Chapter 85: Ravine
Theodore was still breathing.
Arthur kept checking. Every thirty seconds, hand pressed to Theodore’s chest, feeling the rise and fall of it. Shallow. Too shallow. But there.
The forest around them was dark and quiet and Arthur’s network was spread as wide as his blood could sustain it, feeding through every shadow the canopy allowed, feeling for movement. Vexis was worse. He hadn’t stopped scanning while moving, his eyes cutting to every sound the forest made, every branch that shifted, every nothing that presented itself as something.
’Still clear,’ Vexis said. Then ten seconds later. ’Still clear.’
Arthur looked at Theodore’s side.
The blood had soaked through his coat and was moving slowly across the frozen ground beneath him. Too much of it. More than Arthur had a frame for. He’d seen injuries at the academy. Training wounds. Nothing like this.
"Master." Arthur’s voice came out tired. Out of breath.
Roz was already looking at him.
"You healed me before," Arthur said. "After the assassin. Do it for him."
"Brat, That was a clean wound." Roz looked at Theodore. Already unconscious. "The damage is—"
"I don’t care. Do it."
A beat.
"Please."
Roz looked at Theodore for a long moment. His red eyes moved across the wound with the specific attention of something that had seen a great many wounds across a very long life and was making calculations Arthur couldn’t follow.
"It won’t be enough," Roz said.
The please landed differently than everything else Arthur had said. He heard it himself. Roz heard it too.
Roz moved to Theodore’s side without another word and placed both paws against the wound and the fire that came this time was nothing like the fire from the fight. Quiet. Green and Controlled. The light of it barely reached Arthur’s face. Theodore’s body didn’t react dramatically. No sudden movement. No sound. Just the slow cessation of bleeding, the tissue responding to something ancient and precise, and Roz working in silence with his eyes closed and his expression doing something Arthur had never seen on it before.
It took four minutes. While Arthur carries him.
When Roz lifted his paws the bleeding had stopped. The wound was closed at the surface. But the bruising that spread out from it was deep blue and immediate and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the skin.
"Internal," Roz said. His voice was quieter than before. "I closed what I could reach. The damage beneath is beyond what I can repair here."
Arthur stared at Theodore’s face. Pale and still and young. He looked younger unconscious. He looked like exactly what he was.
A kid who shouldn’t be in a forest bleeding outside a kingdom boundary.
’Movement,’ Vexis said sharply. ’West. Forty meters.’
Arthur’s network snapped to it. He held still and pushed the coverage deeper and felt it. A shape moving through the trees, slow and deliberate.
Then it changed direction.
Away from them.
Animal.
He exhaled through his nose.
’Sorry,’ Vexis said. Then immediately. ’But I’m not sorry. We can’t afford to miss anything right now.’
"I know."
Arthur looked around. The forest floor around them was too exposed. Open sight lines in three directions and the ground was flat enough that torchlight from any angle would find them. He pushed his network wider and felt the terrain change thirty meters east. The ground dropped. Significantly.
A ravine.
He felt along the edges of it through his network, reading the shadow depth, estimating the descent. Steep but manageable. And at the bottom, tucked against the far wall where the rock face created an overhang, a space that the network felt as genuinely dark. Contained. Hidden on three sides by stone.
"Master." Arthur was already moving to Theodore. "What should we do? I need something to lower him."
Roz looked at the direction Arthur was moving. Then at Theodore. "Go, I’ll support you with wind magic."
Getting Theodore to the ravine edge took six minutes of Arthur carrying him with both arms while Roz held a quiet sustained wind beneath Theodore’s weight, taking enough of the load that Arthur’s legs didn’t give out. Vexis watched every direction simultaneously and said nothing because there was nothing to say.
The descent was slow. Roz’s wind kept Theodore suspended and steady while Arthur climbed down first and guided him from below, hand over hand along the rock face, the cold of the stone immediate through his palms. When Theodore’s feet touched the ravine floor Arthur caught him fully and got him to the overhang and set him down against the rock wall.
Dark on three sides. The network was dense down here. Shadow pooling naturally in the depth of the ravine, feeding the coverage without cost.
