Chapter 11 #2
Then the ground had begun to move.
It might have been the same moth. Luna moths lived barely a week, and almost that much time had passed.
My mother used to say they found paths hidden from everyone else. My father called it an old story. She always smiled and told him the forest understood more than he did.
The moth opened its wings and lifted from the cedar. It passed close enough to stir the wet hair against my cheek before disappearing between the trees.
Bramble’s claws pressed through my cloak.
A faint pulse moved beneath my boots.
My father’s rough hand closed over mine inside the memory. My mother knelt beside the cedar, clearing fallen needles from the stone while I balanced on one of the roots and pretended the split opened into a buried fortress.
The marker had always been part of our family. I had climbed over it, slept beneath it, and sharpened my first blade on a loose piece of rock nearby.
Now something beneath it called to a male from across the Veil.
My teeth clenched. My family had guarded this place for generations, and I still didn’t know whether they had understood what lay here or whether the Circle had kept all of us blind.
I took a tentative step forward, my boot pressing into the dead ground.
Silence closed in around me as I circled the marker. Several massive roots had lifted from the stone’s weathered face, leaving narrow spaces filled with mud. Pale lines showed beneath them.
I crouched, catching my weight on my good knee. Bramble pushed beneath my arm and sniffed the nearest opening.
“Here.”
Caelan brushed away the mud and exposed the curved edge of a carving. Wooden wedges and bone scrapers passed between us.
Mira and Jalen returned from the north.
“The tracks turn back toward the clearing,” Mira said. “Whatever made them has been circling this spot.”
Caelan handed back her bow. “Watch the trees.”
Jalen took his place between the oaks. Bramble stared at the pouch on his belt.
He held it a little closer. “Your Kindred has already robbed me once.”
Bramble chirred, and I shrugged.
“He prefers to think of it as foraging.” I glanced at the pouch. “Besides, you should know better than to be carrying food through the forest.”
Jalen smiled before crouching to help us dig.
Mud packed beneath my nails as we cleared the stone. When Ivy and Sula returned, they helped Caelan lift one of the cedar roots with a makeshift wedge.
The wood groaned.
Tendrils of green light flickered along the grooves of the bark.
“It’s still tied to the Mother Tree.” I breathed a sigh of relief.
Xandros knelt across from me with Oren’s blade close to his ribs. He ignored it and brushed mud from the other half of the stone.
A star appeared in the grooves beneath his fingers.
More followed, joined by thin lines that matched the constellations along his skin. Carved roots spread across my side of the split. Thorns circled both halves of the stone, and two hands reached toward each other across the divided center.
Xandros lowered his scraper. “This confirms it.”
Caelan crouched beside me. “The road?”
“The marker is its mortal anchor.” Xandros traced the carved roots without touching them. “Roots on this side. Stars on the celestial side. The circle marks the Veil between them.”
Root entwines star.
The words from the prophecy moved through me as I looked from the roots carved beneath my hands to the stars beneath his. The Briar Moon had risen, and a forgotten road waited beneath the land my family had guarded for generations.
My fingers curled around the bandage covering my palm.
The star had appeared when my Wild met Xandros' Everlight. Now I knelt over an anchor carved for those same powers.
That could not be chance.
Either my family had known what they were protecting, or someone had kept us guarding it without ever telling us why.
Bramble climbed onto my shoulders, peering at the stone.
My fingertips still rested inside the roots carved into the stone. I followed one rough groove toward the divided circle.
Warmth moved beneath my skin. I tried to jerk my hand back, but my fingers flattened against the carving instead. Emerald light slipped into the root beneath my palm and followed its curves toward the center of the stone.
Panic closed around my throat.
“Verena, move.” Caelan grabbed my shoulder.
“I’m trying.”
He pulled me backward. Pain tore through my wrist, but my hand remained fixed to the carved roots.
Across the split, gold blazed beneath Xandros' skin.
