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.
