A Hunter's Legacy: Rise of the Fallen
Chapter 34: Warning on wings

Chapter 34: Warning on wings

The forest around their camp still slumbered under a heavy veil of mist, thick and damp like the breath of something ancient—something that had exhaled its last warmth centuries ago and now lingered only as a ghost of moisture clinging to the air. The trees stood crooked and black against the pale dawn, their gnarled branches weaving an uneven canopy that filtered the weak morning light into fractured beams. The mist coiled around their trunks like serpents, shifting sluggishly with each faint stir of wind.

Bane was already awake.

The fire had long died, its embers fading into a bed of cold ash, the last remnants of warmth stolen by the predawn chill. He sat motionless for a moment longer, his eyes tracing the shifting shadows between the trees, searching for movement where there should have been none. The silence was too perfect—unnervingly so. No rustle of leaves, no distant call of waking birds, not even the whisper of wind through the undergrowth. It was the kind of quiet that settled into the bones, that made the skin prickle with the instinct that something was watching.

A solitary black crow fluttered down from the higher branches, landing on a low-hanging limb with a quiet rustle of feathers. Its beady eyes locked onto him, unblinking, as if it had been waiting for him to stir.

Bane exhaled slowly, his breath curling in the cold air. Then, with deliberate slowness, he shifted his weight forward, muscles coiling like a predator preparing to strike. His fingers closed around a smooth stone half-buried in the damp earth beside him. Without hesitation, he hurled it—not to kill, not even to harm, but to disrupt the unnatural stillness.

The stone struck the branch just beneath the crow’s talons, sending a tremor through the wood. The bird launched into the air with a startled cry, wings beating frantically against the mist-laden air. That was all the distraction he needed.

Bane moved like shadow given form.

He lunged, his body cutting through the damp air in one fluid motion, his hands snapping shut around the crow’s flapping wings before it could escape. The bird let out a furious squawk, its feathers thrashing against his forearm, sharp claws scraping at his skin. But he didn’t tighten his grip. Instead, he brought it close, his other hand moving to steady its frantic movements, his voice a low murmur beneath the weight of the morning.

"Easy..." he whispered, his thumb brushing along the curve of its wing, soothing the wild panic in its pulse. The crow stilled, though its dark eyes remained wide with distrust.

From the pocket of his coat, he withdrew the letter—folded tightly, sealed with a smear of wax pressed by the edge of his dagger. The paper was rough beneath his fingers, the ink slightly smudged from where he had written in the dead hours of night, when the others had been lost to sleep and the world had felt like his alone.

Brielle’s name was scrawled across the front in his uneven hand.

No one else knew.

His fingers trembled slightly as he tied the letter to the crow’s leg, the knot tight but not enough to hinder its flight. There was something painfully fragile about the act—like pressing a bruise he didn’t want to acknowledge, like admitting a weakness he had sworn he didn’t possess.

He released the crow into the morning haze, watching as it vanished beyond the skeletal fingers of Umbra’s End, its black form swallowed by the mist.

For a moment, he stood there, his breath shallow, his fingers still tingling with the ghost of the bird’s warmth. Then he turned back toward camp.

By the time he returned, Phil was already awake, his sharp eyes tracking Bane’s approach with silent assessment. Garrik, who was unrolling a cloth bundle across a flat stretch of earth. The fabric was old, its edges frayed, but the symbols stitched into its surface were unmistakable—glyphs woven in silver-dust and crimson thread, their lines shimmering faintly as if breathing.

"You’re going to try reinforcing the anchor alone?" Phil asked, his voice low but carrying in the stillness.

Garrik didn’t look up. His fingers traced the edge of the cloth with reverence, as though touching something sacred. "Only a temporary seal. It won’t last, but it might buy us a little time."

Phil’s lips thinned. "You’re using Elvian ritual magic." A statement, not a question. "Not many still remember how."

Bane blinked. The words settled strangely in his ears. "Wait. What do you mean Elvian? Like... elf stuff?"

Garrik paused, his dark eyes flicking up to meet Bane’s. There was something unreadable in his gaze—something old. "You mean you don’t know about the five races?"

"Races?"

Phil let out a dry chuckle, the sound like gravel underfoot. "Humans, elves, Draconians,..."

Bane stared, his mind scrambling to reconcile the words with the world as he knew it. He searched Phil’s face for any hint of mockery, but the man’s expression was grim. "Huh. So elves are real."

Garrik’s voice was heavy, weighted with something beyond mere weariness. "They walk amongst us. Some of them never left."

The words hung in the air like an omen.

They moved as one toward the cliffside, where the earth itself seemed to pulse with a sickly rhythm. The glyphs carved into the stone were not static—they twisted and shifted like molten veins, their glow flickering erratically beneath the morning light. A sound hummed around them, low and discordant, vibrating through the soles of their boots.

The weakest node pulsed like a dying heart, its pale veins stretching outward toward the other anchors, straining to keep the seal intact.

