Chapter 28: Arkai Dawnoro
The mountain had spoken, and its voice was a five-hundred-year scream. Tonight, Mount Saede’s fury hadn’t been simple lava, but a pyroclastic flow. A superheated, suffocating tide of gas, ash, and rock that had raced down its slopes at impossible speed, incinerating everything in its path.
What remained was nothing but a funeral shroud.
Arkai Dawnoro moved through the grey silence, his black fur coat a contrast against the monochro devastation. His commands were low, guttural things, stripped of all but necessity.
"Dig here. The shelter’s airshaft might be clear."
His n, their own muzzles tight with the effort of breathing the acrid air, moved with a weary purpose.
They found them in the ruins of a stone cellar, a sight that made even the hardest warrior look away. A great Werebear, his back to the collapsed entrance, had wrapped his massive body around a smaller human form. His mate.
Cradled between them, sheltered by both their bodies, was a small, furry cub. The bear had tried to be a fortress, his mate a final blanket. The flow had cooked them where they stood, searing the protective embrace into a tomb.
They had died together.
Further on, under the skeletal ribs of a house, a family of Werefoxes. The parents, their vibrant coats dusted to grey, had tucked their children into a corner, using their own bodies as a shield against the inferno. It hadn’t been enough.
Arkai’s jaw, already clenched, felt like it might splinter. He knelt, and with a gentleness that belied his rigid fury, he closed the unseeing eyes of a fox kit, his clawed hand trembling with the effort. Every still-warm body was a fresh crack in the ice around his heart.
"No one yet?" Arkai’s voice was gravel, worn down by the ash and the silence.
"Not yet, Lord." The reply was just as hollow.
No survivors? Not a single one?
He’d known the odds were a knife’s edge, but a stubborn part of him had sworn he’d dig through the night if it ant pulling just one living soul from the grey tomb.
"Lord Arkai!"
His head snapped up. He was moving before the call fully registered, his powerful form covering the ashen yard in a few strides. His n were clustered around a collapsed house, carefully shifting charred beams. "A bunker! There’s a bunker here, sir!"
He watched, his breath caught in his chest, as they pulled a small, unconscious bear pup from a hidden hatch. The child was clutching a breathing magic stone, a magic stone that created a small, breathable pocket of air, the kind divers use to explore ocean depths.
"Ah," Borak grunted. "The bunker’s lined with protection and cooling magic." It was a crude asure, but it was still a design for survival. "So people were prepared..."
"Find more of them!" Arkai’s order cut through the air. Of course. Because she had been warning them for years. Of course so had listened, had taken her words to heart and carved out a sliver of hope in the earth. "There must be more! Bring them to safety, now!"
"There must’ve been people who successfully evacuated, too, maybe..." he muttered to himself, his mind racing. But his forces were stretched thinner than water. He couldn’t scour the entire valley.
His thoughts shattered as a series of wet, hacking coughs echoed from his n. He scanned the group, his eyes narrowing. "Wear your masks properly!"
Borak looked up, rubbing at his ash-irritated eyes. "Sir," he said, his voice grim. "It’s starting to rain ash. Do you think another eruption is coming?"
"Fuck," a curse escaped Arkai’s lips. Then another, quieter, whispered into the grimy cloth over his mouth.
Finding survivors was a race against the mountain’s patience. But even if Saede held its fire, they were now in a race against a slower, just as certain death. Suffocation, or wounds left to fester in this poisoned air. Every second was a debt coming due.
"Don’t go around alone! Keep your brothers in your sig—"
RUMBLE—
A deep-throated growl from the earth itself suddenly erged. Every head snapped toward the mountain. Eyes widened in dawning horror. A flicker of red pulsed at the summit and they all knew what that ant. The worst was coming, and it was coming in seconds.
"Pack up," Arkai’s voice was unnervingly calm, amidst the churning dread around him. "Get everyone out of here. Now. I’m going up there to shift the wind."
Borak flinched. "But Lo—"
"Chop chop, mutts!"
In that sa instant, Arkai’s humanoid form twisted, bones cracking and reforming in a blur of motion. Where a man had stood, a giant black wolf now towered in 8’2
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