Chapter 17 #2
An indoor forest—how curious, but the strangest thing of all were these rings on the barks, some rough and some smoother.
They were bigger than my head, just rings within rings within rings, glowing a bright blue color.
So full of magic I could have sworn I heard crackling in the air when the birds we couldn’t even see stopped chirping for a second or two.
I thought the masquerade ball with the self-playing instruments and the masks and the illusions posing as real people was mind-blowing—but this exceeded anything I could have ever possibly imagined.
“Guys, I think I’m in love with this place,” Mimi whispered. “Look at these flowers. Look at these mushrooms!” She spread her arm about as she spun around and went deeper and deeper into the tree, inhaling hard and loud. “And do you smell that?!”
We certainly did. It smelled like you’d imagine the Everstill to smell. Just…pure and good and exactly the right amount of sweet.
Some of the fear shed off me as we all moved deeper inside the tree, looking about, analyzing the branches and the leaves, the wood and the barks that were hard and smooth, straight and twisted into knots—all from one step to the other. So different, but all part of the same body at the same time.
I even found myself smiling a little bit as I touched my fingertips to the wood and the leaves and even went close to inspect one of those glowing rings. The heat that came off it was impossible to mistake—it was magic, all right. These branches, this whole place was brimming with it.
Then I saw the flowers just beyond that thick branch I’d been inspecting.
My smile widened. “Guys—look!”
There were twelve of them, and they were not like the other flowers. These were huge, the stems so long the flowers themselves reached up to my chest, and they were all planted in a perfect line, each one a different color. Blue and pink and red and yellow, and the petals were all closed at first.
But as we went closer, they began to slowly pull open, like they could see us. Like they’d been waiting for us all along.
Their scent was intoxicating. My mouth watered. They smelled absolutely delicious enough to eat—and inside each flower, surrounded by those velvety petals, there was a handful of what looked like small rocks at first. But then…
“The helping hand,” said one Hand or the other—and they were right. This must have been the help that Johnny the speaker had talked about before we entered.
“They’re seeds,” said Silas as he approached the first flower and took one between his fingers. We all did the same, too—and indeed, they looked exactly like seeds.
“A handful for all of us,” said Anika. “Should we take them?”
“I think so. The flowers opened for us,” said Russ as he gathered all the seeds from a flower with bright purple petals. I gathered mine from a blue one, the color so pale it looked almost white. Absolutely gorgeous.
Seven seeds were in my fist, and I leaned in to sniff the petal, too, just out of curiosity.
Yes, I’d believe it. This was exactly what the Everstill would smell like.
“So, what now? I don’t see stairs or anything like that,” said Reggie. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“What are we supposed to do with seeds, though?” March wondered as he looked down at his own secured in his fist.
“We save them for now. Let’s just keep moving and see what else we can find. This place is massive.” I put the seeds in the pocket of my suit for safekeeping, certain that when the time came to use them, we’d know.
Together, we made our way deeper into the tree.
“What do you think those rings are?” asked Russ.
“Magic. They buzz,” said Erith.
“Yes, but what kind of magic?”
Nobody had an answer—not even Silas.
The scenery didn’t change much the farther we went.
And whichever way we turned, it all looked identical.
Same colors—all shades of brown and green dotted with the bright colors of the flowers here and there.
There were lanterns mounted on smaller branches here and there, too, and the glowing blue light of the rings was more than enough for us to see everything.
I stopped walking, and March stopped with me.
“There’s no way out.” There was no way anywhere by the looks of it.
The others slowed down and stopped a few feet away, too, looking around, disoriented. No longer smiling.
“Up,” Mimi said, her eyes up on the never-ending network of branches. “We need to go up, don’t we?”
“How, though? Are we supposed to climb these?” Reggie had gone to touch some of the threaded ropes that fell from the branches like decorations—but they were too weak. “Or just climb the trees themselves?”
“It would take us days to get up there—look how they’re connected. None go straight up,” Silas said.
He was right, too. The branches twisted and turned sideways most of the time, and we’d need a very long time to get to the top of this tree like that. Judging by how tall it had been from the outside, I doubted that was the right way.
“The seeds, then,” Reggie said. “We plant the seeds.” And he showed us the seeds he’d held in his fist.
“Could be,” Silas said, wrapping a hand around his chin as he thought it through.
“Do you guys…notice something?”
We all turned to Cook.
He was standing there, looking at his hands.
“Something like what?” March asked.
“We’re…slow.” Cook raised his head. Looked at us. “We’re moving slowly. We’re talking really slowly, too.”
I could have laughed. I’d know if we were moving or talking slowly—we all would.
Except…
“Holy Hour—look!” Levana said, moving her hand in front of her face—but I didn’t see anything unusual. Her hand was moving as it should.
