lead rider reined in first. His eyes found Amelia immediately — not Adrian, not the blade, Amelia — and then dropped to the ring still glowing faintly on her hand.

His face went the color of old paper.

"Impossible."

Adrian stepped forward, placing himself squarely between them. "Leave. Now."

The rider didn't so much as glance at him. He lowered his spear an inch, eyes still fixed on Amelia.

"Adrian Vale," he said, almost to himself, before his gaze slid back to her. "The Hart girl."

Her pulse jumped at the sound of her family name in a stranger's mouth.

Adrian's grip tightened on the hilt. "Don't call her that."

The rider's mouth curved, slow and unpleasant. "Then perhaps it's time someone told her what she is."

"What does he mean?" Amelia asked Adrian.

He said nothing. The silence stretched, and she felt it settle over her like something cold.

The rider laughed, soft and humorless. "She doesn't know. She truly doesn't know."

"That's enough," Adrian said, low and dangerous.

"You brought Eleanor's granddaughter back into Elarion and never told her the truth?" The rider shook his head slowly, almost pitying. "That's cruelty dressed up as mercy, Vale."

Amelia felt the blood leave her face. "What truth?"

The rider's spear rose, its point catching the moonlight.

"The truth about why her grandmother was murdered."

Adrian moved in front of her fully now, blade raised, but the rider got his last words out before the forest tore itself open around them.

"Your grandmother wasn't killed for betraying Elarion." His eyes found Amelia's over Adrian's shoulder, and held them. "She was killed for trying to hide what you are."

Amelia's gaze snapped to Adrian.

"What am I?"

He didn't answer.

And somehow his silence said more — said worse — than anything the rider could have put into words.