Burning the shack proved to be more difficult than even Casek could have predicted. The treated wood made it impossible to simply light the thing, and the lack of sufficient dried wood nearby made crafting a pyre inside, around the bodies, a brutal slog in the darkening marsh.

  It was a task made even more difficult by the emergence of Shades as the sun disappeared, hoping to take advantage of Casek’s visible exhaustion. Cutting them down was the only pause from the work he allowed himself besides wiping the sweat from his face, but eventually there was enough stacked wood and tinder to burn the entirety of the place.

  Raelynn lit the wood with her flint and steel, her only contribution to blaze, and they watched together as the shack was slowly engulfed in flame, along with the two people Casek had once known, but could no longer remember.

  Tauph had also been strangely silent, breaking it only halfway through the building to tell him a little about the two people in the shack. Then, as it did now, grief flooded across their bond, a hollow, all-consuming ache, carving a deep pit into his friend’s heart.

  The flames climbed ever higher as the moist wood of the shack caught fire, launching a vast plume of spiralling black smoke into the night sky. Casek’s face pinched as the moisture in the wood tainted the smell of burning filling the surrounding air, turning it acrid and musty.

  “Are we just going to stand here until this catches the attention of something worse than a Drau?” Raelynn bit out, her voice tearing through the silence like a blade.

  Casek sighed and shook his head. “No. We can go now. It’s done.”

  “How gracious of you,” she said, bitterness staining the words. “We’ll have to walk through the night to get enough distance from this place now you’ve rung the dinner bell–that is, of course, unless something’s already–”

  “Their names were Aodhán and Catelyn,” he said, eyes never leaving the dancing flames bathing the marsh in amber. “I don’t remember their faces, but I remember how it felt to talk to them. You can send as much scorn as you like my way, but if we were to tell me this was my last night–that tomorrow I’d be torn to shreds by some Shadowspawn–I’d still not change a damned thing.”

  Raelynn’s eyes widened, and her mouth opened to reply, but Casek was already moving past her, the heat of the fire warming his back as he trudged onward through the swamp.

  The sun was almost at its zenith before they spoke again. Their night-long trek through the marsh had been an exhausting march through the worst of the terrain, feet sinking deep with every step, and no way of telling in the dark where the deep pits of sludge lay.

  Thankfully, they had to contend with nothing more dangerous than Shades. The gibbering creatures hounded them all through the night, flailing out of the darkness in number whenever any of them got stuck, or looked as though they might be flagging.

  By the time the sun rose, and the frequency of attacks had faded to almost nothing, the pair of them were utterly spent. Casek’s burning muscles dragged him on for a few hours longer until they finally gave out.

  He dropped to the floor atop the driest piece of ground he could find beneath the drooping branches of a willow tree. The more exhausted he’d become, the louder and more pervasive the Drau’s whispering in his mind had grown, and it was now a constant, near-deafening din. He clenched his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting to block out the pain.

  Raelynn tapped his shoulder, extending the jar of pine resin out to him once more. He took it gladly, resuming the soothing chewing.

  “Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “The resin is also a mild pain reliever. It won’t work any miracles, but it’ll take the edge off.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Casek and Raelynn chewed on the resin in silence for a while, the repetitive motion almost meditative, as clouds drifted by overhead. The sun travelled across the sky above them in fits and spurts, the only clue they had been drifting off to sleep intermittently in the willow's shade.

  It was afternoon by the time the two hauled themselves up upon aching legs. Raelynn finally had the time to share what she had taken from the shack with him. She passed him a pair of white linen shirts; well-worn but sturdy black trousers, along with a pair of blankets and a properly sturdy travel pack to replace the one he’d made in the forest.

  Lastly, she handed him a battered travel cloak, navy blue with red lining, and allowed him some privacy to change. He ditched the rags with particularly savage relish and pulled on the relatively fresh clothing. They were the clothes of somebody who worked in the outdoors; visibly worn, but well-tended and hardy, made of solid material.

  The warm gratitude filling him lasted until he was forced, sour-faced, to pull on his still-wet and freezing cold boots.

  Regardless, it was a much warmer man that set off after Raelynn from the shade of the tree, and he couldn’t resist mumbling a muted thanks to the man whose clothes he now wore.

  They were those kind of people, Tauph said, melancholy weighing down his words.

  We knew them well?

  Reasonably. Your family hunted the woods we were in before for some time. The last time we saw him, we were leaving. We warned him to do the same.

  He should have listened.

  I doubt it would have made much difference, Tauph said, their conversation falling quite as Raelynn fell into line with him.

  She stared at him for a moment, dark eyes unreadable but for the restrained anger held in the tight lines of her face.

  “You knew those people.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s the strange thing,” he said. “I don’t know. Not really. I feel as though I did. That shack, their names. It stirred something in me. I don’t have any memories to prove it, but every instinct I have tells me I did.”

  Raelynn sighed, rubbing her eyes heavily with her right palm. “Casek, the writing on that wall talked about implied Shadowspawn had only recently taken the towns and villages around them. That means that shack has been abandoned for more than a thousand years.”

  She met his eyes again, and he returned the look, unyielding. “I know that.”

  Raelynn’s eyes darted, searching his face for any sign of deception or uncertainty. Anything to tell her that what Casek was saying was false. She would find nothing.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I worked it out when I had just woken. There was a stash of old weapons—swords and spears and the like, proper steel—and realised I knew how to use them pretty much instinctively. I must have known how…from before. The foci, though? No idea. I didn’t even know for sure it was a weapon. I just guessed because it was with the others.

  The lie slipped off his tongue with only a tinge of regret. He needed to get the balance of truth and lies just right to avoid questions he couldn’t answer. He very much doubted Raelynn’s trust would last long once she found out about Tauph’s presence in his head.

  But Casek, came Tauph’s voice, more than a little smug. I thought you hated secrets, no matter the reason they were being kept.

  And if I were living in her head, you might be halfway to a point.

  He ignored Tauph’s laugh and fought to keep the irritation from his face as Raelynn responded.

  “One thousand years,” she muttered, eyes wide. “And you remember nothing?”

  There was an unmistakable hope in her voice that vanished as he shook his head. She removed her hand from the leather-bound book strapped to her waist, a subconscious touch Casek had noted more than once, and let out a deep breath.

  “Look, Casek—I get it. I’ve lost people I knew—people I loved—to the Shadow. Some are imprisoned, others just killed. If I had found any of them like that, I would have been devastated. But you have to understand: this is the world now. I can only think of a handful of people who’ve seen more than fifty winters. You can’t afford that kind of useless sentimentality if you ever want to even get close to that milestone.”

  Casek opened his mouth to argue, but Raelynn rounded on him suddenly, a finger jabbing into his chest. “But even apart from risking both of our lives—you also put the lives of everyone we’re trying to save at risk with your actions. If we had died because of it—and who knows, we still might—then my entire team stays imprisoned. Forever being feasted on, unable to escape. Unable to sleep, or even die.

  “I don’t think you’ve realised, yet, just how important what you can do is. You are the only person ever who can do what you can. With you, we can free everyone who’s ever been taken. Maybe even start to take back our world. If you dare throw that chance away for all of us by getting killed doing something as pointless and selfish as that was, you’d better hope you’re actually dead, because what I do to you will be far, far worse.”