His pulse flickered with dread, blaring his senses into flight.
He spun and started back the way he came. In his periphery, he spotted a fat, blush-toned blossom.
Finnian halted in his step, his breath catching.
Father.
Against the desire to run towards it, Finnian glanced around before slowly making his way through the crunch of twigs and corpse-gray leaves. Wary of his surroundings, he kept the muscles in his arms stiff, ready to call on his magic at the first sign of a threat.
He crouched down and examined its frail layers of petals. Delicate and whimsical, pale pink and stunning.
Paeonia lactiflora.A key ingredient for a calming tincture. Father’s favorite flower.
“Where are you?” Finnian murmured.
He waited, hoping his father would hear his plea and give him another sign.
Yards ahead, between two lifeless beech trees, a peony sprouted from the dry soil. Beyond it, the path followed a chasm of darkness.
Finnian’s gut spit something foul into the back of his throat as he rose.
The darkness enclosed around him the moment he stepped into its threshold, drowning out the light peeking in through the blanket of branches.
“Belyse.” The incantation brazed swiftly off his tongue.
With it, his sight sharpened in shades of gray. Through the spell, he could make out the forest beyond him. A dark pit. In its belly were several hollow tunnels. Dead branches twisted into canopies.
A labyrinth.
Finnian was aware that casting a spell to dissolve the darkness would be futile. A spell he had learned in his younger days to disperse the night Marina wrought in the halls of their mother’s palace. This darkness, Death’s shadows, it was something else entirely. Primordial.
If Finnian attempted to burn the trees, they’d only grow back. He could sense the ancient power emanating from them, an energy he was reluctant to siphon out and use.
He turned and studied each path. In the tunnel's mouth to his left, another blossom unfurled, its petals stretching apart and extending in Finnian’s direction, as if he were the sun.
He chose the path the peony beckoned him down.
The tunnel moaned in response to his presence. Every flicker in the grainy outline of the twined branches forming the tunnel had his fingers coiling in his palms. One hasty movement and he would strike it down with a sharp cut of his hand.
About three yards from the tunnel’s entrance, another peony sprouted.
Finnian swallowed thickly, glancing between it and the crevices of the braided branches above. Eyes, small and piercing, beamed through their creases at him. Proof of life in this ghastly forest.
Shivers pricked down his spine. He felt a presence approaching from behind.
Angling his head slightly towards the left, he held his breath and listened closely through his divine hearing. The grating, wheezing sound drew closer, growing louder than the echo of his heartbeat.
His muscles tensed and he quickly spun with a hand drawn.
A woman crawled towards him, her fingers clinging to the terrain. “Help...” she croaked.
Only her torso remained, no legs. Mutilated flesh and the casings of her intestines dragged behind as her pace picked up, reaching an arm out for Finnian.
“Help me!”
His eyes flitted up into the abyss she’d crawled out of, more concerned by what had torn her in half.
Through the gray outlines of the spell procuring his night vision, he stared deeper into the darkness that spat back a sinister aura.
