44. Chaos Theory
Horrible understanding crept in my chest. My father’s blackouts had been Ferrin all along. I wondered if it worked similarly to how Ciarán and I had shared my body using our tether. The difference was that I had been Lucid, as I always was when under the employ of a nocturmancer.
Maxwell, meanwhile, had been the perfect puppet.
“Is it true?” Even at his cruelest, there had always been a hint of mirth hiding in Ferrin’s words. Now, however, his words carried only malice and venom as they echoed over the ice. “Is Caitria dead?”
“She got what she deserved.” I stood up.
That wasn’t true. Caitria had deserved to die ten times over for everything she’d done. She was lucky she’d only had one life to lose.
Ferrin was lucky, too, as Gams bled out at my feet.
“Is that so?” Ferrin sneered. “Did Tiernan deserve it too, then? Did the boy deserve to die with his sister?”
“Stop it.”
“Though I supposed you never liked him much, did you?”
I charged, sprinting across the ice to meet Ferrin.
“Wren!” Ciarán called after me, both out loud and in my head.
“Stop her!” Mom’s shriek chased Ciarán’s shout, and Ciarán chased me. I could hear his boots thundering across the ice. Whether to stop me or aid me, I wasn’t sure.
And I wouldn’t find out because when Ferrin was a meager ten yards away, emerald flames burst in a ring around us, trapping me with him in a dome of fiery Skal.
The fire sent a flurry of heated air through the dome that whipped at my hair and cloak. I fell forward onto the ice to catch myself on my hands and knees.
Ciarán, trapped outside the dome, screamed my name over and over in my head. Orange flames spread up outside of the dome, mingling with Ferrin’s emerald fire, but unable to punch through.
“Hello, Wren,” Ferrin crooned. The light of the green fire glinted against the rims of Ferrin’s Skal-goggles, and I remembered Tiernan’s careful observation about the Quillguard. He always wore his goggles. Ferrin’s Nightmares, meanwhile, never did.
Then this was the real Ferrin.
And that meant I could kill him.
“You’re too late,” I said.
“Am I? That Rift looked awfully open to me, and the Frozen God?” Ferrin sucked on his teeth. “Well, she’s definitely seen better days.”
“She’ll be fine when she’s back in the ice and after I’ve killed you.”
“Oh, ho! You’re going to kill me?” Ferrin’s laugh brought heat to my cheeks, and Ciarán’s hiss in my head echoed my own anger. “Go ahead. Make your flail. Strike me dead.” He put his arms behind his back and lifted his chin as if to better expose his vulnerable throat. “I won’t fight.”
Frost melted against my hands where I pressed them against the ice. I wanted nothing more than to put a flail of Skal through Ferrin’s skull, but the mountains were at their limit. It might already be too late after using magick to break open the rock in the shop.
“That’s what I thought.” Ferrin tutted. “I’ve had my theories since you caved in half of my city a few weeks ago, and again when an earthquake shook damn near the whole continent a few nights back.
I spent a lot of time with the Firelds. I understand that powerful magick is often too volatile to use, and you, little god, have some powerful magick.
Pity you can’t use it without risking volcanic apocalypse. ”
I scrambled for a solution, but Ferrin was right. However, as long as I was trapped in here with him, my friends could still do what they needed.
“Seal Gams.” I sent the command through my tether to Ciarán before I lost the metal to give it. “I’ll distract Ferrin in here. Seal the Rift, and get somewhere safe.”
“You’ll be stuck in Skalterra if we do,” came Ciarán’s reply.
“Seal the Rift, Ciarán. You have my mother. Do it.”
“He’ll kill you, Wren!” Orange fire illuminated the ice in front of me as Ciarán tried to break through the dome again.
He’d warned me, to be fair. He’d told me he would choose my life over the fate of the worlds.
“How do you know I won’t blow the volcanoes anyway?” I spat. “I can leave you here to be buried, and escape through the Rift. Or maybe I kill us both. Tiernan did it to Caitria. I can do it to you.”
“Wren, please!” Ciarán begged through the tether.
