by Natalie Grey
I needed a bolt not of darkness, for darkness did not harm this beast, but of light itself. I needed a weapon. I held out the herbs and felt them grow and settle into something strong beyond belief. Into a light that I could feel in my blood.
When I opened my eyes, I gasped.
I was holding a sword. It was made of light, I could hardly look at it, and at its heart were the fern and the dandelion and the nettle, grown beyond themselves, striking forwards. It was draining what little energy I had left to maintain it, but it was too beautiful to give up.
The beast charged. Its mouth opened, a gaping maw of darkness bending to swallow me up.
I had a weapon. I had a weapon, and nothing else, and I knew the utter terror of standing still as my enemy ran toward me. A scream burst from my lips, the pain of my wound drenched me in icy heat, but I stood my ground.
To turn and run was to die. I had made a blade of light itself, and I would not betray myself now.
I stood my ground, and thrust the blade straight up as my enemy swooped to devour me.
Chapter Twelve
The blade sank so easily into the beast that I knew it was a being of pure magic. There were no bones to it, nothing to change its structure. It was only darkness and death.
It warred with the blade, and the blade warred back. It was my weapon and my shield, born of sun and ancient lore.
I stared the beast in the eyes and watched it die. It was death made into malice made into a hunter. It had been sent here for me, or perhaps—for all I knew—it was me. That was the sort of shape this test seemed to be taking.
It wasn’t so big as I had thought it was. It shrank still further, and then it burst into nothing, smoke curling away into the air, and the blade crumbled away as well. The sunlight drifted up and the herbs fell away from my nettle-stung fingers.
It took everything I had not to fall to my knees.
If I fell, I wasn’t getting back up.
And if I stopped moving, I would die. I started walking without direction. My left hand crept up to the wound on my right shoulder. The cuts went deep, down to the bone, and there was nothing I could do to help myself.
Would they heal me of this, or leave the scar as a reminder of the test?
None of it mattered if I didn’t make my way to them.
I stumbled and only narrowly avoided sprawling out on the ground. Once I turned, in a wide, unsteady circle, to look behind me.
The beast was still gone. The hilt of the sunlight sword was all that remained of our altercation, burning as brightly as a little star. Behind it, the forest swayed, dark and seductive.
Not Daiman’s forest, after all.
I kept going. The sunlight was still warm on my skin and I was trying to hold onto it, but I was getting colder and colder. My teeth were chattering again.
There was no dark force at work any longer, I had simply used up too much of myself.
I had to get back to my world, or I was never going to find the strength to do so. I tried to navigate, and found nothing. I couldn’t focus, my thoughts were dreamy. The sky was so blue….
I had fallen, I realized. My shoulder hurt, but only distantly.
“…You stop moving, you die,” I told myself. Those words had meant something to me once. If only I could remember what.
The real world. I needed to get back. I rolled slightly onto my good arm and stared at the rock. For a moment, I could see grass and feel mist on my cheeks, and then the moment was gone and there was only rock.
What pulled me onward was the feeling of life. I hadn’t realized it until this moment, but the domhan fior I was in had no life at all. Even the nymphs sounded like nothing. The forest’s song, the harmony of trees and vines and animals, was all wrong.
I heard true life now. I managed to roll over and crawl, an awkward exercise at best with only one good arm, and presently found myself staring down at grass … and brown paws.
I looked up and met the bear’s eyes, and had the sense that this was probably the sort of thing I should have checked for before moving between worlds.
It stared at me for a long moment, and then it bent its head and nudged me in the face. I proceeded to go right over sideways with a muttered oath, and lay clutching my shoulder and waiting for the world to stop spinning. I felt a cold nose snuffling at me, and a few huffs of air, and looked up into deep brown eyes that seemed surprisingly human.
What exactly, it wondered, was I doing lying on the ground like that, alone and bleeding? It had thought that humans needed weird dead trees and other humans to survive.
It took a moment to parse the comment about dead trees, but at length, I decided it was talking about houses.
I took a moment to feel out the shape of its mind. It had been spending its day finding food. There had been berries, which it had quite enjoyed, and some leaves that had come with very knobbly sticks, and a few insects as a bonus.
No meat? I asked it, and it nudged me again with its nose. It wasn’t hungry enough to hunt. It didn’t always eat meat. Didn’t I know anything about bears?
I had to admit that I didn’t, not really.
It sat back on its haunches while it considered.
“I have to get back to the hall,” I told it. Then I remembered that words were an imprecise way of talking. I sat up and stared it in the eyes. The sharp pain in my shoulder had become an ache. I showed it the hall in my mind, and asked if it had seen that before.
It had. It knew which place I was describing. The dead trees and strange piled stones smelled of humans who weren’t quite human anymore, and sometimes it caught thoughts drifting out of the place like smoke. It wasn’t quite sure it liked that place.
It was not so far away, in any case. Just over the next couple of hills.
I reached out and touched its fur with trembling, bloodstained hands. I couldn’t make it that far. Could I ride the bear, perhaps?
