Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The plague of nightmares started long before the rotting nightmare tree burst and Ezizh clawed his way out from its remains. But with Ezizh unleashed upon the Nightlands, the plague only accelerated, spreading like a silent cancer throughout Esperia.

Still, there were some places where it was harder for Ezizh to reach than others.

Harder, but not impossible.

The first girl who didn’t wake up was one of the elder prefects who had the privilege of her own room. She had no roommate to raise the alarm. The Sisters only noticed her absence when she failed to show up for the morning roll call. They tried to keep the situation quiet. But a rectory full of whispering girls was the worst place in Esperia to try to keep a secret. By the time that twenty-four hours had passed, everybody knew - or thought they knew - what had happened.

“I heard that when they found her, she was all twisted up, like this,” Diedre said, twisting her face into a grotesque grimace and twitching her hands as if they were claws. “But she was still breathing and her eyes were all rolling around, like they do when you’re dreaming.”

Kieran laughed at the image that Diedre described, but Belinda didn’t think it was very funny. “So is she possessed? Will the Sisters do an exorcism?”

“Don’t know,” Diedre said. “I overheard Sister Cecilia saying it was because of something in the Nightlands.”

“Then it can’t be a demon, so there won’t be an exorcism,” Belinda said. “There are no demons in the Nightlands. And nothing made of Dark magic can enter there.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I looked it up in a book,” Belinda said.

Kieran rolled her eyes. “Of course you did.”

The three of them were down on their knees, scrubbing the chapel floor in the pre-dawn hours before the chapel doors opened to the public. It was hard work, and Belinda’s knees and arms already hurt, but she didn’t mind. The chapel was a peaceful place to start her day, a place filled with the Light. Cleaning it felt good, too. It felt like satisfying, purposeful work. It felt like she was honoring the Light by making this place beautiful.

Kieran finished with her section of the floor, stood up, flung her scrubbing rag into the bucket of soapy water, and brushed what was mostly imaginary dust off her prim Devotee dress. “If you hurry up, we have time to sneak into the kitchen and grab something before morning prayers.”

Belinda shook her head. “You two can go without me.” She didn’t want to break her fasting vows. But a part of her appreciated being invited nonetheless.

“Suit yourself,” Diedre said, standing up to join Kieran. “If you ever change your mind, just let me know.” It was an offer made more out of genuine concern than a compulsion to break the rules. The fasting that the Devotees endured was famously strict, and the girls who didn’t pilfer illicit snacks from the kitchen often got sick or even passed out during the course of the day.

But not Belinda. “Thank you,” she said to Diedre, and she meant it. “But I’ll be all right.”

Diedre and Kieran left. Belinda sat alone in the chapel, peacefully contemplating the stained-glass visage of Dura beaming her Light down upon the world, trying to forget the horrified screaming that they had all heard the morning that the prefect girl had been discovered in her room.

Belinda’s peace did not last long. During morning prayers, the whispers spread again: Another girl had been discovered.

The next day, there was another one.

And then in the middle of the night, a fourth. The girl gave a piercing shriek and began convulsing in her bed, waking her roommate, waking the entire Devotee girls’ dormitory. The Sisters tried to remove her quietly, but every girl in the dormitory was peeking through a crack in their doorway to watch the Sisters attempting to carry the screaming, convulsing child down the hallway.

Neither Belinda nor her roommate Diedre could sleep that night.

Diedre had a string of prayer beads representing Athalia, Flora, and all the Celestials among her possessions. Prayer beads were meant to be held during meditation, not worn as jewelry. But Diedre started wearing the string of prayer beads around her neck for protection. It was against the rules for Devotees to wear jewelry, but nobody stopped her. The other girls also began wearing their prayer beads, or drawing protective charms on their wrists and hands with quill pens.

Belinda knew that these desperate charms were weak, inefficient magic. Not enough to protect anybody from real Dark magic. As soon as her morning prayers were finished, Belinda ran to the library and buried her nose in the books there.

The information that the books held was too basic. The types of Dark magic that could afflict a person while they were asleep were few and far between, and none seemed to match what was happening to the girls at the Temple. An incubus would not have made the girls suffer. A djinn would have killed the victims as they slept. A nue would allowed the girls to wake up so that it could continue to torment them for many nights on end. Likewise with a mara.

Just as Belinda was ready to give up, she spotted something in the index of a particularly old book that gave her pause.

She turned to the page that was indicated in the index, and began to read.

The Nightmare Tree. It was a story told by a cleric thousands of years ago, from an era long before the death of the Goddess. The author of the book that Belinda was reading did not consider this story believable, but was including it in his documentation for the sake of completion. The cleric who narrated the tale started by recounting how he had been having recurring dreams about watching a tree grow in an otherwise barren wasteland. First a tiny sprout, then a sapling, then a thick, twisted trunk covered in glossy black bark that dripped with a thin, runny, almost sweat-like sap. The tree had been pulsing with Dark magic. It had started to grow black and purple fruit that smelled of rot. Acting on instinct, the cleric had gone to bed one night with an axe clutched in his hands. He had dreamt that he chopped down the tree with that very axe. And then he had never dreamt of the strange tree again. But the cleric was convinced that if he had not destroyed the tree in his dream, something terrible would have taken root within the Nightlands.

Belinda put down the book and sighed. She wasn’t sure if she believed that story, either. The Nightlands were protected from the influence of magic, whether Light or Dark. Everybody knew that. That was one of the most basic rules of any kind of magic. And besides, even if this strange story from thousands of years ago were true, in what way could it possibly be relevant to whatever evil was currently attacking the Temple? This isn’t helpful, Belinda thought. How could a tree growing in the Nightlands – even a tree made of Dark magic – possibly be causing what was happening to the other girls?

Belinda took the library book under her arm and walked across the Temple grounds toward the nunnery. Belinda knew exactly which door to go to. She began pounding on the door urgently with her fist. “Sister Cecilia! Sister Cecilia!!”

Cecilia opened her door and gazed down at Belinda, seeming for a moment to see right through her with her otherwise unseeing, clouded eyes. “Devotee Belinda,” she said. “You are supposed to be on duty in the chapel.”

“Sister Cecilia, this book has a story about something called the Nightmare Tree—"

“Yes, yes, child. We all know about the Nightmare Tree. The paladins are searching—“

“Wait, what?!”

Cecilia suddenly clenched her jaw, then sighed through her nose. “Devotee Belinda. Where did you find that book?”

“In the library. It was shelved with all the other demonology books.”

“In the general demonology section?” Cecilia asked.

Belinda stared at her. “Is there another demonology section?” But as soon as she asked the question, she knew the answer. Of course there must have been books in the Temple library that Belinda wasn’t allowed access to. Of course there were. She had been foolish to assume otherwise.

“Sister Cecilia,” Belinda said. “Do you know what’s happening? Do you know about what’s attacking us?”

“Yes, Belinda,” Cecilia said quietly. “I do. As there is powerful Dark magic involved, I trust you understand why I cannot discuss this matter with you further.”

“Is it the Nightmare Tree?” Belinda asked. “If it’s the Nightmare Tree, you might as well tell me. Since I already read about it.”

Cecilia sighed again. “Yes, Devotee Belinda. We have reason – and evidence – to believe that the Nightmare Tree has returned.” Then she held out her hands. “Give me that book. It should not have been in any section of the library that Devotees have access to.”

Belinda did not hand over the book. “What should we do?” she asked.

“ ‘We’? No, child. Vanquishing the Nightmare Tree is not yet your burden to bear,” Cecilia said, sternly, but not unkindly. “You are still a Devotee. Your duty is to carry out your Devotions. Only by fulfilling your Devotions will you grow closer to the Light.”

“So what will you do?” Belinda asked.

“Find the Nightmare Tree in the Nightlands, and destroy it,” Cecilia answered.

Belinda waited a moment for Cecilia to tell her more, but she didn’t. So Belinda tried again to press her for more information. “In this book, a cleric said that he destroyed the Nightmare Tree with just an axe.”

“If it were that easy, you know we would have destroyed the tree by now,” Cecilia said. “But we don’t know where the tree is. We have to find the tree in the Nightlands first.”

“But what if that takes too long?! What are we supposed to do until you find the tree?!” Belinda asked.

Cecilia glared at Belinda with her unseeing eyes.

“I mean, isn’t there some way to protect everyone’s dreams while you’re still searching for the Nightmare Tree?” Belinda revised her question.

“Concentrate on the Light, Devotee Belinda,” Cecilia said, in a quiet voice that was nevertheless full of calm assurance. “So long as you are with the Light, no demon can harm you. Now give me that book.”

Belinda reluctantly handed over the book. She wanted to trust in Sister Cecilia. She wanted so badly for Sister Cecilia to be right. But a part of her doubted that the girls who had fallen victim to the Nightmare Tree so far had been attacked simply because they somehow lacked faith in the Light.

Her heart still full of doubt, Belinda walked back across the Temple grounds, then joined Diedre to fulfill her duty polishing the silver candelabras in the chapel.

The prayer beads around Diedre’s neck made a soft, pleasant rattling sound as she worked her polishing rag across the delicate rim of a particularly ornate candle holder. “You’re late,” Diedre said when Belinda joined her. “You’re never late for this. What happened?”

“I tried to talk to Sister Cecilia,” Belinda said.

“Ah,” Diedre said. That was all the explanation that she needed.

As she always did whenever she had chores in the chapel during worship hours, Belinda watched the people who came to pray. There was a woman who came in every day at the same time, lighting a candle and leaving a coin as an offering in front of the Altar of Laila. Belinda didn’t know anything about this woman, but she felt a sense of peace and warmth just watching her. Today there was also an old man in the Chapel, taking a young boy by the hand and showing him each and every altar in the Chapel, teaching the little boy the names of each Celestial. Belinda also felt a sense of peace as she watched this, a sense that she could feel the palpable warmth of the Light spreading in the world. And then, of course, there was the boy. He came at the same time every day, lit a single candle for Athalia, then sat on a bench and prayed.

Diedre suddenly elbowed Belinda. “You’re staring at him again.”

“What?”

“Biceps McBeefcake over there,” Diedre said, tilting her head in the direction of the praying boy. “I didn’t think you would go for the musclehead type.”

The boy was tall and broad-shouldered, already sporting a chiseled chin, thick neck, and muscular arms, even at his young age. He wore the embroidered tunic of nobility but carried no sword. And he was always in the chapel, at the same time every day without fail. Just lighting his single candle to Athalia and then praying silently.

“Don’t go falling for that one,” Diedre suddenly said. “That’s the Lanward boy. He’s, uh....” She paused, searching for the right words. “He’s soft in the head.”

“What?” Belinda asked again.

“I mean, he’s stupid,” Diedre said. “Everybody says he is. That’s why he’s in here all the time. He never goes out with the other boys. Nobody’s ever seen him at a banquet, even when his parents were there. So. It’s probably because he’s not right in the head. I bet the Lanwards keep him away from everyone because they’re embarrassed about it.”

Belinda gazed at the boy again, watching him gaze up at the statue of Athalia. “Do you know for sure that he’s... stupid?”

“Everybody says he is,” Diedre repeated, her faith in the wisdom of crowds absolute. “But I can see why you keep staring at him. Those arms like tree trunks? Niiiiiiiiiiice.”