“Focus,” Cook said. “Look at your own hands and focus.”
I’d be damned, but I did. I looked at my hand, moved it in front of my face and…there!
My intention was to move it faster, yet my hand still took its time to travel from left to right. Had I really lost it, or did my hand take way longer than it normally would to do that simple motion?
The gears in my stomach shifted. I reached for the pocket specifically designed for our Life Clocks. I pulled it out as the others did, too, and…
“It’s moving so slowly,” Helen whispered, and I saw it, too. The hands that told the time on my Life Clock were counting the seconds too slowly. One in three.
I looked up again, and this time it was like a veil had been lifted from in front of my eyes.
I saw everyone for how they were moving, like they were stuck in slow motion.
I heard the way their voices warped when they spoke, too, but I was moving at the same speed, so I hadn’t noticed at all… until I did.
“We have to get out of here,” said March, except now that I was actively thinking about the normal speed of time, I could hear it perfectly how slowly every word left his lips. How slowly his lips moved, too.
And it was fucking terrifying.
“I’ll do it. I’ll plant the seeds,” Reggie said, and it took him a good five seconds in normal timing—if my sense of time could even be trusted at this point—to lower to his knees as we watched.
Time’s Teeth, I was even breathing slowly, but the panic racing through my veins was as fast as always.
My heartbeat, too—it shook me like a drum, and now that I could hear it slamming against my ribcage, it showed me exactly what normal was.
It gave me the proof that we were indeed stuck in slow motion.
What kind of magic was this?!
How could they slow down time at such a scale?
“Guys, it’s getting worse,” Cook said—and judging by my heartbeat, it took him more than three times the normal time to get those words out.
He was right.
It wasn’t my heart that was beating faster—it couldn’t beat any faster than this if it tried. It was just the time in this place that was slowing down by the second…
“It’s not working!” Reggie shouted, on his knees still, looking down at the pile of seeds he’d put between a mess of thinner branches and roots and leaves that made for the floor of this forest.
We all rushed to him, and we moved so slowly I had trouble believing I wasn’t stuck in a dream. There was no way my heart could beat so fast and my body could move so slowly. There was no way it would take me that long to take three steps and kneel on the floor, too.
Silas had managed to bring both hands over Reggie’s seeds, to drop his in as well. To watch him closing his eyes when we were getting slower and slower by the second terrified me all over again.
Because if blinking took this long now, we were indeed going to be frozen solid. If blinking took this long, in a few of these stretched seconds, none of us were going to be able to move at all. It would take us hours just to blink!
“Not enough.”
The words could have filled my ears years later. Silas’s lips moved slower and slower, and we were practically motionless now, all of us on our knees around Reggie and his seeds.
Not enough magic.
I thought that’s what Silas tried to say when he spoke again, but we could no longer make out the words. It took so long for one to be complete that it lost meaning by the end of the next.
But the others must have understood the same thing because they moved. Slowly, they all moved, reached out their fists and threw their seeds on top of Reggie’s.
Meanwhile, mine were in my pocket.
By the Everstill, I should have kept them in my hand.
I should have kept them in my fist like a few of the others had done because now it was going to take me days and days to get them out.
I was trying, giving it my everything to push my hand to move forward, to get to my pocket faster, but it wouldn’t.
Time wouldn’t let it. We could only move with the flow of it, and in here, the flow was broken.
Not going to lie, I thought that was it.
In a flash, my whole life passed before my eyes.
I saw myself and all the others remaining stuck right here on our knees, trying to move, to plant those seeds somehow, for the rest of eternity.
The world around us would continue to move because time waits for no one, and we’d be here, slow, barely breathing, never blinking, never aging. Stuck for real. Stuck in time.
But as luck would have it, Russ, Anika, and Cook had all kept their seeds in their hands. So, while the rest of us were reaching for our pockets still, they managed to pry their fingers open and let the seeds fall on top of Reggie's and Silas’s.
It took a long time.
The vibrations came the second Russ’s last seed fell over the others. Suddenly it was like the entire tree was shaking from the roots up, and when I lost balance and began to fall, I did so slowly.
Time’s Teeth, I’d never felt more powerless in my life, even when I was giving away my memories. I had never felt so completely out of control of my body, and my heart was about to burst right out of me with how fast it was beating.
Trees did first, though.
Trees exploded right out of the floor where the others threw their seeds.
I only had a second before I was flung back into fast-forward, but I saw the trees—or maybe just branches. About five or six of them, thick and smooth, burst right out of the floor and twisted around one another into a tight braid.
They shot up toward the sky lightning fast, and the energy with which they moved, the speed with which they moved became our own.
We were all thrown back at the same time and slammed against the floor with so much strength it felt like every single bone on the left side of my body had shattered into splinters.
I passed out when I hit something hard with my temple, thinking I would never wake up again.