Garrik didn’t hesitate. He pulled a blade from his belt—a curved, wicked thing that caught the light like a sliver of ice—and drew it across his palm in one smooth motion. Blood welled, dark and thick, dripping onto the waiting symbols below.

Bane stepped forward, his gut tightening. "Hold up. That thing looks like it needs four people worth of blood. You sure you want to do this alone?"

Garrik didn’t flinch. "I’m enough. For now."

He knelt, his blood meeting the glyphs, and began to chant. The words were foreign, liquid, slipping through the air like oil through water. The runes responded immediately. Light surged from the ground, coiling around his wounded hand, drinking deep. The earth groaned in response, a sound that reverberated through bone rather than air.

Phil, meanwhile, paced the edge of the central glyph, his sharp eyes scanning the spirals with the focus of a man deciphering a death sentence. "These symbols... they’re changing. Like a living thing." His voice was barely above a whisper. "It’s not just a seal. It’s a prison... with a heartbeat."

Garrik finished the chant with a gasp, his body sagging slightly. His face was ashen, his breath shallow. "It’ll hold...long enough I hope."

Then it came.

A tremor.

Not in the earth, but in the air itself—a distortion, a ripple of wrongness that slithered over their skin.

A psychic wave burst outward from the glyph, invisible but undeniable, a force that shuddered through the marrow of the world.

Phil staggered, his hands flying to his temples. Bane cursed, his vision swimming. Garrik gasped, his knees buckling.

And deep beneath the earth, something laughed.

***

Morning light filtered through the canopy above, dappling their path with fractured gold and emerald. Kael walked beside Gondor, his strides even, his expression carefully neutral. Lyria trailed slightly behind, her gaze sharp as a blade, scanning the trees with restless intensity.

They hadn’t seen a single Fallen since leaving the cabin. Not one.

That silence gnawed at Lyria like teeth on bone.

"You notice anything weird?" she finally asked, her voice cutting through the quiet.

Gondor grinned, the expression not quite reaching his eyes. "Define weird."

"No Fallen. Not even a howl. It’s quiet."

"You sound disappointed."

Kael chuckled, but Lyria wasn’t smiling. "No. Just... alert."

Kael pivoted, sensing the tension coiled beneath her words. He knew that look—the way her fingers twitched toward her weapons even when there was no visible threat. "So, Gondor," he said, steering the conversation with deliberate ease. "Elves. Magic. Mind telling me more about your kind?"

Gondor’s eyes sparkled, though the mirth didn’t quite mask the shadows beneath. "Curious, are we?"

"Call it research."

The older man shrugged, his cloak shifting like liquid shadow around him. "We’re old. We remember things differently. Elvian magic isn’t just spells. It’s woven into breath. Into rhythm. You don’t learn it. You become it."

Lyria cut in, her tone drier than the dead leaves beneath their feet. "Sounds poetic."

"It is. And dangerous. Which is why we hide."

Kael glanced at Gondor, studying the lines of his face, the way the light caught the faint, almost imperceptible points of his ears. "And the Fractalis?"

Gondor’s amusement faded. "Not something even we understand," he said, uncharacteristically solemn. "It’s not meant to be wielded. It’s meant to be avoided."

They kept walking, the silence thickening between them like tar.

Lyria exhaled, her shoulders loosening slightly. "So you really think Kael’s changing because of it?"

"I think he’s changing with it," Gondor corrected softly. "There’s a difference."

The trees began to thin ahead, their twisted forms giving way to open sky. Far in the distance, the spires of the ancient temple rose like broken teeth against the horizon, their stones gleaming under the rising sun.

Lyria shivered. A strange weight settled in her chest, cold and unyielding.

Kael’s fingers twitched at his sides. Torin was inside. Waiting.

But they couldn’t know.

He said nothing.

They stopped by a narrow stream, its waters clear and icy. Gondor knelt to refill his flask, his movements unhurried.

Kael sat on a flat-topped stone, the cold seeping through his clothes. Lyria joined him, close enough that their knees brushed, the contact fleeting but grounding.

"You okay?" she asked softly, her voice barely louder than the trickle of the stream.

"I’ll be fine."

She studied him, noting the tension in his shoulders, the restless twitch of his fingers. There was a storm brewing behind his calm, something he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—name.

Gondor returned, settling across from them with the ease of a man who had spent centuries in the wild. His expression was unreadable.

"You two have a storm coming," he said simply.

Kael looked up. "What kind of storm?"

"The kind that tests the soul."

He didn’t elaborate.

The silence stretched, thick and heavy, until the sky itself seemed to shudder.

A ripple passed through the clouds—not wind, not light, but something deeper, something that made the air itself tremble like a breath caught in a dying throat.

Lyria blinked. "Did you see that?"

Kael stood, his body tensing. The hairs on his arms rose, his skin prickling with the weight of unseen eyes.

Far away, deep within Umbra’s End, something ancient roared in silence.

It didn’t shake the ground.

It shook the world within.

The Harbinger was stirring.

And the void it was sealed in had begun to thin.