Belinda wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. She loved her roommate Diedre like a sister, but sometimes when Diedre spoke to Belinda, Belinda felt as though Diedre might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

That night Belinda and Diedre both knelt beside their beads and prayed to every Celestial that they could name before they risked closing their eyes. Belinda tried to tell herself that as long as she could still feel the Light with her, she had nothing to fear. But it was still hard to fall asleep. Nevertheless, eventually her exhaustion overwhelmed her, and Belinda slipped into a peaceful slumber.

She awoke the next morning relieved that there had been no screaming in the night. Diedre was up already, stretching to work out a kink in her back. Belinda sat up in her bed. “Did you manage to get some sleep?” she asked Diedre.

“Some. A little.”

Belinda changed out of her sleeping smock and into the plain white dress that was the uniform of the Devotees. She washed her face, brushed her hair, and went with Diedre to their morning cleaning duties.

But the chapel was on fire.

Belinda stared in horror at the wall of red flames. Thick, black smoke filled her lungs, causing her to choke and gag. The trees around the chapel were on fire. The ground was cracking and splitting, flames erupting beneath Belinda’s feet. Diedre touched Belinda’s arm with one blackened, shriveled hand. “It hurts,” Diedre hissed through the hole in the center of the charred remains of her face. “It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it

blink

Belinda awoke in her bed, in the darkness. She breathed a sigh of relief. Just a nightmare, then. A perfectly ordinary nightmare brought about by perfectly ordinary amounts of extraordinary stress.

That was when Belinda felt a cold hand clamp over her mouth and a crushing weight press down on her body.

blink

Belinda awoke with a start. She had fallen asleep in the library while reading the book that contained the unbelievable tale of the Nightmare Tree. She had just finished reading the part where the Nightmare Tree had begun to bear its rotting fruit and the cleric who told the tale had gone to sleep clutching an axe in his hands. Belinda pushed back her chair and stood up, hoping that a few quick stretches could make her feel better, or at least more alert. 

A hand touched Belinda’s shoulder. She turned her head to see who was standing behind her.

“Rotten fruit,” Kieran gargled as blood spilled from her mouth. “Rotten fruit. Rotten fruit.” She showed Belinda the gaping wound in her stomach, her intestines spilling out into the blood-circle drawn on the wooden library floor. “Finish what you started, girl,” Kieran said.

Belinda glanced down at the bloody dagger in her hand.

Then she turned her eyes back toward the Kieran. Her friend’s face was slack, her eyes blank, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth.

Belinda took a step closer to Kieran.

“Finish what you started,” Kieran said again. Her voice was too clear, too easy to understand. Between the blood filling her mouth and her guts spilled on the ground, she shouldn’t have been able to speak at all.

Belinda dropped the dagger to the ground. She reached out with one hand, and touched Kieran’s cheek. Kieran was hot to the touch, almost burning Belinda’s hand.

“Is that who you are?” Belinda asked. “Are you the rotten fruit from the Nightmare Tree?”

“Rotten fruit,” the Kieran-shapes thing said again, as if parroting Belinda. “Yes. No. I am the rotten fruit because that is what you think I am. I can taste and smell all of your thoughts, girl. I will enjoy devouring you.”

Belinda glanced down at Kieran’s intestines pooled at her feet, then back up into her blank, unseeing eyes. She withdrew her hand from Kieran’s cheek. “You poor thing,” she said. “Is that why you came to the Temple? Are you so hungry for the Light that you think you need to consume it?”

Kieran’s mouth opened into a black scream. The sound pierced Belinda’s ears and made her vision swim nauseatingly. She stumbled backward, away from the screaming Kieran-thing, and into an enormous hand that closed around her tiny body as if she were a mere toy. Belinda felt herself being lifted into the air. She saw red and black, a flat eyeless mask of a face with a bloody gash for a mouth. Two curved horns stretching toward the crimson horizon. A body of sulfurous smoke from deep within the earth and uncanny flesh from deep within the abyss. Belinda felt the breath being squeezed out of her, her body screaming with pain as her bones and organs were crushed by the enormous monster’s tightening grasp.

Belinda felt her ribs crack and pierce through her lungs. She felt her throat burn as she suffocated on her own blood. She felt herself dying and thought, All this and you still can’t hurt me for real, can you? This is still just a dream.

PATHETIC LITTLE GIRL, the thing screamed at her even as its red gash of a mouth did not move. TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND. A HELPLESS CUB THAT THINKS IT IS A SHE-BEAR. YOU PRETEND THAT THE PAIN YOU FEEL IS NOT REAL. YOU PRETEND THAT YOU CAN STILL LEAVE MY NIGHTMARE. YOU ARE A CHILD PLAYING MAKE-BELIEVE.

“Guh,” Belinda said, because as the creature’s hand crushed her to death she could say nothing else. But she could still see. Her vision was not fading, and her awareness would not leave her. She felt every bolt of pain coursing through her body with perfect, nightmarish clarity. She was dying, dying, dying, but she couldn’t die. The horned thing with no eyes couldn’t kill her. To do so would be to risk shocking her awake, to end her suffering and to deny him his feast.

YOU DENY ME NOTHING! the beast howled at her. YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF DENYING ME MY PLEASURES! He opened his red slash of a mouth, blasting heat and flame into the air. He lifted Belinda’s broken body, holding her above his hellish abyss of a mouth. YOU WANTED TO LEARN ABOUT ME, LITTLE GIRL? YOU WANTED TO KNOW MY SECRETS? NOW YOU SHALL KNOW ALL OF ME, FOOLISH GIRL. The mouth opened wider. REJOICE, CHILD. WITHIN ME YOU SHALL FIND ALL THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE OF THE ABYSS. REJOICE AS THE FLAMES OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE CONSUME YOU. REJOICE AS YOU BURN WITHIN ME FOR ALL ETER—

blink

Belinda was dropped, but not into the creature’s mouth. Her broken body landed on jagged obsidian, pierced by rocks as sharp as knives.

blink blink

Her broken body landed on soft dirt and grass.

blink blink

Her body landed on soft grass, healed and whole. Belinda heard the singing of night insects. She looked up, and saw the night sky blocked by the spreading branches of ancient, ancient trees.

help me

“No! I will not let you take this one from me! Not this one!” The horned creature howled with rage, but he was smaller now, so much smaller, made of whisps of smoke instead of great burning plumes of ash, his voice no longer full of thunder but still full of shadows. The roots of the great trees surrounding them burst from the ground and wrapped around the nightmare creature, trapping him. He howled again, but his fury seemed more impotent than ever.

Belinda stood up shakily.

help me

Belinda whirled around, searching for the source of the voice. All that she could see was verdant and beautiful, the forest singing in the night. She could not see who or what was crying for help.

help me please

he grows stronger every time

help me light-bearer

please

The nightmare creature laughed. “So it’s you again, is it? You sad little bug?! Are you something so weak that you would admit your own inevitable defeat right in front of me?!”

Belinda ignored the nightmare creature and stepped closer to one of the impossibly large trees, larger and older than any trees that grew in the human cities. She knew these trees. She knew this place, even if only from descriptions that she had read in books. This was the forest that surrounded the great Yggdrasil tree, the living heart of the continent that the forest guardians worshipped and guarded zealously. “Tell me what I need to do,” Belinda said to the voice.

go to the tree

do the magic

go to the tree

Belinda nodded. “I understand.”

“You understand nothing!” the nightmare creature hissed. “You think you will win, girl, just because this little bug can protect your dreams? I have other ways to torment you, girl. I have no need to enter your dreams when I can turn your every waking moment into a nightmare!”

oh no, the little blink of light said. oh no no no no no

Belinda was awoken by a piercing scream.

She sat up in bed, her heart pounding in her chest. Diedre was convulsing in her bed, howling and clawing at the air, her eyes wide open and rolling in their sockets.

Belinda sat in her bed and watched her friend suffering for a long, long moment. “You can’t fool me,” she said. “This is just another nightmare, isn’t it?”

But this time the blink of light did not come to save her. Instead, the door to her room burst open, and the panicked Sisters rushed in.

--------------------------------------------------

Diedre was removed, quickly but not quietly. The Sisters surrounded Belinda, riddling her with questions. She answered honestly. And then the clerics came. But the clerics were wearing strange tunics that Belinda had never seen before.

They did not allow her the dignity of changing out of her sleeping smock. They escorted her, barefoot and cold, out of the Devotees’ dormitory and into the Great Hall of the Temple complex. Then they went beneath the Great Hall, into the dungeons.

But they did not put her in a cell. Instead, they took her to a small room warmed by a small fireplace. They sat her in a wooden chair. They let old Father Wendell sit across from her, regarding her with his gentle eyes. But Belinda did not fail to notice that the clerics surrounding her were armed with shortswords and holy talismans. One of them was holding a chalice of holy water. Just in case.

“Tell me again what you saw,” Father Wendell said.

Belinda told him about the eyeless thing with the gash for a mouth and the two curved horns on its head. Then she told him about the little blink of light that had made the horned creature grow small and trapped, but that had not been strong enough to keep the horned creature trapped. The little blink of light that had begged for help, and that had been unable to save Diedre.

When Belinda was finished, Father Wendell took her hands in his and looked her directly in the eyes. “That is quite a story, child,” he said. “You say that a voice told you to go to the Yggdrasil Tree and... do what, exactly?”

“Do the magic,” Belinda said. “I will know what to do when I get there. The Light will show me.”

“So you don’t even know what magic you are supposed to do.”

Belinda shook her head. She knew how it sounded. She had a good idea of what was coming next. She did not begrudge the Temple for taking cautionary measures.

The priest’s eyes flickered toward the cleric in the strange tunic holding the chalice. “Go ahead,” he said.

Hands grabbed at her, pinning her down, forcing her head back, forcing her mouth open. Belinda did not try to resist. They poured holy water down her throat. Belinda sputtered and coughed, but did not begin convulsing or speaking in tongues. The clerics took their hands off her.

“The Horned One is not speaking through her,” one of them said. “Her words are true.”

Belinda wiped the holy water from her chin with the back of her hand. She thought this a rather poor test, as she knew that if holy water could cast the nightmare creature out of someone’s body then they would surely have used it to cure the afflicted girls by now. But Belinda also knew that it would hurt her case to point this out to her inquisitors.

“We can’t know that for certain,” another one said. “Even if this girl believes that she speaks the truth, the Horned One might still be tricking her. Her vision of Yggdrasil might have been a vision that he wanted her to see.”

“That’s true,” Belinda admitted. “But the Light is with me, and the Light is telling me to go to Yggdrasil.”

One of the clerics scoffed. Belinda noticed, but did not care. She was used to adults acting like that when she started talking about the Light. She looked up at the clerics in the room, the ones wearing the unfamiliar outfits. “You called it ‘The Horned One,’” she said. “So you all know what that thing is? You all knew about it?? You all knew about the Nightmare Tree and the fact that it could grow a demon like that? Why did you hide something like that from us??”

“Because you are still a child,” Sister Cecilia said, pushing her way into the room. “You are still a child who never even stopped to consider that there are obvious reasons why Devotees are prevented from learning about Dark magic. You act entitled to knowledge of the Darkness without realizing how utterly useless, if not dangerous, that knowledge would be in your hands.”

