She scoffed, backing up from the ring, too close to it for comfort—Even Damien’s innards squirmed standing there. “You know this thing by name?”
Damien scratched at his neck and tugged his collar. “Yes, I suppose that now, I do. Though that thing can’t be It entirely, more like a tendril of It. Regardless, It needs to be banished. You would be better off with a divine mage who can manipulate luxerna, but the four of us will have to do. Come, darkness knows how long this may take.”
No matter how skilled Damien ever grew to be, there were base rituals he had kept with him since childhood. There was rarely time to pull them out for use, never in battle certainly, but the older and more primitive and more time consuming, the more powerful. Which was exactly what they were up against.
Damien instructed the others to gather sticks and vines from outside the rot, things newly fallen and still full of life, and to arrange them in a circle outside the spire’s reach. He pulled the parchment from his pouch that he always kept on him, the translations of the Lux Codex he had carefully been reworking to counter his own magic. He wasn’t willing to risk testing it on Amma, but on this, he had no qualms. Hurting whatever It was would only be a boon.
As the witches set up the ritual, Damien was alarmed to see the ring of rot had grown. He couldn’t know for sure if he was one of the Us that It questioned him about, but there was a similarity, a link to the noxscura that was still beating at his insides to go back and discover more. But It had been distilled, a purer evil, beyond even something wholly infernal like Kaz or his father, and It had fed off of him. Had E’nloc been truly whole, It might have swallowed Damien completely, but there was no time to dwell on that.
When they had created a new ring of good, warm, living things about the corruption, Damien passed around the parchment, showing them the original spells from the Lux Codex. For hours they discussed which to use and how to modify the spells to make up for what they lacked until finally night had fallen and they were set to begin.
Damien sliced just below his collarbone, and the blood trickled down his chest, creeping out to the circle and easing into it, filling the protective barrier they’d made with noxscura as the witches pumped their own magics in alongside it. Again, there was blackness, jolts of chaos and fear, and a heavy sense of pending destruction. He could feel the others there at the beginning, their strange, earthen magic mingling with his own, but It fought back to isolate each of them, and Damien was left alone.
But he was not alone, not really. There was someone he had to return to because she told him he must, and though it had felt endless, the darkness finally cleared. The double moons hung low in the sky as dawn was breaking over the Innomina Wildwood. The spire collapsed in on itself, a heap of melted wood and sickly rot, and the forest was free of It.
Nell was still sitting upward, eyes popping open but weary, but the other two had fallen backward. Soot licked Kalani’s face, and the monkey tossed pebbles at Fior until both mumbled and stirred to confirm they were not dead, just spent.
Damien touched inside the circle, but E’nloc was gone. He lay back and closed his eyes too, falling asleep as the sun rose. When the four were whole again, they covered what was left with fallen leaves and dirt and began the long trek back to the witches’ camp.
CHAPTER 22
THE IMMUTABLE WISDOM OF TREES
Every day had been the same, and every day had been frustrating. Amma was woken early to walk through the Innomina Wildwood with Em, the elder witch, asking questions but getting very roundabout, non-answers. That was a thing older people did, and Amma knew this, expecting it had something to do with the fact that there either weren’t answers, or it would ultimately be more profitable to find them on her own, but it made it no less annoying that Em wouldn’t just saythatinstead of, “Well, you know, a tree is a lot like a loaf of bread, when you think about it,” which was probably true, but also definitely wasn’t. Then she would change the subject, pointing out a poisonous lizard or a cluster of mushrooms that would lead to the Everdark.
Amma would spend her afternoons with a number of the other witches, inside a burrow beneath the base of a tree, up in someone’s incense-filled hut, or sitting in the middle of the ruins, attempting to enter into a state they calledhessach. At first, Amma had simply sat amongst the rest of them while they were motionless with eyes closed, minds wandering off and leaving their bodies to visithessach, the place that wasn’t a place. It was the state of pure arcana, they somewhat explained, and also the sound the wind made as it blew through leaves. Amma was supposed to “go” there because if she was there, she wouldn’t pass out, she guessed. As the days went on, she was able to close her eyes too, to fall still, and to see things. Sort of. At least, she thought it might be working, or she was slowly falling for the huge prank being pulled on her.
