Chapter 52: Chapter 49: Cooldown Timer

 

The brightness of my magic should have blinded me. It probably should have burned a hole through my cornea that came out the back of my head, it was so bright. It didn’t. Instead, I saw, perfectly illuminated, everything that had been hidden by the shadows and the trees in perfect, vivid, horrifying detail for a half a second that stretched out for what felt like a minute. 

 

I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing the creature that had been talking in my head. My life would have been just as full and happy, perhaps even more so, if the light in front of me hadn’t shone on the writhing mass in front of me. The creature, this crawling chaos, was impossible to discern. What had felt like oppressive darkness before now seemed to be teeming with… something. It was at once a singular mass, stretched across the darkness like a net, thrumming with horrid life, and a writhing, seething collection of what seemed to be smaller creatures. Calling the things that composed its body insects would be doing arthropods a disservice. They slithered and slipped through and around each other, a million eyes and legs skittering to form a body that was all teeth and tentacles. And all of it recoiled, away through the darkness. Its hiss was deafening, a thousand mouths becoming one, wailing in agony. My eyes were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to focus on anything in the miasma. 

 

As quickly as the light had flashed into existence, it faded only slowly. My gut feeling had been correct. This thing was truly vulnerable to the light, but I felt there was more to it. When I’d extended my hand, my intention hadn’t been to harm, or to conjure up light as such. I had rejected its entire premise, built on a lack of worth that the people around me had helped to solidify. I had refused, apparently not just on an emotional but also on a more literal, magical level, to accept everything it stood for, and it had retreated into the shadows that seemed to be its home and its hunting grounds. I didn’t know if it was wounded, scared or angry, but I could tell it would leave us alone.

 

Of course, a flash of light like that woke everyone else up. I heard scrambling behind me and I turned around almost in a daze. My mind was still refusing to process the swirling mass I’d seen earlier. Morgana took me by the shoulders and shook me. 

 

“What happened?! What did you do?” she demanded, her voice a rasping whisper. 

 

I blinked a few times, before my ability to speak came back to me. I felt… tired, as if I’d just run a marathon. “I… it wanted to steal me, I think…” Words didn’t make much sense, and I was suddenly having a hard time processing what had happened. 

 

“And?! What then?” Morgana seemed to be flitting between furious, terrified and curious.

 

“I didn’t let it,” I said, and was just in time to see Kazumi and Sabine rush over when everything went dark and the forest floor came up to greet me. 

 

I didn’t exactly come to. Not as such. I lost all sense of the passage of time, of space. I drifted in and out of consciousness. 

 

I was back in Whitehallow. Sabine and Kazumi were there, in my arms, and I in theirs. The sun baked the rolling hills, the wind waving fields of grain like water on which we sailed our castle through the blue skies. Sabine’s soft touch like dipping your feet in a cold stream on a hot day, cool at first but infinitely refreshing. Her eyes a deep crimson, beautiful and only an inch away from my face. My heart fluttered; and her cold lips touched mine and I fell backwards into a night of only stars. Kazumi wrapped herself around me, her tail warm and strong, and our foreheads touched. I didn’t know if I cried in the dream or in person, if her kissing my tears was real or imagined. My feelings for them ran deep, and I was deeply grateful that they were with me even when I was asleep. 

 

The trees moved past us above me. I was on a stretcher of sorts, being dragged forward. The wood wasn’t as dark as it had been before. There was a greyness to everything, a lack of contrast. Was that me? Was I imagining things? Or was this the Deepwood Morgana had talked about? One by one, I saw familiar faces drifting in and out of reality. My loves, the ones who even now made my skin tingle and my heart get stuck in my throat, walked next to me, touched my face for a moment. 

 

I was back in Whitehallow, leaning on the bannisters, my hair whipping in the wind. Sally sat next to me on the parapets, her hands around her knees, with a shit-eating grin on her face. The sun reflected softly off her horns and she was laughing about something. Erza had her eyes closed, a subtle smile on her lips as she soaked in the evening sun. Someone said something I didn’t hear and I felt a giggle rise up in my throat and let myself be swept away on the evening breeze, wings spread wide. 

 

I took a deep breath and smelled wood and leaves. Morgana’s face was close to mine, Erza’s hovering over her shoulder. They were speaking, but their voices were muffled, as if they were coming from underwater. I picked up words like “safe” and “okay,” but that was it. 

 

Everything went dark again for a moment. I wished it would stay that way. When I woke up, nothing especially terrible was happening, nothing except a throbbing headache. I wished I could keep my eyes closed and drift back off to summer spent with the people I cared about. Instead, someone seemed to find it necessary to hammer the insides of my eyes and temples with a pneumatic hammer. Every heartbeat was agony, so I decided to try looking. 

 

“Ow,” I said, to nobody in particular. The camp slowly came into focus. We were still in the part of the forest that I thought had been a part of my imagination before. Close to the fire, the trees had colour, a reddish brown. But outside of it, their colours, all colours, became shades of grey. The trees, the forest, lacking in colour, now fully came into view. The trees here were hundreds of feet tall, and looking up gave me a distinct feeling of vertigo, the fear that if I stared too long I’d be falling towards the thick foliage in the distance above.