Belinda stared at Sister Cecilia. Cecilia was not wearing the usual habit that she wore around the chapel. Long slits had been cut into the sides of her habit, exposing her legs but also giving her freedom of movement. A cape protected her shoulders and a plate of golden armor protected her chest. A white hood was pulled down over the top of her face, concealing her blind eyes. Nevertheless, Belinda could still feel something behind Cecilia’s cloudy, hidden eyes seeing straight into her soul.

Sister Cecilia addressed Father Wendell. “Let me speak to her. Alone.”

The priest nodded, and he and the other clerics left.

Sister Cecilia sat down across from Belinda, in the seat that Father Wendell had vacated.

“You’re here to tell me that I can’t go to Yggdrasil,” Belinda said.

“No,” said Cecilia. “I am here to honestly, genuinely dissuade you from running off into the forest.” Cecilia folded her hands in her lap. “You are a gifted child, Belinda. You are brilliant in more ways than one. So I hope that you can be reasoned with.”

Belinda looked down at her own hands, folded in her lap.

“Tell me what you are thinking,” Cecilia said, but with a kind softness in her voice that Belinda had never heard before.

“I’m thinking that what happened to Diedre wasn’t my fault, but it is my responsibility,” Belinda said. “And I’m knowing that the Light is telling me to follow the dream-voice and go to Yggdrasil.”

Cecilia sighed. “I doubt that your head is clear enough to understand the Light right now. You’re in shock.”

Belinda shook her head. “No. I can always feel the Light. And I’ve never felt such a... such a clear directive from it before. Such a clear purpose.” She looked up at Cecilia’s stony face. “Please, Sister Cecilia! Let me go to Yggdrasil!”

“You’re still a Devotee. You can’t even wield a staff yet. The forest is too dangerous for you.”

“The forest of Yggdrasil is filled with the Light!” Belinda protested. “There’s probably no place safer in the world!”

“That is profoundly untrue,” Cecilia sighed again. She did not need to say that she considered Belinda’s naive statement yet more evidence of her childishness. It was implied in her sighing escape of breath. “The forest guardians will never let a human like you approach Yggdrasil. And even if not for the guardians, the forest is still the forest, Belinda. There are wolves and bears and other dangerous animals—“

“Then the paladins can escort me!” Belinda said.

“The paladins have their hands full right now—“

“What? Why?”

“Because of everything!” Cecilia snapped. Then she seemed to immediately regret her shortness. “I am sorry, Belinda,” she said. “But right now, we are fighting against more than just the Horned One. Quadeam’s servants walk among the living, the Butcher’s cult has returned, the Ocean Elemental has gone strange, and...” She trailed off, then seemed to reconsider her words, as if she were saying too much. “It would be unwise to send a gifted student like you or a group of paladins on an impossible quest. It would be a waste.”

“So you’re telling me that we should only fight battles that are without any risk?” Belinda challenged her.

“I am telling you that you are not alone with the Light,” Cecilia said. “You are not the only one who knows the Light, Belinda. You are likely not the only one to whom your dream-friend called out. And before you start shouting again about how the Light is telling you to go to Yggdrasil, then consider this, child: I know the Light, too. So does Father Wendell. So do all who serve the Temple. You are not the only one who receives guidance from the Light. Yet you have convinced yourself that the Light is telling you to risk your life on this foolish mission. Have you not considered, child, that the Light is telling the rest of us to save you from yourself?”

Belinda bit her lip and said nothing.

Cecilia stood up. “Come, child,” she said. “I will walk with you back to the dormitory. Do your ablutions and put on your clothes. Then meet me in front of the Chapel of Altars.”

Belinda obediently followed Cecilia back to the dormitory. Fortunately, by now the sun had already risen, and the girls in the dormitory were busy elsewhere in the Temple complex with their chores and their lessons. Belinda was thankful that she didn’t have to endure their stares or their whispers. She washed her face, put on her Devotee dress, and brushed and pulled back her hair.

She went through the motions of each step of her routine absent-mindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, her mind racing. She was thinking about the shady spot behind the trees across from the chapel where the outer wall of the complex was lower and more easily scalable. She was thinking about when exactly would be the right moment to sneak into the Sisters’ armory and borrow a pair of boots. She was wondering if she should risk borrowing a staff, too. Belinda only knew about using a staff to channel Light magic in theory, as she was not yet allowed to put her theory into practice. But there was no better time to learn than the present.

Belinda walked down to the Chapel of Altars. Sister Cecilia was standing there, waiting for her. She had changed back into her usual nun’s habit and was holding a broom.

Cecilia held out the broom to Belinda. Belinda took the handle of the broom, then looked up at Cecilia quizzically, not understanding.

“Follow me,” Cecilia said. She walked into the chapel. Belinda followed, clutching the broom handle in her hands.

Cecilia pointed to a spot on the floor right near the chapel entrance. “Start here,” she said. “Work your way across the entire floor. By the time that you finish, this area will be dirty again from more worshippers having entered the chapel. So come back here. Do the whole floor again. Keep doing so until it is time for you to join the Devotees for dinner.”

Belinda looked up at her. “Am I being punished?” she asked.

“No,” Cecilia said, again with that gentle kindness in her voice. “But you are being kept busy until your emotions settle. And you are being kept here, in this sacred hall, because...” Cecilia leaned forward and whispered quietly to Belinda. “Because this place is filled with Light. So do what you do best, Belinda. Stay here today, and contemplate the Light. Let the wisdom of the Celestials fill your heart and guide your thoughts.”

Belinda nodded. “I understand.” She looked up at Cecilia again. “Thank you,” she said.

Cecilia left, and Belinda started sweeping the chapel floor, trying to still her thoughts, trying to quietly contemplate the Light, trying not to think about the great bloody gash of a mouth opening to swallow her or the pain of her broken ribs piercing her lungs or the shriek of Diedre’s screams echoing in her ears.

She swept for hours. The chapel was quiet. Only a few entered that day to light a candle or leave an offering. The entire Temple complex was unusually quiet that day.

Around noon, however, that changed.

Father Wendell came into the chapel, followed by the Devotee boys carrying extra candles and extra candle holders. They laid a fancy embroidered cloth over a table, then placed the table in front of the altar of Athalia. The Devotee boys began arranging the unlit candles across the table in front of the altar.

Belinda shuffled and swept until she was close enough to one of the Devotee boys to whisper. “What’s going on?”

“Athalia’s blessing,” Father Wendell answered Belinda directly. “The young men who are being sent to the King’s Manse next week will be receiving Athalia’s blessing before they leave.”

Belinda watched Father Wendell direct the Devotee boys as they finished setting up the altar. Sent to the King’s Manse, she thought. That meant that they were being sent to the front lines of the never-ending war against the beastmen.

The preparations were finished, and the Devotee boys left. Belinda worked her broom down the far side of the chapel, sweeping the floor in front of the altar of Flora and the altar of Elijah. She watched as the first young men and their families began to enter the chapel.

Belinda’s heart sank in her chest. Not young men. They were just boys. One by one they followed their fathers, their mothers, or their brothers to the altar of Athalia. One by one they lit a candle and prayed. One by one they received Father Wendell’s blessing.

Belinda watched them all, surreptitiously, as she swept.

Then, for a moment, her broom froze in her hands. Lord Lanward entered the Chapel, resplendent in his finest robes, striding confidently up to the altar of Athalia as if he were entitled to divine blessing rather than humbly praying for it. The boy whom Belinda had watched praying quietly in the chapel every day followed a step behind his father, his expression blank and unreadable.

Lord Lanward turned around to look at his son, seemingly for no other reason than to make his cloak swirl dramatically. The boy looked up at his father, and for a moment, Belinda felt that something unspoken but unfathomable to outsiders was exchanged between them. The moment passed, and the boy finished walking up to the altar.

The boy lit his candle, then clasped his hands, closed his eyes, and prayed silently. Father Wendell placed his hands on the boy’s head and spoke the words of blessing. Lord Lanward looked on, not bothering to hide the obvious pride that he felt.

Father Wendell finished. The boy opened his eyes, and gazed up at the statue of Athalia, her twin swords raised and ready to smite the wicked. “Father Wendell,” he said quietly. “I have been praying for conviction. But I am still so full of doubt. What should I—“

“Lucius,” Lord Lanward said, and now instead of pride there was something else in his voice. Something harsh and ugly. “This is neither the time nor the place. There are others waiting to receive the Divine Protector’s blessing.” His admonishment wasn’t wrong, Belinda thought, but there was still something cold and biting about the way that he said it.

“I am sorry, Father,” the boy said.

Lord Lanward reached into his cloak, pulled out a small pouch, and placed it on the table next to the candles. “A small donation, to make up for the scene that my son just caused,” Lord Lanward said. “I apologize for interrupting your ceremony. Come, Lucius,” Lord Lanward said before Father Wendell could interrupt. “We have business at home.”

The Lanwards left. The rest of the blessing proceeded without incident.

Belinda swept the floor and tried not to think about how young all the boys had been.

As the afternoon passed into evening, the Chapel emptied out completely. Belinda stood alone beneath the altar of Laila, sweeping the floor, her mind still racing, very much not contemplating the Light.

It was nearly the supper hour, and Belinda’s duty was nearly finished, when the chapel door opened one last time.

The Lanward boy stepped into the chapel.

He moved with surprising grace and quietness, almost tip-toeing toward the altar of Athalia, glancing around surreptitiously as if he were afraid that someone would stop him. His eyes fell on Belinda for a brief moment, then darted past her, paying her no mind. He was wearing an expensive-looking embroidered tunic and fine dress shoes. He had definitely snuck away from a banquet to come to the chapel.

Belinda watched him sit in front of the altar of Athalia, then gaze up at it, saying nothing. He was doing what Belinda was supposed to be doing. He was quietly contemplating, listening for the Light to guide him.

Belinda swept her broom through the aisles of prayer benches, moving closer toward him.

If he noticed her, he wasn’t paying attention to her.

Belinda put down her broom, leaning it against a prayer bench. She took a deep breath. She silently thanked the Light for guiding him to her. She knew what she had to do.

Belinda walked right up to him. “Hello,” she said.

He was clearly startled by her greeting. “Hello,” he said, a bit hesitantly.

She gazed down at him, at his thick neck, his broad shoulders, and his chiseled muscles that were clearly visible beneath his dress tunic. Are you strong? would have been a stupid question to ask. So instead Belinda asked, “Are you a good fighter?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you a good fighter? Do you know how to fight?”

He glanced around the otherwise-empty chapel, nervously. “I don’t think that I’m supposed to talk to the Devotees,” he said.

“You’re not. But this is an emergency,” Belinda said.

“What is it? Do you need help?” The concern in his voice was immediate and genuine.

“My friend needs help,” Belinda said quickly. “She was attacked by the Horned One.” Then she realized the he wouldn’t know who or what the Horned One was. “I mean, she was attacked by the Nightmare Tree,” Belinda clarified.

But from the look on his face, he still didn’t understand. “The what?”

“A demon who makes people have nightmares and then traps them so that they can’t wake up,” Belinda said,

“Ah,” he said, easily accepting this explanation.

