34. Geological Climatology III
Ice cut into my cheek, and wind howled overhead. Thin strands tickled at the back of my neck, and I jolted upright, clawing at my nape before Ergoth’s mycelium could burrow back beneath my skin.
“No!” I tore at my skin. Ergoth’s mycelium, it was—
It was just my hair, stirred by storm winds.
I continued clawing, trying to erase the feeling from my skin, then scratched at my arms, face, chest—anywhere I could reach. It wasn’t enough. It never would be, not when I could still feel the ghosts of root tendrils twisting through my viscera.
“Wren, you stop that right now and tell me what the hell is going on!” The snapping voice stayed my clawing, and I froze on the ground to look up at Gams. “A volcano, Wren? A goddam volcano in the middle of the continent where I very specifically did not put a volcano? That was you I just felt, wasn’t it?
Blowing things up!? Are you trying to wake the mountains faster? ”
Her storm was weighing on her. Aging her. She looked closer to how I remembered, though her hair was still long, and her dress still gossamer.
This version of Gams suited the storm better. Something about her graying hair and the lines in her face I was so familiar with looked all the more powerful and terrifying—though that might have been the fire in her eyes behind her round spectacles.
She was angrier with me than she had ever been before, but I could still feel Ergoth’s mycelium snaking around my spine. I could still see the rotting Magicians gasping for air. I could still smell death, sickly sweet and fetid, as it burned at the inside of my sinuses.
And Ciarán…
Ciarán needed me.
“I can’t be here!” I staggered to my feet and looked out into the haze of Gams’s storm, as if I might see all the way to the fungal forest. However, I couldn’t even see to the shore. “I have to go back. Ergoth—”
“Ergoth?”
The wind stopped, and snow settled across the broken ice as silence rang out. A final peal of thunder rumbled over the Bay of Teeth.
Maybe it was the moonlight that broke through the cloud cover to bounce off the jagged ice, but Gams suddenly look paler.
“Ergoth?” Gams hissed again in a pained whisper. She staggered across the ice to take my shoulders in her shaking hands. Ice clung to her eyelashes, and her cheeks flushed with anger and cold. “Ergoth!? Wren Warrender, you tell me right now—you did not go into the strath!”
“I did!” I pushed her away from me. My fight with Ergoth was over, but my panic and my adrenaline screamed for some new outlet.
And how dare Gams look at me with so much anger when I was doing this all for her?
“I went into the strath! Because I’m trying to save you!
Because my friends are going to drown at Lyria’s doorway!
Because I don’t want Ferrin letting rotsbane into Keldori and destroying everything!
Because I don’t want my grandmother to die! ”
“No one asked you to do all that! In fact, I recall specifically asking you not—”
“My grandma is going to die, and you think I care about what everyone is telling me to do?” Tears needled behind my eyes, then stung my cheeks as they met the frigid air there.
“Your grandmother is going to die of a heart attack at the rate you’re going!” Gams snapped. “Ergoth, Wren! Ergoth!”
My hair brushed at the back of my neck again, and I whimpered and clutched my nape. Gams’s angry facade softened, bringing her closer still to the Gams I recognized from Keldori.
“My dear girl,” Gams sighed, “don’t worry. I’ll think of something to get you out. As long as your consciousness is here with me, Ergoth can’t feed on your fears.”
“Ergoth is dead.” I dragged my nails across the skin of my neck as I lowered my hands.
Gams’s lips parted as she stared at me with a strange mix of pity, fear, and fascination.
“Dead?” she repeated. “But that shouldn’t be possible.”
“I killed them.”
“Killed—?” She stammered, then her eyebrows drew together in understanding. “The seismic activity. Wren, did you kill Ergoth with a volcano?”
“I don’t know, are you going to yell at me about it more?” I hissed.
“Your magick is developing at an alarming rate. Are you okay?”
The stinging of the tears returned, and while I was sure she could see them swimming in my eyes, I refused to respond.
She stepped forward with her arms wide to draw me in, but then she staggered backwards, looking at the advancing figures of ice at her feet.
“Dammit,” she growled, and looked up at the distant shore. “That’s the Baron’s army. Hold on.”
Blue electricity sparked between her hands, and wind kicked at her skirt. A peal of thunder shook the bay, and lightning blasted apart an iceberg between us and the shore, signaling the restart of the storm.
“So you killed Ergoth,” Gams said evenly, but I could tell she was forcing the tone. “And Liam?”
My stomach twisted with panic, but it loosened again as I recognized the gentle buzzing at the back of my head. He was far away but alive.
