17. Chapter 17
AMARIA
I woke up with a mouthful of dirt and a headache like someone had taken an axe to my skull.
What—
I pushed myself up. My hands sank into cold earth.
My clothes were damp, clinging, and definitely not the green silk gown I remembered wearing.
The embroidered gold thread was gone. The soft waves of clean hair were gone.
Everything was gone except the reality of a forest floor and the sour taste of whatever we'd actually eaten last night.
My stomach turned.
Around me, the others were stirring. Maxx groaned from somewhere to my right—a pitiful, theatrical sound. Serenya sat up slowly, pressing her fingers to her temples like she was trying to hold her head together.
The flowers were gone from her hair. She looked wrecked. Tired. Real.
"What—" She blinked. Looked down at herself. At her travel-worn robes, stained and wrinkled. "Oh. Oh no."
"The glamour wore off," Maxx said miserably. He was lying face-down in the ground ivy, making no attempt to rise. "Along with my will to live."
After a beat, his voice emerged again, muffled by ivy.
"I've survived assassins. Court poisoners. Eryndor's personality." A groan. "And in the end I was felled by foliage. Drugged by trees. I want that on my tombstone."
I would have laughed if my head didn't hurt so much.
The fire had burned down to ash. The "feast" was gone—just empty space on the flat rock where phantom pheasant and ruby wine had sat. Dreadscale was already up, packing his bedroll in spare, economical motions. He glanced at the rest of us.
Said nothing. The look was enough. I told you so written in the angle of his brow.
I turned to find Eryndor.
He was sitting on a log at the outskirts of the camp, his back to me. Already dressed. Already armed. The relaxed line of his shoulders from last night—the softness, the easy laughter—
Gone.
His spine was rigid. His jaw was set. He looked like a recruiting poster for suffering.
He didn't turn around.
Right. My chest tightened. We're back to this.
I remembered sitting in his lap. Kissing his scar. Feeding him water from my cupped hands while he watched me with those dark, soft eyes.
My face burned. I looked away.
What were we thinking?
I was thinking I deserved having him look at me like I was something other than a wound that needed closing.
Stupid thought. Dangerous thought.
I shoved it down where it belonged.
"We should move," Eryndor stated. He still hadn't turned around. "We've lost time."
Lost time.
He wasn't wrong. While I'd been dancing in borrowed silk, the Void had kept eating. While I'd been soft and stupid and pretending I got to have good things—
Enough. I re-strapped every blade, slid the stars home, checked the threaded razors in my braid, and grabbed my pack.
"Let's go."
We walked in silence.
The Sensorium felt different in the morning light. Less magical, more menacing. The trees that had seemed to dance last night now loomed. The glass-chime leaves made sounds like warnings instead of music.
No one spoke about the spring. No one spoke about the feast. No one spoke about any of it.
Eryndor walked ahead, putting as much distance between us as the tether allowed. Every time I accidentally brushed too close, he adjusted his stride. Subtle. Purposeful.
Message received.
Fine. Fine. I didn't need him to hold my hand. Didn't need to remember the way his laugh had rumbled through his chest when I'd stolen that grape—
Nope. Not going there. Just keep walking.
The trees began to thin.
At first, I thought I was imagining it. But no—the twisted trunks were spacing out, the canopy opening, shafts of real sunlight breaking through instead of the Sensorium's strange, filtered glow.
"We're close," Dreadscale said. "The border."
The border. The edge of the Wood. The return to the real world.
The forest loosened its grip by degrees. Another bend in the path, another stretch of thinning trees, and then the air changed.
We pushed through the last stand of woods, branches scraping at our arms, and emerged into open air.
I stopped.
The sky stretched above us—grey and heavy. Normal clouds. Normal light. The ground beneath my feet was dirt and grass, not luminescent moss. The air smelled like earth and rain, not magic and intention.
We were out.
But that wasn't what made me stop.
It was the horizon.
The grey was closer.
When we'd entered the Sensorium days ago, the Dead Zone had been a smudge on the eastern edge of the world. Distant. Terrible, but contained.
Now it filled a quarter of the sky. A wall of colorless nothing, creeping toward us, swallowing everything in its path.
"No," I breathed.
"It's spreading faster." Serenya's voice was hollow. "While we were... while we..."
She didn't finish.
She didn't have to.
While we were bathing in magic springs and playing dress-up, the apocalypse hadn't waited. While I was sitting in Eryndor's lap and kissing his scars, the Void I'd created was eating the world.
The grey swallowed the horizon and I stood there with the taste of enchanted water still on my tongue, moss stains on my knees, the memory of laughter—actual laughter, the stupid breathless kind—still warm in my chest. I'd giggled.
I'd nuzzled. And the world had been ending the entire time and I'd been happy.
That was the thing clawing at me. Not the guilt.
Guilt was old furniture by now, heavy and useless and always in the way.
This was worse. I'd forgotten. The grey. The suffering. The hundreds of lives dissolving into nothing. Gone from my mind like they’d never belonged there at all.
And if I could forget that easily, if joy came that cheap, then what had every night of grieving been?
Was that even real love? Real loyalty? I carried my dead and others’ suffering with me for years and all it took was warmth and someone's hands in my hair and I put them down.
Like baggage. Like something I'd been holding because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
But that wasn’t even the part that gutted me.
I'd liked who I was in that spring. That girl.
The one who giggled and nuzzled and fed him water and didn't flinch.
She'd felt more real than the girl standing here with her fists clenched and her face hardened.
If the soft version showed up that fast, that easy, then what was the rest of it?
Years of razors in my hair and sleeping with one eye open and crushing every soft thing before it could be taken—performance?
Armor I wore so long I forgot it wasn't skin?
I chose him over my ghosts. That's what the spring was.
Not enchantment, not the forest lowering my walls.
A choice. Chose the living warmth of him over everyone I'd failed.
And I'd do it again. Walk back into that water, climb into his lap, forget every name on the ledger—I'd do it again and it wouldn't even be hard.
The dead can't want anymore. And I stood here with a wanting so sharp it was shredding my own heart into useless ribbons.