“I know how to defeat this demon. If I go into the forest and find the Yggdrasil Tree, and then do a spell, then I can defeat the nightmare demon,” Belinda said, rushing to explain herself. “But the Temple won’t let me go.”

“Why not?”

“Because they think that I can’t do it,” Belinda said.

“Hmm,” he said. He must not have been as stupid as everyone said that he was, because Belinda could see from his face that he already knew where their conversation was headed. But he apparently still had doubts. “I mean,” he said, as if choosing his words carefully, “I heard that the forest guardians won’t let a human anywhere near Yggdrasil.”

“But if I was chosen by the Light for this mission - if I had a vision in which I saw the forest and heard a voice telling me to go there, which, by the way, I did - then the forest guardians will let me pass! Right?”

“I don’t think that the forest guardians can be reasoned with like that,” the boy said. “They’re, uh... They’re like animals. They’re not reasonable. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“That’s why I need you to go with me,” Belinda said. “So that if I have to fight the forest guardians, I won’t have to fight alone.”

He stared at her.

“You’re a good fighter, right?” She asked her first question again.

“I am,” he said without a trace of modesty. “But I can’t—“

“My name is Belinda,” she said, interrupting his objection.

“Miss Belinda,” he said. “My name is—“

“Lucius Lanward. I know. I saw you in here earlier today. You and your father.”

Lucius glanced away from her, as if suddenly unable to meet her eyes. Belinda wondered if she had miscalculated by mentioning the blessing in the chapel from earlier that day. Was he ashamed? Humiliated? Belinda didn’t think that he had anything to be ashamed of.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t go with you. If you were here earlier today then you know why. I’ve been assigned to the garrison at King’s Manse. Third Calvary division.”

“But I heard that the new recruits don’t ride out until next week,” Belinda pressed.

“Yes, but—“

“It’s less than a day’s hike to the edge of the forest. Yggdrasil is closer to us than King’s Manse. We’ll be back before you have to leave.”

“You have no idea how much trouble I’ll be in if I run away with you,” Lucius said.

“Probably as much trouble as I’ll be in,” Belinda said. “And I don’t care. Even if the Sisters have me whipped for being disobedient, or even if they cast me out of the Order, I don’t care. I have to do this. I have to do this for my friend’s sake. And I have to do this because the Light commands me to!”

He stared up at her. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you.”

She nodded.

“You say that the Light is telling you to go?” He looked up at the statue of Athalia again, wide-eyed and wondering. “Are you sure?” he asked quietly.

“I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. And... I think it was the Light that brought you here tonight, too. I think it was the Light that brought us together. I think the Light is telling you to help me.”

Lucius sat, quiet and still, for a long, long moment. Belinda held her breath, her heart pounding in her chest. She had made her case. There was nothing more that she could do.

Then, slowly, he nodded.

“Thank you. Thank you!” Belinda pointed through the chapel door. “Meet me at the big tree out there after dark. I mean completely dark, so that no-one will see you. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He nodded again. “I will see you tonight, Miss Belinda,” he said.

Belinda grabbed her broom and ran out of the chapel. She had much to prepare, and little time to do so.

She skipped the meager dinner offered to the Devotees, taking advantage of the fact that everyone was in the dining hall to sneak into the armory and borrow a pair of good boots. After a moment of hesitation, she borrowed a training staff as well. Then she quickly ran into the dormitory and hid her pilfered treasures beneath her bed. She finished hiding the boots and staff just moments before Kieran found her.

“Belinda?” Kieran said, knocking on the door to Belinda’s room and then inviting herself in anyway. “Sister Cecilia said that we could see you at dinner, but you weren’t there. Are you, uh... All right? I mean, obviously not, right?” Kieran said, with a nervous, awkward laugh. “But, uh... What I mean, is... you know...”

“I know,” Belinda said. “And I’m sorry that I wasn’t at dinner. I just don’t think that I could eat anything right now.”

“Yeah. I’d imagine.” Kieran glanced nervously at Diedre’s empty bed. Then she said, “You can sleep with me and Carla tonight, if you want to.”

“That... sounds really nice, actually,” Belinda said. “I’d like that. I would. But my stomach has been being weird all day and... Um, I think I’d rather have some privacy tonight.” Belinda hoped that the embarrassed flush on her cheeks was convincing.

“Ah. I get it,” Kieran said. “But my offer still stands. For when you feel better.”

“Thank you,” Belinda said. And she meant it.

Kieran left. Belinda sat in her room, waiting for the sun to go down.

She heard a knock on her door, and then Sister Cecilia’s voice. “May I come in?”

“Uh, no!” Belinda said. “I’m using the chamber pot. I don’t feel good.”

“Belinda—“

Belinda knew that Sister Cecilia wasn’t going to be easy to fool. But she grabbed the pitcher of water by her bed, splashed some water into the chamber pot, and groaned in a way that she hoped was convincing. “I’d rather have some privacy now. Please!”

Sister Cecilia was still on the other side of the door. “Belinda...” Then, whether she was convinced by Belinda’s act or not, she said, “I would like to speak with you tomorrow. Come to my office after morning prayers.”

“I will, Sister Cecilia.”

“Good night, Devotee Belinda.”

“Good Night, Sister Cecilia.”

Belinda listened to Sister Cecilia’s footsteps leaving. Then she sat on her bed again, and watched the sun set through the only window in her room.

When it was fully dark, Belinda retrieved the boots from under her bed, tucked the staff under the crook of her arm, and climbed out of the window of her room.

Lucius was waiting for her underneath the tree across from the chapel, at their agreed-upon meeting spot. It was dark and the moon was waning, but Belinda could still see well enough to tell that he was wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a bag slung over his shoulder.

He frowned when he saw her. “You are not going dressed like that.”

“What? I have good boots.”

“I mean, your clothes.”

Belinda looked down at her white Devotee dress. “But I don’t have any other clothes,” she said. “Except for the sleeping smock. Devotees aren’t allowed to keep their own clothes or jewelry.”

Lucius sighed, then took off his cloak and tossed it toward her. “At least wear that,” he said.

Belinda put on the cloak. She could see now that he was dressed in a plain hunting tunic and carried a sword at his hip. Good. Between his sword and her staff, they were going to be able to fight their way to Yggdrasil. If they had to.

“There’s one more thing that I have to tell you,” Belinda said as they walked toward the crumbling part of the outer wall of the Temple complex. “About the Horned One. That’s the nightmare demon that attacked my friend. If you help me on this quest, he might come after you, too.”

“You probably should have mentioned that earlier,” Lucius said.

“But you don’t have to worry!” Belinda said quickly. “Yggdrasil’s forest is full of Light. As long as we get to the forest quickly, then the Horned One can’t touch us.”

“Are you sure about that? That this nightmare demon is somehow repelled by the forest?”

Belinda was pretty sure. But she wasn’t completely sure. So instead she said, “I promise that I won’t let the nightmare demon touch you. I promise you.”

“Let’s just pray that the Light will protect us,” Lucius said.

They climbed over the crumbling wall and then they were on their way.

To be continued.

Chapter Text

They hiked in silence through the low mountains north of Ranhorn for hours. Belinda’s legs were starting to ache, her throat was scratchy with thirst, and she was sweating beneath her heavy cloak. But she had endured worse during her Devotions. So long as the Light was with her, she could endure. And she could feel the Light now, filling her with strength and hope, filling her with conviction, filling her with purpose.

The moon was beginning to lower in the sky when they reached the edge of the forest. Lucius stopped in a spot that was still surrounded by tall grass and said, “We should stay here until the sun rises.”

“Here? Why here?”

Lucius glanced worriedly at the tree line looming above them. Beneath the canopy was nothing but deep, black darkness. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go in there when it’s dark,” he said. “We should really stop here and wait until we have sunlight again.”

“And what do you plan to do while we wait?” Belinda asked, somewhat impatiently.

“Prevent each other from falling asleep. Also, we need to hide and hope that a search party doesn’t find us.”

“No. We don’t have time to waste.” Belinda raised her staff, waving it in a pattern through the air as she muttered a spell under her breath. A ball of soft, glowing light formed in front of her. “We can bring the Light with us,” she said. Not bad for my first ever attempt at staff-wielding magic, she thought but did not say.

“All right,” Lucius said, although he still sounded doubtful. “But just to be clear, you don’t intend to keep going all the way to Yggdrasil without stopping, do you? Even if your nightmare demon is still out there, we still need to sleep at some point.”

“We’ll rest when we have to,” Belinda said. “We shouldn’t stop until we need to sleep. And when we need to sleep, it will be safer to do so inside the forest.”

They cautiously began picking their way through the underbrush of the forest. Once they were beneath the trees, they were in almost total darkness. Belinda’s ball of light illuminated their way sufficiently. It also immediately attracted unwanted attention.

Belinda swatted one bug away from her ear. She waved her staff to shoo a moth with a wingspan larger than her face away from her ball of light. She waved her hands and her staff in front of her face, but the bugs were swarming thick and fast. Then she heard Lucius sputtering and spitting.

“Lucius?”

“Ugh, I think I swallowed one!”

Belinda sighed and extinguished her ball of light.

Now they were in total darkness. Belinda stood still for a long moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust. There was barely any moonlight filtering through the trees, but at least it was enough for her to see a few feet in front of her. “Let’s stop here,” she conceded, sitting down in a convenient hollow formed by the diverging roots of a massive tree. She set her staff against the trunk of the tree, then sat down, curling her knees up to her chest as Lucius sat down beside her. The ground was hard beneath her and the roots were hard behind her back, but that was all right. Belinda was used to resting and sleeping on hard surfaces. That was also part of her Devotions.

Lucius offered her his pack. “Put this behind your back,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “Thank you. But I don’t need it.”

“Then let me take first watch,” Lucius insisted. “You should get some sleep.”

“I should,” Belinda admitted. “But I don’t feel tired at all.” Her heart was still pounding in her chest. The knowledge that she was doing something wrong, the thought that she was at that very moment being missed at the Temple, the idea that search parties might be riding through the moonlight and calling her name... How could she possibly sleep with all of that buzzing about in her head?

“Try closing your eyes,” Lucius said, “and, uh... counting sheep?”

Belinda laughed. But then she closed her eyes. And she sat in silence, for a long long time, listening to the singing of the night insects and the soft sound of Lucius’s breathing, willing sleep to come.

It never did.

Finally, Belinda opened her eyes. “Lucius,” she said.

“I’m right here,” he whispered.

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because we’re being watched.”

Belinda glanced around, but saw only darkness. “Are you sure?”

“Certain. I keep hearing sounds, moving in a circle around us.” Lucius lowered his voice even further. “We’re probably surrounded.”

“Is it the forest guardians, do you think?”

“If it’s not the forest guardians, then it’s the smartest and stealthiest pack of wolves that I’ve ever heard of.”

“If it’s the forest guardians, then they can probably hear us too. So there’s no point in whispering.” Belinda raised her voice. “And if it’s the forest guardians, then they know that we were brought here on a mission from the Light. So they will let us pass unharmed. Right?”

The singing of crickets was the only sound that greeted Belinda’s proclamation.

Belinda closed her eyes again. If any forest guardians were watching, she hoped they would take that as a sign that she trusted them, and that they could trust her. Once again, she tried to relax her thoughts and let herself sink down into a Light-blessed sleep. Once again, nothing happened.

