The single, misshapen eye of the monster filled my field of vision—my mind went blank save for the vision of the eye and its crystalline, insectoid limb, stretched from somewhere above us—behind my own eyes there was nothing but a static buzz of fear and confusion.
I had never seen any creature like this before in my life. No index popped into my head, no list of attributes, no idea of what this thing could or would do to us. Frozen in time I crouched there, eye-to-eye with something that didn’t exist, unaware of anything around me except the roar of blood in my ears.
The instant shattered with a thin, wispy shriek of half-anger, half-laughter splitting the air; the hanging hand smashed out of place in a blaze of reddish-gold.
Mara shoved me backward with a hand to my chest. “Go!” she screamed at me, and I realized she had my baseball bat in her fist, somehow activated so that its aluminum surface writhed with mithecal fire. She had hit the eye—hand—thing—
Before I could think anything else, she scrambled past me, out into the forest. I spun around after her as the monster laughed again.
The night had fallen deathly silent. Leaves, twigs, brush—the ground crunched and crackled beneath us, and that was the only sound. Past the static in my head, I could tell that there was no birdsong, no insects, not even wind.
“Okay, then.” A whisper filled the forest like smoke, “let’s make this a game, shall we? Something a little more… interesting. After all—” the sound wooshed forward somehow, like it was floating along beside us—”I still don’t know who you are, yet. And how else to find out if not by spending time together?”
I’m not sure how I saw anything through the night and the running and the awful, awful silence, but I did. Grabbing a tree branch with one hand and the back of Mara’s coat with the other, I jerked us both to the side, altering our course as the bushes in our former path erupted, spurting shadows and gleams and teeth.
Mara changed course even further, turning back towards where we’d originally come from. “Old friends,” she gasped out to me as I caught up to her, and I understood. She was hoping the illdýr would fight each other and forget about us.
I didn’t think it was likely—I suspected, instead, that the thing behind us would barely register the existence of either foxlights or whisperwings, and that something as small as the foxlight would go to earth rather than tangle with a true monster. But I didn’t have anything else in mind, and we could only run so long.
The voice came, mocking. “You guys already have friends besides me?”
I didn’t know what it was going to do. I didn’t know what it could do.The undergrowth clutched at my clothes as I passed, like claws pulling me back, down.
There was dark and faintly glistening flash, and I drove Mara’s head down to avoid a sudden, extended line that materialized level with our necks. Mara stumbled and rolled, almost falling on her face, but I grabbed her elbow in time and hauled her back up. Instead of running, Mara squeaked and jumped, pushing us to the side as something shifted in a pile of leaves, twining itself around a tree trunk. Another lopsided, double-pupiled eye started opening, but neither of us were going to stay to observe it further.
What would Grammy do if she were here? Llewellyn? I tried to think through panting, sprinting, feet slapping against the ground.
Grammy would simply know how to handle it. Llewellyn would talk its secrets out of it. Neither were options for me—how else could I take control of the situation?
Solid shadows flared up like mock flames in front of us—Mara yelled and smacked at them with the baseball bat. The shadows split, away from the glowing bat, and a voice breathed like fingers across the back of my neck. “That’s very rude, by the way. And all this running around—what exactly are trying to accomplish? You don’t even know where I am, so I feel like it would be much more sensible to just… sit down and talk. Or something to that effect.”
The sensation of a presence, just behind me, was unbearable. I whirled around, smacking out with my flashlight as though it were a club. There was nothing there.
“Of course, I don’t expect you to be sensible, and this is a lot more entertaining, but I thought I may as well point it out. Now, where were we?”
Mara yanked me back as another eye opened in front of us. I flicked my flashlight on and used it to point out a path towards a patch of clearer-looking ground, shadows and shapes dancing just around the edge of the light as though they were living creatures. Without a second thought, she barrelled on ahead, me at her heels, making for the stream bed from earlier.
Except it wasn’t there.
Oh no. I didn’t say it out loud. We’ve already gotten turned around. I shone my light towards where I thought the creek might be, and was rewarded with a bit of rock that looked familiar—next instant, a wall of black sprang up, blocking my view.
Take control? Oh, right. That would require me to be someone competent.