“The Rift, Ciarán. Are they sealing it?”
He went silent along the tether, and I let Ferrin size me up as I waited for Ciarán’s response.
“They’re getting ready, but I’m not going to leave you.”
“If you decide to blow the volcanoes, you’ll kill the armies on the shore,” Ferrin simpered. “I don’t think you have the spine, Wren. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”
“You trapped me in here because you know I can’t use Skal without killing everyone?” I sat up on my knees. “Coward.”
“Or maybe I just wanted to catch up?” He gave me an animated shrug. “Not everything is a plot to get you, you know.”
“Not everything, but definitely this,” I sneered.
Ferrin rolled his neck and rubbed at the back of his head. “Fair enough. It’s absolutely a trap, but you’ve already sprung it, so why not have a little chat first?”
“I’m not going to have a ‘little chat’ with the man who just shot my grandmother!” I snarled.
“I wouldn’t have had to shoot her if you’d just cooperated like you were supposed to.
Just look at the mess you’ve made.” Ferrin shook his head.
“If you had played your part weeks ago, this could’ve all been over by now.
But no. You had to be difficult. You had to delay the inevitable.
And for nothing! We’re right back where we were at the Rift, but how many had to die because you decided to try to take matters into your own hands?
Galahad, Tiernan, Caitria—all dead. Because you fought back.
And by the end of the night, your friends, your mother, and your grandmother will all be dead too. ”
Anger rose in my gut, then my throat, and I was on my feet bracing for a fight I had no way to arm myself in. “You won’t touch my friends, and you will never set foot in my home.”
“Keldori is already mine,” Ferrin hissed. “I can go there as I please. I can control whom I please. All that remains to take is its magick, and nothing, not even you, Wren Warrender, will stand between me and my Skal.”
“They’re resealing my grandmother right now. You can’t stop them.”
“No. Probably not,” Ferrin admitted through a smile. “But that’s okay, because I’ve got you to help me.”
Ever since I’d let him into my mind in the canyon outside the Keep of Realta Fiel, there had been a door in my head that I kept closed.
It was easy to ignore with both mine and Ciarán’s thoughts already crammed inside my head.
It was not easy to forget about, however, because I knew what monster lurked on the other side.
I’d wondered if Ferrin knew it was there, but had decided he must not, because he never attempted to come back through it.
That had been a terrible miscalculation, because now the door in my head slammed open, reigniting the tether between Ferrin and me.
Skal surged and burned through every synapse in my head. The pain of the sudden magick coursing through me brought me to my knees.
It was intoxicating. Every fiber of my body electrified, and that familiar hunger reared.
Skal.
Searing, metallic Skal.
I needed more, and Ferrin had plenty to give. It was the canyon all over again. Ice pressed against my face as magick surged through me, bringing fire, electricity, and that horrible hunger.
More Skal. Only more Skal could fix this.
I dug my fingers into the ice.
Ciarán screamed my name in my head, and I reached to him in the flood of power.
Last time Ferrin had tried to turn me into a rotsbane, he’d severed Ciarán’s connection to me, but after everything—Willow’s Grave, Ergoth, fighting rotsbane on the Baron’s train—that connection had been tempered in a forge of blood and mutual faith. It could no longer be broken.
I clung to it. It was a lifeline in the flood.
“You can’t resist me forever.” Ferrin’s voice sounded directly in my head. “You will give in. You will turn rotsbane and rip apart your friends and family and if they don’t have the gall to put you down, then you can watch me take Keldori and be the beast that heralds my arrival.”
No…
No.
No amount of Skal, no level of hunger was worth the death of my friends. Mom, Gams, Orla, Iseult, Fana.
Ciarán.
We were so close to the end. I was so close to a quiet life in Keel Watch Harbor with Ciarán at my side.
“I am not your weapon,” I growled at Ferrin through gritted teeth. “I’m not Tamora’s weapon. I was not Galahad’s weapon. I am done being used by assholes!”
All that Skal bearing down on me, paralyzing my limbs, threatening to turn me inside out—I pushed back.