Belinda opened her eyes again. “I can’t sleep,” she sighed. “Lucius, are you tired? Why don’t you let me take first watch.”

Lucius shook his head. “I can’t sleep knowing that we’re surrounded.”

“If the forest guardians haven’t done anything to us yet, then they’re probably not going to,” Belinda said. “They must know that we’re with the Light.”

“Miss Belinda...”

It was too dark for Belinda to read the expression on Lucius’s face. But she could hear the doubt in his voice. “What is it?” She asked.

“Do you always know what the Light wants?” he asked quietly. “I mean, can you always... hear it? Can you always hear the Light speaking to you?”

“I can,” Belinda said, without a trace of modesty. “Even in my earliest memories. The Light was always with me. It’s because my inner eye was always open.”

“Your what?”

“My inner eye,” she said. “It’s the difference between people who can feel certain types of magic and those who can’t. The Light is just one possible source of magic, but it’s the most powerful.” She had to restrain herself from fully nerding out about magic theory, as this was neither the time nor the place for it, but it was hard not to. “I mean, anybody can open their inner eye with training. And technically anybody can use magic even if they don’t feel it. I mean, anybody can follow a ritual or use a relic, although that can be pretty dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. But with me, well, I could always hear the Light guiding me.”

“But how do you know that it’s the Light?” Lucius asked. “If there’s a voice inside your head telling you to do exactly what you already know that you want to do, then... how do you KNOW that’s the Light guiding you? What if you’re just following your own desires?”

“You think I brought us into this forest just because I wanted to?” Belinda asked, defensively. “Is that it?”

“Oh no. No! No, I’m sorry,” Lucius said quickly. “I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant, was... uh... For people who aren’t you. For the rest of us who maybe hear the Light sometimes but not all the time.”

At that moment there was just enough moonlight for Belinda to see the doubt and sadness in his eyes. And then, suddenly, she remembered what Lucius had asked Father Wendell when he had interrupted the blessing ceremony. Then she understood what Lucius was really asking her about. “You don’t want to fight in the war, do you.”

Lucius suddenly turned away from her. Belinda hadn’t expected that reaction from him. Had she been too direct with her diagnosis? “Of course I’m going to fight in the war,” Lucius said. “It’s my duty to protect our kingdom from the savages.”

“But you think the Light is telling you not to fight,” Belinda insisted, gently.

“But I have to,” Lucius said. “It’s what I’ve trained my whole life for. It’s the entire reason that my family exists. Father always says that all the wealth and power in the world means nothing if we do not serve Athalia and use our strength to protect the common people from the Darkness.” He took a deep breath. “My father served in the army. My grandfather served in the army. My great-grandfather served in the army. My family has sacrificed life and limb to protect our kingdom from the Enclave. And the beastmen of the Enclave... They don’t know the Light. They turned their backs on Dura’s teachings. They’re our enemies... right?”

Belinda had heard plenty of times that the beastmen of the Enclave did not worship Dura. But, suddenly, she could feel the Light gently pointing out to her that she didn’t know for certain if that was true or not. So she said nothing.

“They’re our enemies, right?” Lucius asked again, his voice growing louder. He turned toward Belinda. “They rode into Malden and they slaughtered every man, woman, and child for no reason other than because they could. That makes them enemies of the Light. Right??”

“Of course,” Belinda said. “Obviously.”

“Then why does something about this war feel so wrong?” Lucius asked, his voice quiet again.

Belinda didn’t have an answer to that.

“What does the Light say that we should do?” Lucius asked.

“The Light says...” Belinda closed her eyes. “The Light says to banish darkness wherever we may find it.”

Lucius looked down at his knees. “The Light doesn’t give easy answers, does it.”

“Of course not,” Belinda said.

“I should fight,” Lucius said. But he sounded as if he were convincing himself. “I have to fight. The Light says to banish darkness. We’ve seen the savagery of the beastmen with our own eyes. They are a source of darkness. They are a scourge upon the land.” Lucius held up his hands. “If I don’t fight, what else can I do? I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Did you want to do something else?” Belinda asked quietly. “Is that what you think the Light was trying to tell you?”

Lucius put down his hands and sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Fighting the beastmen is the right thing to do. Helping you on your quest is the right thing to do. Right now, getting some sleep is the right thing to do.”

Belinda regarded him silently for a long moment. Then she said, “Maybe there is another path for you,” she said.

“Like what?” Lucius sounded skeptical.

“The Temple,” Belinda said. “When we go back, you could stay with me at the Temple. You could pledge to join the paladins.”

Lucius shook his head. “Father says that the paladins are boys who like to wear fancy armor but don’t have the will to fight in a real war.”

“That’s not true,” Belinda said. “Paladins have to fight Dark magic users and demons and the graveborn. They help King Edwin’s army fight against the beastmen invasion, too. Paladins fight all the time.”

“I don’t know...” Lucius said. “You had to give up your family name when you joined the Temple, didn’t you?”

“Yes. That’s how it works.”

“I don’t think I can just walk away from my house like that. I can’t do that to Father.”

“Why not?” Belinda asked. “I did.”

“It’s different for you.”

“How so?” Belinda asked. Then she realized. “Wait. Are you going to say that it’s because I’m a girl?”

Lucius looked uncomfortable. “I mean, you’re not the heir to your house.”

Belinda wanted to feel sympathy for him, she truly did. But a part of her just didn’t understand what all of the fuss was about. Things like house names and titles and inheritances all seemed so pointless when compared to the call of the Light. She knew that this boy had to be feeling the Light trying to guide him, at least on some level. Why was he trying so hard to resist it? “I know it’s not easy to give up your title and your name,” Belinda said, trying to choose her words carefully, “but that’s the whole reason that the Temple asks you do it. It’s not supposed to be easy. But to grow closer to the Light, you have to let go of your worldly concerns.”

“That sounds wrong,” Lucius said. “Family isn’t just about titles and names. It’s about so much more than that. And the war against the beastmen isn’t just a ‘worldly concern’ to let go of. People’s lives are at stake.” But he once again sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “I should be at King’s Manse, fighting for the king. If I ran away to join the Temple that would be the same as betraying my house and my kingdom.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Belinda said. “Like I said. You would still have to fight the beastmen if they attack the kingdom. But you would be fighting for the Light instead of for King Edwin.”

“It’s not about if the beastmen attack the kingdom,” Lucius said. “It’s about when. They’re savages. They’re never going to stop. Not until…” He trailed off, unwilling to finish.

Belinda thought of him, of the way that he had been the first time that she had noticed him, the quiet boy with the gentle eyes who came to light candles in the chapel every day. “You don’t really believe King Edwin when he says that he’s going to wipe out the beastmen once and for all, do you?” she asked. Then she answered her own question. “You don’t think that’s a cause worth fighting for.”

“Do you?”

“No,” Belinda said. “Fighting to protect your home is one thing. Fighting to destroy a whole people is something different. That’s why you should come to the Temple, Lucius. You can fight for the Light, not for some human king. I think you do feel the Light, and I think it’s been pointing you toward the Temple this whole time. Maybe that’s why you kept coming to the chapel every day.”

Lucius shook his head. “I went to the chapel every day just because it’s---”

He never had the chance to finish his statement, however, because at that moment the vine that had been slithering down the tree trunk toward him suddenly dropped down and wrapped around him in one quick motion, pinning his arms to his side. Belinda didn’t even have time to react before she felt something tightening around her neck. But her arms were still free, and for a panicky moment she was able to reach up and claw at the thick vines around her neck, trying desperately to pull them off. Her head was jerked backward, and for a split second she saw bright white flower petals in the moonlight. Then a cloud of pollen exploded across her vision, and she slipped down into darkness.

--------------------------------------------------

Belinda awoke to the cry of seagulls and the feeling of wet sand plastered all over her back. She coughed, spluttered, then stood up slowly. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyelashes were crusted with salt, and her boots, dress, and cloak were soaking wet. Her staff was gone. She turned her head and saw Lucius lying beside her, eyes closed, but breathing softly. Thank the Light.

The sky overhead was blue and cloudless. The sun was beating down on her exposed face, turning her nose and cheeks red. Belinda felt her head throb and her heart pound. The last thing that she remembered was the feeling of something wrapping around her neck... No. That wasn’t exactly the last thing. There had been something else, like dust falling in her face.

Pollen from snooze-blooms.

Oh, no.

Belinda reached toward Lucius, brushed his wet hair away from his face, then tried to shake him awake. “Lucius! Lucius!”

Lucius didn’t move. But at least he was still breathing.

Belinda stood up slowly, shakily. She held her hand above her eyes, trying to cut through the glare of the sun, trying to get a bearing on her surroundings. Nothing but sand, shrub, and waves as far as the eye could see.

Where am I? she thought. She could feel the Light with her, but the Light was not a map.

Belinda turned her attention back toward Lucius. She knelt down in the sand beside him, and tried shaking him again. This time he moaned softly. Belinda realized that his pack was gone. She pushed him over, just to make sure that he wasn’t lying on top of it. No such luck. It was gone. But at least his sword was still strapped to his waist.

Was he knocked out, the way that she had been? Or was he sleeping? What if he was sleeping and couldn’t wake up? What if the Horned One was tormenting him in a never-ending nightmare?! What if—

Lucius’s eyes fluttered open. “Miss...?” he croaked.

“I’m all right,” she said, answering his unspoken question as she felt a wave of relief wash over her body. “Can you stand?”

“Where...?”

“I don’t know.” She slid her arm beneath his back, trying to help him sit up. “Can you stand?” she asked again.

“What...?”

“The forces of darkness must have snuck up on us,” Belinda said. “They cast us out of the forest.”

“No,” Lucius said. His eyes met her eyes, and Belinda saw that his eyes were clear and lucid. “The forest guardians cast us out.”

“Lucius—“

“The forest guardians cast us out,” Lucius said again, calmly but insistently.

“No! The forces of darkness must have—“

“ ‘Forces of darkness’ my butt,” Lucius groaned as he stood up slowly, leaning only slightly on Belinda for support. “If demonic forces had gotten us, we’d be dead by now. But we’re still alive, so it must have been the forest guardians. They decided not to let us get close to Yggdrasil.”

“But that can’t be,” Belinda said. “The Light told me to—“

“You wanted to be a hero,” Lucius said. He stumbled away from Belinda, still shaky on his feet, but haltingly making his way across the wet sand toward the dry dunes farther from the waves. “You wanted to be the one to save your friend. I wanted to run away from the war.” He stopped, drew his sword from its scabbard, flung a few drops of water off it, inspected the blade for a brief moment, then re-sheathed his sword. “We were both just being selfish, and using the Light as an excuse, and the forest saw. right. through. us!”

Belinda stared at him.

“Where’s my pack?” he asked.

“It’s gone,” Belinda said quietly.

He turned toward her. She expected to see anger on his face, but instead she saw only remorse. Remorse, and a piece of dried seaweed stuck to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. But he did not say I didn’t mean it because they both knew that to be untrue. He held out his hand to her. “Come on. We need to get some water, and figure out where we are.”

Belinda took a step toward him, felt seawater sloshing around in her boots, then sighed, reached down, and removed her boots. She shook the water out of them, then tucked them both under her arm, and walked toward Lucius with her bare feet sinking not-unpleasantly into the damp, cool sand.