I staggered back and sprinted off, the beam of the flashlight wobbling around the forest floor. What else was there to do but turn tail and run? We didn’t know where this monster was, and we didn’t know where we were, either. Was there any other option besides hoping to stay one step ahead of the shadows? Of its limbs and eyes? Of whatever it was going to do to us?
A sob mingled into my gasps for breath. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
Undergrowth crackled under our feet, rocks sprang out of the dark to trip us, branches snatched at us. Mara grabbed my arm and yanked me towards some bushes, dropping to a crouch beside them.
“How do you turn this thing on?” Mara hissed at me through heavy breaths. From my flashlight’s glow, pointed at the ground, I could see her forehead glistening with sweat, her hair crumpled and in disarray.
“What?”
She thumped the baseball bat against the ground, now dull and colorless.
“We can’t fight it, Mara!” I hissed back. “That thing will chew us up and spit us out and barely notice we resisted.”
“So you know what it is?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life.” The flashlight beam trembled against the ground, and I stared at her with eyes I could not shut, eyes paralyzed open by the horror of what might happen next. “That… that thing isn’t… it’s not… I don’t know—we can’t—” What could I even say? We were going to die. I was getting us killed. I had let this happen.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. How come I never learn?
If Grammy were here, she’d tell me to not let my fear call the shots. But she wasn’t here. None of this would have happened if she had been here.
It was always going to be this way. It was always going to end like this. The only way I was ever going to die was out in the woods with some victim to my idiocy. One way or another, I was always going to end up in the woods, again. Or worse, I’d make it out, again, and then end up back here anyway. Grammy would find me, again, take me back, and my life would never stop repeating itself.
There was no escape from myself, from being a curse.
“Well, I’m not just going to let it run us ragged,” Mara snapped. “That’s what it wants, I think, and we have a weapon, so let’s use it.”
“It’s not… it can’t…” How could I say that the bat was practically useless? “I’m not good at Mithae, okay? The light spell? My ten-year-old cousin learned that years ago. The rewrites all over the bat? Nothing. They can’t do anything, except burn out in ten seconds flat, because the bat is made of aluminum. Not really the pinnacle of density, y’know?” I had tried more complicated rewrites on the bat, but those needed more sustainability.
Two hits. That had been all that my rewrite had been worth. I couldn’t even remember which one I’d used.
“So what? You’re just gonna wave your flashlight around while we try and dodge until we trip and break our necks?”
Why didn’t she understand? Why couldn’t she see? We were dead. I stared at her, trying to somehow say what couldn’t be said, somehow trying to tell her that I had doomed us both—when a gleam caught in the torchlight.
“Okay, okay, correct me if I got this wrong—” the voice bounced up from behind Mara—”but from what I can gather, the little dark girl is named Mara, right? That’s a nice name. Good to know.”
Mara whirled and hit out at the bushes, bare sticks rattling and swaying.
It knows her name now, I thought. Because I said her name.
How on Earth had I made such a rookie mistake?
We weren’t escaping.
It knew her name. It could track her. It would find us again. Even if we survived the night, it was going to kill us. And we weren’t going to survive the night.
Grammy would kill me if she found out—but at this rate, she might never even find our bodies.
Mara seized my hand, hauled me upright, and ran.
But what was the point? If that thing was made of shadows, we were in its domain—endless stretches of night for hours and hours to come. There was nowhere we could go.
“Look,” Mara snapped, shoving me towards a tree, “when it showed up, I turned this thing on somehow, and hit it, and that made it upset. So how do I do that again? It had an effect. We can use that to our advantage.”
I looked up at her. She was still trying, like we had a chance. Maybe it was because she wasn’t as well trained, so she couldn’t see the signs that this was futile. Maybe she hadn’t ever faced off with a monster like this before. Maybe she just hadn’t failed as much as I had, wasn’t so aware of her inabilities.
What’s the point of being trained if it just makes you give up? Something yelled inside of me, a dim flicker of fury at the situation, some echo of a long-past lesson from Grammy, some old word of encouragement from Llewellyn. But it was too deep down to move me.
“Honestly, I’m not sure what rewrite you used,” I said slowly, before Mara could shake me again. “It may have just… burned out.”
“Well, then, make another one.”