 

The others rushed over to me. Kazumi and Sabine first, both hesitant to throw their arms around, both seemingly fighting the urge to do exactly that. Morgana was close behind them. She seemed uncharacteristically worried, although it might be that she was simply wondering if I had fallen victim to the crawling chaos after all. I couldn’t blame her, not really. 

 

“How are you feeling?” she asked. Sabine moved back a little, and I could see a bit more clearly. I was still small, which made sense. It was probably a lot easier to transport me that way. 

 

“Like my skull is a grinder and my brain is about to come out of my ears,” I responded. I groaned for emphasis and raised a heavy hand to my forehead. “Ow,” I added. Morgana smirked. I assumed that that meant that a headache was good news somehow. I didn’t feel like it was, but I was biased.

 

“That makes sense,” she mumbled and turned back and motioned to Erza, who walked over, producing a small flask from one of the many pouches on her belt. She handed it to Morgana, who handed it to me. “You fought a creature older than most civilizations,” she said with a frown on her face. “And it looks like you won.”

 

I blinked a few times. “I d--” I began, but Morgana wasn’t going to let me finish my sentence before forcing me to bring the little green bottle to my lips. It tasted horrible, which was how I knew it was probably going to help. Still, I was having trouble keeping it down, and I coughed when I finally finished it. I was waiting for something for a second, but nothing changed.

 

“It’ll take about half an hour,” Erza said, clearly able to read minds. 

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“Ech,” I said, smacking my lips. It didn’t help with the taste, but making a face seemed appropriate. I saw Kazumi smile and softly rub my shoulder. I reached up and squeezed her hand. “So you were saying,” I turned to Morgana, “I did what? I just flashed a light, didn’t I?”

 

She shook her head. “You didn’t walk to the edge of camp on your own volition, Eliza. You’re not that stupid, and I doubt you’re suicidal. It must’ve gotten into your head already. But then you chased it out, somehow.”

 

I frowned. “How?” Did my magic chase it out of my head? Or did I? I looked around. 

 

Morgan shrugged, but her attempted indifference was not reflected in her eyes. She seemed completely nonplussed. “I have no idea.”

 

“How long have I--”

 

Sabine softly kissed my cheek. “Two days. We’re in the Deepwood.”

 

I looked up. “But it’s not as dark here…” 

 

Morgana nodded and stood up. “The things that hunt and prowl in the Redwood… this is where they rest. This is, for all intents and purposes, a sanctuary. The eye of the storm, of a sorts. But here more than anywhere, we do not want to disturb the peace.”

 

I looked around. Now that there was some visibility, the forest seemed surprisingly empty. Now that there were barely any shadows, all the things I’d imagined lurking in them were gone too. It was just dark, grey and desolate. 

 

“Hopefully we won’t run into anything here,” she mumbled. “But we’re still on the right course. If you can walk, I estimate that by tomorrow we’ll be out of the Redwood.”

 

I nodded, which proved to be a mistake. I closed my eyes again. “Gimme a few.” Morgana and Erza walked off, I heard, but Kazumi and Sabine stayed by me, both sitting next to me and making me feel safe, nestled against a tree. 

 

After an hour, Erza’s medicine started working, and the painful pressure behind my eyes started to subside. Another thirty minutes and I felt good enough to get up and eat something. Silently, we had a meal around the fire, the last of our salted fish, before we began the last leg of our journey through the forest. I saw a lot of relieved faces looking at me, and a lot of worried ones. Tilly, seemingly uncaring, was chomping down on her food, and it made me smile to know that some things didn’t really change. Without the oppressive darkness, I figured she was much more comfortable. 

 

We packed all of our things -- though I noticed that my pack was a lot lighter and I couldn’t help but wonder who had taken some of the weight out of it -- and for the first time I walked through the Deepwood on my own strength. It was a strange place, almost surreal, like watching a silent film. Sound propagated infinitely, bouncing off the trees until everything sounded like a hushed whisper. 

 

We kept quiet for most of it, and I was a little disheartened to find that the shadows between the trees were beginning to deepen again. We were reaching the edge of the Deepwood, which meant that true darkness would be around us again soon. I hoped that our second journey through the abyss would be less eventful.

 

Of course, I utterly failed to knock on wood. 

 

There was a sound, off in the distance, slow and painful, and I knew instinctively that one of the trees was starting to topple. A massive plant like that, splintering at its base and shattering everything in its path as it slowly fell over, was a terrifying thought. Hundreds of feet, thousands of tons of dying wood crashing down to the forest floor was scary enough, but what really got to me was wondering what could cause something like that to fall over. 

 

The crashing seemed to last for minutes. At first we just stood still, trying to figure out which direction it was coming from, but after a while Morgana urged us to keep going, pick up the pace, and we did. 

 

“What was that?” I asked her.

 

“I doubt we wish to find out, unless you wish to test your mettle against everything in these woods,” she said, and began to turn away when we felt a rumbling underneath us. “I think,” she said, “we should start running.” She raised her voice enough so we could hear her over the noise that was coming from behind us, from all around us, the sound of a thousand animals that lived hidden in these woods, all beginning to panic. 

 

As we started to move faster and raised our lanterns to the deepening dark behind us, we could hear the sounds of a growing stampede behind us getting closer.

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