Chapter 2 #2
“I’m not ready for this,” I said, and hated how small my voice sounded.
“No one ever is,” Peeble replied. “But ready or not, it’s happening. The storm’s not just weather, Elle. It’s the boundary breaking down. And when it does, they’ll come through.”
“They?”
“The ones who’ve been hunting your bloodline for sixty years. The ones who want the locket and what it represents. The ones your grandmother fled from a lifetime ago—and the ones she’s been hiding you from since the day you were born.”
As if in response to Peeble’s words, the boundary shuddered.
What sounded like rain lashed against the windows—but when I glanced outside, there was nothing but clear night and impossible lightning.
Wind that wasn’t wind howled through the spaces between reality, carrying voices that might have been screaming or might have been singing.
I walked to the window, each step feeling like I was moving through molasses.
Outside, the garden was transforming. With each lightning strike, I could see it more clearly—the overlay becoming more real than the reality.
The dead grass was now silver moss that moved like water.
The overgrown vegetables were glass-like structures that pulsed with inner light. And the elm tree…
The elm tree was opening like a door.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, and immediately felt guilty. This was terrifying. I should be running. Calling the police. Calling a psychiatrist. Something.
But it was beautiful. Heartbreakingly, impossibly beautiful.
“Beautiful things are often the most dangerous,” Peeble said, now perched on my shoulder. I hadn’t even noticed them move. “Your grandmother learned that the hard way.”
“What happened to her? Really?”
“She loved a king. Bore his child—your mother. But the king already had a queen, and in that place, such things matter. The queen cursed your mother while she was still in the womb. ‘May your bloodline forever be torn between worlds, never fully belonging to either.’ Jo stole the locket—the key between worlds—and fled here, hoping distance would break the curse.”
“Did it?”
“What do you think?” Peeble’s legs tickled my neck. “Your mother died young, torn between two natures she couldn’t reconcile. Jo spent sixty years in exile, trying to suppress the inheritance, hoping if your mother never crossed over—if you never knew, never crossed over—the curse would fade.”
“But?”
“But blood calls to blood. Power calls to power. And the garden… the garden has been waiting for you since before you were born.”
The crack in reality was spreading, spider-webbing across the kitchen like broken glass. Through it, I could see figures moving. Tall, impossible figures dressed in armor that might have been grown rather than forged. They carried weapons that looked shaped from radiant silver, and their faces…
Their faces were beautiful and terrible and utterly inhuman.
“The Rootguard,” Peeble whispered. “The King’s hunters. They’ve found you.”
One of the figures turned toward the crack, and our eyes met across dimensions. His were silver, like mercury, like moonlight on water. His expression shifted from determination to something else—shock? Recognition? Hope?
He pressed his hand against the crack from his side, and I felt an insane urge to match the gesture. The locket burned against my skin, and suddenly I could hear Jo’s voice, clear as if she stood beside me:
“Trust the Root, not the Bloom. The garden chooses its own.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, but Jo’s voice was gone.
The figure—the guard—was saying something, but I couldn’t hear through the boundary. He looked frustrated, then afraid, then determined. He pulled out what looked like a blade made of condensed shadow and began cutting at the crack, widening it.
“He’s trying to break through,” I said, stumbling backward.
“No,” Peeble said, sounding puzzled. “He’s trying to… warn you? That’s not right. The Rootguard don’t warn. They hunt.”
The guard’s mouth moved urgently, and this time I could almost read his lips: Run. Hide. Now.
Then something hit him from behind—a blast of brilliant light that sent him flying out of view. Another figure stepped into frame, this one wearing a crown of thorns that writhed like living things. His smile was cold, perfect, and absolutely terrifying.
“Found you,” he mouthed, and even through dimensions, I could feel the weight of his attention like hands around my throat.
The crack exploded outward, reality shattering like a mirror made of air. The overlay crashed into the real world, or maybe the real world crashed into the overlay. Either way, my grandmother’s kitchen ceased to exist as a separate space.
I stood in a room that was both and neither, tiles shifting between linoleum and living wood, walls flickering between drywall and woven vines. The refrigerator grew roots that burrowed into the floor while simultaneously remaining a perfectly normal appliance.
And through what had been the kitchen’s back door—not the tree, but a second breach in reality—stepped the crowned figure, his portal rimmed with thorns and starlight.
He was tall—impossibly tall, like perspective was just a suggestion he chose to ignore. His clothing seemed to be cut from the night sky, complete with slowly moving constellations. The crown of thorns on his head writhed and reached toward me with disturbing intent.
“Lady Elle,” he said, and his voice was like honey poured over broken glass. “How delightful to finally make your acquaintance. I am Prince Auradelle, Regent of the Thornwood Realm, and I’m afraid you’ve inherited something that doesn’t belong to you.”
“The house is legally mine,” I said, because apparently my panic response was sass. “I have the paperwork.”
He laughed, and somewhere in the garden, flowers withered. “Not the house, dear child. The birthright. The blood. The binding.” He stepped closer, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. “Your grandmother stole more than just herself when she fled. She stole the future of our realm.”
“People keep saying that, but I don’t know what it means.” I stepped back as he moved closer. “Peeble said Jo stole a ‘possibility.’ You’re saying she stole a birthright. Which is it? What did she actually take?”