“It will take way too long, if I can even remember what I did. And it’s just toying with us now. If it sees we figured out something to hurt it, it’s not going to give us the time we’ll need.”
“What about light? It’s made of shadows.”
“It showed up in my flashlight beam, and I don’t think it did anything.”
“Ugh.” Mara smacked the baseball bat against the ground. “Well, we ran after you saw it, so we don’t know if it would have attacked us, or if it had the strength to do so through the light. We’ll try it again when it shows up.”
It won’t work, I thought. The shadows allow it to move too freely. We might be able to shine the light on a single part of it, but a different part can just… come at us from behind.
But what if it couldn’t? What if there was a way to control the light, or the terrain around us, in a way that would trap it? The same voice that had sparked earlier whispered again, fighting through choking layers of fear and resignation.
As if in the face of that momentary defiance, the woods in front of flashlight’s beam shifted, and the voice came again from behind us. “Mmmmmm, you’re just chock-full of despair, aren’t you, little pale one? I think you’ll be pretty tasty once we’re done here.”
Mara grabbed my hand with the flashlight and jerked it towards the voice, but the movement faded away, leaving a trail of laughter.
“What has gotten into you?!” Mara glared at me as if in disbelief, as I just let the flashlight fall again. “With the fox thingee, once you snapped out of you shock, you actually did something. And now you’re just standing here? Letting me push you around? For what? To get eaten?”
“Foxlights actually have a solution,” I shot back.
“Then let’s find one for this!” Mara threw her free hand into the air in exasperation.
“You can’t feel it, can you?” I said. She couldn’t understand the first thing I had noticed once the monster had spoken, what I still felt permeating the woods around us—an overwhelming flood of immense power, far and away stronger than anything I’d dealt with before.
Except maybe the dragon-man.
“Feel what? You loosing your grasp on reality?”
Wait.
Kalgyrad. He was in the woods somewhere. He wasn’t in town, he was in the woods. I started walking before I could finish thinking it through, the little spark in me flaring enough to move my legs.
Did I trust Kalgyrad? No, absolutely not. But he was a dragon. And nothing was stronger than a dragon. And he had made some kind of deal with Grammy that involved us. Maybe that didn’t involve actively helping us, but maybe it did.
“Uh, where are you going?” Mara asked, jogging the few steps to catch up to me.
My legs stopped moving.
Kalgyrad might be in the woods, but the woods were massive, and filled with mountains, and illdýr, and bears. Dragon or not, it wasn’t like we could just trot up to a mountain peak and wave and hope we’d get seen. But… if we could get someone to come to us… Grammy was also in the woods.
Which will be helpful only as long as she can actually handle this thing. I ignored the thought, because there are some things too terrible, even for fear.
Either way, all I could do was keep us running, and maybe I could keep us alive.
“We need… we need to….” My voice trembled. We need to call for help, I wasn’t able to say. We need to send a signal for someone to come get us. Using light and sound, or maybe a rewrite. I don’t know.
Mara waited.
“I… I can’t…” I can’t talk right now.
“Clearly not.” The voice popped up again, laughing. “That was exciting, though. I thought for a second you might be about to do something of your own initiative.”
“Would you shut UP!” Mara kicked an ineffective stick into the darkness.
“No, thank you. I’m bored again. Your friend has disappointed me, and I want to see what I can get him to do.”
Everywhere, all around us. Where did the voice even come from?
I only dimly registered that he was talking about me—right now I needed to focus, to do something, to figure out how to get someone’s attention, to manage to force some kind of sound out if I was going to do anything. Telling Mara might help with whatever I was going to do, but, more importantly, I had to be able to sing or hum or whistle. No music, no Mithae. I stared up at the trees around me, up at the cold, clear stars, looking for an idea, searching the twisting tree branches for the form my plan had to take. But it was all muddled, fuzzy. My heart thrummed in my ears, and for a second, it felt like I could see Mara and I from outside of where we were, like I was watching one of those movies play out in real time.
Mara gave a frustrated shout and pushed me, smacking fruitlessly at the ground as a mass of black, sectioned shapes burst out of the dirt where I had been standing. I stumbled, and bashed my shoulder into a tree, my face momentarily connecting with the rough bark.
