Against her face, the feather touch of whatever unknowable membrane it was that held the worlds distinct, and she was through.
She was in Eretz.
No blue sky here; it arched white over their heads and darkened to gunmetal gray on the single visible horizon, all the rest lost in a haze. Beneath them was only water, and in the colorlessness of the day it rippled almost black. The Bay of Beasts. There was something terrifying about black water. Something pitiless.
The wind was strong, buffeting the host as it fell back into formation. Karou pulled her sweater closer around her and shivered. The last of the host pushed through the cut, Uthem and Thiago last of all. Uthems equine and draconic elements were indistinguishably supple, green and rippling and seeming to pour into the world out of nothingness. The Vispeng race not naturally being winged, Karou had gotten creative in order to preserve his length: two sets of wings, the main pair like sails and a smaller set anchored near his hind legs. It looked pretty cool, if she did say so herself.
The Wolf had bowed his head through the portal, and as soon as he was through, he sat up to take stock of his circling troops. His eye came quickly to rest on Karou, and though he paused on her only briefly, she felt herself to be knew herself to behis first care in the world, this or any other. Only when he knew where she was, and was satisfied that she was well, did he turn to the task at hand, which was to guide this army safely over the Bay of Beasts.
Karou found it difficult to turn away from the portal and just leave it there, where anyone might find it and use it. Akiva was to have scorched it closed behind them, but Jael had changed their plan. Now they would need it.
To return and start the apocalypse.
The Wolf once more took the lead, turning them eastward, away from the gunmetal horizon and toward the Adelphas Mountains. On a clear day, the peaks would have been visible from here. But it wasnt a clear day, and they could see nothing ahead but thickening mist, which had its pluses and its minuses.
In the plus column, the mists gave them cover. They wouldnt be sighted from a distance by any seraph patrols.
In the minus, the mists gave anyone cover and anyoneor any thing would not be sighted from a distance by themselves.
Karou was in a central position in the pack, having just come alongside Rua to check on Issa, when it happened.
Sweet girl, are you bearing up? Issa asked.
Im fine, Karou replied. But you need more clothes.
I wont argue with that, Issa replied. She was actually wearing clothesa sweater of Karous, slit wide at the neck to accommodate her cobra hoodwhich in itself was unusual for Issa, but her lips were blue, and her shoulders were drawn up practically to her ears as she
shivered. The Naja race hailed from a hot climate. Morocco had suited her perfectly. This cold mist, not so much, and their frigid destination even less, though at least there they would be sheltered from the elements, and Karou remembered geothermal chambers in the lower labyrinth of the caves, if all was as it had been years ago.
The Kirin caves.
She had never been back to the place of her birth, home of her earliest life. She had planned to return, once upon a time. It was where she and Akiva were to have met to begin their rebellion, had the fates not had other ideas.
But, no. Karou didnt believe in fate. It wasnt fate that had murdered their plan, but betrayal. And it wasnt fate re-creating it nowor at least this twisted shadow-theater version of it, fraught with suspicion and animosity. It was will.
Ill find you a blanket or something, she told Issaor started to tell her. But in that moment, something came over her.
Or at her.
At all of them.
A pressure in the lowering mists, and with it a seizure of certainty. Karou shrank down and threw back her head to look up. And it wasnt only her. All around her in the ranks, soldiers were reacting. Dropping, drawing weapons, spinning clear of something.
Overhead, the white sky seemed near enough to touch. It was a blank, but there was a rush in Karous blood and a thrum like a sound too low for hearing, and then, sudden and looming, fast and massive, pushing before it a wind that flicked the soldiers aside like toys to a tide, something.
Big.
On them and blotting out the sky, fast and past, skimming the heads of the company. So sudden, so there , so huge that Karou couldnt make sense of it, and when it surged past, it touched her, and the trail of its air-warping weight seized and spun her. It was like an undertow, and the chains of her thuribles flew wild, entangling her, and for that dark spinning instant she thought of the black surface of the water far below, and thuribles splashing into itsouls consumed by the Bay of Beasts, and she fought for control of herself and just like that was released, adrift in a weird calm of aftermath. Her chains were wound tight and tangled but nothing was lost, and all it took now was a glance to see what it waswhat they were, oh. Oh before the dense white day swallowed them again, and they were gone.