Except—hadn’t her magic also donegood? She wasn’t to blame for everything. And she was tired of making herself small as a form of self-punishment. She didn’t deserve this. She’d done enoughatonement for her mistakes, and her dampening herself, making herself mediocre again, helped no one, least of all her.
The ghosts around her seemed to sense the shift in her mind. The look in Keiran’s eyes turned violent. The others around him too. And suddenly it was as if they were pouncing on her, drawing all the darkness around them and looking to suffocate Emory with it. Feeding off her guilt, shame, every negative emotion she’d been feeling.
She wouldn’t let them.
“Leave me alone!” she screamed, throwing a vase at Keiran’s translucent face. It went through him and shattered on the floor, eliciting a cruel smile from his ghost. Emory let out a defeated whimper and crumbled to the floor amid the broken ceramic. Drawing her legs close to her chest, she buried her face in the crook of her arms and waited for the darkness to pass as sobs racked her body.
When she looked up some time later, the ghosts were gone. Romie’s door was still tightly shut, as if she had not heard the scream or the breaking vase or the sobs.
As if she had chosen not to.
Aspen knocked on their door at first light. “The matriarchs have come to a decision about what to do with you.”
Emory’s stomach dropped. The witches had wanted her and Romie gone after Bryony got possessed the first time; surely they would be out for their necks even more now that Bryony was in the state she was.
They followed Aspen to find Mrs. Amberyl at Bryony’s bedside. The High Matriarch had bags under her eyes, her mouth lined with profound worry. Bryony’s small hand was tucked in her mother’s grasp. With her eyes closed, her chest slowly rising and falling, she appeared to be sleeping.
“Will she be all right?” Romie asked.
Aspen’s face was grave. “We don’t know. Her consciousness is stuck in the astral plane now. There’s no knowing if she’ll find her way back to her body.”
It struck Emory how eerily alike this was to the eternal sleepers from her own world—Dreamers whose consciousness got lost in the sleepscape, leaving behind their bodies in a comalike state.
Mrs. Amberyl stared at Emory with an indecipherable expression. “What do you think happened in those woods?”
Emory blinked at the question. She wanted to defend her actions, to explain that she was only trying to save Bryony from the demon inside her. Instead, she said, “I think you’re right to believe your forest is rotting because of us. Whatever it is we might have woken in the space between worlds, whatever it is that possessed Bryony… it’s the same. And it’s looking forme.”
Tidecaller, it had said in recognition when it saw her silver veins. The hunger in that word, how the demon seemed tocraveher power, excited by the prospect of her within its reach.
“Did Bryony tell you the story of the twins and the demons?” Mrs. Amberyl asked.
Emory blanched. “Yes. And that you believe we’re trickster demons.”
“That story is a lie designed to hide a darker truth,” Mrs. Amberyl said. “The real story is this: long ago, twin witchesdidbear the Sculptress’s mark, an anomaly in our long-standing traditions in which a singular witch holds that honor. Asphodel and Oleander, they were called. One day, a stranger appeared to them, bearing a spiral mark like yours. The stranger’s coming opened the door wide for demons to escape the netherworld and poison our woods, the same way they are rotting now. The stranger convinced the more impressionable sister, Asphodel,that they were meant to travel through worlds together and petition the gods at the center of all things to heal our broken worlds.
“The other sister, Oleander, stayed behind, acting as a bridge between the Wychwood and her twin, who traveled from it, possessing the ability to scry into her sister’s mind. Asphodel was always meant to come back, but she never did, not even once the rot receded and the demons were cast back to the netherworld. Oleander could no longer feel her twin’s essence, could no longer commune with her through scrying. She tried to go after her, but found she could not go through the door. Asphodel was forever lost, and Oleander could only curse the stranger who had taken her to her death. A trickster demon indeed.
“Oleander swore she would never let our kind be tempted out of the Wychwood. She concealed the truth in her journals, hid away all evidence of doors to other worlds, even from the other matriarchs. The only one she shared this with was her successor. And so this secret was passed down from High Matriarch to High Matriarch.”
Mrs. Amberyl turned pleading eyes to Aspen. “I would have shared this truth with you eventually. But then we found two strange girls half-drowned beneath a waterfall, and the woods began to decay, and your sister ascended bearing the Sculptress’s mark and showing signs of demonic possession. I knew then that the past was repeating itself, and I swore I would not let my daughters know such fates.
“The others believed the problem lay in Bryony’s possession. But I knew it originated with you.” Mrs. Amberyl sneered at Emory and Romie. “That your coming here meant you would try to convince my daughters to follow you to the center of the universe, just as the stranger who came before you did.”
Just like the scholar on the shores from Clover’s story, who’dgone through worlds and convinced a witch and a warrior and a guardian to follow him to the sea of ash, where all their fates were sealed.
Stranger, scholar—that was who Emory was. And perhaps the thing that awoke in the sleepscape, that was trying to seep out of it by possessing Bryony, was the great beast in the sea of ash, looking for retribution.
“I have done so much to keep my daughters from harm, yet fate found them anyway,” Mrs. Amberyl said. “One’s mind is lost to the astral plane; the other might be the only one who can save our dying woods, even the universe at large. I’ve seen it in my scrying how this blight is spreading across worlds, and it terrifies me.” Her eyes slid to Emory. “I have felt you prodding at the edges of my mind. This is what I didn’t want you to see. But I’ll share it with you now, if you wish.”
Emory was hesitant to reach for her magic so soon after what happened. She caught Romie’s eye, hoping for some encouragement, but was met only with distrust.
Wary of her own power, of the ghosts that would follow, Emory reached for the Memorist magic, convincing herself it was safe to do when not standing on a ley line. She sighed as the pressure in her veins disappeared. Thankfully, Mrs. Amberyl’s mind was laid bare to her, and as soon as she brushed against it, images flashed between them:
An angry sea flooding a familiar coastline. A rotting forest. A barren earth growing cold and dark beneath a too-dim sun. A sky full of impossible storms. A world reduced to ash, where a small glimmer of hope still burned, like a torch against the coming dark.
Emory let go of the magic just as Mrs. Amberyl’s wards went back up around her mind, casting her out. Her heart beat rapidly. Darkness pressed in, though not in the form of ghosts thistime—just their accusatory voices whispering in her ears, an eerie tidal wave of sound that sought to pull her under. Emory faltered back, clasped her hands over her ears.
Not real not real not real.
