Chapter 14
Fourteen
Vale sat at the edge of the remnants of the silver pool, and his heart filled with dread.
Ivy sat beside him, gnawing her lip. “There’s some water in it. Look there, down at the bottom.”
She pointed. A thin layer of white sludge sat in the shallow depths of the hole. It stunk of poison and rot. If Vale stepped in it, the puddle would not even cover his toes, let alone transport him to another realm.
They were stuck in the wilderness void. Nobody could get in or out.
“Your Circle will be disappointed when they cannot get inside,” Vale said.
“We were told the portal would weaken. Not… stop working,” Ivy replied, peering into the useless hole miserably. Then she sat back, hugging her knees. “How do you feel?”
Vale resented the question. He was going to wither and die here, helpless. His lone companion would surely follow suit. Even without the bodily effects of the poison, how could he possibly feel anything but terrible?
“I am fine,” he lied.
Ivy gave him a piteous look. She even reached out like she was going to touch his arm. Vale hoped she would. Vale hoped she would not. Before he could decide, her hand faltered and dropped back to her side.
“So, this is happening faster now,” Ivy said, looking around them at the white, cracked ground that had spread so far around the pool. “We need to find some way out of this.”
“Out of the void? There is none. Even if my brother tried to open a portal, he could not. The door is locked.”
“No, I mean a way out of this situation.” Ivy stood, curling her bare toes in the cracks the poison left behind. Her face twisted with regret, and Vale waited for her eyes to well. Then she took a deep breath, and her face smoothed out with determination.
“There is magic here,” she started. “That even you don’t understand. Right?”
She said it timidly, like he was worried he would be angry. But she still said it.
“I suppose,” Vale said slowly. “But none that would allow us out of this void. Even if we found a way, where would we go? Our brothers do not know how to help. Your uncle insists there is no antidote.”
“But we used a poison made in the mortal realm,” Ivy said desperately. “Surely there’s something here to counteract it!”
Vale stared glumly into the ruined pool, considering. It was harder to think with this exhaustion in his bones. “So, your solution is to pour every poison cure into the void until we fix it?”
“I don’t know,” Ivy sighed. “I just know we can’t sit around here and let ourselves die! There’s so much of this void I haven’t seen. Maybe if we…”
She trailed off. She was silent for so long that Vale looked over at her, expectant.
She was not looking at him. She was staring at a flower on a nearby tree. It was white and wilting, succumbing to the poison. But it was still reaching for her.
Ivy walked over and touched its dying petal. It curled gingerly around her finger, then spasmed and went limp.
Ivy’s breath hitched.
“What?” Vale demanded.
Ivy turned to him. Her eyes were glowing green. His green. The green of the wilderness void.
But only for a moment. Then the glow was gone, and her eyes were the beloved green that he had grown irritatingly attached to.
Ivy growled in frustration. “I lost it! It was trying to show me something, but it left before it could deliver the message. If I could find a way to connect with it, really connect with it, not just get thoughts and fleeting emotions, then maybe I could find a way to cure it.”
“Maybe,” Vale repeated, dubious. “What are you suggesting?”
Ivy tugged at her hair. It was up in a braid again—she had started braiding it out of stress as they sat by the useless pool.
“You know how you said I could spray myself with a heatbloom again?”
It took Vale a moment to remember. Their time in his nest felt like long ago, though it was possibly only minutes.
“You want to sicken yourself with pollen-lust,” Vale said slowly. “Now?”
“Not for the lust! To talk to the void. The first time it sprayed me, that was when I heard it the loudest.”
Vale was tired. Bone-deep, the kind of exhaustion that went beyond the physical.
Part of him still felt betrayed that he, the one who had cared for the void all his long life, had not been communing with the void in place of this new mortal.
But the anger was quieter now. It was harder to blame the void for reaching out to Ivy, who was filled with a passion he had been lacking for centuries.
“You think the pollen will let you connect with it more thoroughly,” Vale finished.
Ivy smiled at him excitedly. “I think it can connect us.”
“Us,” Vale repeated. An idea formed in his head, golden and risky. “What do you mean?”
It did not take long to find a heatbloom. Just beyond the rotting whiteness sat a strange plant that Vale had not seen in his void until Ivy appeared.
“You are sure about this?” Vale asked as he appraised the red flower the heatbloom had turned into upon Ivy’s approach. “We will be insatiable.”
“I will be insatiable,” Ivy corrected. “For a while. You said the magic would be weaker with the poison. And you said it might not work on you.”
“I have never caught it in its full force,” Vale said warily. “I thought I felt twinges of its effects when I was wiping it off of you. But… that might have simply been from touching you.”
He had not shared his emotions with any being for so long. It still felt wrong to do so. But less so with Ivy, who flushed with pleasure. The satisfaction it brought him to watch her smile was worth his reluctance to say it.
“Unless you have a better idea,” Ivy said, toying with her braid. “I say we try it.”
Vale inclined his head.
They stepped up together. Ivy reached out, and the plain red bloom twitched in response.
“The flower,” Vale said. “What did you call it?”
Ivy’s hand stopped. She looked up at him, surprised.
“A rose,” she said. “They appear on the ivy here, sometimes. I don’t know why. Back home, ivy doesn’t have roses.”
“It must be significant,” Vale said. “The heatbloom only turns into something that lures you in.”
Ivy said nothing. She looked oddly shy.
“I didn’t know why at first,” she admitted. “But now, I think it’s because of a storybook my mother read to me as a child.”
“A storybook,” Vale repeated. He had never heard of this.
“A book for children,” she explained. “With pictures. It’s about a gardener who falls for a princess.
