Chapter 25 #4
Stonewater.
Cedarstone.
Fractures and roads whose names I hadn’t learned yet.
All of them wounded, and pulling.
I reached for the first one.
Then stopped.
There were too many.
The Mother Tree surged beneath my hands.
The Wild surged toward every open road at once, pressing against the torn places in the Veil. Each path offered the same choice: pull back, or leave something living behind to close it.
My breath broke.
I could fill every wound at once. But the Wild I gave them would not come back.
I dug my fingers into the bark, and opened myself anyway.
Wild tore out of me. Green raced through every wound in the Veil at once. Pain ripping from my palms to my spine.
My vines flared. The first leaf went gray. Then another. And another.
My Wild stretched beyond my body, farther than it had ever reached before, flowing through root and stone and river and tree into every place where the Veil had been torn thin.
The Mother Tree remained solid beneath my palms, holding me to the Deepwood while everything inside me stretched farther.
I had spent my life standing before the wall between worlds.
Now my Wild entered it.
Stonewater collapsed beneath the green Wild. Then Cedarstone folded shut.
A fracture beneath distant rocks sealed so violently I felt the impact through my teeth.
Another disappeared beneath roots I had never touched.
My Wild filled every empty place.
Mine.
And it didn’t return.
My arms went cold as the vines faded. But the Mother Tree was getting stronger. Amber light climbed her trunk, and her branches groaned, no longer bowing beneath the strain.
Then the western wall surged upright.
Marred shrieks beyond the Grove cut off.
Another road collapsed.
Then another.
The Veil gathered around me, pressure sinking through skin and muscle until it settled in my bones.
Wet earth, root, sap, and the deep pulse of the Wild pressed against one side of me. Ash, bitter cold, and fading starlight crowded the other.
Between them, something pulled in both directions at once. My stomach dropped as the ground seemed to fall away beneath my feet, while pressure closed around my ribs from every side.
The Wild spread into that space, through me, until I could no longer tell where my body ended. The wall stretched through me, the Veil taking its shape around what I gave it.
Safe.
Bramble’s fear struck through our bond again, faint and ragged beneath the pressure of the Veil.
The familiar shape of home. Of me. Of everything that had always bound us together.
Then the connection stretched painfully thin.
“Bramble.”
His scream rose somewhere below. I forced my eyes open.
Caelan held my Kindred against his chest while Bramble fought toward me, claws tearing at the leather over his arm.
I could see him.
I could hear him.
But I could barely feel him at all.
“No.”
The Veil pulled more Wild from me.
The last green lines in my vow-markings dimmed.
My right arm went cold.
Another road vanished.
Then gold trembled through the forming wall.
Xandros.
My breath caught.
The tether between us, impossibly thin through everything I had sealed.
The Wild moved toward it; one more layer would close over him too.
I recoiled, and the Veil bucked through my body.
Pain tore across my shoulders.
I reached for the thread with my star.
Gold.
Alive.
I guided the forming boundary around it, just barely.
A hair-thin seam remained where the wall hadn’t yet closed.
There was no road, or rift, nothing large enough to carry Wild or Everlight.
Only the faintest pull of him on the other side.
The remaining roads collapsed.
The force ripped through me all at once, and my head snapped back.
For one impossible moment, I felt everywhere the Veil touched the Deepwood.
I felt the roots buried beneath black earth. The stone beneath mountains. The water moving beneath ice.
Every old wound closing. Every ancient road disappearing.
Wild filled the boundary from end to end.
My Wild, my pulse, my life threaded through the wall between worlds.
Nothing crossed or pulled. Nothing answered the Briar Moon.
The Mother Tree’s pulse thrummed beneath my palms.
It was strong again.
Around me, the Grove settled, and the warning whistles stopped.
There were no more shrieks rising beyond the walls. No road dragged at the Mother Tree.
The Deepwood was safe.
My arms shook.
I tried to pull my hands away, but they refused to move. The Veil held me as tightly as I held it.
And below me, Bramble cried.
And beyond the wall, gold continued to tremble through the seam.
Xandros.
I squeezed my eyes shut, and his face returned from the dream.
Eyes full of stars.
One by one, they went dark.
The Mother Tree lived beneath my hands.
Rhian would live beneath her roots.
Children would grow beneath her branches.
My parents’ home would still stand, and Bramble would still have a forest to run through. Everything I had sworn to protect remained.
Xandros would remain too.
On the other side of the wall I had made.
I had saved everyone I had been raised to protect.
And buried every star he had begged me to save.