Chapter 28 #2
I raise my sword, knowing it will do little against this thunderous beast, especially when it wields several swords, and my knees are already ready to buckle. Even so, I stay firm.
Both hands curl tightly around the hilt. I clench my teeth, waiting for the impact.
But before the horde can reach me, Raker emerges right beneath it, his sword flying out of his grip, soaring, cutting right through the creature, through every gnarled bone and sheet of flesh that lashes out, until it is halved.
For a moment, there’s just silence.
Then, a dozen gemstones fall around Raker, spilling into the water. And there are two thunderous splashes as both halves fall on either side of him. His sword is still in the air, floating, glimmering. He reaches toward it.
Right behind him, another skelmire silently rises from the depths of the pale water, ancient sword gripped high. It swings right for Raker’s head.
I throw my blade through the air with all my power, and it buries itself right through its glow, knocking the stone out of its chest. It goes still.
Raker turns to see the blade half an inch from his neck. He looks from it to me.
The skelmire collapses into a pile of bones, and we just stand there, staring at each other. Chests heaving.
Slowly, I take a step forward, and he doesn’t stop looking at me. Not as I bend into the water and retrieve my blade. Not as I sheath it. We’re both panting, wrung out, and exhausted.
“Not nothing, after all,” I say, before turning my back on him and the bog.
The bog turns into woods. The trees are hardly standing. The forest is bare, like it’s been ransacked. There are no streams. No berries. No mushrooms. Nothing.
It’s been too long without water, without food, without rest. Fighting the creatures took too much energy, which we didn’t have to spare, and something about that bog still sticks like a film to my skin.
Poison.
I try to deny it, but the cold slowly sliding through my veins becomes too noticeable to ignore. This was left out of the book, but I can feel its effects.
Raker must feel it too. Their skin touched his when he defeated the horde.
Our steps slow. We don’t speak. My eyes open, then close, and I have to catch myself from falling multiple times.
There’s nothing to do but keep walking, hoping somehow our starved bodies are able to fight this.
Sun rains down through the sparse trees, but I barely feel its warmth. My body has gone numb and cold.
The gray is ending, I think. Just a little longer. I grip that hope and will it to keep me moving, knowing that all bad places end, but—if there is a good place after the bad, I don’t think I’m strong enough to reach it.
“Raker,” I say, the word just a whisper.
I’m fading, it says. I can’t keep going.
“Aris,” he says, and it’s ridiculous that my body still has the energy to form a chill. The word is quiet but filled with a strength I don’t currently possess. Filled with keep going. Filled with don’t fucking quit now.
I stumble on a vine, and a hand reaches out to steady me. His fingers wrap around my arm, keeping me upright. His hand doesn’t drop, as if he knows that if he lets go then I’ll go down.
My legs are boneless. My thoughts become muddled. My feet drag against the increasingly fertile ground, pulling me forward.
Just a little longer—
No matter how badly I want to keep going, to swallow down the pain and just keep moving, I can’t.
Flashes of green and brown and fading sunlight blur together until I hit the ground. It’s cool and soft beneath my cheek. There’s no movement. No one next to me. It’s only then that I realize Raker must have already fallen. Or he left me.
If I close my eyes now, they’ll never open again. I know that. Body quivering with the effort, I turn onto my back so that I can see the sky.
One last try.
With a final scrap of energy, my fingers crawl into my pocket. There, I grab something I stole from the bottom of the bog. An emerald, large as my palm.
I hold it up to the sky, arm shaking. “Eat,” I say, the word a croak. “Come to me. Come to eat. Please.”
I repeat the words until they are just rasps.
Then my arm drops. My eyes close.
The moment they do, something gleams above me, so bright I can see it through my eyelids. It’s getting closer and closer, like a falling star.
It feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I force my eyes open, just to see it, just to know what’s so bright that I can see it with my eyes closed.
My dragon?
No. A woman with a crown of stars, in a silver dress, the fabric glowing, liquid, curling behind her. A woman with golden hair floating right above me like a cloud.
She looks like an illusion, but no. There’s a force around her, an energy. My sword hums against my spine.
I blink away the darkness as she turns her head, studying me so carefully, it’s like she sees through me. She frowns.
Then she reaches a gleaming finger toward me. I use every last piece of myself to reach back. Between our hands, something like a star forms, blinding me.
When I can see again, she’s gone. My hand drops against the dirt, spent, and from the finger she touched, silver roots spiral across the ground, through the forest.
Somehow, I know it’s a road. I know it’s a gift from this mysterious woman. She won’t save me … but she’ll show me the way.
Just when I think I’ve reached my limit, there is more. More strength waiting.
Slowly, knees shaking, I get to my feet. I take one step. Another. Raker. He didn’t leave me. He’s just a few steps behind, sprawled out on the dirt. Only poison could have brought him down.
“Get up,” I say roughly, the way he did to me not so long ago.
He doesn’t move.
I reach for his mask, and his hand stops mine just an inch away.
“Get up,” I say again. “I know the way.”
Raker doesn’t question the silver. Maybe he can’t see it. But I can, and I follow it, with desperation scraped from the very bottom of my soul.
And he follows me.
My body is aching. It’s pushing beyond itself. But I never, not once, doubt the silver stranger. For the first time on this quest, hope and peace bloom in my heart. This path is leading somewhere, I know it. I just have to be strong and patient enough to reach the end of it.
I stumble through the forest, fluttering through memories, my mind not strong enough to smother them.
I see my parents. My mother, with her long, brown hair and freckles across her cheeks, and her lips red as cherries. Her dark blue eyes she gave me. I see my father, with his wide smile and the lines around his eyes, because he smiled with his whole face, and laughter poured from him like song.
I remember.
“I remember you,” I whisper to the forest, which might be listening. “I remember, and because of that, you’re not dead yet. You’re with me.”
You’re with me.
I feel them here, helping me take every step. Pushing me forward, like I’m being carried by a wind of all our memories. My mind plays the ones I have left, and they’re alive in my head. Always.
My eyes burn, my limbs are trembling, but I keep going, for them. For them all. For Stellan, on the floorboards.
For my sister.
For my parents, who never left, never gave up trying to save us.
Until the forest begins to twist together.
It starts with the roots. They join like ribbons. Then the branches. They unite in embraces across the forest floor. It keeps going until the woods tangle into a knot that ends at an arched set of gates, twisted from the trees.
Raker falls.
I try to last one more step, for the both of us. My arm reaches toward the doors.
But as I fall, my fingers don’t even brush the lock.