Page 85 of The Blight of Hollowmire

I swallow, gathering my courage.

“Blight Mother?”

A dark laugh splits the early morning air, coming from every direction at once. In the distance a lone wolf howls and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.

“Silence, knight,” the Blight Mother hisses. The ground trembles again—harder this time—and I almost lose my footing.

Vireth stands jerkily, her movements awkward and lacking the grace with which she normally moves. I watch in horror as her antlers grow upward, pressing through her hair that’s still tangled from our lovemaking. Suddenly, I am acutely aware that we are both still naked, and I snatch my breeches and shirt from the ground.

The bones that have vibrated up through the soil begin to clatter together, bouncing upon the shaking ground as though they are being puppeted by a great unseen force. They begin to wriggle across the ground into collections, or piles, until they begin to form the skeletons of the long-dead beasts they once belonged to.

I recognize skeletal bears, wolves, foxes, and hares, along with a number of birds hopping around—then there are the creatures that I know hail only from this realm, like the wyreboar. An army of dead things gathers in the surrounding woods, the trees now covered in growths of mushrooms too thick to see the bark.

Vireth—no, she is not my Vireth now, she is the Blight Mother—turns in the direction of Valehar.

“It’s there,” she thunders, though I don’t think she’s speaking to me. “The imbalance. It hails from the humans.”

She takes a few halting steps forward.

“No!” I cry out, but am surprised when she whirls around.

The woman staring back at me is not my Vireth—owner of moonlight hair and oxblood eyes. Her eyes are as white as pearls, rimmed in red as black tears streak down her cheeks. Not only have her antlers grown to towering height, but small crops of mushrooms and moss now wreath her head in an odd sort of crown. Vireth’s skin is covered in the dirt and grass stains from our intimacy, but some new, terrible thing slithers beneath her pale skin—threads of black running along her veins, leaking out into dripping black liquid that falls from her fingertips and hisses when it hits the ground.

For a heartbeat, I see her eyes shift back.

“Renard!” she wails.

My chest cracks open and I rush to her, grabbing her face between my hands.

“I am here,” I tell her. “You are not alone. I will do anything, Vireth—what can I do? Tell me what to do to stop this, to help you!”

Heaving sobs wrack her body as she clings to me.

“Please,” she begs. “Don’t let me destroy it all. I cannot bear it. Take my life if you must—I cannot be the end of all things.”

“No! I will find another way!”

Horror and desperation surge, and I press my lips to hers in a kiss that feels gut-wrenchingly like goodbye.

I feel the moment the Blight Mother takes control again, the kiss turning hard and the sobs quieting.

“You are a stubborn one,” she says. “Your fae will be the instrument of my will, knight, whether it is wanted or not. The balance must be corrected.”

“Please—”

The word sounds weak beneath the groaning of roots and the endless clatter of bones.

“Please,” I say again.

The Blight Mother tilts her head, studying me with Vireth's face, and then she laughs. The sound rolls through the forest, shaking loose clouds of spores from the mushrooms choking the trees, and the ground trembles beneath my boots as the gathered dead stir around us.

“You beg for the world now?”

I force myself to meet her gaze, trying to appeal to her, or to reach Vireth within.

“There are innocent people in Valehar.”

“There are innocent people everywhere.”