“Move!” Mara yelled, jumping back as a hand-like form snaked out and wrapped itself around the baseball bat. “Let go!” Tugging, pulling, she stepped backward, a delighted chuckle echoing from somewhere behind us. For a moment, her hand touched the dark tendril; she reflexively loosened her hold, gritting a cry of pain between her teeth. Then, the shadows disappeared—and so did Mara. One second she was there, floundering, unbalanced by the sudden absence of resistance, and then she was gone.
I clutched at the bark, digging my fingers into the side of the tree, trying to smash past the fog that slathered itself over my thoughts. She couldn’t have disappeared. That didn’t make any sense. People don’t just vanish. She was right there a second ago.
A wisping shadow curled around a branch over my head, half-steaming with an oily black presence. A geometric line broke it into shapes as it solidified, expanded into something like a hand drawn by a psychotic toddler. I could feel the bark, rough and real under my hand, and a choking, scentless smell that stung my nose and mouth.
“Oops, I think little Ms. Mara fell from somewhere.” Another line appeared in the palm of the ‘hand’, glowing white. It grew, widened, opened—a grinning mouth, somehow all the more sinister for how plain it looked. “What are you going to do now, scared little boy? You two are friends, right? I know you don’t have any options, really, and either way you’re both going to end up dead, but what do you want to do before that?”
Fell. There had to be a slope or a cliff or something over there.
“Are you going to accept the inevitable? Go through the motions and pretend you have a choice? How are you going to react when you can’t change a thing in this world?”
Its words weren’t making sense. Nothing made sense.
But Mara hadn’t disappeared, she’d fallen.
Shouldering myself away from the tree, away from the smothering in my lungs, I took a few steps towards the trees she’d been next to.
A small, thin, clicking sound made me snap my head around—a writhing collection of misshapen hands smacked themselves together in a mockery of applause.
“Ah, the boy is trying to be brave. What happens next?”
The thin clapping echoed disconcertingly in my ears, adding a surreal touch to the already unreal night. Almost against my will or knowledge, I kept moving.
Looking back, I can never quite catch hold of what happened next. My memories smudge into a blur—and then I was falling, stumbling over stones, trying to grab something for balance, limbs flailing and contorting, skidding over mud, slamming into roots and rocks, off my feet and rolling helplessly from the push of momentum. The world fuzzed out of focus.
I wonder if I’ll ever stop falling.
But then—I realized I had thought that, and was conscious; I hadn’t been a second ago. I must have been stunned, and now I was coming back to myself, now I was on my back at the bottom of… something. Naked trees overarched where I lay, but far off above me. The obscurity of the ground towering over and around me was punctuated with gleams from the moon, marking an uneven surface that stretched into the distance. Behind it, all blue and purple and star-studded, the sky spanned, untouchable.
A shadow, all limbs and joints and smoking darkness, seeped into the space of clear sky, edging its way between the light, carving distorting chunks out of the moon. Deep in the midst of the mass, I thought I could see a pale line, like teeth bared in a smile.
“Rhys?”
A voice hissed at me, but it wasn’t the body-less whisper of an illdýr. Something poked at me.
I sat up, shaking my head, trying to shake free of the spinning, the mind-fog that still lurked like it was waiting to re-envelop me. My body ached like I’d been tossed around by Grammy for an hour. It took several tries to bring moisture to my mouth. I was dry, thirsty, cold, and everything hurt. Groaning, I touched my head, half to make sure it was still there, half to make sure that, if it was, it was still intact.
Mara crouched a few feet from me, streaked in dirt, jacket torn both along its side and its sleeve, a line of something darker than her skin trickling down her temple—blood.
“You’re gleaming a bit,” she said, squinting.
I looked down and saw the fading silver dust of a Mithae shielding rewrite. “Grammy made my jacket,” I said, as if that explained everything. I and my clothes would have been protected from anything major. Except—I tested my ankle and winced.
“Twisted?”
“I… I’m not sure yet.” I couldn’t remember what angle it had been at when I’d sat up; it twinged when I moved it, but it didn’t hurt yet. Likely because of shock and adrenaline. And I couldn’t remember how to tell the difference between a sprain and a fracture. I hadn’t heard any cracking noises, but I hadn’t heard much of anything at all, past the sounds of me crashing down a mountain.
