Page 163 of Keldori By Daybreak

Everything was heat and noise and the breaking of my bones, but I’d been breathing Skal all night, and I would use it to turn the earth inside out if that was what it took to escape.

My magick made this land.

Now it would destroy it.

And if it destroyed us, too, so be it.

Mycelium snapped, and the earth rushed upwards. I landed in the loam next to Ciarán, surrounded by molten rock and steam. Blue spores still hung on the air, but the landscape was stained in fiery reds and oranges as earth churned.

Ergoth’s screams subsided to a faint whistle, and then faded on the wind as fungi continued to collapse in the distance.

“Ciarán?” I reached for his face as dark fog at the corners of my vision impeded the light of the lava. The mycelium that had bound him had receded, but he lay immobile, and my head was silent, devoid of the buzzing of his thoughts. “Did we…did we make it?”

The darkness won. I slipped into unconsciousness.

34. Geological Climatology III

Ice cut into my cheek, and wind howled overhead. Thin strands tickled at the back of my neck, and I jolted upright, clawing at my nape before Ergoth’s mycelium could burrow back beneath my skin.

“No!” I tore at my skin. Ergoth’s mycelium, it was—

It was just my hair, stirred by storm winds.

I continued clawing, trying to erase the feeling from my skin, then scratched at my arms, face, chest—anywhere I could reach. It wasn’t enough. It never would be, not when I could still feel the ghosts of root tendrils twisting through my viscera.

“Wren, you stop that right now and tell me what the hell is going on!” The snapping voice stayed my clawing, and I froze on the ground to look up at Gams. “A volcano, Wren? A goddam volcano in the middle of the continent where I very specifically did not put a volcano? That was you I just felt, wasn’t it? Blowing things up!? Are you trying to wake the mountains faster?”

Her storm was weighing on her. Aging her. She looked closer to how I remembered, though her hair was still long, and her dress still gossamer.

This version of Gams suited the storm better. Something about her graying hair and the lines in her face I was so familiar with looked all the more powerful and terrifying—though that might have been the fire in her eyes behind her round spectacles.

She was angrier with me than she had ever been before, but I could still feel Ergoth’s mycelium snaking around my spine. I could still see the rotting Magicians gasping for air. I could still smell death, sickly sweet and fetid, as it burned at the inside of my sinuses.

And Ciarán…

Ciarán needed me.

“I can’t be here!” I staggered to my feet and looked out into the haze of Gams’s storm, as if I might see all the way to the fungal forest. However, I couldn’t even see to the shore. “I have to go back. Ergoth—”

“Ergoth?”

The wind stopped, and snow settled across the broken ice as silence rang out. A final peal of thunder rumbled over the Bay of Teeth.

Maybe it was the moonlight that broke through the cloud cover to bounce off the jagged ice, but Gams suddenly look paler.

“Ergoth?” Gams hissed again in a pained whisper. She staggered across the ice to take my shoulders in her shaking hands. Ice clung to her eyelashes, and her cheeks flushed with anger and cold. “Ergoth!? Wren Warrender, you tell me right now—you did not go into the strath!”

“I did!” I pushed her away from me. My fight with Ergoth was over, but my panic and my adrenaline screamed for some new outlet. And how dare Gams look at me with so much anger when I was doing this all for her? “I went into the strath! Because I’m trying to save you! Because my friends are going to drown at Lyria’s doorway! Because I don’t want Ferrin letting rotsbane into Keldori and destroying everything! Because I don’t want my grandmother to die!”

“No one asked you to do all that! In fact, I recall specifically asking you not—”

“My grandma is going to die, and you think I care about what everyone is telling me to do?” Tears needled behind my eyes, then stung my cheeks as they met the frigid air there.

“Your grandmother is going to die of a heart attack at the rate you’re going!” Gams snapped. “Ergoth, Wren! Ergoth!”

My hair brushed at the back of my neck again, and I whimpered and clutched my nape. Gams’s angry facade softened, bringing her closer still to the Gams I recognized from Keldori.

“My dear girl,” Gams sighed, “don’t worry. I’ll think of something to get you out. As long as your consciousness is here with me, Ergoth can’t feed on your fears.”