Chapter 27
THERE WAS NO monster hiding in the dark. Instead, there was a body that Corin once buried.
Long ago, in the depths of a cave, in the depths of her mind, she had found a body and pretended it never existed. Elly simply floated away into a dream, where she shared teacups with talking animals and swam star-filled oceans with princesses. Elly was beside her, and they argued and fought and laughed, the way sisters could.
But the truth was that Elly was dead.
So Corin might as well have been too.
Thunder rumbled across the island. Corin couldn’t hear the raindrops anymore, only soft pelts against numb skin. She held Elly for what felt like eternity, thumbpads brushing against wounds that were split open like overripe fruit. Each sob scratched against Corin’s throat, her chest hollowing with every breath until she feared collapse.
She never told Elly she was sorry.
Everything began to sink. The surrounding walls, the starved bodies, the bones, the sisters. The tunnels or the island or wherever they were. In the darkness, it didn’t matter. As mud sloshed inside her ears and worms crawled beneath her skin, Corin curled into a ball beside Elly. Even with their bones pressed together, Corin still felt her sister’s absence, an empty and hollow thing.
The darkness whispered back to her.
Your fault.
Everything has always been your fault.
You’re too angry, too mean, too selfish, too resentful. Look where it brought you. You don’t know how to care for someone, and you don’t even know how to love.
It should have been you who died.
Roots twisted around Corin’s limbs, dragging her deeper into the dark abyss. She understood, then, the desire she harbored to be pulled down all along. By ice in Winterland. By broken houses in Springland. By oceans in Summerland. By sinkholes in Autumnland. To here and now, where she belonged in the dirt with Elly.
It had never been Briar Rose who planned her downfall. It had only been Corin, pushing herself to the comforting arms of death, a deserving punishment for her horrible mistakes.
Thousands of black flies swarmed their graves. They feasted on her stench and despair. Their drones turned into muffled noise as soil buried Corin deeper until she could feel nothing, not even the weight of her sad existence.
Then a new sound drilled her mind, sharp yet muffled. The noise grew louder alongside pounding footsteps and smashing fists. A rush of cold air struck her body. Soil slipped from her grave as nails pierced into the flesh of her arms. The sound turned strikingly clear. A harsh voice—
“Get up!”
Malicine lifted her from the ground and tossed her out of the sinking grave. Corin’s body rolled across the dirt, then lay limp. Her cheek pressed into the soil as raindrops pelted her skull like tiny bullets. She wanted to tell Malicine to leave her alone and let her die, but she was too tired to speak. She tried to slip back into unconsciousness, yet Malicine persisted in shaking her awake.
“Snap out of it! None of this is real.”
A flash of anger sparked Corin to finally look at the demon. “But it is real.” As soon as anger came, it broke under the weight of defeat. Her voice cracked as she said, “It’s the only real thing in this world.”
If anything had been a lie, it was the rest of the dreamworld. With cruel kindness, these dreams told her she had more seasons with Elly. They had time to grow old together. If they argued, they could make up. If Corin did something horrible, she could still say she was sorry.
But the reality was this: There were no second chances.
Corin said she never wanted Elly, and Elly died believing it.
Corin reached for her sister, but Elly’s cold flesh slipped through her fingers, the bones dissolving to gray ash. The storm carried the girl away, scattering her into the air to leave Corin clutching nothing. She tucked herself into a ball once more and let the roots curl around her limbs. They squeezed tight, the thickest around her throat, until she could no longer breathe.
Before darkness filled her vision, a light burst through the air, slicing branches and scattering its pieces to the ground. She felt a gust of air enter her lungs as she breathed, even though she wanted so desperately to never do so again.
“I’m not going to tell you it gets better, because that would be a lie.” There was a forced solidness to Malicine’s voice, a striking contrast to the haziness of Corin’s mind. “But if you die, you’re not going to wake up. Ever. So you can’t make a permanent decision like that here. Not right now, not in this place. You need to get out of the darkness before it swallows you whole.”
Another branch shot toward them like the tongue of a snake. Malicine spun around and sliced it with their staff. They grabbed Corin’s arm to hoist her up. Her legs wobbled like a broken puppet, stumbling over roots as the demon pulled her forward.
“Stop dragging your feet and move!”
“I can’t.”
Corin’s words barely came out a whisper. Malicine’s eyes fell to her blood-soaked shoes and oozing blisters. They pulled her arms over their shoulders, draping her on their back, and splayed their wings open. Before they could take flight, a swarm of thorns stretched across the sky and trapped them inside. Malicine pointed their staff and sent another beam of light to cut the thorns. As quickly as they shot a path, the thorns regrew, enveloping them in darkness once more.
They cursed under their breath. “I hate this place.”
They hauled Corin down a winding path, trying to make sense of the overhanging limbs that stretched like bony fingers, the dark trees with screaming faces carved into their trunks. Branches thrashed at them in the storm. Icy drops of rain stung their skin like pellets. Even in Corin’s haze, she could tell they were going nowhere. The woods were sheathed in shadow. Too many rotting leaves covered each path, blending them together.
Malicine let out a strained yell as a sharpened branch cut through their sleeves and into flesh. The wind screamed to push them back. Corin felt them pull their full body weight forward along with hers. She wondered, watching them struggle, why anyone would fight so hard to live.
They managed to find a stream past the woods, where water turned into a muddy sludge that sloshed against a trail of rocks. Malicine attempted to cross, even though Corin’s weight on their back barely allowed them to keep balance. The smell of rotten eggs from the water hit her nose as she strained to hold her breath.
They stepped on the last rock when a blast of wind hit them. Both Malicine and Corin fell forward, crashing into water. Corin let the tides wrap around her limbs and pull her down. If Malicine yelled for her, she wouldn’t have heard. But a red light kept blinking, no matter how tightly she clenched her eyes shut. She opened them to a blur of dark river and a red orb turning smaller, like a light close to extinguishing.
She grasped for a rock and pulled her head from the surface in time to hear Malicine.
“Don’t let it get away!”
Their empty hand pointed at the staff floating down the river. The gem flickered in dying red. Corin swam in the tide’s direction and reached for the stick, but the end of its crooked shape melted to mud, and her hand was covered in leeches. They sank their teeth into her arm. She shook away their wriggling bodies, watching them drop like pebbles into the river and get sucked down the end of nowhere, where the staff and its amulet were gone forever.
Panic raced through her mind. The gemstone was important, but she didn’t know why. She could only remember the way clouds of blood swirled inside the stone whenever Malicine cast their magic. How the staff only reacted that way whenever the demon changed the land around them. What it would mean if the amulet never returned.
She turned to Malicine, but their face had paled into a sickly shade of green. In their eyes she saw pupils so wide they shrank color. Two pits of black for what should have been life.
As if the island sensed their fear, the wind picked up with a howling storm. Waves crashed around them, and Corin felt the strangle on their bodies, pushing both of them to the bottom to drown.