Belinda reached for Lucius’s hand. He closed his hand around hers, and she felt immediately comforted. She wanted to righteously insist that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. She wanted so badly to prove to him that the Light was still calling her back to the dark forest and the Yggdrasil Tree, even at that very moment. But she felt the warmth in his hand and for the moment, that was enough. His heart was closed to her words but still full of concern for her wellbeing. He was so achingly gentle. She squeezed his hand gently, and with that, the argument between them was ended. For the time being.

Now they had to figure out where they had been sent, and how to get back home.

The two of them walked inland, hand in hand, across the sandy dunes and into gently rolling hills of oceanside brush. The ground became a mix of sand and rocks, which hurt Belinda’s feet. But she felt instinctively that walking in soaked boots would be even worse, so she grit her teeth and said nothing. I’ve been through worse in my Devotions, she told herself for the umpteenth time.

Lucius suddenly pointed toward the horizon. “Look!”

Belinda squinted through the harsh sunlight. Then, she saw it: a thin line of smoke rising toward the sky.

Please please please let that smoke be coming from a chimney, she prayed to the Light. And please let that chimney belong to someone helpful and kind!

They walked toward the smoke rising from the horizon for what felt like forever. Finally they crested a small hill and saw the source of the smoke: a tiny log cabin in a large open clearing, with a chicken coop on one side and a pig pen on the other, and a line of smoke rising lazily from the chimney at the back of the small building.

“Maybe they have a well,” Belinda said, even though she couldn’t see one. “Maybe they could give us some water. Or at least tell us where we are.”

“Let’s hope they’re friendly,” Lucius said. He let go of Belinda’s hand, and touched the sword at his hip.

They walked down the hill toward the cabin. They made no effort to be quiet, as both understood that they didn’t want to appear to be sneaking up on the cabin’s inhabitants. As they approached the cabin, Belinda could hear the chickens clucking in their coop and the pigs snorting contentedly as they fed on what looked like freshly-scattered feed in their pen. But there was no sign of anybody stirring within the cabin.

Lucius walked right up to the front door, raised his fist, and knocked loudly. “Hello?” he called out. “Hello? Is there anybody home?”

Belinda glanced up at the smoke rising from the chimney. Somebody had to be inside the cabin, right? It was dangerous to leave a fire unattended, wasn’t it?

“Hello! HELLOO-OOO!” Lucius knocked again. Still no answer.

Then he reached for the doorknob and twisted it. The door was unlocked. It opened inward, creaking on its hinges.

Lucius glanced over his shoulder toward Belinda. “Well...”

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “We’re not thieves. We won’t take anything. But if we look around, maybe there will be something that at least tells us where we are.”

Lucius nodded. Then he stepped through the doorway, one hand gripping the hilt of his sword. Belinda placed her wet boots beside the door of the cabin, so that she would have two free hands just in case, and then followed one step behind Lucius.

The interior of the cabin was one large, dimly-lit room. There were windows, all of which were shrouded by thick, hand-stitched curtains that all but entirely blocked the sunlight. A fire burned in the fireplace. A large bear skin covered most of the wooden floor. Belinda could smell burning wood but nothing else. There was nothing cooking in the fire. There was no food at all in the tiny cabin. There was a table, a chair, a whetstone, various knives and implements hung on the walls, and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.

“Miss Belinda,” Lucius said quietly. He was gripping the hilt of his sword so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. “There’s no food in here. And there’s no bed.”

Belinda stepped forward onto the bearskin rug. The animal fur felt soft and soothing beneath her sore feet. She allowed herself to wriggle her toes against the soft fur and sighed contentedly.

“Do you know what kind of creature doesn’t need to eat or sleep?” Lucius asked, his voice tense with alarm.

Belinda knew. But for some reason, standing on the soft bearskin rug, she couldn’t bring herself to share Lucius’s sense of alarm. “Graveborn, probably,” she said, as if it were the least alarming thing in the world. “That’s funny. I thought they lived in cemeteries or slept in coffins. I didn’t think they would have a cute little house like this.” She laughed.

Lucius was looking at her as if she had said something strange. “This isn’t funny. We need to get out of here. And get as far away as possible.”

“If a graveborn thing does live here, then why keep all the pigs and chickens?” Belinda mused. Then she answered her own question. “They must be for blood sacrifices.” She glanced around the cabin interior. “I wonder where the magic circle is?”

Lucius was already halfway out the door. “Come on,” he insisted. “We have to go!”

Belinda glanced down at her bare feet. She wriggled her toes against the soft bear fur again. It felt so, so good. “I wonder where the magic circle is,” she said again.

Lucius stepped toward her. “Miss Belinda,” he said. Quietly, but urgently. “Are you... all right?”

“I’m perfectly fine,” she said. The pain in her feet was gone. Her thirst was gone. Her fear was gone. Her doubt was gone. Even her sunburn was healed. She had never felt better in her life. She was radiant with the Light, filled with its strength and warmth.

“All right then,” Lucius said, slowly, cautiously. Belinda didn’t understand why he was acting so strangely. He held out his hand toward her. “Why don’t you take my hand? Please?”

She reached toward his hand, then stopped. She stared at her own outstretched hand, fascinated by the lines in her fingers and the pinkness of her knuckles and the blue veins visible beneath her skin. “Amazing,” she breathed.

“What’s amazing?” Lucius asked.

“My hands are so alive.” Belinda held both of her hands up to her face, staring at them with her mouth gaping in amazement. “I haven’t been alive in so, so long!”

That was when he lunged at her, grabbing for her perfect pink hands. What was he trying to do, pull her off the bearskin rug? No matter. Her new body was strong and fast, toned and trained by the grueling Devotions of the Temple. Most importantly, he had clearly not been expecting her to be strong or fast. She dodged him almost effortlessly, then knit both her hands into a single fist and swung it toward the side of his head.

He went down easily. Too easily. Why hadn’t he drawn his sword? She searched the memories in her new mind and found admiration and aching warmth and a fearful, fearful vision of the poor boy lying crushed and broken beneath a stampeding horde of beastmen or, even worse, being dragged screaming into a nightmare from which he would never, ever awaken again.

Mine, she thought. Mine. He didn’t draw his sword because he’s mine. Now I have to protect him. Mine. My responsibility.

She bent down and pushed his limp body off the bearskin rug. He moaned and stirred, but did not awaken. Then she carefully rolled up the bearskin rug, revealing the magic circle of dried blood crusted on the floor beneath. She grabbed the boy and dragged him toward the center of the summoning circle. Then she glanced around the cabin, searching for a suitable implement. There. The axe hanging on the wall. Perfect for chopping small firewood. Also perfect for cracking through a human sternum to get at the heart underneath.

She took the axe in her hand, then knelt down beside him. She tenderly brushed his salt-crusted hair from his forehead, just as she remembered having done when they had awoken on the beach not too long ago. “It’s all right now,” she assured him. “Everything is all right now. You don’t have to go to the war. You don’t have to be sad about the killing. You don’t have to be afraid to fall asleep. We are in the Light now. And we will stay in this Light forever.”

She positioned herself at the right angle, then raised the axe above her head. “Come into the Light with me,” she whispered.

She brought the axe down. One powerful, perfect swing to end his pain and suffering forever.

The first arrow shot the axe clean out of her hands. The second arrow pierced her shoulder, causing a lightning bolt of pain to course through her body. She shrieked, a wailing howl that was not the voice of the girl whose mouth from which it issued.

“Leave her!” the creature that crouched in the cabin doorway hissed. “Let her go!”

“No! NO!” She clawed at the arrow in her shoulder, trying in vain to pull it out, only succeeding in making her wound worse. “I’m with the Light now! I’m part of the Light now! Don’t make me leave the Light again!!”

“Is that why?” the boy asked.

She looked down, and saw that the boy was awake. But instead of struggling or trying to escape, he was looking up at her with deep sympathy in his eyes. “Is that why you entered Belinda? Because you were seeking the Light?”

“Seeking? Seeking?!” She shook her head, feeling hot tears prickling at her eyes, hot blood dripping from her shoulder wound. “No no no no no. I am Belinda. My name is Belinda. I’m alive. I’m filled with the Light. I promised that I would protect you. I’m going to save you.”

“You’re confused,” the boy said as the creature from the doorway crept toward them, its bow drawn but its arrows stayed, at least for the moment. “You’re not Belinda. You’re not alive. You were lost in the darkness. You were drawn to Belinda’s light and now you’re trapped inside of her. But right now, if you let go, you can go into the Light for real.”

“Go...?” Her voice trembled with fear. And longing. And tenuous hope. “Let... go?”

Lucius rolled over and pushed himself up into a sitting position. He reached out and touched her face, gently, focused on holding her gaze with his eyes even as he positioned himself between her and the undead creature’s drawn arrows. “Let go,” he said quietly, encouragingly. “You can go into the Light now. It will be all right.”

“But... if I let go...” She stared up at him imploringly. “In this body I know who I am. If I let go I’ll forget again.”

“Not if you go into the Light,” the boy said.

“Do you promise?” she whispered.

“I promise.”

She didn’t protest any longer. Nor did she say goodbye. She simply rolled her eyes back, let her head loll forward, and left.

Belinda felt Lucius catch her as she slumped forward. She felt the sharp twist of pain as the arrowhead buried in her shoulder pushed further into her wound, goring her flesh. Then she heard the whistle of an arrow pass right by her ear.

“Get out of my house,” the dead thing hissed at them.

“Wait,” Belinda tried you say, but her voice came out like a dry croak and her head felt as though it were filled with fuzz. “We need—“

And then she fainted dead away.

To be continued.

Chapter Text

When Belinda awoke, it was dark, but the flames in the fireplace still illuminated the interior of the cabin. She was wrapped in a warm fur skin and her shoulder was tightly wound with bandages. The arrow was gone, at least. One sleeve of her dress had been torn completely off by whomever had treated her wound. Her throat was no longer scratchy and her lips were wet with water, water that had probably come from the cold metal bucket that was sitting by her side. Yellow eyes were watching her.

“Graveborn,” she said.

“Intruder,” the dead creature hissed.

Lucius was crouching next to her. He must have been watching over her the whole time. Had he also treated her wound? Or had the dead man done that? “Do you think you can move?” Lucius whispered urgently. “If so, we should leave.”

Belinda ignored him, trying to stare through the dancing shadows created by the fireplace at the owner of those yellow eyes. The graveborn man was crouching on the ground on the other side of the cabin, staring at them warily, his body tense, his bow at his side. He wore a green cloak that did not completely conceal the withered gray bulb that was his face, the wispy cobwebs hanging from his skull that might have once been his hair, or the puckered hole that was all that remained of his mouth. The cloak also did not hid the fact that his arms were too long or that his hands were elongated and gnarled, like the roots of a tree. He did not rot, but his skin was riddled with stitches holding it together. He smelled of nothing at all. But when he spoke, his voice was sibilant with the whispers of the abyss. “Go,” he commanded them. “Leave this place. I allowed you to stay so long as you were incapacitated. But if you are awake now, girl, then leave. You do not belong here.”

“Come on,” Lucius said quietly. “I’ll help you up.”

