Allissa

In the morning I stood at the edge of camp and looked back the way we had come.

The cave was still there. A low black mouth in the hillside, breathing out that faint blue-green glow even in the daylight.

Damien had walked through that. My relative. My however-many-greats grandfather, give or take a thousand years and a whole lot of watered-down blood.

He went into the dark with his own fire eating him alive, and he came back out the other side with a plan carved into the rock. Alone. ...