The ride back to camp is faster than it should be. The bees sense urgency, or maybe they sense the wrongness vibrating through the air like a tone just below hearing. My corruption flares along my arms, the marks twisting with an agitation that isn't mine. It's reactive. Something is pulling at the fabric of things, and the darkness in my blood can feel it.
When we reach camp, the damage is worse.
Tents are knocked sideways, support poles snapped, supplies scattered across churned ground. The central fire pit is a mess of kicked embers and overturned pots. It hit significantly harderhere, and the reason doesn't go unnoticed. Our camp sits closer to the Earth realm border. The thin place where Wynmire and the human world press against each other like two hands separated by glass.
Whatever just happened, it came from that direction.
I'm barking orders to secure the perimeter, check for injuries, and get those fires contained when I hear it. The heavy drone of Kevin's wings, louder than usual, frantic. Bryx and Mora burst into camp like the ground itself is chasing them. Kevin lands hard, and Bryx practically falls off his back.
Mora's face is pale. The worry evident and written all over her expression.
"Kaelren." Bryx's voice is stripped of its usual humor, his compound eyes wide and dark. "You need to come. Now."
"What happened?"
Bryx and Mora exchange a look containing an entire conversation in a single glance.
"It's the Earth realm," Mora says, and her voice shakes. "Something is wrong. The crossing—it's destabilizing. The borders are thinning in places they shouldn't be, and there are fractures spreading through the barrier like—" She swallows hard. "Like fissures spreading through glass. If we don't stabilize it—"
"How bad?" I cut in.
Bryx looks at me, and for the first time since I've known him, I see genuine fear behind those compound eyes. Not the theatrical alarm he wears for laughs. The real thing.
"Bad enough that Elle's grandmother's house is sitting on top of the worst fracture," he says. "And bad enough that if we don't moveright now, there won't be a border left to stabilize."
The locket burns against my chest, hot with the echo of her presence.
I'm already running.
We freeze at the border.
All of us, simultaneously, as if the air itself has thrown up a wall. Because it has.
The last time I crossed between realms, the boundary was invisible. A thin place you could feel but not see, just a shimmer in the air if you caught it at the right angle. What stands before us now is something else entirely. A visible barrier stretches across the landscape from ground to sky, a flowing wall of color that shifts and pulses. Rainbow hues bleed into one another in slow, nauseating waves. It hums.
“Was it like this when you came through earlier?” I ask Bryx.
He shakes his head, compound eyes reflecting the shifting colors. “No. It was acting strange. The shimmer was thicker than normal, like the border was starting to distort. But this?” he gestures at the wall of light. “This wasn’t here two hours ago. We barely made it back to Wynmire before a massive crack split open behind us.”
“Crack,” I repeat.
“In the ground. A big one. Right along the border.”
I walk toward the edge of the rainbow haze, close enough that the colors wash across my skin and make the corruption marks writhe in agitation. The ground beneath my feet changes texture, harder, more brittle, and I look down.
The crack Bryx described is worse than I imagined. It isn't a crack. It’s a cavern. A deep, jagged wound torn through the earth where the border between realms should be, its edges raw and uneven, dropping into darkness so absolute my fae sight can’t find the bottom. The rainbow haze pours over its edges and down into the void, colors swirling into nothing.
I lean forward to get a better look.
The ground bucks.
Not a tremor this time. A full, violent heave that throws me forward off my feet. I pitch toward the edge, arms reaching for something, anything, and then the ground crumbles beneath my hands. I go over. My head cracks against the side of the cavern wall on the way down, and my vision collapses.
For a heartbeat, maybe two, there’s nothing. Just darkness and the sensation of falling.
Then pain snaps me back. My vision swims, blurs, refocuses, and I realize I’m dangling. Someone has my leg, my body swinging against the cavern wall, the bottomless dark yawning below me.
“Kaelren, I can’t hold your large ass forever,” Sarnyx’s voice, strained through gritted teeth. I look up to see her braced against the edge, both hands locked around my ankle, thorns extended from her bracers and dug into the earth for purchase. “How about you use some of that useful magic of yours before my arms give out?”