He sacrifices himself for her and dies. But she plucks the rose he grew for her and places it on his grave, and he comes back to life.
That story was why I fell in love with plants in the first place.
That illustration of a rose… It was so beautiful. ”
She grinned, her cheeks still red. Vale was, once again, struck by an annoying amount of want that he never had to bother with until she showed up. If this was what others had to contend with, he had no idea how they got any work done.
He wanted to tell her that she was gorgeous. But he had already complimented her a moment ago, and he was still not used to spilling his thoughts so often. So, he allowed her to step forward and touch the center of the rose.
It sprang open immediately. Vale was almost triumphant. His void might be sick, but it was not dead. And unlike him, it wanted loudly and unabashedly.
Pollen gushed out over them both. Vale closed his eyes, letting the warm fragrance wash over him. Golden motes stuck to his antlers and clung to his skull mask, showering over his robes and the exposed part of his chest.
Finally, the torrent ended. Before Vale even had time to open his eyes, he heard a gasp beside him.
He blinked pollen out of his eyes and looked over.
Ivy was radiant. The pollen did not just cover her—it adorned her. Tangling in her braid-crown and dusting her fair skin, making her body shine. She looked like a creature from a myth.
“Do you feel it?” she asked breathily.
Vale concentrated. He could not feel the pollen’s influence. He could feel the void, but only faintly. He could only catch glimpses of its exhaustion, nothing of the words it had been sending him sporadically since Ivy showed up.
“No,” he replied. “Can you?”
She nodded, her smile trembling. “It’s… wonderful. I can… I can almost…”
She stumbled into his arms. Her hands caught on his chest, smearing pollen. And suddenly, he was seized by a wild desire unlike anything he had felt before. It made his entire body clench, a growl tearing out of his throat.
His exhaustion vanished as the world narrowed down to Ivy. Her slick skin and her even slicker thighs, still dripping with him from their last coupling. Her hot breath against his chest, her skin heavy with pollen. She was moaning, grinding against his leg like an animal in heat.
“Have me again,” she gasped, eyes still glowing green. “I’m close.”
Vale did not know if she meant she was close to her peak or to finding answers to the void. But he did not care. He cared for nothing but Ivy, the only thing he had truly wanted in centuries.
He pushed her to her knees and yanked their clothes out of the way, then shoved unceremoniously inside her.
He had mated her less than an hour ago, but they both groaned like it had been an eternity.
His spend slicked the way, but even without it, the slide was easy.
Her inner walls strained and squeezed but never protested—even when he pushed all the way to the hilt.
Ivy went lax, moaning into the dirt. There were no vines to hold her down, but Vale made do. He grabbed her hands, listening to her breathing hitch in excitement as he pinned them behind her back.
He could not get close enough. He licked salt from her neck and golden pollen from her cheek, his tongue curling around her throat.
If he were not so pollen-crazed, he would have worried he was taking her too roughly—even more roughly than he allowed himself before.
But there was no pain in her scent, only desire so wet it squelched each time he drove back in.
“Yes,” Ivy slurred into the dirt. “Yes, I’m—I’m so close—”
She cut off with a cry. It turned strange and otherworldly, almost a howl as green light radiated out of her, overshadowing the golden pollen coating her skin.
Vale thrust one last time and came, pumping deep inside. He slumped over her, his hands trembling around her wrists as the pollen-lust faded from his blood.
Ivy hummed tiredly. Vale circled an arm around her waist and dragged her up, dusting the dirt from her cheek where it had been pressed into the ground.
“What did you see?”
Ivy looked up at him, almost bending backwards to do so. Her eyes were bright from the green void-glow. But it faded fast, leaving only her natural green behind.
“The vial that hangs from my uncle’s staff,” she declared. “That’s the antidote! Hells! We could have grabbed it off of him!”
Vale was suddenly glad that he hadn’t crushed that irritating vial when he had the chance. There had been several times where he had considered it, watching it swing infuriatingly with each movement of the staff.
“We will,” Vale said, stroking a claw down her pollen-heavy neck. “If we manage to find our way into the mortal realm.”
Ivy’s grin grew. She sat up, gasping as he slid out of her. Then she turned to him, so full of giddy confidence that Vale had to stop himself from kissing her.
“The void isn’t just dying,” she said delightedly. “It’s breaking.”
“I take it there is a reason you are happy about that.”
Ivy nodded, her disheveled braid falling out of place from its circle atop her head. “It’s breaking! That means there are cracks.”
“Into other realms,” Vale realized. “And if we find a crack to the mortal realm—”
“We can get through and find the cure!” Ivy yelled. She stood, her pollen-stained dress falling back down her legs as she whooped and jumped. She whirled in a circle, arms outstretched. Trees bent weakly to touch her, leaves leaping from their branches to touch her skin on the way to the ground.
Vale watched her, spellbound. He had never seen anything so beautiful.
If only he had the time to appreciate it.
Then again, if her plan worked, they could have more time than he dreamed.
If he fixed the silver pool, one of their first stops after hunting down that vial would be to his Anderfel brother to extend Ivy’s lifespan to match his own.
Vale climbed to his feet. At first, all was well, still feeling the rush of the pollen. Then his head swam, and he hit the ground once more.
Ivy stopped spinning and knelt in front of him, concerned. “Vale?”
She grabbed his arm. She could not pull him up. She could not even steady him. But Vale appreciated the effort.
Vale pushed himself to his feet again. His vision swam, and his legs threatened to give out again, but he held firm until the dizziness passed.
“The crack to the mortal realm,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”
Ivy nodded wildly.
“Good,” Vale said. “Lead the way.”