Chapter 2 #3
He looks at the locket around my neck. “She told me once that the locket wasn’t just jewelry. She said whoever wears it carries the way home.” He gestures around us. “Here. This garden. Where she put down her roots when she left…wherever the hell you all are from.”
Raskel thumps his stick once. “The boy is right. The locket is the key, but it must be used here, at the Rootline Gate, built as the anchor point between worlds. The locket should act as the tether. If the bond is strong enough, it can pull her fragments toward a single point in time.”
The weight of what he’s saying settles over me.
Months. Months of searching, of reading, of screaming into the dark for answers.
And the answer was hanging around my neck the entire time, waiting for me to stand in the right place.
I assumed it was just another relic Jo left behind. A comfort. Not a key.
I could kill something. But that can wait.
“Then let’s do it. Now.”
“It’s not that simple,” Raskel says, because of course it isn’t.
“The ritual requires the garden to be prepared. The gate needs to be opened properly, not that hack job you did with the portal. That was just a temporary crossing. The Rootline Gate is older magic. And you need someone on this side to hold the boundary while you pull her through, or the whole thing collapses in on itself.”
“I’ll do it,” Leo says immediately. “Tell me what to do.”
I study him for a moment, this broad-shouldered human. He’d walk into Wynmire barefoot if it meant getting Elle back. I recognize that feeling. I’ve been living in it for months.
“Fine,” I say. Then I turn to Sarnyx. “You need to go back.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but I see the slight tightening around her eyes. “Kaelren—”
“Wynmire can’t be unguarded. Not with the boundary fracturing like this. I need you to keep things stable, keep the settlements from panicking, and keep an eye on Eltrien, Nimor, and Vashael.”
“You don’t trust them?”
“I trust them, but they need a leader." I hold Sarnyx’s gaze. “You’re the only one I trust completely. Go back. Hold the line. If anything changes, if the fractures get worse, send word immediately.”
She stares at me for a long moment, then nods once. Thorns retract. Decision made.
“Don’t die over here,” she says.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I mean it, Kaelren.”
“So do I.”
She leaves through the portal without looking back. That’s Sarnyx. No theatrics. No drawn-out goodbyes. Just work.
What follows is the strangest hour of my life, and I have lived a long and unusual life.
Raskel directs the preparations with the authority of a general, the temperament of a hornet.
Leo and Sarah clear debris from the garden: dead plants, fallen branches, the remains of the carnivorous sunflowers.
Bryx and Mora help, though Bryx spends more time complaining about the heat, the dirt, the general indignity of manual labor, than actually moving things.
I work on the elm tree. Or what’s left of it.
The old tree stands at the center of Jo’s garden, massive and ancient, its bark scarred with age.
In Wynmire, it would be a crossing tree.
A living doorway between realms. Here, Jo disguised it as an ordinary elm.
But the magic is still there, buried deep within.
I can feel it when I press my palms to the bark. Old. Patient. Waiting.
“You need to open the gate within the trunk,” Raskel instructs from below, having climbed onto a garden stool to supervise. “Jo sealed it when she came through. You’ll need to unseal it carefully and channel the bond through the locket.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“The last three hours suggest otherwise.”
Peeble, who has appointed themselves chief morale officer, divides their time between pestering Leo with increasingly personal questions about Elle’s childhood and narrating my failures to anyone within earshot.
The elm’s gate responds to my magic slowly, reluctantly, like waking something that’s been asleep for decades. The bark splits along lines I can barely see, hidden in the grain. Light seeps through the cracks, pale gold, and the locket against my chest burns.
Not painfully. Purposefully.
I close my eyes and reach for the bond. That thin, impossible thread connecting my present to her scattered existence across time. I pull.
Elle.
If this works, I get her back.
If it fails… I lose her again.
A faint pulse answers. Faint, confused, but there. Undeniably there.
I pull harder.
“Kaelren, the locket!” Raskel shouts. “Open it! Hold it against the gate!”
I unclasp the locket with shaking hands and press it against the elm’s bark. The light inside the tree flares. The portrait inside the locket shifts. Elle’s mother, then Elle. Fragmented. Overlapping. Her seventeen selves looking back at me across time with growing recognition.
The garden responds. Every living plant turns toward the elm. The wind chimes go silent. Even the air stops moving.
“Leo,” Raskel barks, “place your hands in the soil. You’re the anchor. Think of home. Think of her. Hold on.”
Leo drops to his knees and buries his hands in the garden dirt without hesitation. Sarah stands behind him, hands on his shoulders.
The light is building. I can feel her. Closer now, more coherent, the scattered fragments of her consciousness pulling toward the locket, toward me, toward home.
Something moves at the edge of my vision.
A vine. Then another. Black, slick, coiling up from the garden beds with deliberate speed. The plants are coming back. Not just coming back. Growing, multiplying, spreading across the garden in a tide of corrupted green and black.
“Raskel!”
“I see it!” The gnome backs toward the patio, stick raised. “Hurry! The fracturing is drawing the corrupted growth through. And these are worse than before. They cause hallucinations. Whatever you see, it’s not real. Finish the ritual!”
A vine wraps around Bryx’s ankle. He yelps, then goes still, compound eyes glazing over. “Mom?” he whispers. “Mom, is that you?”
“Bryx!” Mora slaps him across the face. He blinks, snaps out of it, and she’s already pulling the vine off his leg.
More vines. Faster now. A sunflower the size of a small car erupts from the garden bed, its petals oozing that same toxic green. Spores fill the air, thick and sweet-smelling, and the edges of my vision begin to bend.
I see her. Not in the locket. Standing in the garden, whole and solid, reaching for me.
Elle.
No. Not real. Focus.
I pour everything into the bond. Every ounce of magic, every fragment of the connection between us. The locket blazes white-hot against the bark.
“She’s coming through!” Raskel screams. “Don’t stop!”
A shape forms in the light within the elm. A silhouette, familiar, pulling itself together from scattered moments—
And then Peeble, who has been dodging spores and screaming about beetle murder for the last thirty seconds, banks hard to avoid a lunging vine, overcorrects, and slams directly into me.
Into the locket.
Into the gate.
The world inverts. The light that was building in the elm detonates outward, a soundless explosion that throws Leo and Sarah backward, tears the vines apart, and rips the ground out from under my feet. I grab for the locket, grab for the bark, grab for anything solid, but there’s nothing.
Peeble screams in my ear. Or maybe I’m the one screaming.
We’re pulled. Not forward, not backward—inward. Through the gate, through the light, through something that has no direction and no shape. Jo’s house vanishes. The garden vanishes. The sky vanishes.
There is only darkness.
Not absence of light. Presence of void. Thick, textured, alive in a way that darkness shouldn’t be. It presses against my skin, fills my lungs, crawls behind my eyes.
The locket is still in my hand. I can feel it. Warm. Pulsing.
Somewhere in the infinite dark, very far away and impossibly close, I feel her.
“Kaelren?” Peeble’s voice, small and stripped of all bravado, reaches me from somewhere to my left. “Kaelren, where are we?”
I don’t have an answer.
The darkness swallows us whole.