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Smoke hung in thin ribbons across the lower ground, not from cheerful campfires but from burned tar and broken siege engines.
Ikea stopped on a rise and set her pack down. She planted her hands on her hips and squinted at the mountain.
This, she told herself, is why you do not plan surprises for n who live on strategic terrain. You show up with a smile and a sultry idea and the universe says that is adorable, have a war instead.
A dry little wind tugged at her hair. Sand whispered around her boots. The desert did not care about her mood. It rarely had. She had once walked through a sandstorm that could strip flesh from bone and the storm had not noticed her either. That had been before she fell. Before the stars disappeared from her status and her power folded in on itself like wet paper.
She closed her eyes for a mont and breathed, searching along the thread of the Soul Road.
It was still there. Thin, but there. A faint line in the dark, humming with the sense mory of one very specific ant lord. The echo of teeth and warmth and an oddly earnest kind of hunger. The last ti she had followed it, it had led her to a cave and an argunt and then to the fateful mont where careful intention had lost a wrestling match with curiosity and attraction.
He had told her the location of his mountain after. He had done it in that practical way he had, as if giving directions to the market instead of inviting her into the core of his world. If you ever need a place. If you ever want to co. If you survive whatever that tension is hunting you.
She had survived. Barely. She had not found what she was looking for. Her rank was still gone. Her identity was still more question than answer. She had walked into ruins and out of storms and through a temple that slled like old lightning, and nowhere had she found the piece of herself that had been cut away.
But she had found, in the middle of all that, that she kept thinking of Kai.
It was ridiculous. She had known beings who could crush mountains by having a bad day. She had danced with spirits that humd at frequencies mortals could not even na. She had once sat in a palace carved from the skeleton of a fallen sky beast and listened to a choir of monks argue about the taphysics of spoons.
And yet the thing that kept drifting into her mind when she made camp or patched her worn cloak was a stubborn white haired ant who built a hive because the world had tried to kill him once and he had taken that personally.
You are going soft, she told herself. Then she rembered his idea of soft involved carrying entire battles on his back and decided she was probably safe.
She picked up her pack again and started down the slope. Her steps were light, almost absent. She moved with the unthinking grace of soone who had been six different kinds of dangerous long enough that even being officially no rank could not convince her body to behave like a fragile thing. The air around her bent just a little to make way, as if it rembered who she had been even if her status panel did not.
As she walked, she rehearsed her arrival.
She would co in through the lower tunnels, not the main ramp. No sense walking straight into whatever drills or grumpy guards he had set on the front door. She would slip through shadows, let a few of the more alert drones get a flicker of movent in the corner of their compound eyes, then vanish again before they could shout. She would find him sowhere half dignified, perhaps in a war room or a council hall, and lean against his door fra like she had never left.
Surprise, she would say. Did you miss , or did you only miss the way I improve your cave's decor.
He would probably choke on whatever serious thing he was drinking and try to pretend he had expected her all along.
Then there would be ti for other things. For pressing him against a wall and seeing whether his aura had grown as much as his confidence had. For that delicious rush when his restraint cracked and he stopped treating her like sothing breakable. For the soft, ridiculous bit after when he looked at her like she was both problem and solution and asked in that careful voice how long she was staying.
She felt her cheeks warm and snorted at herself.
Look at you, she muttered. Reduced to blushing in the sand like a teenager because you want to drag a man back to bed. And he is not even technically a man. He is an ant who walks wrong.
A scrap of cloth flapped on a nearby rock. She reached out and caught it. It was part of a banner, torn, the emblem sared with brown. Not old brown. The kind that had been red earlier in the day. She inhaled without thinking and winced.
Now the blood sll made sense.
She straightened and looked again at the mountain, this ti not as a woman planning a surprise visit but as soone who had seen enough battlefields to know fresh scars when she saw them. The trenches were not theoretical. The lted stone was not artistic. The faint smoke was not incense.
Soone has been trying to knock on his door very hard, she thought.
The Soul Road thread trembled under her attention. It did not answer with clear images, but there were impressions. Exhaustion like worn tal. The echo of a roar held in. A dull, steady throb of pain, the kind of thing soone decided to ignore because there were more imdiate problems. He had not spoken across the Road in so ti. She had assud he was busy or sulking or both. Now she considered the possibility that he had simply been too occupied not dying.
The idea made sothing cold curl in her stomach.
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