Chapter 7 #2
The quartz outcrop to his left splits. A fissure races up the stone face, spitting shards, and something pushes through from behind it.
A root. Thick as my thigh. Black and pulsing with veins of deep purple light.
It uncoils from the rock like a waking serpent and slams into the creek bed, sending up a geyser of silver water.
Another root. Then another. They punch through the ravine wall in sequence, each one larger, faster, angrier.
"FLYNN!"
The rope stretches taut again. Flynn is climbing, and the roots are between him and the wall. One of them curls around the fallen oak and squeezes. The trunk explodes into splinters.
The roots turn toward him. All of them. At once.
The closest root lunges. He stops to slash with the trowel, and the blade bites into bark that splits open like a wound, leaking thick sap the color of a bruise. The root recoils. Two more whip toward his legs.
"CUT THE LINE!"
"ABSOLUTELY NOT."
Flynn climbs again. The harness looks like it’s about to burst off of him, and his boots leave the creek bank just as a root slams into the spot where his knees were.
Shimmerloam sprays into the air like golden confetti.
He’s stowed the trowel and is safely protecting the shimmerloam inside his shirt.
He kicks off the wall and scrambles, boots finding purchase on a jutting ledge, then another.
The roots thrash below, blind and furious, ripping the creek bank apart in their search for whatever woke them.
Flynn climbs hand over hand below me, each heave lifting him up two feet, three feet, and the raw power of it vibrates up the line.
The roots can't climb. They strain upward, stretching, purple veins pulsing brighter, then snap back to the ravine floor with wet, defeated thuds. By the time he clears the midpoint of the wall, they're retreating into the shattered quartz, dragging creek stones and mud behind them.
Flynn grabs scrubby brush at the lip of the ledge and hauls himself over the edge like a sack of potting mix. He lands on his back in the lichen, gasping, the two shimmerloam sheets still pressed to him.
"Got it."
He's breathing hard. His headlamp has gone sideways, casting light across the canopy at a useless angle. Sweat cuts channels through the grime on his face.
"You were supposed to cut the line if the anchor point failed."
"The anchor point held."
"If it hadn't—"
"It held." I take the loam sheets from his hands, inspect them, and slide them into a padded case from his pack with the reverence of a museum curator handling ancient scrolls. "Twelve-inch squares. Clean edges. Good work."
We climb. The trail back up is steeper than the descent, the predawn darkness thickening under the canopy rather than lifting.
The bioluminescent lichen has dimmed, and the humming stones along the creek have gone silent.
Something about the ravine has shifted since the roots woke.
The air pressure has dropped. My ears pop twice in thirty seconds.
Flynn leads. I follow his boot prints exactly, stepping where he steps, which works until it doesn't.
The section of trail that gave way isn't notable.
It looks like every other stretch of packed earth and root lattice we've crossed.
Flynn's weight passes over it fine. But his boots are wide, his stride is long, and he distributes his mass across the whole foot.
I land on my heel, shifting my center of gravity backward for half a second, and the ground dissolves.
Not crumbles. Dissolves. The soil turns liquid under my boot, and the entire trail margin sheers off the hillside in a curtain of mud and loose stone.
My feet go out from under me. The trowel flies from my hand.
I'm sliding, clawing at roots that rip free, and the ravine opens below me like a mouth.
His hand closes around my wrist.
The jolt nearly dislocates my shoulder. My body swings out over nothing, feet dangling, mud cascading past me into the dark below. His grip is absolute. Not tight. Not straining. Absolute. Like the concept of letting go doesn't exist in whatever operating system runs behind those amber eyes.
He pulls.
One arm. Just the one. The other is braced against a boulder, fingers dug into a crack in the granite. The muscles in his forearm don't tremble. They bunch and release in a single, hydraulic motion, and I come up out of the void fast enough that my stomach drops.
I slam into him.
His arm locks around my back. My face presses into the worn cotton of his tee shirt, which smells of cedar shavings and clean sweat and something deeper, something green and mineral that might just be the way orcs smell.
My hands grip his shoulders because there's nothing else in the world to hold onto, and underneath my palms his body is a wall of dense, living heat.
His heartbeat against my cheek. Steady. Not fast. Steady.
"You good?"
I nod into his shirt. Don't pull back. Don't want to.
His arm doesn't move either. His chin rests on top of my head, and for three full seconds, we stand on a disintegrating goat trail above a magical ravine, and we don’t breathe.
Then the sky splits open.
Not sunrise. The canopy above us goes white.
A crack of thunder hits so hard the boulder under Flynn's hand vibrates, and the pressure change sucks the air from my lungs.
Rain follows, instant, vertical, cold enough to sting.
But it's wrong. The drops fall upward in patches, reversing direction mid-air, and the clouds visible through breaks in the canopy are the color of an old bruise, spiraling in a tight, unnatural rotation directly overhead.
Lightning. Close. The flash burns blue afterimages into my vision.
The ancient hemlock forty feet uphill takes the bolt dead center. The trunk detonates. A hundred-foot column of wood and bark and smoking heartwood tips, groans, and falls directly toward us.