But it was silver things, specifically, that Amma was seeing, and though no one would tell her exactly whathessachlooked like, she had enough experience with arcana to recognize magic when she saw it.
Evenings were spent trying to call up roots from the ground to form a staff, an “easy” thing, they all said, but Amma couldn’t do it. She could touch flowers and make them bloom, and she could force things to grow larger and fuller, but that wasn’t what the witches wanted out of her, and by the sixth day, she was beginning to worry she would never get it which was rather silly—six days wasn’t long enough to do anything, even for a heroine, but Amma didn’t know this about herself.
When night came on that sixth day and she was to return to the small hut she stayed in alone, she opted instead to remain in the center of the ruins while the others dispersed. She’d intended to sit for only a few minutes more, to watch the moons come out if she could spy them through the canopy, and she lay back on the mossy, stone floor to wonder if she would get a handle on anything well enough to justify whatever Damien was doing out in the wildwood. The nighttime sounds intensified, insects and frogs chirping and calling, and the dusky deep blues and greens melted into darkness behind her closing eyelids.
Amma was barefoot. Her toes gripped the earth as she went, feeling every stick and leaf and rock against the soles of her feet. She took herself forward through the Innomina Wildwood right to the base of a liathau tree. She’d seen this one before, and while it wasn’t as thick as some, it was the tallest one she had ever come across, dwarfing even the elder liathau in the Faebarrow market district.
When Amma touched its trunk, there was a crawling against her palms, itchy and weird, but she knew the unpleasantness was necessary, and she endured it for what would come next. A yellow light peeked out from under her fingertips and then shone brighter and brighter as she pulled her hands back. Like many embroidery threads, the light ran from her palms back to the tree, tethering her to it.
The brightness of the threads illuminated her body in the twilight, naked, though she wasn’t concerned with that. She pressed her hands to her bare chest and felt that thready light sink into her skin. It wrapped itself around her lungs, her heart, her tongue, her mind, wholly warm and blissful, and she knew she could step intohessach.
Then the threads went taut, and Amma was jerked forward. Tangled up in everything inside her, there was no severing them, and she panicked at their sudden, violent independence. Yanked another step closer to the tree, Amma struggled to keep her footing, her next breath shallow and sharp. A new light, crimson, was glowing from beneath her skin. Wrapped up in many, thin threads, it was wrenched right up against her chest, bulging outward from between her ribs.
Amma cried out, slapping her hands to her chest, struggling to hold it in place. Pain seared through her as it was pulled, and she pushed back, trembling with the effort. Wetness bubbled up from beneath her fingers, blood seeping out and running down her stomach.
“No,” she choked out, more blood flooding her mouth as the threads around her lungs and throat tightened. “You’re supposed to be good,” she managed in a pained whisper. “Aren’t you good?”
The tree did not answer. It only stood there, massive, uncaring, bending only to the wind.
“Please, I don’t want this,” she rasped, pressing into herself and spitting a mouthful of blood to the ground. “You can’t! Stop!”
The pressure on her chest broke all at once. She inhaled sharply, falling to her knees on the wet earth, and waited, but she wasn’t dragged forward again. The golden threads detached themselves and slipped off of her skin, one by one. She watched them recede toward the tree from her place in the muck and wrapped arms around her naked body. Still covered in slick blood, there was now a scar running between her breasts, though it looked old, and she could just see the crimson light as it dimmed, sinking back where it belonged.
There was a thwack at Amma’s side, and her eyes sprang open. Brightness blinded her from her spot on her back on the mossy stones in the middle of the ruins. Morning had come, and she hadn’t moved, but she also wasn’t covered in blood.
“Ready for our walk?” asked Em, a haloed shadow against the day’s light.
Amma tugged her tunic down to see her chest unmarred, and mumbled, “Bloody dreams,” before pulling herself to her feet to begin the day.
She didn’t tell Em about the dream, but she had a feeling she already knew, especially since the old woman had said she had practically become a tree herself—whatever that meant. Her gauzy eyes were brighter though, and her steps through the thick jungle quicker.
