Chapter 25 #3
I shook my head to snap to attention. I shouldn’t be standing here amazed. I should get the hell out of here. I scrambled toward the trestle table. Snapping the rabbit’s cage door open, I scooped the animal out, clutching it against my chest. “Hang on, Your Majesty.”
The General raged around the clearing. “Don’t let them escape! Everyone, get her!”
The ghostly villagers surged after me all at once.
Rabb called out in my mind, “Watch out, Allie!”
I yelped, darting just beyond one’s grasp, narrowly escaping getting slammed by another, and kicking a third one away.
“Hatter,” the General hollered. “What are you doing? Tie her back up!”
A burst of magic spewed from the Hatter. His small figure glowed, his eyes mere slits. With a massive shockwave of energy, chains of light streaked through the air as crackling electricity filled the forest.
The onslaught of power shunting through me as I ran, I almost tumbled over.
Light swallowed the world as the entire clearing exploded.
The earth split apart with a deafening crack; the ground convulsing beneath us as a jagged fissure tore through it and exposed a churning pit of vicious, molten lava glowing beneath the shattered rock.
“Oh my god—” I gasped in horror.
Ahead, the land groaned and shifted in a violent subduction, one side heaving upward above the other in a spray of stone and ash over the seething fire below.
“Hatter, are you doing this? You’re destroying everything!” the General bleated in panic.
The ghostly villagers seemed to shake themselves awake from a trance, some tumbling across the trembling ground, some scampering away from the breaking land.
The Hatter and his magic were imploding on themselves, finally breaking under the sustained stress of the otherworldly energy.
With another deafening snap, the forest floor beneath my feet tilted to one side, worktables, crates, loose stones, and even the fantastic machine itself started to slide helplessly across the shifting earth. Everything was on a headlong plunge into the boiling magma.
“We have to get out of here.” The rabbit’s nose twitched in panic.
Scrambling to keep upright, I racked my brain, my eyes darting around for a solution.
Think! Think! Think!
The ancient tree was across the way, over the giant wall of stone rising before us, past the roiling magma. I had to get to the tree hollow. It was the only way out.
My gaze snagged on the Hatter’s giant umbrella leaning against a wooden crate. I lunged for it, fingers closing around the slick handle just as another tremor splintered through the earth.
With a loud grunt of effort, I pushed the wheeled crate marked ‘EXPLOSIVES’ to give it enough momentum to help it slide across the grass.
The ground bucked violently beneath my feet as I sprinted toward the jagged split in the earth, molten lava churning far below in furious waves of orange and gold as heat blasted upward in suffocating bursts.
Loose stones skidded into the abyss around me, the fractured path rising sharply where the land had thrust upward beyond reach.
The rabbit wriggled against my chest. “What the hell are you doing?”
I clenched my jaw. “I’m going to jump.”
His eyes bulged. “Jump? Into the lava pit? Are you mad? My magic is weak, Allie. We won’t survive—”
“Just hold on!”
The crate of explosives tipped over the side of the uneven floor, hurling downward into the magma and vanishing into the molten churn one after another.
“You cannot possibly know this will work.”
I clicked my tongue. “But it might.”
The explosions ignited below.
A thunderous blast erupted from the lava pit, fire and molten rock bursting skyward as a violent gust of heated air roared upward through the fissure.
I snapped the umbrella open and jumped.
The canopy caught the rising current so hard it nearly ripped from my grasp.
A gust of air launched me off the crumbling ledge.
For one sickening heartbeat, I dropped, the lava blazing beneath my feet close enough to scorch, the umbrella jerking wildly in the violent turbulence as though it would collapse entirely beneath my weight.
Then the updraft struck fully.
The umbrella lurched upward.
Tightening my grip around the rabbit, I cried out as I was thrown into the heated current, my descent slowing into a precarious glide as the explosions continued to thunder beneath me. The umbrella strained and shuddered, tilting perilously as I drifted toward the elevated side of the broken land.
For one terrible moment, it looked as though I would fall short.
Then another surge of heated air caught beneath the canopy, lifting me just enough that I slammed hard onto the higher ledge as the fractured ground collapsed into the magma below.
“NO!” the General cried out in despair.
I didn’t need to turn back to see, to sense his wretched agony whilst all his work fell to ruins.
I staggered onto unsteady feet amid the trembling earth. Through a curtain of creeping fog, I spotted the massive ancient tree ahead, its hollow trunk pulsing with an eerie red glow beneath the dangling curtains of moss.
With the roar of molten earth rising ever louder behind me, and the rabbit clutched against my shoulder, I leaped into the hole hidden within the heart of the tree.