Minutes dragged into eternity before we finally stopped.
“We can’t go farther,” Amelia said, crouching down with me. “One more step and we’re dead.”
They lowered me beneath the torrent of rain, my body sagging like a sack of stones. Amelia propped me against her chest, her hands supporting my weight.
Lightning split the sky again, and she quickly pointed ahead, over my head. “It’s far…but do you see it?”
The world went black again before I could locate it.
Another screech echoed in the forest, closer this time.
“What are those?” Amelia whispered.
Selvanyra’s creatures. Coming for me. I had to get to the cave all by myself before they reached me, I had to get to the cave before I shut down completely. I would really hate myself if I did.
I couldn’t let that happen.
With the knife still buried in my stomach, I moved.
“Sanora, don’t—” Amelia’s voice cracked as I dragged myself onto my hands and knees. My body couldn’t stand, so crawling was all I had.
The rain hammered me, the ground slick and uneven, moss and stones cutting into my palms and knees. The screeches grew louder. Footsteps, heavy and fast, shook the earth beneath me.
I knew going there was dangerous. Amelia had said one would rot if they stepped there, but all that clearly wasn’t enough to stop me as I crawled forward with no sense of direction, moving as fast as I could.
“Sanora, you’re...you’re within the perimeter...” I heard Amelia say, her voice distant and quiet. “...and you’re not rotting.”
Another lightning flashed, and I blinked the rain in my eyes away, taking advantage of the quick illumination to make out my path.
She was right. I was in the cave’s boundary. And I was intact.
I was still alive. The moment I crossed that unseen line, something shifted. It was as if the cave exhaled into me, breathing a surge of strength I didn’t think I still possessed. The numbness that had been creeping over my body receded; the deadened parts of me sparked awake one by one. My limbs grew lighter, my chest fuller. I was moving faster now, almost alive again.
Instead of killing me, the cave’s surroundings were fortifying me, knitting threads of vitality through my veins. I could feel the faint, defiant pulse of life pressing against the knife still buried in my stomach.
This place recognised me. Or rather, it recognisedher. Kalimetryna. Her essence remained here, woven into the very marrow of the grounds, and it answered me now.
Even though centuries had passed, the pieces she left behind still claimed this surrounding as hers, and it was wrapping me in the last of its strength.
My head snapped back sharply at the sound that cut through the air. Fear lodged itself high in my throat, leaving no space for breath.
Those screeches—shrill and raw—were close. Closer than they had been a heartbeat ago. The ground beneath my palms trembled with their approach, vibrations rattling up my bones until they echoed against my ribcage.
I crawled forward, dragging myself as fast as I could, though “fast” was an insult to the word. My movements were slow, every scrape of my palms against the wet stone like fire under my skin. A baby would win a race against me.
Amelia screamed.
My head jerked back violently at the sound, my whole body twisting with it, dragging me back to sit. My eyes went wide when lightning split the sky open in a crack that seemed to tear the world apart. For an instant, the forest was drenched in white brilliance, and in that merciless flash I saw them.
More than ten.
Creatures, all sharp limbs and rippling shadows, rushing towards me with a speed so frenzied it was maddening to watch. Their faces twisted in grotesque hunger, their wails piercing enough to shred the silence that followed the thunder.
They were all coming for me.
I scrambled back, palms skidding on the slick earth, my body jolting with every frantic movement. The strange, stolen strength the cave gave me almost made me forget the knife buried in my stomach. Almost.
When the next bolt of lightning forked across the sky, I saw the first creature break free of the shadows, stepping past Amelia and Merton, its gaze fixed on me.