“Wait,” Belinda said. She closed her eyes. She listened to the Light. And the Light showed her a memory.

Pity the graveborn, Sister Cecilia had once told her. Some choose to walk the path of eternal pain. Others are ripped from the Light against their will. But all of them are lost in the darkness.

Ah, Belinda thought. But that’s not true. This one had let Lucius save her instead of decapitating her with an arrow. This one had given her water, a fur skin , and bandages. This one had shown her both mercy and kindness even though she had been a stranger intruding in his home. This one still had the Light in him.

Belinda opened her eyes. “Don’t make us leave yet,” she said to the creature with the yellow eyes. “I can repay your kindness to us. I can help you.”

“Uh, what?” Lucius said.

“What?” the creature with the yellow eyes asked.

“Your summoning circle,” Belinda said. She nodded toward the bearskin rug that had once again been spread out over the circle drawn in dried, crusted blood. “It’s... amateurish,” she said. “You’re not even really summoning spirits. It’s more like you’ve set out a lure for any lost spirits who wander your way. That’s why you ended up attracting a spirit who was seeking the Light in the first place. You don’t really know how to do Dark magic, do you?”

“Belinda, stop!” Lucius hissed.

But the creature with the yellow eyes regarded her with guarded curiosity. “Girl, how could you possibly know that?” he asked.

“Because I study Light magic,” she said. “At the Temple we study how to counter Dark magic, too. I know what a properly-drawn Dark magic circle should look like, at least in general principle. You drew your circle on a wooden floor, which means that the grain in the wood is interfering with your lines and symbols. You should never do blood magic on a porous surface. Or, if you’re going to use a wooden surface, then you should carve your symbols to make deep grooves that you can fill with blood.”

“Belinda, please,” Lucius begged, “can we please please please just get out here? We’re the ones who broke into his house. He has a right to ask us to leave.”

“I can help you,” Belinda offered again, staring straight into those uncanny yellow eyes, showing him that she was not afraid. “But Lucius is right. If you ask us to leave, then we will leave.”

The creature tilted his head at her, curiously. “I knew you were from the Temple,” he said. “I recognize the uniform of the Devotees.” Then he laughed, a harsh sound full of dust and cobwebs. “Is that why you ran away, girl? Because they didn’t like you learning so much about Dark magic?”

“I didn’t run away,” Belinda explained calmly. “The Light chose me to go on a quest.”

“And you, Lanward boy,” the undead creature said. “Did you run away with her to escape fighting in the war?”

“How do you know my house name?!” Lucius asked.

“Your family crest is carved on the hilt of that sword, stupid boy,” the undead creature said. “Of course I recognize the Lanward family crest. I fought alongside your kin in the war.”

“You fought in the war? Against the beastmen?” Lucius asked incredulously. “Is that how you died?”

“No,” the creature said. “That is not how I died.”

“What’s your name?” Lucius asked.

The creature shrugged. “If you ask for my human name, I can no longer speak it. And it no longer matters. I am not now the same being that I once was.”

“My name is Belinda,” Belinda said quickly. “This is Lucius. What can we call you?”

“Will you be able to speak the name that the grave spirits bestowed upon my when they tore me from the Light?” the creature dared them.

“Yes,” Belinda said.

“Then call me Ferael.”

“Ferael,” Belinda said. “That isn’t such a terrifying name at all.”

Ferael grunted, then stood up. Belinda and Lucius also stood up. Ferael walked over to the corner of his cabin where the axe that he knocked out of Belinda’s hands had fallen. He picked up the axe, then said, “Lanward boy. Take this. Put those muscles of yours to some use and chop us some more firewood.” He handed the axe to a gaping, incredulous Lucius. Then he turned toward Belinda. “Human girl. Do you know how to dress a chicken?”

“She’s injured!” Lucius protested.

Belinda ignored him. “I know how to dress a chicken,” she said. “I did my share of hours in the kitchen as part of my Devotions.”

“We are NOT going to help you perform blood magic!” Lucius said.

“Blood magic?” Ferael laughed again. “Idiot child, I’m offering to feed you. When is the last time that you ate, anyway?”

As if on cue, Belinda’s stomach rumbled loudly.

--------------------------------------------------

There were no seasonings for the roast chicken, not even salt. They had no plates or goblets, so they ate off the table and sipped from cupped hands dipped in a bucket that held freezing-cold water from the well at the edge of the clearing. But it was still the best meal that Belinda that had ever tasted in her life. And she suspected that Lucius felt the same way, even though he wouldn’t admit it. Once she had convinced him that the graveborn man wasn’t trying to poison them, he had eaten an entire half of the roasted bird.

Ferael sat on the other side of the cabin, sharpening his knives on his whetstone, watching them eat by the flickering light of the fire. “Are you sure you don’t want some?” Belinda offered him.

Ferael grunted. “I don’t eat,” he said.

“I read that graveborn did eat,” Belinda said, being careful to swallow her food before she spoke but not so careful that she could resist wiping her fingers on her dress. Or what was left of her dress.

“Some do,” Ferael said. “The grave always hungers for something. For some, the compulsion is for flesh or for blood.”

“So what do you hunger for?” Lucius asked, darkly.

“Fear,” Ferael said. He examined the sharpened edge of a carving knife. “I hunt. When I was alive, I hunted for the kill. My prey never knew fear, as they died before even realizing that they had been struck. But now?” He shrugged. “I can’t be satisfied unless I see the terror in their eyes the moment before they die.” He spoke casually, as if he were describing his method for digging a well or constructing an arrow. “That is what Ferael consumes. The fear of his prey.”

“So then why are you summoning ghosts?” Lucius asked. “What’s that all about?”

Ferael looked at Lucius as if Lucius were the stupidest boy he had ever met. “To terrify my prey, of course.”

“Why don’t you just show them your face?”

Ferael glared at him.

“Lucius,” Belinda admonished. “Don’t be rude. We’re the uninvited guests, remember?” She hadn’t failed to notice the lack of any sort of mirror inside the cabin, either. She wondered if Ferael was sensitive about his spoiled appearance. Was that why he was always trying to cover himself with his cloak, even when he was indoors?

Belinda turned toward Ferael. “You never studied magic when you were alive, did you. Then why are you trying to do it now?”

Ferael grunted. “Feel like I have to. I’m following my instincts.” He ground another knife against his whetstone. “I killed a sorceress, once. She had... books. I took those books with me and tried to read them. I couldn’t read the language they were written in. But there were diagrams, and symbols, and pictures. So I just copied those.”

“That seems reckless,” Lucius said.

“Says the boy who tried to mess with the forest guardians and then broke into a stranger’s house,” Ferael countered. Then he turned his yellow eyes toward Belinda. “What about you, Temple girl?” Ferael asked. “I’ve spoken enough about myself. Tell me about this quest of yours that led you to break into my house.”

Belinda told him the whole story, and Ferael listened, his shriveled ruin of a face unreadable, expressionless. When Belinda finished her tale, Ferael looked at her with his piercing yellow eyes and spoke slowly. “So... You heard a voice crying for help.”

Belinda nodded. Lucius watched them both quietly.

“Are you certain,” Ferael asked, “that this voice was calling out to you and only you? And are you certain that ‘the tree’ this voice spoke of is the Yggdrasil Tree?”

Belinda was ready for these questions, because Sister Cecilia had already asked them to her. “I am certain that I need to go to the Yggdrasil Tree, because that is what the Light is telling me. No, I can’t be certain that I am the only one that the dream-voice called out to. But that doesn’t give me an excuse to just ignore—“

“Arrogant girl,” Ferael grunted. “Full of Light but full of hubris. No wonder that particular lost spirit was drawn to you.” He wrapped his knives in a piece of leather, then stood up. “The forest guardians apparently found you unworthy of approaching Yggdrasil. So, girl. What will you do now? Will you give up on your quest?”

“No!” Belinda insisted. “My friend is suffering! You can’t expect me to just throw up my hands and stop trying to help her!”

Ferael sighed. “Full of hubris and with a savior complex the size of a flying whale.” He walked toward Belinda, then looked down at her. She glared up at him, unwilling to be intimidated. “So show me, girl,” he said. “Show me that your arrogance is not unwarranted. Fix my summoning for me.”

“All right,” Belinda said. “First, do you still have those books that you were talking about?”

Ferael glanced toward the wooden chest at the far side of the cabin. “Yes.”

“You’re really doing this, huh,” Lucius said to Belinda.

“Of course I am. I promised him, didn’t I? A priestess keeps her word.” She turned her attention back toward Ferael. “Don’t take out the books. I don’t want to see them. But you said that you could copy the symbols from those books, so that’s what we have to work with. Like I said, blood magic on a porous surface is a bad idea. But if you know how to work with wood, then instead of blood magic you could use carvings. Create something that you can carry with you and imbue with powerful curses. That’s what the priestesses do when they carve their staffs. If it works with Light magic then it has to work with Dark magic.”

“Hmmm.” Ferael furrowed his shriveled brow, pondering this. “A staff would be inconvenient to carry or to use. But something else....” His eyes flickered toward his bow.

“Your bow would work perfectly,” Belinda said. “Carve the symbols from your books into your bow. Carve those symbols onto your arrowheads. Then you can summon spirits anytime, anywhere, so long as you have your bow and your cursed arrows.”

“Hmmm,” Ferael said again.

Lucius suddenly stood up and pushed himself away from the table. “I’ve lost my appetite,” he said, almost petulantly, although his declaration was a moot point seeing as how he had finished devouring his half of the roasted chicken a while ago. “I’ll clean the table.”

“Let me help you,” Belinda insisted. She stood up too, then suddenly felt a bolt of pain pierce through her shoulder. “Aaah!” she cried out.

Lucius was at her side in an instant. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine,” Belinda said. But then she saw the blood soaking through her bandages.

“You’re not fine. Your wound re-opened.” Lucius turned toward Ferael. “I have to stitch it closed.”

“You have to what?” Belinda asked, feeling her stomach clench in a fearful knot.

“Sew your wound closed,” Lucius repeated calmly. “Otherwise it will keep tearing open like this.”

Ferael nodded matter-of-factly. “I’ll boil the water for the needles. Sewing supplies are over there.” He sighed. “Let’s get this over with quickly. Tonight has been long enough as it is.”

--------------------------------------------------

Belinda was proud of the fact that she did not scream. She was proud of the fact that she did not cry. She wasn’t proud of the fact that she swooned into unconsciousness when Lucius pierced her flesh with the hot needle for the first time. But at least that way she managed to get a little bit of sleep.

She awoke beneath her warm cloak on a pile of blankets in the corner of a dead man’s cabin, her stomach still pleasantly full but her shoulder throbbing with pain. She had a moment of clenching panic when she realized that she had fallen asleep, but then the moment passed. She was awake now, which meant that either she had gotten lucky, or that she been spared a night of torment because the Horned One was toying with her. Maybe both.

Belinda stood up slowly. She felt dirty, almost crusty. No, not almost. Definitely crusty. She knew that her dress was missing a sleeve and her cloak was a ragged mess. Her face and hair must have looked even worse. The lack of mirrors in Ferael’s home was a blessing for which Belinda was suddenly thankful.

Outside the cabin, birds were singing. Inside the cabin, Ferael was packing a bag and Lucius was lacing up his boots.