Ride it? The bear was confused by this. It had seen into my head. It knew what I did. It hadn’t expected me to ask that.
“I’m trying to be a better person,” I muttered, through cracked lips.
It wasn’t sure what I was saying when I chirped at it like that. It padded to my side and dropped one shoulder to let me grasp at its fur. I should climb on, it told me.
That was far easier said than done, and the process was fraught with more than a few failures and falls. In the end, success was a very undignified scramble, and I wound up with my face pressed directly into its fur. I picked my head up and tried to get stray hairs out of my mouth.
I let myself relax into its thoughts as it carried me. Fall was coming, and it wasn’t sure if it liked fall. Fall was the time when the earth’s heartbeat slowed, like a very old animal, and the bear found itself sleepy. It liked the rest, but it feared the cold, and the long sleep.
I felt its muscles moving underneath me, and let my thoughts drift. I could almost see inside its body, see the way the joints moved and the paws hit the earth. I could almost smell the world as it did. I grew accustomed to the way it swung its head back and forth.
I could be a bear, I thought sleepily. That wouldn’t be so bad.
It agreed that I might make a very nice bear, if I only put some work into being less fragile. Being a bear was nice. It could understand why I would want to be one. Anyway, we were close.
It let me down off its back and helped me stand up. Whether it was the rest or some old magic, I had the strength to do so now.
I wished it well on the long sleep, and it wished me well in my learning. What a strange mind I had, so empty and looking for new things to think about—and so many thoughts all at once! No wonder it found stray thoughts drifting about when it was near humans.
It wished me well and padded away, and I stared after it with my head tilted.
Something was growing in my chest, a strange certainty. I had confronted a beast made of the same darkness that was in my blood, and defeated it. I had faced the same sort of temptation I leveled at
others, and denied that as well. I had found power in sunlight and in the old druidic lore.
And at long last, when I came back to my world, I had spoken with the animals that roamed this land, and started to learn the mind of one. Someday, I might take a bear’s shape, and I would forever remember this bear in particular.
I had come here to be a druid—but I realized that only now did I truly believe I might succeed.
I was smiling as I made my way up the hill. Bedraggled and bloody, injured and half-dead, I was nonetheless victorious. I had fallen into the other world, as Daiman feared, and emerged. I came over the crest of the hill with a smile on my lips, ready to see his eyes light up.
The smile died, and my mouth fell open.
Where the hall had been, there lay a smoking wreck, suspended in animation as a blast of power burst its walls outward. Curling around it lay a shimmer of black and grey, and flames were stopped in mid-flicker at its roof. Evil, so palpable it was difficult to breathe, lay cloaking the place like a fog.
I hoped, for a foolish moment, that this was the wrong world, and an alternate universe.
But I knew it was not. I had come back to the right place.
The hall, and its inhabitants, were gone.
Chapter Thirteen
I didn’t think, I didn’t pause. I ran down the hill as fast as my battered body would carry me.
“Daiman!” My voice was hoarse with exhaustion and panic. “Daiman!”
I could feel his magic. He was somewhere there, he was still alive. There was no realistic hope of accomplishing anything at all in this scenario, let alone accomplishing anything right now. The magic I was looking at was powerful, well-planned, beyond the skills of one sorcerer or druid.
Nothing of this magnitude could have happened by accident. This had been planned.
And I was half-dead right now.
But I wasn’t thinking of anything beyond Daiman. He was in there, I knew it. He had to be, didn’t he? The conclave was supposed to be happening right now.
I held the robe with my weak hand and put the arm over my eyes, ready to plunge through the wall of fire and smoke into the hall. Even with the fire frozen in time, I couldn’t stop myself from fearing it instinctively.
I had just enough time to wonder if fire held in time could still be hot on bare feet, before I found the wards. They were cunningly hidden, concealed within the fire itself, and I had no warning.
I ran into them at top speed.
Pain. If I thought I had ever endured pain before, I found myself thinking again. I had been tortured in my time. I had been kept in dungeon cells and hurt for the amusement of others, and I had never felt a sensation like this.
My body jerked. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to move, but my mind could give me no orders. I was swimming in pain—in truth, I was drowning in it.
Take another step, the wards whispered to me, and this pain will be magnified tenfold.
Even the thought was enough to make me whimper. I opened my eyes to the sight of wards that glowed white hot, branding runes into my very flesh.
Run, run, run, my mind pleaded with me.
I slumped to my knees and fell backwards. It was the best I could do, and thankfully, it was enough. The pain released me.
I lay there for some time. An hour? A day? I had the sense that the shadows moved around me. If a night passed, I didn’t notice it—but then, I could hardly feel my body at all. I could have sworn that I was floating, so luxurious was the absence of pain.
When I came to, my shoulder no longer bled. The skin had healed over, and if the wards had truly burned their marks onto me, the marks were gone as well.
I sat up. I was hungry, my mouth bone-dry, and even though my shoulder seemed better, my muscles ached. My body remembered the hurt that had been done to it, and it knew, with an animal sense, that the wards were still nearby.
I reached out, fingers trembling, and yanked them back at the last moment.