Ciarán was there too, forcing Skal back towards Ferrin.
The tide shifted, the weight of magick lifted, and Ferrin’s mind opened up inside of mine.
I saw all of him all at once.
I saw the lonely young man who accidentally stumbled into a foreign world that was both full and completely devoid of magick. I saw his fear become curiosity as he learned the world’s strange ways and how to navigate them.
He visited every chance he got, crossing the Rift as a self-projected Nightmare, but the ever-present magick of the world corroded him.
Skal had a way of turning Magicians hungry, and he was no exception.
Each visit to Keldori left him needing more, until being home in Skalterra was no longer enough.
And it wasn’t just the magick, but the world itself that demanded his attention. The people, the technology, the abundance of Skal going unnoticed and unused—it could all be his if he could figure out how to get his real body across the impassable barrier between realities.
He couldn’t stop returning to the strange world and all its wonders, but each morning when he returned, he’d been stripped away just a little bit more, and what had been taken was replaced by that insatiable hunger.
He was all hunger and thirst for something he could never get enough of, but he would try, and he would kill if that meant finally satiating his appetite.
He wasn’t a rotsbane, but he was something worse. Where rotsbane lost all sense, he’d maintained his. He was calculating and manipulative and constantly scheming.
A rotsbane would be easier to kill.
So be it.
If Skal was what he wanted, then Skal was what I would give him. It poured from the open Rift at my back, and I could feel it swirling on the air. I siphoned it into myself, felt it tear through my body and my mind, and threw it down the tether at Ferrin.
Ferrin grunted and keeled over on the ice.
“You think that’ll work?” He spat into the frost and growled through the pain of the surging Skal. “You think you’re stronger than me, Wren Warrender?”
“You’re not strong.”
“I’m stronger than all of you combined,” he seethed. Bones snapped and his fingers elongated into claws, but he fought the transformation. “Stronger than you, stronger than the Sovereigns, stronger than your mother and her mother, and stronger than that whelp of a Grimguard.”
“You are nothing,” I said. “You are a murderer and a coward. No one with real strength has to claw so desperately for power.”
“Strength is sacrifice, and I sacrificed everything. You’ve sacrificed nothing. And you’re the one who will spend the rest of her life clawing at Skal, not me.”
Ferrin’s body shuddered.
We’d have to be fast once he transformed, but we’d faced rotsbane before.
He would be easy to kill.
His back arched as he shivered, but then he raised his face and grinned.
Skal slammed into me from his end of the tether a second time, stronger than before. It ripped my body, tore at my skin, burned me from the inside.
No. I was stronger than him. I was stronger than the rotsbane that wanted to burst out from inside me.
Except I was losing. The rotsbane was rising within me. I knew the feeling all too well, but this time, there was no Grimguard to save me.
He was trying, of course. Ciarán screamed my name, and commands to fight Ferrin’s push reverberated in my head loud enough that I wasn’t sure if Ferrin’s magick or Ciarán’s voice would tear me open first.
The fire of the dome weakened and dimmed as Ferrin sent every shred of Skal he had left down the tether, and when I screamed in fear and pain, the shriek of a rotsbane overlaid that of my own.
And then the crushing weight of Skal disappeared.
I gasped for air at the sudden lightness. Magick passed through me, still electric and paralyzing, but no longer suffocating. The hunger was gone, and I looked up at Ferrin from where I lay on the ice.
The prison he’d formed around us was gone, and he grinned, but not at me. He focused on something behind me instead, something beyond the smoldering embers of his barrier.
A horrible, guttural grunt formed around my name.
“Wren,” Ciarán choked.
I rolled on the ice, unable to move against the Skal using my body as a conduit.
Ciarán was on his hands and knees, shaking as he siphoned the Skal down our tether. Orange sparks melted the snow around him, but no matter how much of the magick he expelled, Ferrin didn’t stop.
“Ciarán!” I fought against unresponsive muscles.
“My Lady,” he managed through our tether. “Let me take your Skal for you. You were… everything.”
And then bones splintered, and Ciarán tore open.