Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT
“Lightwing,” I rasped as Islasees’s amulets shone around her throat, shaking my head in refusal of what I was seeing.
I stepped toward her, she and I the last of the Champions. Even the urge to hunt down Islasees couldn’t turn me from the Great Elm now. It was over. The boon was ours. One of ours.
“Please,” I whispered, despising how broken I sounded as the reality of our dilemma closed in on us.
Ferris was something other. A creature of the forest herself and I wasn’t sure she even realised that the Lost Children were singing to her, about her.
Her hair glimmered like starlight and power rolled through her, commanding the attention of even the Great Elm at her back. All of my spirits ran to the tree, eager to be reunited with their mother, for the final deed to be done.
“Give me your amulets,” I begged, already knowing her answer, the suffocating weight in my chest telling of what was coming next.
I lowered to my knees in front of Ferris, tossing my sword aside and showing her the rawest, most shattered version of who I was.
“I need this. For them,” I croaked, the failure of my task pressing down on me and choking the very air from my lungs.
Ferris’s eyes brimmed with tears, her pain becoming my own as nothing but the soft and haunting song of the Lost Children carried through the air.
“She has come, the task is done.
We’ve waited oh, so very long.”
“Ferris please,” Rissa breathed from the branches of the Great Elm and Ferris lifted her head to gaze up at her sister, a tear slipping from her eye and sailing smoothly down her cheek.
“I’m sorry, truly I am,” Ferris whispered, a sob catching in her throat as she dropped her gaze to me.
“But I came here for my sister. I won’t leave without her.
I can’t.” Her pain was clear on her face as she made her choice and magic stirred around me in the air, the amulets at my throat beginning to glow.
I grabbed onto them, desperately trying to keep hold of them but they slipped through my fingers like a gust of wind.
They were there one moment then gone the next, falling at her feet with a resounding clang that marked my loss.
“I’m so sorry, Bane,” she repeated, tears rolling in an endless stream down her cheeks, the pain she felt at making this choice enough to rent another fissure in my heart.
But she didn’t relent, the magic of what she was summoning the spirits to her, calling them away from me.
Runes appeared on her arm and she gasped as their power connected to her soul.
“No!” I cried, lunging to my feet, trying to snatch the amulets back but she picked them up and fixed them around her throat.
My chance at the boon vanished just like that, crushing my heart to dust. The pain suffocated me to my roots, the weight of what I’d lost falling down on me like a thousand tons of molten rock.
“Bane,” she stepped closer, reaching for me and using that name just to cut me all the deeper.
“Ferris, please,” I rasped, reduced to nothing at her feet.
“Listen to me. My family are living half a life, trapped here in this world, aching for death. They suffer through every day.” My voice broke on those words but somehow I managed to go on.
“They want peace, that’s all. How can you take that from them?
They’ve lived hundreds of years in agony.
They cannot sleep, yet they are fatigued by living.
They cannot eat yet they starve for nourishment.
They begged me for freedom. My own baby sister, my younger brother, on their knees as I am before you now and they pleaded for a way out.
And here you are, denying them that when it is all I have sought for year after year.
My mother weeps for her family, my father has lost himself to the wildness of death.
They are trapped, don’t you see? I am trapping them in a cage designed of misery and they must face it eternally unless I can break their chains.
” My fingers dug into her ankle and Ferris lowered down to a crouch, her arms wrapping around me, her tears falling to wet my tunic.
“Oh Bane, I cannot even imagine how terrible that is.”
“Then please, offer me this. Please do not take it from me. From them.”
She fell silent, her arms tight around me, her face pressing to the crook of my neck. “I…”
The silence hung between us, my pain a living thing writhing from my body into hers. She was going to give it to me. I could feel her hesitation, her change of mind.
Hope blazed through me with all the promises of the world gliding alongside it.
“Please,” I choked out one more time.
She leaned back, her violet eyes wrought with agony as she stroked my cheek. “I can’t,” she rasped, those words a dagger to my chest.
I recoiled from her, my teeth bared and heart shattering to jagged shards in my chest.
“Forgive me,” she begged.