“That creature might follow us down here, see if it finished us off or not,” Mara said. “You can have the baseball bat back, since we don’t have a crutch.”
I could make one. Or at least, I knew how. But I didn’t have a good knife. Or any string or rope. But more importantly—
Tilting back, I found the sky clear, bright, miles away.
No shadow. That meant I had no idea where it was or where it could be. Distantly, I thought that if I wasn’t in shock, I might be hyperventilating.
“We have to move,” I said, or at least meant to say. Either way, Mara handed me both my flashlight and my baseball bat, and tried to stick her shoulder beneath mine. Since she has a few inches on me, it was less that she was supporting me and more that I was hanging on to her. After sorting that out, I examined the flashlight before sticking it in my jacket. It was miraculously undamaged. Only a scratch along the side.
Normally, if you get lost or hurt (or worse, both), the best thing to do is get somewhere safe and findable to sit and wait, minimizing the chance that you and a search party end up walking circles around each other. Grammy liked to say that unfamiliar woods could kill you as surely as any illdýr, so stay put and signal for help. But staying put wasn’t an option for us right now. If nothing else, that would get our hunter bored enough to just kill us or… whatever it did to lost children in the forest. Earlier, it had mentioned eating us, and I didn’t want to find out how serious it had been about that plan.
Images of all the gruesome ways an illdýr likes to eat flashed through my head, from swallowing their prey whole, to tearing it apart, to dividing it into chunks, to melting it in acid, to sucking out blood and bone like a spider. I shivered, and tried to focused on walking. But hop as I might, I couldn’t avoid putting pressure on my injured ankle, and it was starting to swell visibly.
“Guess we won’t be doing any more running,” Mara said, adding an awkward chuckle.
I was doing good for being injured, but that didn’t mean I was going fast.
“We should get out of this fissure,” I said, “get somewhere high, and visible.”
Mara have me such a side-eye that I thought that maybe my voice still wasn’t working. “Visible for whom, exactly?”
“If we light up one of the trees,” I said, still grasping for the right words, “someone will find us.”
Grammy wasn’t the only Warden in the area, after all. And most illdýr that came out at night came because they didn’t like light. So if there was enough light, they probably wouldn’t bother us. What the new monster would do, I had no idea. But a big light like that should signal to someone who might be able to help us—or who could recover what was left of our corpses.
I had often wondered what it would be like to die, but so far my best theory was: painful.
“Like… set a tree on fire? That’s not a bad idea, but I wouldn’t want to start a forest fire, even if it might corner Ms. Shadow.”
I shook my head, shifting my grasp on the baseball bat. It was serviceable, but not the most effective cane. “No, not fire. Using Mithae. A modified version of the rewrite I showed you. It wouldn’t last forever, but with a whole tree there it should last long enough.”
Directional modifications were simpler than some of the others. Could I make what I wanted to? I wasn’t sure. But I had a chance.
The rocky cleft we found ourselves in was winding and opening up to a more workable (if still steep) slope to our left, and an increasingly sheer cliff to our right. Or at least, the slope would be workable under normal circumstances. I was having enough trouble walking on flatter ground; I didn’t want to think about climbing. Without saying anything, we both agreed to keep walking and hope for a better out—though we tried to avoid the deeper shadows as much as we could, in the meantime.
“Man, it sure would be nice to find some water out here,” Mara said as we struggled along. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this thirsty.”
I nodded. I had been, but that was once. And it’s not like you build up a tolerance to that kind of thing. “I forgot to bring some water. Sorry.”
She half-shrugged with her free shoulder. “Me too. So I guess that makes us even.”
The woods were still as silent as a graveyard. More confirmation, if we needed any, that the monster hadn’t left us alone.
In my mind, I tried to picture all the parts to the rewrite that I’d need, how to do the modifications—but without being able to draw the marks and see them, the lines and sounds slipped from my mind in a disordered jumble. The pain in my leg wasn’t helping, either. If I wasn’t also moving, I should be able to think fine, but there were too many demands on my mind all at once.
“Do you think it’s still following us?” Mara said, quieter than she’d been before.
