Page 165 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

The Ybris. Only a girl—a child.

Snow stepped to my side. “What is this place?”

The girl hopped from the rock. “A purgatory of sorts, you’re partly in Caligo and partly in Numengarth. Crossing neither yet stepping neither. A between land.” Trees groaned with each step she took, almost drawn to her. “I guard the sceptre as you might have already guessed. It gets pretty lonely here but now I am saved.” She stopped a few feet from Snow, eyeing my wife with a curiosity I didn’t like. “How are you so grown? Has he brought you down here to trap you with me?”

Snow frowned at her. “Trap?”

The girl blinked with confusion but nodded. “Did master Blackwell bring you here?”

“Who is Blackwell?” I asked.

“The Dark Crafter who chained me here.”

Blackwell was dead and she was a forever prisoner of wherever this was.

“Has there been anyone before us?” Snow asked. “To come here and look for the sceptre.”

The girl sighed. “A few, but not many manage to pass through the veil to begin with.” She perked as if in remembrance. “There have been many trying to come play with me these past few months, few that have managed to even pass the feathery beasts in the cave. But they all die so quickly. And they rot even quicker,” she said, sounding almost upset.

Snow's face tightened at her words, and she extended a hand to the girl. “We need the sceptre piece, young lady, where is it?”

The girl blinked rapidly and moved back as if scared from Snow. “Master has promised to free me if I protect it well and I want to play before I kill you.”

“The sceptre piece and I'll send you to play in the Otherworld,” Snow demanded again.

I winced a little bit at her harsh words, considering the way the innocent looking child’s eyes widened and teared up in horror. “That wasn’t very nice, my love.”

Snow gave a look. “Would you rather I let her kill us, or worse, free the jolly bird onto our realm?”

Good point. Bad priorities.

The little girl’s face shifted with a wild scowl, soon her hands tightened in fists and her hair floated furiously as if under a vortex of wind and her body gradually turned to complete blue ice. The shift caught us by surprise, and we gawked at the creature she became. Ice crept all around her, freezing the forest as it aimed for us. Backing away from her reach, our backs met a large tree trunk stopping us from going further. Suddenly, branches curved around our bodies trapping us under them. Verglaser and Senchi. Ice and Vegetation.

I swung my Adriatian steel upward, cutting through the branches and freeing myself and Snow.

Snow let out a bolt of lightning, the magic not even reaching close to the girl as she blocked it with hundreds of thick branches. Blow after blow from Snow, she blocked and attacked twice as hard. For each burst of ice Snow summoned, the girl doubled it. Black tattoo markings had doubled on Snow's face from the amount of magic she’d called from the seal. When her hands began to shake, I knew she had pushed beyond her limit.

“Enough,” I said, pulling her hands down. “If this is an in-between world, the flow of your magic through the seal to Caligo is cut.”

She breathed hard. “You suggest we die?”

“I suggest you don’t die.”

The hybrid girl was not only strong, but she was extremely smart, trying to tire us out without sending the last landing blow. “She is playing with us, like she said,” I told Snow, while I furiously cut through the tentacles of branches coming in our direction.

“Play with me!” The girl screeched and the earth almost shook as if in command. Trees twisted their trunks and then furiously shook till they pushed from the ground as if alive, walking on their roots toward us.

“We are getting beaten by a ten-year-old,” Snow panted, grasping her daggers with shaky hands.

I gathered her in my arms. “Shut your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t have you see what I will do.”

Her dark brows pulled in a frown. “What happens if your magic exhausts your mana? You’re not an elemental.”

“You doubt me too much, my love. Shut your pretty eyes.”