Flood
Unfortunately, they didn’t get any sleep.
They’d stayed up too late and the camp rose early—the gradually increasing noise acted as an all-too-effective alarm. A second reason, however, was because of each other.
Perhaps if the situation had been more romantic—if they’d removed their clothes, if the bedding had been more than woven rugs and animal skins thrown over a mound of dried grass—then the lack of sleep might have been blamed on more pleasant distractions.
Instead, silence pressed between them, awkward and unfinished. There was a dissonant clash between what they both wanted and what they both knew was inadvisable. Each too aware of the other. Each unwilling to be the one to speak first.
Even if none of that had been true, Math doubted he could’ve slept. Not after the day they’d had. Lying in the dark, staring up at what was likely a lattice of reeds and leather, he had too much time to think. And mostly, he thought about the plants back at the train crash.
About how he’d controlled them. How they’d done exactly what he wanted.
On the one hand, he could control them. That was great. That meant the Idallik Order wouldn’t use that as an excuse to announce he was a grimmock. But there was an underlying pain, a threat that this did nothing to lessen.
What did that say about what had happened to his parents?
When predawn light turned the black of the hut’s interior to soft gray, Math heard the camp begin to stir. He and Kai dressed, ate the breakfast brought to them, and returned to Dulbach’s hut. A few curious Souna lingered outside, but when nothing dramatic happened, most drifted away.
Kai sat beside the leather, one hand resting lightly against it. Math took her other hand. From the outside, they must have looked like a young couple holding hands at the bedside of a sick parent.
Inside their connection, the magic stirred.
That feeling of wrongness he’d first experienced when Kai woke at Isofal returned: rigid and claustrophobic, oppressing and trapping.
As Kai pulled in more power, the feeling grew.
Her body began to shudder—not visibly, but Math felt it through her grip, through the way her fingers tightened on his.
He squeezed her hand, trying to feed her more energy so she could draw less through herself.
Despite what Kai had originally claimed, the two sources of magic were not antithetical. In fact, once she led him through the process with careful precision, he discovered he could feed power directly into the graving.
Keeping focus was harder. The magic felt like heat in his spine and behind his eyes, like a migraine waiting to crest. But when he wavered, Kai squeezed his hand and steadied him.
They learned quickly: it was more effective for Math to channel energy into Kai rather than the graving itself. She could regulate the flow with far greater precision than he could.
She had the knowledge. He had the power.
For a while, that was enough.
For a while.
The stumble caught Math off guard. Though Kai had been drawing from him, she still maintained a trickle of power from her own source—a slow stream barely escaping an ever-strengthening dam. It wasn’t much.
Then the dam broke.
Magic exploded through her—not gently but all at once, a great wave of floodwaters bursting through stone.
Kai screamed.
The sound stopped so sharply it felt carved from reality.
“No—!” Math’s eyes snapped open.
Kai’s eyes had rolled back. She wasn’t convulsing.
She wasn’t moving at all. Her body glowed with a pale white light—not warm or divine, but cold and final.
It felt like the onset of winter, like the coming of death.
She’d stopped breathing. He suspected her heart had stopped beating, too. Every biological function, frozen.
Math lunged forward and caught her before she could fall. He tried to heal her, but this wasn’t a wound. She hadn’t meant to take so much; he knew that.
The bond was the worst part, because he felt pain like it was his own, sharp and splitting, knew it meant that she was alive and aware. Her fear thundered through him. His dread surged back in response.
She had walked too close to a metaphysical cliff, and the ground had vanished beneath her.
He cradled her in his lap and poured energy into her blindly. Anything, everything, too much, too fast. His own body reacted and he could feel the feverish burn of a wild magic overdose trying to climb out of his veins.
Some small part of him laughed, dark and detached, at the idea of overdosing while trying to save her from the same.
If someone’s drowning, he thought numbly, you don’t give them more water.
Math released the wild magic he’d been channeling and pressed his forehead to hers. This time, instead of pushing power into her, he pulled.
Gently. Carefully. He reached for the energy flooding her body and drew it back into himself, hand over hand. The current resisted, then yielded. Still—there was loss. A trickle siphoned elsewhere, through the cracks the bond had opened. He felt it like water slipping through a broken seal.
He didn’t care. He prayed to the Tri-Mother and all her children that he could pull Kai back before it broke him, too.
Kai gasped.
Her breath returned in a painful rush. She coughed, hard and choking, and winced. “Ouch,” she rasped. “That was—” Her voice caught again in another fit of coughing.
Math held her, barely breathing himself.
The bond between them roared. Her pain was his. His relief was hers. Magic still sparked between them, too raw to settle. Her pulse thudded against his chest.
She opened her eyes.
In that instant, they kissed.
That kiss was desperate and hungry. Her hand fisted in his shirt, and he leaned into her like she was the panacea to every poison he could imagine.
For one silvered, pure moment, the world didn’t exist beyond each other and the certainty of two people who had pulled each other from the gates of death.
His hand was in her hair. Hers dragged down his shoulder.
The bond flared—too bright, too fast, magic and sensation and breath colliding. It was overwhelming.
They broke apart at the same time, stunned and shaken, eyes wide, mouths still parted like they couldn’t believe what they’d just done.
Math swallowed, hard.
Kai’s eyes darted away, her hand still resting against his chest. Her pulse matched his. He could feel it. The bond hummed with heat and confusion and want—and under that, the terrible knowledge that it meant something. They could claim it was the heat of the moment and always know they were lying.
Neither of them said a word.
Then Kai coughed again, this time half laughing, half in pain. Her gaze tracked upward. “It is always a garden with you.”
He frowned, a little embarrassed because it took him a moment to understand what she was talking about. Then he noticed they were no longer in a hut but resting under a living canopy—an enormous awning of vines and wild growth. The plants had consumed the hut, using it like a trellis.
His clothes were in tatters. Vines had curled up his legs, beneath his shirt, around his arms.
“At least now, I don’t have to hack my way out,” Math muttered, throat raw. He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. “How are you feeling?”
“Like someone tried to pour glue through my veins,” she said, voice strained but composed. “Otherwise, I am marvelous.”
“Good,” he said hoarsely. “Because if circumstances were even slightly different…”
She turned to him, eyes narrowed. “What circumstances?”
He tilted his head toward the vines. “Can’t move.”
Kai blinked, as if only now remembering their surroundings. She scanned him, noting the snarl of green climbing his limbs. “Ah. Yes. That would complicate matters.”
“I can fix it,” he muttered.
She said nothing, only raised an eyebrow and folded her arms.
Math focused. At first, the vines resisted, or perhaps he did, but then he forced the plants to release him, one by one. They let go with surprising gentleness. He expected pain. He found none.
The silence after was too complete.
Footsteps approached.
Oltaxath’s voice filtered in through the wall. “Is anyone alive in there?”
Math sighed. “We’re alive. Just…” He looked back at Dulbach—still asleep—and then leaned closer to Kai. “Maybe we can say there was a problem. That we’ll have to start over.”
“We could do that,” Kai said, too carefully. Then her gaze moved to the old man. “But why should we lie?”
Math looked again.
Dulbach’s stomach was no longer bloated. His face, once tight with pain, was now peaceful.
“It worked?” Math stared at her. “How could it have worked? How long were we doing this?”
“Not more than a few hours,” she said, blinking in wonder. “The graving fully charged. It seemed wasteful not to trigger it.”
Not weeks. Not even days. Hours.
And yet Math’s chest ached.
He could still feel the press of her mouth against his. The pulse of her magic through his bones. And under that, the knowledge that whatever had just happened between them had been a dam breaking in more than one way.