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I would deal with any regret or wrong feelings when the tether was broken. For now, we carried forward.
I poked Bracken’s wing, and he lifted it at once, allowing in a gust of cold air so that he could look at us. It was slightly lighter than I’d realized. The sun was indeed about to break the horizon.
Kiar and Clem both groaned.
“Time to get up?” Bracken asked.
I nodded.
“Yes. Alhadya is correct. We need to go now. There is no time to waste.”
Bracken pulled his wings all the way back and I sat up, shivering.
Alhadya was sitting above us, almost as though he was keeping watch while we slept. Perhaps he had been.
He was crouched as small as he could get though, and for the first time I wondered if the chill bothered him.
The mountain was unforgiving. It was cold, jagged and steep with nowhere to offer shelter as the winds grew stronger. It had snowed at some point and the fluffy powder was nearly unbearable on my feet which had nothing but thin, worn sandals to offer protection.
Standing, I tried to stretch my worn, stiff muscles. I knew that today’s climb would be no different than the last day’s had been, except, perhaps to grow even more difficult.
It was a wonder that anyone had ever spoken to the goddess before and now I understood why the stories of the meetings with her were so rare. It was no easy feat to climb to the top of her mountain to her temple. And I had four monsters to help me.
“Is everyone ready?” I asked. “There is a shortcut we shall take, so we can beat the blood moon. This chain will lead us straight to her temple.”
They each nodded in turn.
Clem was already hugging himself for warmth but his sullen gaze on me and the way he inched a little bit closer told me that at any moment he would try to start warming me with his magic again, whether I wanted him to or not.
“We have one day left,” I reminded them.
“Then we’ll have to climb all the way back down,” Clem pouted.
I frowned.
“We will deal with that when it comes...” I glanced at Bracken, already not looking forward to the prospect of one more day of this.
He seemed to catch my thoughts because he spread his wings behind him.
“I will fly you and Clem to the bottom of the mountain when we are done,” he promised. “At least if we are spotted in the air by enemy nocs, we will have plenty of time to shake them. We can hide in the woods below where we will not be found.”
I swallowed and shook my head.
“We will deal with that when the time comes,” I repeated.
I forced my head to remain down and to avoid looking at Alhadya, or the other two.
Bracken was clearly forgetting the most important part. When we descended this mountain, we would not be doing it together. We would no longer be bound or dependent on one another. For all I knew, he would leave all of us here, or maybe even help Alhadya push me from the steepest slope.
I swallowed and for some reason reached for him.
Bracken did not notice anything, simply taking my hand to help me onto a ledge as we began our climb.
We continued like that for some time, using each other, helping each other climb higher and higher until the path leveled out some.
The temperature was rapidly dropping, but I knew the rope had to be close. Brave souls had created a metal chain linking the middle of the mountain to the peak. That tether, that rope, had been climbed by thousands of pilgrims before I was born.
And, despite Tsuki falling from her goddess standing, the chain should still be there. It was made of the hardest metal humans could forge, strong enough to survive the elements and the test of time.