I shook my head, muted by my agony as she stood up and placed the amulets on their plinths, offering them to the spirit of the forest. Magic shivered along the ground, building with promise as the Lost Children sang a song of rising hope.
“Yes, Ferris!” Rissa cried to her sister, her eyes glittering with delight.
As Ferris placed the final amulet on its plinth, the Great Elm groaned with exuberant joy, the trees around us shuddering until a shockwave of pure energy exploded through the atmosphere, throwing us onto our backs side by side.
The Lost Children clung to the Great Elm’s branches, crying out their song to the sky, the power of their rapture tangling with the threads of my soul, trying to make me feel it too.
But I refused to give in to the magic of their melody.
I shielded my eyes as the Great Elm began to glow like the sun, blazing brighter than any star in the sky as ripples of power echoed out from it all across the forest and beyond.
The thirteen spirits gathered close around the tree, eyes bright and full of understanding as the madness lifted from their shimmering bodies.
They raced out toward the Great Elm with howls and hoots of joy, remembering their roles among the woods, the Raven dancing beneath the moon and guiding the night deeper between the boughs, while the Tiger released the animals from its back and let them climb the trunks around them or burrow into the earth, and the other spirits rushed to fulfil their own tasks.
The Dragon roared as it raced around the trunk of the enormous spirit tree and the branches of the Great Elm shivered in reply, its leaves reaching out to brush across its scales before it found the rest of the spirits and welcomed them home too.
The song of the forest reverberated through the air, no longer weighted with maddening pain – though still an ache of loss lingered in its tone.
Red and white mushrooms sprouted across the bark at the base of the Great Elm as the Stag rubbed its horns against its trunk.
Flowers pooled over its roots as the Unicorn cantered by.
The Phoenix sung a lilting tune and landed in a high branch alongside the Raven, the two birds nuzzling each other in a long-awaited reunion.
The Boar rutted its tusks through the dirt, tiny shoots erupting in its wake and the Rat released the insects which crept across its back so that they too could hurry to greet their lost mother.
Their reunion was a brief balm to my pain, the rush of magic that swept around us stealing the breath from my lungs and hurling my dark hair around my face.
The Bear shook its coat and droplets of cool water coated me, their touch a kiss to my skin.
The Fox bounded from branch to branch, yapping its greeting to the spirit who had given it life, the Serpent coiling over branches beneath its feet.
Even the Carp seemed filled with joy as it flopped and flailed in a puddle formed in the crooked roots at the base of the enormous tree.
It wasn’t just the cursed forest that was mending, Rathian was healing too, I could feel it in the earth itself, the oppressive weight of the forest’s power finally lifting.
The curse was broken. And in the wake of its power, Ferris stood up, moving closer to the Great Elm as if lured by some spell.
Her head lifted as she met the gaze of her sister in the branches above and a tangible moment of relief passed between them.
“You did it,” Rissa sighed, a choked sob racking through her chest. “The boon is yours.”
“I can hardly believe this is happening,” Ferris whispered as a single shoot grew at her feet, up and up, growing a hundred times the speed it should have, then the little vine coiled around her hand.
“Speak the boon you wish for,” an ethereal voice shivered through the atmosphere and I realised it was the spirit of the Great Elm itself.
“Ask it,” Rissa rasped, desperation pouring through her voice.
I shook my head in denial of what was happening, but Ferris spoke the words, asking the Great Elm what she’d come here for, what her heart most desired above all else.
And if I hadn’t lost my own chance at my wish being granted, I might have urged her on.
But instead, only resentment coursed through my blood, a bitterness that wouldn’t shift.
“Release the Lost Children. Let them return home to their families with my sister among them. Please release them so that they are no longer prisoners of the forest.”
“It is done,” the Great Elm answered and an enormous boom echoed through the ground, the roots of the Great Elm rippling in a wave that spread out in every direction. The Lost Children sang louder, their voices a river of glee as their skin shimmered with rivers of gold.
“You’re free!” Ferris cried to Rissa as light glittered along the Lost Children’s bodies, revealing chains that danced across their skin.
“It’s really happening,” Rissa gasped as the chains began to break, one after the other, making the Children squeal in utter joy.