Nothing good could come from tackling this problem head on. I had to think. I had to look at the facts and make a plan if I was going to get around this.
So what did I know? I knew that the hall was in flames, though I did not know if it had been attacked from inside or outside. I knew that whoever or whatever had attacked it could freeze time—
Or perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps someone inside the hall had, knowing they were outnumbered, chosen to unleash this spell to stave off the battle. They were waiting for rescue, and knew it would come someday.
Perhaps that someone had been Daiman. My chin trembled for a moment and I sniffed hard.
My only chance of saving him depended on me keeping a clear head—and not ever asking myself whether anyone was still alive in there. Daiman was alive, I told myself fiercely. He was not dead. I would not believe that for a moment.
I heard a strange noise drifting on the air and raised my head curiously. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, halfway between a mechanical clank and something organic: water lapping, wind blowing.
Then it was gone, and I shook my head. The magic had its own sound, perhaps.
What did I need? I needed facts. I needed allies.
I needed food, or I was going to keel over where I stood. I looked around myself distractedly. Berries, leaves, vegetables. One didn’t live through the dark ages without learning to forage, but I had never been to Ireland before. I’d have to hope that I didn’t eat anything poisonous.
And then the sound was back, directly above me, almost deafening.
I looked up, and froze for one precious moment.
I had never seen anything like this in my life. It took the form of a serpent, easily as wide as I was tall, but air glimmered between the segments of its body, and surely no serpent was made of metal and stone. Some portions gleamed as if they were alloys beyond human knowledge, deadly and strong, some portions rusted like iron or copper, and some gleamed like polished marble.
Between the segments glistened a darkness that I had seen all too recently, in the claws of the sea beast.
Something from that world, then. Something from the rite—it had escaped, and it was here.
I had the time to think that, with a sort of terrified clarity, before its mouth opened with a scream like rusty hinges. It did not have jaws, not as such. No, its mouth opened like petals, each razor-sharp, and its maw glittered coldly at me as the head swayed.
The head plunged down in an attack even as I ran. I was not going to fight this thing on short notice. All I could hope was that it didn’t have time to catch me before—
I burst into the domhan fior with a gasp of relief. I was alive, I was still running, and a quick glance showed me that the serpent had been unable to follow me.
I stumbled to a halt and gave a more careful look at my surroundings. This truly was the domhan fior, unlike wherever I had gone during my rite.
And that gave me an idea. I looked behind me, to where the hall should be. I had seen Daiman make his way into locked buildings by traveling between the worlds. Perhaps I could get past the wards the same way.
I paced back, trying to sense the landmarks of the world that existed alongside this one. Down into the hollow of the valley, where the hall stood….
I couldn’t sense anything at all. Common sense, and my training so far, told me that I should be able to feel the druids inside the hall, as well as the hall, itself. Magic could be smelled from the domhan fior, or at least, it should be able to be.
It should be here. I cast around myself in increasing frustration. I was hungry, I was tired. I was hurt—though I wasn’t sure if that hurt had ever existed in any version of the real world. And I couldn’t just go back, or that beast would find me. I had to find the hall, and I had to find it from here.
I didn’t realize there were tears on my cheeks until I heard the laughter. My head whipped around.
“What in God’s name happened to you?” Philip asked.
Chapter Fourteen
I stared at Philip wordlessly. It was hard to think of anywhere worse to be right now, to the point that I was seriously considering going back into the real world to face the serpent.
Philip, like a born hunter, could smell my fear and my anguish. He smiled, his lips curving gorgeously, utterly merciless. He wanted to tear me apart at the seams, and though he told himself it was to turn me back into what I had once been, the truth was just that Philip wanted to destroy me.
Like me, he could sense weakness. Like me, he felt it calling to him. He wanted to dig his fingers into the cracks in others’ masks and tear everything apart until his enemy was utterly defeated.
And anyone who showed the slightest weakness was his enemy.
“Why would I ever tell you anything?” I asked him. I shook my head. “And don’t say, because we were once everything to one another. We were once allies, Philip, that’s all it was. We weren’t even that, we were just rivals, letting the other one carry us as far as we could before it came to a fight.”
“And did you realize you made the same mistake all over again?” He’d always been good at this: taking someone else’s words at face value and twisting them around to make a weapon out of them. “Was your druid just using you to see how far he could get?”
It was a good guess on his part, it really was. He’d gotten under my skin so many times by asking sly questions like this, by picking at the very true fear that Daiman would someday leave me.
In this case, however, it was so far off that I actually laughed at him.
He faltered.
“Look.” I managed to find the wherewithal to turn my voice into a weapon. “I understand that you’re bored, stuck in here with nothing to do, but that’s really just your own fault, isn’t it? And since I don’t have to stand here and listen to you needle me, I’m not going to.”
I turned on my heel and marched away.
“Oh, come on,” he called after me. He was half-laughing, but I could hear the worry in his tone at being left. He genuinely hated this—no one to adore him, and nothing to entertain him. “You’re not going to tell me why you’re dressed as a monk?”