Chapter 13
MAREN
Fighting monsters in another dimension with my mate is definitely not covered in any photography manual.
The shadow realm presses against my bear form like freezing water, trying to seep into my fur, my skin, my bones.
Everything here feels wrong in ways that make my newly awakened instincts scream.
Colorless expanse stretches in all directions, stone formations rising at angles that hurt to perceive.
Light exists but casts no shadows. Distance means nothing.
Up and down are suggestions rather than facts.
Jonah's presence blazes like a star through our connection. Golden. Warm. Real. The only fixed point in this nightmare landscape.
The Guardian's rage slams into us before I fully process where we are.
"You dare bring her here?" The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating through the stone beneath my paws. "You dare contaminate my realm with your light?"
Forms coalesce from the dimensionless space around us. Not three or five like before. Dozens. Hundreds. The Guardian manifests in a swarm of shapes, each one wrong in different ways. Too many limbs. Eyes where mouths should be. Bodies that fold through dimensions my brain refuses to process.
They converge on us with terrible speed.
Jonah roars, placing his massive bear form between me and the nearest threat. His voice carries across the impossible space. "Maren, stay close. Don't let them separate us."
The first wave crashes into us, and instinct takes over.
My claws rake through shadow substance that feels like cold smoke wrapped around bone.
The texture is wrong—solid where it should be vapor, yielding where it should resist. My bear's claws sink deep, finding purchase on something that screams when I tear through it.
A shadow creature lunges for my throat. I catch it mid-air, jaws closing on its core.
The taste floods my mouth—rot and metal and something that burns like acid on my tongue.
My neck muscles strain as I shake hard, violent, the way prey should be killed.
The creature shrieks directly into my mouth, the sound vibrating through my skull and down my spine.
Then it dissolves into wisps that smell like corruption and leave my mouth tasting like I licked a battery.
Another takes its place immediately. This one's faster, coming at me low.
It tears into my shoulder, teeth that shouldn't exist puncturing fur and flesh.
Pain blazes white-hot through my nerves.
Blood—my blood—runs hot down my foreleg.
The creature's breath against my neck is freezing, sucking warmth from my body with every exhale.
Twisting, I use my weight to throw it off. My claws catch its flank as it passes, tearing deep furrows that leak darkness instead of blood. The shadow matter hisses where it hits the stone, evaporating like water on a hot griddle.
Jonah's roar reverberates through my chest. Something crashes to my left—his fight, close enough to feel but too chaotic to track. My own battle demands every scrap of attention. Another creature circles, testing. This one learned from watching its companions die.
Two more creatures appear, flanking positions already chosen. One feints left while the other goes right. Classic battle strategy. My photographer's eye catches the coordination, predicts the attack pattern.
The one on the right commits first. We collide with bone-jarring force, the impact driving air from my lungs.
My claws dig into its shoulders while its talons—impossibly sharp—score deep lines across my ribs.
We roll across the stone in a tangle of fur and shadow, each fighting for position.
My teeth find what passes for its throat and I bite down hard.
Something cracks between my jaws. The creature spasms once, twice, then explodes outward in a spray of darkness that coats my muzzle.
More keep coming. The sheer number threatens to overwhelm us despite our strength.
Then the mate bond flares between us.
Golden light erupts from my chest, from his, connecting us with visible brilliance that cuts through the empty expanse like sunrise.
The light spreads outward in a sphere, and where it touches shadow creatures, they scream and dissolve.
Some simply cease to exist. Others flee shrieking into the colorless void.
The Guardian's forms retreat, hissing. "Impossible. The bond cannot function here. This is my realm. Light does not exist in shadow."
"We're not just light," I snarl back, and hearing my own voice in bear form still startles me. "We're bonded. That's stronger than your darkness."
Jonah moves to stand beside me rather than in front of me. Protection becomes partnership. His flank presses against mine, our bond pulsing between us with each heartbeat.
The creatures circle but don't attack. The golden barrier holds them back, burning any that venture too close.
Reaching for the bond instinctively, I try to understand what's happening. The connection thrums with power that feels familiar despite being hours old. It tastes like the ley lines back home, like the shimmer I spent eight months photographing without understanding what I saw.
Realization crashes through me. The ley lines still flow through me.
Even here in another dimension, the energy pulses because I'm freshly turned.
My transformation happened at a convergence point, ley magic woven into my DNA before it fully settled.
One foot in reality, one foot in shadow. A bridge between worlds.
And through me, the ley lines can reach into this realm.
"Jonah." Testing the theory, I close my eyes and reach deeper into the connection. Golden light intensifies around us, pushing the shadows back another foot. "I can feel them. The ley lines. They're feeding power through our bond."
His bear's head swings toward me. "That's not possible."
"Neither is me being here in the first place." My eyes open, watching shadow creatures writhe at the edge of our protective sphere. "I'm new enough that I haven't fully settled into one reality yet. The transformation energy is still active in my cells."
"You're a conduit." Understanding floods him, warming the bond between us. "You're channeling ley energy directly into the shadow realm."
"And it burns them." The creatures shriek and claw at the barrier, desperate and furious. "The Guardian feeds on isolation and despair. But we're the opposite of that. We're connection. Unity. Light."
The Guardian's laughter echoes around us, coming from all directions at once. "Clever. But temporary. Your energy will fade. The shadow realm will drain you until nothing remains. And when your light dims, I will consume you both."
Maybe it's right. My limbs already ache with exhaustion I shouldn't feel this soon. Channeling ley energy through dimensions is burning through my reserves faster than I can replenish them.
But I'm not planning to be here long enough for that to matter.
"Where's the anchor point?" My voice comes out rough, strained. "The thing holding this realm together."
Jonah goes still. His mind races, processing. "You can sense it?"
"I can see it." And I can, now that I'm looking with intent rather than panic.
My photographer's eye translates the chaos into patterns, finds structure in the madness.
Ley lines exist here too, corrupted but visible to someone who knows how to look.
They all converge toward a point deeper in the realm, pulled like water down a drain. "It's that way."
Moving before he can argue, I push forward. The golden sphere moves with us, our bond maintaining the protective barrier as we navigate through the landscape that shifts beneath our paws. Shadow creatures follow but keep their distance, circling like sharks.
Jonah matches my pace, his larger bear form surprisingly agile across terrain that opens chasms without warning. "The anchor point will be heavily guarded. When I found it before, I couldn't get close enough to do damage."
"You were alone before." A chasm yawns open directly in my path. I leap, landing on stone that shouldn't exist at the angle it does. "Now you have me."
Pride and fear war in him. Both emotions bleed through our connection, raw and honest. He wants to keep me safe, wants to send me back through the tear. But he knows we need to do this together.
The convergence grows stronger as we run. Tainted ley energy pulses ahead of us, twisted into something wrong. My fresh sensitivity to the lines makes it painful to approach, like walking toward a fire that's burning too hot.
The empty space opens into a vast chamber, and the anchor point looms before us.
Massive. A construct of corrupted ley energy and shadow matter, woven together into a pillar that stretches from the stone floor into the nothing above.
But it's not empty. Faces press against the surface from inside, mouths open in silent screams. Souls.
Trapped beings whose despair feeds the Guardian's power.
The sight tears a roar from my throat. Not conscious thought. Pure fury from somewhere primal and absolute. The sound carries every ounce of rage I have for what this thing has done, is doing, to innocent beings who became lost in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"You see now," the Guardian's voice whispers from the construct itself. "This realm exists on suffering. On isolation. On the fear and despair of those who became lost. Your light is nothing compared to centuries of accumulated darkness."