“Yeah.” I didn’t feel like elaborating. It was playing a game. It wanted to see what we would do, so it had thrown us down a hole. It was probably lurking, waiting to push us back down as soon as we got out, like a kid playing with frogs in a bucket.
It would be waiting for us.
I limped to a halt.
“Do you want to try to make your way up?” Mara asked when I didn’t move.
I shook my head. “We can’t go up.”
“Why not?”
“It’s waiting for us.”
Mara looked up at the slope, back towards the skyline above us, as if double-checking what she already suspected: there was nothing to see. “Are you sure? It might be down here with us.”
“I don’t think it is. I think it’s watching us.”
“Yeah, I could see it doing that.” Mara grimaced, adjusting her grip on me. “What does that mean, though? For us? We can’t stay down here forever, and I don’t think it would let us, anyway.”
A breeze sent the trees swaying and murmuring. Both of us jumped, Mara shimmying us away from a movement on the ground that was nothing more than a blown leaf.
It wasn’t going to work as well if we were at the bottom of a ravine and hidden, but we had to try. We were rats in a trap, but we didn’t have to die like it. And if Mara was right about the creature not liking light, maybe our efforts could protect us, if temporarily. “We need to make light,” I said after a while. “A lot of light.”
“And I suppose waving your flashlight in the air isn’t going to do all that much,” Mara replied.
“No, but… hm.” I looked down at the handle poking out of my jacket. Maybe, instead of, say, rewriting stones to be spotlights or something, I could simply amplify my flashlight.
Except… part of the appeal of lighting up a whole tree was that the tree itself would be clearly glowing in the darkness, creating something more tangible than just a ray of light. Light straight up wouldn’t do much, not unless there was something for it to catch on—and tonight’s skies were cloudless.
I wondered if there was some way to make the beam more solid, not just light. Not that I’d heard of—but even if that was a possibility, it was far beyond my skill.
We’d just have to work with what we had.
I pointed ahead, towards a little hollow ahead of us. It was an almost unnaturally round, flat space sunk into the cliff’s surface, but it being open would give me room to work—and provide me with natural light to see by. I still wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to do, or how. But I couldn’t stop to think about that. If I did, if I stopped to think about any of what was happening, I’d shut down for good. Grammy’s voice was in my head, telling me to breath and keep going. Find your grit, son, and clutch at it ’til it cuts you—before something else does.
“Help me sit down,” I said when we’d reached the spot. “More towards the middle.”
Mara obliged, pulling me along quicker than was comfortable. “What are we doing?”
“Making lots of light.”
What did we have, anyway? The baseball bat, my flashlight, some dirt and earth, some rocks. I lowered myself down at the edge, looking around for good, hard stone.
“Can you find me a twig for writing?” I said. “It… it helps.” I could just use my fingers, but that was more unfamiliar, and it felt sloppier.
I would take some stones and set them around the flashlight, make some of them glow and some of them be amplifiers for the rest, and… and then… I guess shoot a beam into the sky, and pray it would catch enough in trees that it would be visible. I could angle the beam a bit, towards the cliff, and it would also show on the stone.
Grammy had to be around here, somewhere, right? She’d notice the change in the forest.
I wondered what time it was. How long we’d have before the monster came back.
Close by were flattish rocks, crumbled shale, so I pulled chunks of them towards me, setting them up in a loose ring. Something pulled free from the dirt with one of them, a small bit of what looked at first like a pebble—but when I picked it up, it didn’t feel… naturally formed. It was a hard, crisp stone, smooth as if it had been polished, without any sharp edges. But there were ridges and contours to it. Holding it up to the sky, I couldn’t make out much of it, but it looked carved.
It was too small for me to write on, though it felt decently hard. Without thinking about it, I switched it with the flashlight in my pocket. By the time I’d finished settling the flashlight so that it wouldn’t fall down, Mara was back with a little twig about as long as a pencil. Twisted splinters showed she’d pulled it off of something nearby.
“Well, I guess it’ll be cool to see some magic again,” Mara offered half-heartedly, and settled down across from me.
I stared down at the rocks. If I didn’t get this right, we’d die down here. We’d be lost, and stuck, and the illdýr or monster or whatever it was would come back and kill us. And it might, anyway, before I could finish.
