Page 157 of Keldori By Daybreak

I fell back to the ground as Ciarán’s mother looped the orange string of her longbow around Ciarán’s neck. His fingers scrabbled at the ligature, and his eyes locked with mine as his mother dragged him into the shadows of the fungi where Una and Ferrin’s apparition had already disappeared.

“Let him go!” I finally managed to climb to my feet, and a fresh arrow zipped from the shadows to catch me in the stomach and embed in my spine.

I keeled backwards, and towers of fungus swam overhead through a spore-laden haze. My leg didn’t hurt anymore because I couldn’t feel anything lower than where the arrow had struck me.

The arrow dissolved like the others had, but when I tried to roll onto my stomach, only my shoulders and arms obeyed. I dug my hands into the loam of the earth, bracing against the agony that umbrellaed through my chest.

“Ciarán—” The silence of the forest stifled my broken gasp.

“Run, Wren! We can’t beat them!” His voice, broken and desperate, in my head was a small mercy. He wasn’t dead. Not yet.

“I can’t.” I held my hand over the wound and heat swelled in my palm as I pulled on more healing magick. “I’m coming after you. I—”

I broke off as my spinal cord rewired itself at my magick’s bidding, and electricity coursed through my legs. Pain erupted in my shin, but I focused on the hole in my stomach before I allowed myself to sit and tend to anything else.

I grit my teeth against the burning of healing magick in my stomach. Pressure nudged at me along that invisible tether between me and the earth.

This level of healing was too much for the volcanoes, and the land rattled ominously in my head, but I couldn’t stop. Not when Ciarán needed me.

“Anything the spores make us hallucinate, our magick makes real!” Ciarán’s telepathic warning sounded too loud in the silence of the forest. “We’re fighting our own nightmares, Wren! You need to get out!”

“Keep fighting.” I grunted and forced myself to stand. I would heal my leg as I ran. There wasn’t time otherwise. “I’m coming!”

“We can’t win, Wren! No one can! The stronger we are, the stronger they are too!”

“They haven’t killed you yet!” I took the first running step in the direction Ciarán’s headless parents had dragged him. Magick screamed in my leg, but the pain only spurred me forward. “I’m coming! Ciarán, I’m—”

Fresh panic reverberated along our tether, and my heart constricted in my throat.

“No, no, no!” Ciarán begged. “Stop! Wren, run! Get out! You won’t—”

Ciarán’s voice cut off in panicked howls that ricocheted through my mind, filled my skull, and turned my freshly healed stomach to lead.

“Ciarán!” I screamed, trying to cut through the noise that crescendoed in my head. “Ciarán, hold on!”

My own panic swirled against his, and his screams of terror turned my mind to slush. I wasn’t sure I was even sprinting in the right direction anymore. All I knew was I needed to go faster. I needed to reach him. I needed to save him.

More horrible than Ciarán’s screams was when they cut, replaced by sudden and sharp silence.

I staggered to a halt, and fear wrapped my chest in an iron fist. The ember of his presence flickered at the back of my head, muted and distant, but there.

“Just hold on. I’m almost there.” But that was a lie, and as I scanned the surrounding forest, I was met with rough bark and distant canopies of leafy trees. Real, proper trees, just like the ones back home.

Had I really made it through Mycastrath? I should’ve been relieved. Instead, my throat seized.

Not only had I somehow gone too far, but I was alone in the woods.

My breathing turned shallow, and I pivoted, unsure of which direction I’d come here from, unsure of where to go next.

“Wren, help!” Hauntingly familiar and horribly impossible, the voice was too feminine to be Ciarán’s.

“Linsey?” I stammered.

“Help me!” she screamed again.

“You’re not real!” I yelled back and pressed my hands over my ears when the underbrush rustled in response.

It was just the woods. I’d faced so much worse since graduation night. Monsters, Magicians, the potential end of the world…