“Same time next week?” I ask.
Dr. Thorne inclines his head. “Indeed. Until next week, Miss Hallowind.”
I practically bounce out of the Destiny Sphere.
Wylder waits in the corridor, leaning against the stone wall with his arms crossed. He straightens when he sees me walking instead of being carried.
“Look at you, still conscious. You’re not even bleeding.”
“Right? When you start by assplanting, there’s nowhere to go but up.” I can’t keep the grin off my face.
He falls into step beside me as we head toward the training grounds. Rowan and Orion are supposed to be finishing up their afternoon sessions and will be joining us. The grounds of Arcana seem even more brilliant today.
Maybe it’s just me on an energy high, but I’d swear everything feels sharper. The colors of nature surround me in a verdant embrace. The ley lines feed this entire pocketed world, pumping power and awareness through me like veins of light.
“I can’t wait to show Rowan the new trick you showed me with the…”
The world tilts, and my reality shifts.
Power slams into me from nowhere, a crushing wave that has nothing to do with my magic. It’s external, wrong, and the force of it drives me to my knees.
My vision whites out.
I hear Wylder shout my name, feel his hands on my shoulders, but everything is distant and muffled. The power keeps coming, pouring into me from some unseen source, filling me past capacity until I’m drowning in it.
My last thought before darkness swallows me is that this isn’t my magic.
Then, the manicured lawn rushes up to meet my face, and everything goes black.
I wake to the smell of sulfur and ash.
My eyes snap open. The training ground is gone. Instead, I’m sprawled out on a slab of black stone that pulses with veins of molten red, heat radiating through cracks in the rock and into my palms. The sky overhead—if you can call it a sky—roils with crimson clouds shot through with silver lightning that never quite strikes.
“Welcome, Poppy Hallowind.”
The voice scrapes across my consciousness like claws on bone. Not one voice. Many. All speaking in unison, layered and discordant.
My scramble to get to my feet is uncoordinated, my heart hammering against my ribs. The nightmarish landscape stretches endlessly in all directions. Jagged obsidian spires pierce upward. Rivers of fire carve channels through the wasteland of stone. The oppressive air hangs heavy and tastes of decay, burning, and hopelessness.
And standing before me is something that shouldn’t exist.
The demon before me is tall. Too tall. His limbs extend at angles that make my eyes water to track them, his frame skeletal beneath taut, blackened, leathery skin marked with glowing red script that shifts and writhes. Where his face should be, there’s only a smooth bone mask, and a vertical mouth that splits it from crown to sternum, lined with teeth that move independently of each other.
My magic surges.
But not in defense.
It reaches toward him like a flower turning toward the sun, eager and hungry in a way that makes my stomach twist with revulsion. Something inside me hums in recognition, pulling against my control as if trying to answer a call I can’t hear.
“What the hell?”
“Close.” The mouth curves. “But not quite.”
I stumble back a step, wrapping my arms around myself as if that might contain the power straining beneath my skin. “What’s happening? What are you doing to my magic?”
Why does it want him?
The thought barely forms before the slit in his sternum widens, revealing more teeth than any mouth should hold.