But glow rewrites, amplification rewrites—those were simple. Basic stuff. Even if I didn’t have a pattern to look at.
But what was the point? I could make some stones glow. So what? Even if I made them glow really bright, what was that going to do? Let wildlife for miles around know that a human was here? We were too sheltered for the light to be widely seen, but going anywhere else risked an attack we wouldn’t be able to fend off.
“Do you need any help?” Mara asked.
But she couldn’t help me. And I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t—
Something, that little spark in me, flared and snapped. Biting my lip, I reached out and grabbed a stone and started writing before I could think anymore, humming the little glow-spell tune in its slow cadence.
Grammy’s dry voice told me to calm down and focus, to let muscle memory take over so I wouldn’t overthink the lines and mess up. Mithae can be quite patient. Even if you do have to stop to think, don’t lift your pen and you’ll be fine.
I finished one, an amplifier, and was reaching for a second stone, when there was a sharp thump of a sound behind us, and a pale glow—like moonlight filtered through a curtain. Mara rose to one knee, baseball bat already in hand; I dropped the rock, trying to turn and see without twisting onto my ankle.
The cliff had split open.
Or, a split had appeared in the cliff, like two halves of the mountain had been pushed aside to make room for it. Or maybe it had been there all along, and we just hadn’t seen it?
But, more importantly, a short figure stepped out of the split, towards us—a rough, human-like figure of gray rock, and clothed in what looked like a cloth of stained glass. Its big, round, pupil-less eyes glowed silver in the dark, and crystalline horns, twisting downwards, shone faintly with the same color.
This was something I knew, something I recognized—even though I’d never met one. That in itself was relief enough—no more stumbling about through unrecognizable shades—but this was also a friend. Or at least, a non-hostile under most circumstances.
“I’m… I’m a Warden,” I stumbled out before I could figure out what to say. “Or at least, I know Wardens. Can you help us?”
The silverie blinked slowly, eyelids closing sideways, and looked me up and down. “I guessed as much, since you were using Mithae. Not often you hear the old songs from the humans, otherwise.”
Mara stayed where she was, wide-eyed.
The silverie waved a hand at her. “She’s with you, I’m guessing?”
I nodded.
“Well, I suppose that means we have visitors,” she said, hands on her hips and shoulders squared. Or at least, I was pretty sure she was a girl—that’s what downward horns were supposed to mean. And her voice sounded feminine, relatively speaking. “There’s something rotten in the forest tonight. Best not to be out in it.” She was scanning the forest with an expression I couldn’t read, but I noticed her hand was by a pocket of some kind, and something thin and straight stuck out of it—maybe a weapon.
I didn’t wait for a second invitation. Grabbing my flashlight from the rocks, I wobbled my way onto one foot and skip-hopped towards the opening, gesturing frantically for Mara to follow me. She picked the baseball bat up and took a less enthusiastic step after me, looking over her shoulder at the slope and the trees.
There was no breeze, but the trees moved like there was, anyway. And so did the shadows.
“Come on!” I hissed at her, and she picked up her pace.
The silverie pulled her forward, taking out a long piece of what appeared to be rebar from her pocket. I was too busy trying to fit through the awkward crack, but even from the corner of my eye, I could see that the rusty metal was covered in rewrites.
Now inside and on soft moss and dirt, I turned to watch as Mara passed the silverie.
An explosion of shadows spread out from the trees like a mist of insects, writhing and reaching, all jagged angles and smoke—in the dead silence, the movement sounded like the air breaking from a punctured tire—or maybe it was the beginning of a laugh.
The silverie shoved Mara into the split, drew something across her eyes, and slammed the rebar into the ground.
Mara fell over top of me.
A crackling crescendo, a brilliant spurt of gold and orange and white—the stark outline of the tunnel, the silverie, and what looked like thousands of tendrils rushing towards us—it all burned into my eyes in a split second—then the flash fully blinded me. The monster cackled, a shrill sound edged with hysteria. Mara and I were jostled backwards, the earth rolling and shaking beneath us, and a thumping crack like we’d heard before echoed around us, shutting off the monster’s voice with a snap.
We were now shut off from the outside world.
To be continued…..