Arthur held up one hand.
"Don’t move."
Nobody did.
His network remained spread across the ravine walls and into the forest above, every shadow feeding him fragments of the world outside. At first there was nothing.
Then movement.
One.
Two.
Three.
Different directions this time.
Not searching randomly.
Searching methodically.
Arthur lowered himself further beneath the overhang until the stone hid all three of them from above. Theodore remained unconscious against the rock wall, his breathing barely audible.
Voices drifted through the trees.
"Track the rats with your aetheric field. They can’t get that far."
"We can’t. The forest is too dense, other life forms are disrupting my ability to find them."
"Then look closer you bastard."
"Understood"
Arthur did not dare to breathe.
Luckily the forest is full of monsters and other life forms with aetheric essence. Finding them is not that easy.
Torchlight flickered briefly across the lip of the ravine, orange bleeding through the branches before disappearing again. Someone walked almost directly overhead. Arthur could hear boots crushing frozen leaves less than twenty meters away.
Nobody spoke.
Even Vexis.
Nobody breathed louder than they had to.
Five minutes passed.
Then another.
The voices slowly faded deeper into the forest.
Arthur didn’t move until his network confirmed the last shadow had finally drifted beyond his range.
Only then did he exhale.
Arthur knelt beside Theodore and looked at the bruising spreading across his side.
"Master." Arthur’s voice came out desperate. "What should we do? He is still not waking up—"
Then he remembered.
He pulled his sleeve back. The jade bracelet Avara had given him sat at his wrist, green and small and fancy looking. She’d said it was blessed through mysticism.
Wait. Mysticism blessed objects carries some sort of blessing.
Arthur looked at the bracelet still attached.
Maybe..
He unclasped it.
He took Theodore’s hand, the one that wasn’t pressed to his side, and fastened it around his wrist.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the bracelet cracked down the center and the two pieces fell away from Theodore’s wrist and hit the frozen ground and went still.
Arthur picked one up. Cold. Inert. Done.
"Master what’s happening."
Roz kept watching Theodore’s breathing.
"It helped."
Arthur looked up immediately.
"The blessing reinforced what little I managed to repair." Roz’s expression didn’t change. "But only enough to delay the inevitable."
Arthur felt his stomach tighten.
"The bleeding I stopped was external. The damage inside his abdomen is still there." Roz glanced toward the dark bruising spreading beneath Theodore’s coat. "Blood is still collecting where neither my magic nor that bracelet could reach."
Arthur looked back at Theodore.
His breathing was steadier.
But it wasn’t healthy.
"He needs a healer," Roz continued quietly. "Not tomorrow. Not tonight." His red eyes met Arthur’s. "Within hours."
Silence settled between them.
"If he doesn’t receive proper treatment before then..."
Roz didn’t finish.
He didn’t need to.
Arthur understood.
Arthur set the bracelet piece down carefully.
Theodore’s chest rose. Fell. Rose again.
The bruising was still there. Dark and spread and ugly against his skin. But his breathing had evened slightly. The edge of crisis pulled back just enough to become something that could be survived rather than something that couldn’t.
Vexis hovered close to Theodore’s face and said nothing. Just looked at him.
Arthur stood.
Every part of him had a complaint and he overruled all of them and looked at the ravine wall and the dark forest above it and thought about the northern gate with the hooded men and the purple-haired man walking through burning trees like he had nowhere urgent to be.
Staying here was dying slower.
"We need to find the southern gate," he said. "Or any entry point that isn’t north. Staying here gives them time to regroup and sweep." He looked at Roz. "Can you feel the kingdom boundary from here?"
"Approximately," Roz said.
"Good enough." Arthur crouched and got Theodore’s arm over his shoulder and took his weight. Theodore’s head dropped forward and his breathing didn’t change. Still under. Still out.
Arthur straightened with him and turned toward the ravine wall.
"Vexis. Eyes open."
’Always,’ Vexis said. He was already looking at the trees above the ravine edge.
Arthur set his jaw.
And started climbing.
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