Page 93 of Keldori By Daybreak

Magick flickered feebly in my hands, and Linsey’s eyes met mine. They widened in recognition, her lips started to form my name, and then she burst from her skin into an overgrown mess of claw and shadow as the lake surged forward and swallowed us.

21. Intro to Entropic Reactions

Lake water, dark and thick with sludge, crashed forward, carrying me and Ciarán in a tangle of limbs. I slammed into something solid—Linsey’s rotsbane, I think—but careened away before she could snag me with her claws.

The water pulled at me from every angle, and my grip on Ciarán loosened and slipped, and even though I knew I was probably about to be slammed into a canyon wall by an impossible amount of water and be killed instantly, I didn’t want to be alone when that happened.

But Ciarán continued to slip, his fingers scrambling for a grip on my hoodie as I tried to keep hold of the edges of his armor. I screamed for him, but acrid water that had been sitting at the bottom of a lake for too long filled my mouth and lungs, and Ciarán was getting harder to hold onto.

My fingers gave way, and my hoodie pulled taut around me, then slackened. I somersaulted through raging water and debris, then bounced off the canyon wall, though not hard enough to kill me. My hoodie tightened around my neck, and the dark lifted.

Raging water broke over my head and I got to see the star-studded sky and its dual moons one last time before unconsciousness claimed me.

I dreamed about Linsey. I dreamed about her swinging effigy in the forest when she’d tricked me into thinking she’d killed herself. I dreamed about the smug look on her face when I’d come out of that forest covered in twigs and dirt. I dreamed about the video she’d posted of my mom online.

I dreamed about her trying to say my name before Ferrin stuffed her full of volatile magick. I dreamed about her face splitting and releasing the rotsbane underneath. And I dreamed about her mother, a woman she’d no doubt inherited her bitter spirit from, screaming when her daughter refused to wake up in the morning, not knowing she was still alive in a parallel world but living out a fate worse than death.

A gentle lurching gait carried me into the waking world, and I opened my eyes to jade fur pressed against my face. Sun warmed my back, but when I pushed away from Una to come to a sitting position on her back, my front was still wet from the flood.

The world spun, twisting the surrounding moorland in a kaleidoscope of sky and flower-dotted heath.

“Careful.” An arm wrapped around my waist from behind, steadying my position.

“Linsey.” It was all I could muster through my dry mouth and throat.

Ciarán’s chest heaved against my back as he sighed. “The best we can do is hope she drowned.”

I bowed my head, hiding my face behind tangles of hair, and stared at the fur between Una’s shoulders. I was afraid to close my eyes. If I did, I might see Linsey’s face just before she turned into a rotsbane, with eyes wide with recognition and fear even though she didn’t know what was about to happen to her.

“And if she didn’t drown, can we fix her?”

“No.”

Entropy was the theory of chaos. The universe was falling into disorder because disorder took less energy. Less magick.

It was why heat dispersed in a cold room. It was why metal left in the rain rusted. It was why Skal turned Magicians and Nightmares inside out.

The higher the entropy, the harder it was to reverse what had been done, because chaos was the natural order of the universe.

And that was exactly what Linsey’s transformation had been—a high entropy reaction that would be near impossible to reverse. It was a cold description of a brutal reality.

“So she’s dead. Back at home.” I buried my fingers in Una’s fur.

“Yes.”

“But her mom—”

“Let’s focus on catching up with the others.”

I nodded, vaguely wondering if Mom would hear the news, and if she did, if she’d be able to figure out what had probably happened.

“We didn’t drown,” I said, forcing myself to think about anything other than Linsey.

“You can thank Una for that.”

I leaned forward so that my face rested in the scruff of Una’s neck, both in thanks and because sitting upright was making the pounding in my head worse. “And Ferrin?”

“I don’t know.”