Chapter 5: Steeds of Smoke and Midnight
The trap was closing. Sister Margot's searches were now brazen invasions. My meager possessions were tossed and left in disarray, a message of total disregard. Her eyes held the flat, assessing gleam of a trapper checking a snare. Mage Alaric's "lessons" had become forensic examinations. The crystal resonator, the aetheric parchment—they were probes, seeking the truth beneath my mimicry. Each session was a high-wire act, sheathing my void-touch in psychic noise, leaving him frustrated and increasingly certain something was deeply, unnaturally wrong.
The Order's agent hadn't returned, but his gold had bought thicker locks and a silent, watchful brute of a man who seemed less a groundskeeper and more a jailer. The orphanage walls, once merely dreary, now felt like the sides of a coffin slowly being nailed shut.
Flight was imperative. But to flee a coordinated hunt, I needed more than a head start. I needed to become a ghost. For that, I needed a steed born of silence itself.
My experiments grew bold, fueled by desperation. In the woodshed, with Arran standing eternal vigil, I moved beyond extraction and infusion into the realm of pure creation. My first success was the Shadow Mote—a cat-sized being of animated darkness, perceiving the world through an echolocation of silence. Creating it cost a significant portion of my Reserve, and a tiny, continuous trickle maintained it. For an hour, I saw through its void-sense, the orphanage rendered in inverted grayscale, a landscape of muffled heartbeats and the thermal ghosts of recent presence. It was a scout, a perfect spy. But it could not carry me.
The horse was an act of architectural ambition. I spent nights molding shadow into complex forms: a hoof that could bear weight, a leg with articulated joints, a ribcage of interlocking darkness. The cost was immense. A single, solid leg would drain me as much as summoning Arran. To create and sustain a full, functional steed felt suicidal. But the alternative was the Atheneum's dissection table or the Order's purifying flame.
On the eve of my planned flight, the final sign came. Mage Alaric, his face uncharacteristically grim, informed me that "eminent thaumaturges from the Royal Collegium" would arrive at dawn for a "comprehensive evaluation." His tone left no doubt: this was an arrest, not an exam. The jailer-groundskeeper took up a post at the orphanage's only gate.
It was now or never.
I waited for the profound silence of the dead watch. My Shadow Mote, which I'd named Whisper, hovered at my shoulder, a blot of deeper night. I summoned Arran from the field, the familiar drain hitting my Reserve. Then, I infused him. Shadow poured into his bones, darkening them to obsidian, sprouting jagged spurs, amplifying his strength into the Skeleton Brute. His violet eyes flared with amethyst fire. He was my distraction, my chaos-maker.
Then, I turned my focus inward, to the abyssal vault of my Shadow Reserve. I did not reach for it gently. I commanded it to open.
The power that answered was not a stream but a tidal wave of absolute negation. It roared through my channels, a torrent of frozen midnight. The effort was not one of delicate shaping, but of catastrophic containment and direction. I wasn't just visualizing a horse; I was imposing the concept of locomotion and endurance onto the formless void.
Bones of condensed void-stuff formed a spine. Muscles of rippling, smoke-like shadow woven over it. A hide that drank the faint light of the stars. Hooves that seemed to rest on a plane of darkness just below the earth. For eyes, I placed two burning coals of cold violet flame. The construct solidified before me, life-sized, steaming with palpable cold. A Shadow Steed.
The cost was beyond anything I had imagined.
It was a metaphysical amputation. My vision tunneled to a pinprick. A deafening roar filled my ears—the sound of my own vitality being siphoned. My Shadow Reserve didn't just dip; it was gutted, reduced to a faint, swirling mist in a vast, empty cavern. Maintaining the Steed was a sucking wound in my soul, a continuous hemorrhage of self. I had minutes of consciousness left at most.
Gasping, I named it. Erebus. The name was a binding, a focal point for my crumbling will.
"To me," I choked out.
Erebus knelt, a motion of unsettling, silent grace. I hauled my trembling body onto its back. There was no warmth, no scent of animal. Only a solid, chilling presence and a connection that felt like holding the leash of a black hole.
I looked at Arran, my first and most loyal soldier. "Cause chaos. Then, guard this place. Let none follow. Your command is eternal."
The Brute's shadow-clad skull dipped. He understood. The command was simple, direct, and without a time limit. He turned and, with a blow that shattered the silence as well as the wall, exploded through the back of the woodshed.
I nudged Erebus with the last shred of my focused intent. "West. To the border. Fast. Do not stop until you are in deep wilderness."
Then, the darkness took me.
Consciousness fled. My body went limp, slumping over the neck of the shadow-steed.
But Erebus did not falter. It did not dissolve.
The final command was etched into its being by the will that had forged it: West. Fast. Do not stop. The shadow-stuff of its form, animated by the vast power I had invested, continued to function. It was an instinct, a programmed directive written in the language of primordial dark.
Erebus surged forward. It flowed out of the shattered woodshed, a streak of moving night. It passed the orphanage, where shouts and torchlight now bloomed around Arran's position—the Brute was a whirlwind of destruction, hurling carts, tearing doors from hinges, a silent, unstoppable monument to my last order. The hunters were engaged.
The Steed hit the open road. Its speed was preternatural, a smooth, silent glide that devoured distance. The world became a blur of gloom. I hung unconscious over its neck, a ragdoll passenger on a nightmare ride. We passed the sleeping town, crossed the river, and plunged down the western road. No hoofbeats. No tracks. Only a faint trail of cold air that dissipated in seconds.
The Steed ran. It did not tire. It did not breathe. It simply executed its command, fueled by the reservoir of shadow-energy I had poured into its creation.
Dawn began to threaten, a grey smear in the east. The command was to run to deep wilderness. As the forest thickened and the road began to climb into the border foothills, Erebus's instinctive programming assessed the environment. Deep wilderness. The trees here were older, the shadows they cast were longer and more permanent. This matched the criteria.
At a point where the road curved sharply around a granite outcrop, Erebus left it. The Steed turned north, ascending the steep, wooded slope without slowing, its form flowing over roots and rocks as if they were flat ground. It carried my unconscious form deeper into the untamed woods, seeking the deepest shadow it could find, following the letter of its last command.
Finally, in a small, dark hollow where an ancient pine had fallen, creating a cave of sorts with its root mass and a canopy so thick the dawn light could not penetrate, Erebus stopped. The environment was wilderness. It was deep. The command was fulfilled.
The Steed stood, motionless and silent, a statue of shadow and cold violet embers. I remained slumped across its back, dead to the world. The connection between us was dormant, but intact. The power I had invested still animated it, waiting. It would stand there, guarding my inert form, until a new command was given, or until its energy was finally exhausted—which, given the magnitude of its creation, might be days.
Back at the orphanage, chaos reigned. Arran the Brute was a force of nature. He could not be reasoned with, only destroyed, and he was far stronger than any town guardsman. He fought with silent, brutal efficiency, following his eternal command: Guard this place. Let none follow. He did not pursue, only held the line at the orphanage grounds, breaking any who tried to pass in the direction his master had fled. It would take hours, and significant magical force from a frantic Mage Alaric, to finally dismantle him. And when the last shadow-infused bone clattered to the ground, it told them nothing except that the boy they sought was far more dangerous, and far stranger, than they had ever imagined.
In the deep hollow of the Blackwood, the first true rays of sunlight filtered through the dense canopy far above. They did not touch the shadow-steed or its rider. In the absolute quiet, broken only by the drip of dew, the only movement was the slow, shallow rise and fall of my chest.