“No? Then why does the Root-mark bloom on your skin?”
I looked down. There, spreading across my collarbone like spilled ink, was a mark I hadn’t had five minutes ago. It looked like vines, or veins, or maybe both—golden lines that pulsed with their own light, forming patterns that hurt to follow with my eyes.
“That’s not possible,” I whispered.
“Many things are possible when the blood runs true.” Auradelle took another step closer. “You are the granddaughter of Josephine Thornweaver, daughter of Marielle the Lost, heir to magics you can’t begin to comprehend. And I’m here to bring you home.”
“This is my home.”
“This?” He gestured dismissively, and the walls flickered more violently between realities. “This is a shadow. A refuge. A lie your grandmother told to keep you safe. But safety is an illusion, and lies have a way of coming undone.”
He reached out, and I knew with absolute certainty that if he touched me, I would cease to exist in any meaningful way. I would become something else, something that served his will, something that—
A hand grabbed my arm and yanked me backward, through space that folded wrong, through air that tasted metallic with otherworldly glow. I tumbled through the ruins of my grandmother’s kitchen and landed hard on moss that definitely hadn’t been there before.
“Run,” said a voice like distant thunder. “Now.”
I looked up into silver eyes—the guard from before.
Up close, he was even more inhuman. His features were sharp enough to cut, all angles and edges like someone had carved him from moonlight and shadow.
Dark hair fell across his face, and there were markings on his skin too—but his were different.
Darker. Carved rather than grown, silver-black lines that looked like scars lined with luminous silver.
“I said run!” He pulled me to my feet with strength that made my bones ache.
But there was nowhere to run to. We were caught between worlds—the kitchen floor beneath my feet one moment, soft moss the next.
The house and garden had become the same confused space, realities merging and separating in waves that made me nauseous to watch.
Earth plants fought for space with things that had no names in any human language, and the walls kept flickering in and out of existence.
“Who are you?” I gasped.
“Someone who doesn’t want to see you become Auradelle’s puppet. Now move!”
He dragged me toward the elm tree—or rather, toward what the elm tree had always truly been. The ancient door it had been masking. A door carved from wood that had never grown on Earth, standing free in space without frame or wall, opening onto darkness that had texture.
“I’m not going through that!”
“You are if you want to live.”
Auradelle’s voice echoed across the chaos: “Kaelren. I should have known you’d interfere. Still playing the hero, even after all these years?”
The guard—Kaelren—turned back with a smile that was all teeth and danger. “Still playing the tyrant, even after the Bloom rejected you?”
Auradelle’s perfect face twisted with rage. “The Bloom chose patience. I chose action.”
“You chose genocide.”
“I chose survival.”
They moved at the same time, faster than my eyes could follow, their battle tearing through the merged space around us.
Darkness met light in an explosion that turned the air solid for a heartbeat.
Kitchen cabinets shattered behind me—or were they trees?
I couldn’t tell anymore. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only watch as they fought with magic that shouldn’t exist.
Kaelren fought like a storm—all fury and chaos, shadows bending to his will like eager pets. Auradelle was precise, surgical, each gesture sending blades of light that cut through reality itself. Where their powers met, things unmade themselves, existed and didn’t exist simultaneously.
“The door!” Peeble buzzed in my ear. “While they’re distracted!”
But I couldn’t move. The mark on my collarbone burned like molten gold pressed into flesh, the lines carving themselves deeper, solidifying. It felt like being rewritten from the inside out, like every cell was remembering something it had forgotten.
“I can’t,” I gasped.
“You can. You must. The door won’t stay open much longer.”
The door was flickering, its edges starting to fray. Through it, I could see glimpses of somewhere else—a forest that had never known axes, water that ran upward, stars that hung close enough to touch.
Kaelren went down, bright light wrapped around his throat like a noose. Auradelle stood over him, crown writhing with satisfaction.
“You always were too emotional,” Auradelle said. “It made you weak.”
“And you were always too cold,” Kaelren gasped. “That’s why you’re alone.”
Something in those words hit Auradelle like a physical blow. His perfect composure cracked for just a second, but a second was all Kaelren needed. Shadows exploded outward, sending the prince flying.
Kaelren rolled to his feet and looked at me with those impossible silver eyes. “Go! Now!”
“But—”
“GO!”
The mark on my skin flared, and suddenly I was moving without my permission. My body knew what my mind didn’t—that this was flight or dissolution, escape or end. I ran toward the door as reality collapsed behind me, as two impossible beings tore the world apart with their war.
I reached the threshold and hesitated. Through the door was everything unknown, everything Jo had protected me from, everything my mother had died to keep me from becoming.
Behind me was everything falling apart, everything I’d known being unmade, everything human and normal and safe becoming anything but.
“Trust the Root,” Peeble said, and I remembered Jo’s voice, remembered the locket’s warmth, remembered that sometimes the only choice is to choose the unknown over the unbearable.
I stepped through the door.
The last thing I heard was Kaelren shouting something in a language that sounded like breaking glass.
The last thing I saw was Auradelle’s smile turning to rage.
The last thing I felt was the mark completing itself, spreading across my skin like roots, like wings, like coming home.
Then darkness, and falling, and the sound of roses laughing, whispering in a language older than words.