“He’s fine, but his name isn’t Liam. It’s Ciarán Ahltira.”
Another crack of lightning lit the bay.
“He told you his name then?” Gams sniffed.
“Yes.”
“He shouldn’t have.”
“He had to prove to me he was real somehow.” I swallowed the painful lump in my throat. “Ergoth was using his image to trick me.”
“Yes, I know how Ergoth works—” Gams started.
“How?” I demanded. “Ergoth killed every Magician that entered the strath.”
“Because I spent the last three hundred and seventy-two years listening to Ergoth in my head as they ate my friend,” Gams snarled, suddenly harsh.
I remembered the skeleton held aloft over the graveyard, and my stomach turned to lead.
“Your friend?” I pressed.
“Glaciers are lonely, Wren. The other four Magicians gave me their full names so I could let my consciousness wander outside my body and see the world we had built through their eyes. It’s how I know Lyria would sneak away to Keldori to visit her daughters every few months.”
“One of Skalterra’s founders went into the strath?” I hissed. “But why?”
“Ergoth was a failed experiment,” Gams said.
“Quill was worried about the bloodline lock on my prison, so he sought a way to cheat death. He created a marsh in Skalterra’s Deadlands where no one would find it, ripping open a new Skal spring, but using himself as a conduit that filtered the Skal that poured from our world into this one.
It nearly ripped him apart to do so, but the result was purer Skal. Different Skal.”
“Different?” I demanded, but I’d felt it when I had been connected to Ergoth. The Skal beneath the forest had felt cleaner and lighter than normal Skal. It had been more stable, less volatile and entropic.
“Quill discovered that no matter how much Skal he used from the marsh he’d created, it never threatened to tear him open.
It never threatened to overwhelm him and turn him into a rotsbane.
” Gams explained. “It was a clever trick, one that would remove rotsbane forever if we ever learned to do it on a massive scale.”
I’d breathed the Skal in all night through the spores and had made countless apparitions, but never once had the magick felt the same way usual Skal did when I used too much at once. There had been no feverish hunger for more, no need to claw myself open in search of more Skal.
“With the marsh’s Skal, Quill figured he could build something that would keep him alive indefinitely,” Gams continued. “It worked, but at the cost of his own experiment cannibalizing him.”
I shook my head, remembering the massive statue that stood over the entrance to the Second Sentinel’s city.
“He was Orla’s ancestor,” I said.
“And he was my friend. After Ergoth strung him up, I would check in on him from time to time. There’s not much else to do when you’re frozen in a glacier and everyone else is dead.
It was never pleasant though. Ergoth took over his mind a long time ago.
But if you killed Ergoth—” Her eyes glazed over for a moment, and her frown tightened.
“I don’t feel him anymore. So he’s gone then. After so long.”
“He said your name before he died.” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at her stricken face. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
A dark realization crept in my stomach, and I opened my eyes again to look at the glowing tunnel behind Gams.
“But then Ferrin would never have made it through to Keldori, even if he killed Fana and Orla,” I said. “Because Quill was still alive. I opened the Rift for nothing.”
“You opened the Rift to save your friends,” Gams reminded me.
“Except you could’ve told him about Quill in the strath and let him run to Ergoth and get eaten himself!”
“He would’ve killed you first, my dear. He was not planning on letting you leave that cavern, whether he got what he wanted or not.”
“You should have warned someone about Ergoth.” I whirled on her as my anger spiked again. “You didn’t think to at least tell Sorcha?”
“Oh, yes, Wren! Absolutely, let’s tell all the Magicians about the fungal colony hiding the secret to an unnaturally long lifespan in its strath! Surely no one would be dumb enough to march in there to try to take it and end up spending the next century as fertilizer!”
“That is the stupidest excuse I’ve ever heard!” My voice rose in pitch as it did volume. “Keeping secrets doesn’t protect anyone! Sort of like not telling your own granddaughter about the secret fantasy world you’re a god of because you didn’t want to burden her with the details!”
“I’m not a god, and none of this is your burden, Wren!” Gams exclaimed. “I wanted you to have a normal life! Your mother agreed—”
“It’s all my burden!” I clutched at my chest. “All of it! Because of you! Because you have to be the Frozen God, and because you’ll die if I don’t do something!”
“I have not been sustaining a storm for the last three weeks, without rest mind you, for my own granddaughter to tell me she holds all the burden!”
“Then stop the storm! Leave the Rift! Why are you choosing this when you could have run away with me?”