His gaze dropped to the hand carved into his half of the stone. He lunged toward it, but Oren caught him around the chest and dragged him back.
“Stop.” Caelan drew his sword.
“That carving matches hers.” Xandros twisted against Oren’s grip. “It may be the only way to release her.”
“Or it opens the road.”
The anchor snapped my arm forward. My wounded leg gave beneath the force, and my knees struck the mud. Pain jolted through my thigh as the earth shifted below us.
Wild burst from me in a blaze of emerald light. The vines along my arms stretched from my skin and wound into the carved roots, tethering me to the anchor. The surface bucked beneath my palm while light flooded every groove still packed with mud.
Caelan yanked on my shoulder again. My arm wrenched inside the joint, and white pain flashed across my vision.
My hand remained fixed.
Green filled my half of the circle and followed the carved thorns toward the split, where it struck the broken center and stopped.
The pull deepened.
Warmth threaded beneath my palm and followed the same living paths my Wild used to reach the Mother Tree. It climbed through my wrist and elbow before branching across my shoulder and beneath my ribs.
Every pathway inside me drew taut. Like the anchor recognized something in my Wild, and then pulled on all of it at once.
Bramble screamed beside my ear.
He scrambled down my back and caught the rear of my cloak between his teeth. His small body strained as he tried to drag me away, and terror crashed through our bond hard enough to steal my breath.
Across from me, Xandros drove his heel into the mud and threw his weight forward.
Oren’s grip slipped.
Tessa caught the back of Xandros' cloak, but the fastening tore free in her hand.
“Stay back.” Caelan swung the blade into his path.
Xandros ducked beneath it and dropped into the mud across from me before Caelan could turn.
“She can’t break it alone.”
His palm struck the carved hand opposite mine.
Gold burst through the stars beneath his fingers.
The marker shook beneath us. A deep tremor rolled through the ground, rattling my teeth and driving fresh pain through my knees.
The cold pressure beneath my palm began to fade as my hand slipped further into the carving.
I sucked in a breath as the stone gave way around my fingers, its solid surface thinning into warmth and light. Xandros' hand moved through the other half at the same time.
Our fingertips met inside the broken center.
The pull inside me steadied. My heart still hammered, but the pressure beneath my ribs loosened as the road divided its hold between us. His fingers pressed against mine, hot and solid within the shifting stone.
A narrow strand of emerald reached across the gap, and gold curled around it. Our two powers twisted together, until a seam of blinding light opened between us.
Warm air rushed over my hand and struck my rain-cold face. Wet stone filled my lungs, mixed with a sharp scent I remembered from the rupture.
Pale earth appeared beyond the crack. A blackened root lay across it, its surface crumbling into ash beneath a strip of sky too narrow to see.
The dead moss beside my knee trembled. Its gray strands softened and darkened before lifting from the mud in small green fronds. Color spread outward through the lifeless ground, waking each patch it touched until a thin trail of living moss reached the cedar.
The nearest root shuddered beneath the soil. Moisture gleamed along its bark, and the lowest branch above us stirred as dull needles deepened toward green.
Across the divide, a thin line of life spread through the blackened root.
The road carried power both ways.
Xandros stared wide-eyed through the opening. Gold lit the rain caught along his dark lashes, and every hard line in his face went still.
“Asterra.” The name slipped past his lips on a shaky breath.
The break in his voice caught beneath my ribs. My breath snagged with it as his gaze stayed fixed on the thin strip of pale earth beyond the stone.
The new shoot trembled in the air between our worlds, turning toward our power like a dying plant turns toward the sun.
For one heartbeat, he had called to his dying world, and it had answered him.
Bramble’s fear pounded through our bond. North. Wrong.
I twisted toward the trees just as a branch snapped beyond Mira.
“Movement!” Her bow rose as she turned.
The creature broke through the tree line before she released the bowstring.
Indigo light blazed from three sets of eyes as the rift hound lunged straight toward the open road.