Chapter 7: Cliff [1]
"HERE! YOU DUMBASSES!"
Mirielle’s feet were already moving before she finished shouting.
She grabbed Drelan’s sleeve. "With me. Now."
He didn’t argue. He swung once at the nearest Dranox and gave it something angry to follow.
That was all the invitation they needed.
A hiss tore through the air. Every creature near the treeline turned at once, claws dragging across dirt, eyes locking forward.
One became five. Five became too many to count.
They poured after her and Drelan in a wave — exactly the way Aries needed them to.
She had half a second to wonder what happened after this part.
Aries was already going the other direction.
He cut through the forest at a sharp angle, weaving between trunks, branches whipping across his arms. His lungs had been complaining for a while and he was actively choosing not to listen.
He shoved his weight against a fallen trunk and felt it catch the slope.
Gravity did the rest.
He didn’t let himself think about whether this would actually work.
Mirielle hit the cliff edge and stopped dead.
The ground just ended. Stone and open air and darkness below.
Behind her, the Dranox poured from the treeline, claws scraping across rock, glowing eyes locked forward. The circle closed in seconds.
Drelan stepped up beside her, sword raised, shoulder still bleeding through his sleeve.
"What now?" he muttered. "Nowhere left to run."
"I’m wondering that myself," Mirielle said under her breath. "Just what is Aries thinking?"
Something crashed through the trees.
They both turned.
Massive broken trunks rolling down the slope. Bouncing off rocks. Flattening everything in their path. Heading straight for the Dranox flooding the ridge.
And stumbling out from between the last few trees — dirt all over his clothes, sweat everywhere, both hands wrapped around a sphere of mana.
He looked like he was running entirely on stubbornness.
The sphere trembled between his palms, swollen with more mana than he had any business still producing. And he was wearing the grin of someone fully committed to this plan regardless of how it looked from the outside.
"JUMP!" he shouted.
Mirielle looked at the cliff.
Looked at her brother holding what was basically a small natural disaster in his hands and telling her to jump off a cliff.
"WHAT?!" she barked. "You absolute idiot — are you trying to get us killed?!"
Even Drelan looked genuinely thrown. "Aries — did you just bait your own family to the edge of a cliff?!"
Aries clicked his tongue hard enough to cut both of them off.
"Oh for the love of — just TRUST ME AND JUMP ALREADY—"
The Dranox lunged. Claws tore through air.
Mirielle looked at the drop.
Looked at Aries.
Made the fastest calculation of her life and got absolutely nothing useful.
Grabbed Drelan’s sleeve.
"IF THIS KILLS ME—" her voice came out completely raw—
"I AM HAUNTING YOU—"
She threw herself off the cliff. Drelan went with her.
The air rushed up. The darkness came rushing toward them.
Mirielle’s entire mind went white.
Something caught them.
It hit like a surface made of pure force — mana stretched beneath their bodies, bending under impact, and then it snapped back hard.
They were launched upward.
"HUH—?!"
The sound Mirielle made was not a scream. It was something her body produced entirely without her permission.
Drelan’s sword nearly left his hand.
Both of them spun back up over the cliff edge and hit solid ground rolling, the world going sideways, sky and trees swapping places several times before she finally skidded to a stop.
She lay flat on her back.
Stared at the sky.
Let several seconds pass.
"Just what the hell," she said, with great feeling, "was that."
The Dranox that had followed them over were finding out the same answer.
Creature after creature rocketed back up from the mana platform below, bodies launched toward solid ground in various states of confusion.
They came up in a cluster, disoriented, claws scrambling at nothing.
And standing at the top — both hands around that massive trembling sphere, wearing the most exhausted, ugly, satisfied grin Mirielle had ever seen on a human face was Aries.
He glanced at the first Dranox bouncing back toward him.
"Wassup, folks."
The sphere detonated forward.
The first creature vanished into it before it could orient itself.
Aries drove forward with a short sharp yell, bulldozing through the frontline.
The logs came crashing in from the slope behind — slamming into the mass still scrambling at the ridge’s edge.
"MOVE!" His voice was raw. "Die already, you ugly freaks—"
The mana was nearly gone. Mirielle could see it.
Each sphere came up smaller and dimmer than the last. His arms shook between strikes.
He didn’t slow down.
One more step. One more hit.
One final push — the sphere swept through the last cluster and sent them over the edge one by one until the final one tipped backward and the sounds they made faded into nothing.
After all the chaos, silence finally fell.
Aries stood at the cliff’s edge breathing hard, one hand braced on his knee, the sphere gone, hands empty and shaking.
He held himself upright for exactly one more second.
Then dropped into a crouch and pressed his palm flat against the dirt.
"Finally," he muttered.
Footsteps on the path behind them.
"Mirielle! Aries!"
Althea broke through the treeline breathing hard, face carrying everything she’d been imagining for the past several minutes. She closed the distance fast, eyes sweeping all of them.
"You’re all okay?!"
"Alive," Mirielle said. Felt more honest than okay.
Drelan sat upright against a rock, hand still pressed to his shoulder.
And started laughing.
He looked at Aries the way a man looks when something he believed for years has just been proven right in front of everyone who ever doubted him.
"We did it." He shook his head, grinning through the blood on his sleeve. "No — you did it, Aries."
His voice settled into something quieter.
"I always knew there was something in you. Always."
Aries looked up from the dirt. Blinked once.
Then smiled. Tired and crooked and completely genuine.
Mirielle couldn’t stop looking at it.
She stood there while Althea fussed over Drelan’s shoulder and the forest settled back into quiet around them.
And she kept looking at the boy crouched in the dirt at the cliff’s edge.
The Aries she’d carried in her head for years — built from watching him fail, from defending him anyway, from resenting both of them for the whole arrangement — kept trying to line up with what was in front of her.
And she had told him not to call her his sister.
She crossed the few steps between them and stopped just behind him.
He hadn’t noticed her. Still crouching in the dirt. Breathing slow.
Hands still shaking slightly against the ground.
She looked at the back of his head.
At the dirt on his clothes.
"Umm..." The word came out less steady than she meant it to. She cleared her throat. "Aries."
He looked up. "Hm?"
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The thing she wanted to say wasn’t even that hard. Her throat had decided to stop cooperating right now, in front of the one person it mattered to say it to.
"There’s... something I wanted to say."
A blackened hand shot up from the ground and locked around his ankle.
Nobody moved.
Half a second of pure silence.
Then Aries was yanked backward. His body hit the dirt. He slid.
The edge was right there.
"Aries!" Mirielle was already moving, already reaching—
He went over.
"ARIES—!!"
Her voice tore out of her the same moment Drelan and Althea screamed his name.