“Feeling better?” Lucius asked, hopefully, when he saw that Belinda was awake.

Belinda smiled at him. “I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me until it’s healed all the way,” Lucius said. Then he added quietly, “It will leave a scar. I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize.” She stood up, put on her cloak - which conveniently concealed the missing sleeve of her dress and her bandaged shoulder - and brushed the blanket lint off what was left of her dress. She glanced over toward Lucius. “So... did you...?”

“He fell asleep,” Ferael confirmed.

Lucius shook his head. “I tried not to.”

“But you woke up this time, so we’re still safe,” Belinda said. “For now.”

Lucius looked up at her, and she saw the exhaustion etched on his face. “We can’t keep going like this,” he said. “We have to be able to get some real sleep. Somehow.”

“Hmm. Well,” Belinda said. “I think I have an idea about that.”

Lucius looked at her curiously.

“I still have to think about the logistics of it a bit more,” she said. “But I think best while I’m walking. Are you ready to go?”

“Extremely ready,” Lucius said.

Belinda glanced one last time around the cabin. “Then let’s go.” She stepped through the front door of the cabin and into the blessed sunshine. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in the fresh air, listening to the birds singing to greet the day. Lucius and Ferael joined her outside the cabin.

Belinda turned toward Ferael. “Thank you for everything. Really.” Then she eyed his bow and quiver. “So, where are you going?”

“You’re coming with me,” Ferael said, instead of answering her question.

Lucius took a step closer to Belinda. “No, I think we’ll be on our way now,” he said.

“What exactly is your plan, boy? Are you going to walk through the Enclave all the way back to Ranhorn?”

Belinda gaped at Ferael. “Come again?”

Ferael pointed in the direction of the sun. “Ranhorn is hundreds of miles to the East. You would have to cross through the Enclave to reach it. Or...” He pointed to the south. “You could return the same way that you got here. On the ocean. Not carried by angry forest guardians or thrown into a portal, of course. You would have to pay for passage on a ship.”

“We’re that far away from Ranhorn?!” Lucius spluttered.

“The forest guardians portaled us to the other side of the continent?!” Belinda said, still shocked and more than a little indignant to learn this. Surely the forest guardians hadn’t needed to go to the trouble of creating a portal just to send them that far away. It seemed a little excessive, at least from Belinda’s point of view.

“You’re coming with me,” Ferael repeated. “I can get you passage on a ship. If your advice from last night works, girl.”

“What does that mean?” Belinda asked.

“You’ll find out.”

“Why are you still helping us?” Lucius asked, suspiciously.

Ferael shrugged. “Instincts,” he said again.

Lucius looked at Belinda doubtfully. But Belinda returned his gaze and said calmly, “I think he’s more than earned our trust by now.”

“Hmm,” Lucius said, clearly not wanting to agree with her but unable to argue the point.

Ferael was already walking toward the direction of the trees. Belinda followed, Lucius a reluctant step behind her.

They hiked up and down low rolling hills, through scattered copses of tall trees and fields of grass and flowers. It was a glorious, sunny day. Belinda once again felt warm beneath her cloak. She pushed back her hood, letting the light breeze blow through her sweaty clumps of hair. Then she thought of Lucius walking beside her and, suddenly struck by a self-conscious feeling that she had never felt before, pulled the hood of her cloak back over her head to hide her tangled, dirty hair. Her cheeks felt hot. Well, that was probably because of the sun.

She turned to look at Lucius. He looked tired, and unhappy. He was definitely unhappy to still be following the dead creature leading them through the wilderness. Suddenly Belinda wanted very badly to wipe the frown off his face. Maybe if she could get him talking again. “You’re awfully quiet,” she said, for lack of a better conversation starter.

“I’m just... worrying,” Lucius said.

“About how we’re going to get back home?”

“Yes. That. And,” he said, looking up at the blue sky as if he expected to see something threatening up there, “Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Belinda blinked at him. “What?”

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s an expression,” Lucius said. “It means waiting for something inevitable.” When he saw that she still looked confused, he tried to explain further. “So, normally, when a person takes off their shoe and drops it to the ground, you hear a thud, right? And then you know that you’re about to hear a second thud, because they still have to take off their other shoe. So. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Belinda turned away from him, and watched Ferael skulking through the tall wildflowers a few steps in front of them. “What’s this inevitable thing that you’re worried about?” she asked.

“The same thing that you warned me about when we left,” Lucius said quietly. “The reason that I tried so hard to not fall asleep last night. I mean, other than the fact that I had to keep watch because you were out cold and I was trying to make sure that the animated corpse holding us hostage didn’t try anything while you were asleep. But I was also worried about your nightmare demon.”

Belinda nodded solemnly. She remembered that terrifying moment on the beach when she had, just for a few seconds, been unable get Lucius to wake up. When she had imagined the Horned One devouring him from the inside out.

“Your plan was to have Yggdrasil’s forest protect us from the Horned One,” Lucius reminded her. “But we’re on the other side of the continent now. So what’s this new plan of yours?”

Ferael suddenly held up his hand. “Silence!” he hissed. “Don’t move.” Without making a sound, he pulled an arrow from his quiver, knocked it on his bowstring, and took aim.

Belinda watched him, fascinated.

The bowstring snapped. The arrow flew.

Something shrieked and flew into the sky, furiously beating its enormous wings as hissing black spirits streamed through the air in pursuit of it. Belinda ignored the horrifying sight of the Dark spirits as she was distracted by trying to figure out what, exactly, the spirits were chasing. Was it a bird? Belinda had never seen a bird that looked like that before. She had never heard a bird that screamed like that before.

The shrieking thing flapped its wings in a panic as the Dark spirits swirled around it, tormenting it. It darted this way and that across the sky, but the spirits would not let it escape. Ferael watched his prey for a long moment, as said prey desperately struggled, trying to escape its fate. Then Ferael drew back his bowstring for a second time, and fired.

This time his arrow pierced the flying thing and sent it plummeting to the ground. A moment later, the hissing Dark spirits dissolved like smoke.

Ferael hefted his bow, now covered in carvings of arcane symbols, appreciatively. “Your idea worked, girl.”

“What kind of bird was that?!” Lucius asked.

“Not a bird,” Ferael said. He led them through the tall grass and flowers toward the spot where his prey had fallen. He stepped aside, letting Belinda and Lucius get a good look at the dying creature.

It was not a bird. It was not a bat. It was not anything that should have existed in the world, a bulbous head attached to a small blob of a body, outstretched wings, a gaping mouth lined with rows of sharp teeth, and two strange, glowing orbs that might have been eyes. The creature was still, no longer breathing, and leaking a thick black fluid from where Ferael’s arrow had pierced its body. But its eyes - if they even were eyes - were still glowing with a sickly green, unnatural light. Its mouth was still gaping open, revealing all of its sharp, dagger-like teeth. It was a creature of Dark magic, vicious hunger personified. Belinda took an instinctive step away from it.

“What do you feel, Temple girl?” Ferael asked quietly.

“I feel... that...” Belinda searched for the right words.

Lucius put a hand on her shoulder, comfortingly.

She was immediately grateful for the touch. She turned and looked at him, and saw that he was revulsed by the thing on the ground, too, but bravely trying to hide it for her sake. Or bravely trying to hide it because he didn’t want to give Ferael the satisfaction of seeing him react to the grotesque creature. Maybe both.

Belinda turned toward Ferael. “I feel that the Light is in all things in this world. But the Light is not in that thing. It’s completely absent.”

“That’s because this creature is not of this world,” Ferael said. “This thing was born of Annih, in the realm of the Abyss, and it came here...” He stood and pointed for the second time that day toward the south. “...through one of the great, growing cracks in the Barred Gate.”

Belinda felt Lucius’s hand instinctively squeeze her shoulder. She was, again, immediately grateful to have him there with her. “There are cracks in the Barred Gate?” she asked softly. She thought that she should have been horrified to hear Ferael’s words. But a part of her, strangely, was not surprised

Maybe a part of her had already known about the cracks in the Barred Gate.

Maybe she had already known because the Light had already known.

Or maybe she had known since the moment that the whispers about the prefect girl found frozen in her bed had begun to circulate at the Temple. Or the moment when Sister Cecilia had started listing all the evils in the world and then had stopped, as if afraid that she had said too much.

Or maybe she had known from the moment that she had seen the eyeless face with the bloody gash of a mouth looming over her in a nightmare. Rotten fruit of the Nightmare Tree. A newly-born creature of darkness, a literal infant in terms of the cosmic scale of time, but already oh so powerful. A creature who might never have been birthed in the first place if not for the cracks in the Barred Gate.

“So, what are you going to do with that thing?” Lucius suddenly asked, practical as ever.

“Sell it to someone that I know who will want it,” Ferael said, “in exchange for something of equal rarity and value: passage for you two on a coastal voyage.” He reached down and picked up his arrow, holding the creature as if it were a piece of meat skewered on a roasting stick. “Come, children,” he said. “We’re going to King’s Bay.”

--------------------------------------------------

They continued to hike until the sun was high in the sky, and the hunting trails that they followed had turned into winding paths and then again into proper dirt roads with deep wagon ruts running down the center. Ferael held up his hand again, signaling them to stop. “Civilization soon,” he grunted. “Need to make preparations.”

They sat down in the grass by the side of the road. Ferael opened his bag, rummaged around the inside, then tossed some scraps of fabric at Lucius. “Cover the hilt of your sword,” he said. “Plenty of beastmen in King’s Bay. They’re not hostile to humans. Normally. But the House of Lanward has killed plenty of their people in the war, so it’s best that your family crest isn’t recognized.”

Lucius regraded the scraps of fabric in his hands for a long moment, his expression unreadable. “Why are there beastmen in King’s Bay?” he asked. “That’s part of our kingdom.”

Ferael shrugged. “Money,” he said. “Things and people, bought and sold. Plenty of riches in King’s Bay as long as Edwin turns a blind eye to his enemies doing business there.”

Lucius nodded and unsheathed his sword. He began carefully, tightly wrapping up its elaborately-carved hilt.

Ferael unwrapped his knives and began working on the corpse of the Dark magic creature. He carefully removed its teeth, cut something that might have been an organ out of its body, and squeezed its blood into a set of small vials. He removed another utensil from his bag and began carefully scooping the eyeballs out of the dead creature’s skull. The eyeballs were still glowing with that sickly green light.

Belinda watched this careful, surprisingly delicate work for a few moments, fascinated. Then she remembered that she had a job to do, too.

She stood up, glanced around, then found what she was looking for. All that she needed was a stick, even a small one. She found a perfect twig, almost the exact size of a quill pen. Then she knelt by the side of the road and began drawing in the dirt.

“What are you doing?” Lucius asked.

“An idea,” Belinda said. “If Mister Ferael can use Dark magic to summon Dark spirits, then...” She frowned, erased one line that she had drawn, and started over. “Then the opposite should be true. If people die when they’re at peace, they go into the Light. So we should, theoretically....”

She trailed off, lost in her concentration. She was acting on instinct now, feeling the Light pulsing in the grass and the insects and the worms and the dirt and all the living things around her, feeling the Light that was in the living and feeling the Light that existed beyond the living, and letting that Light guide her hand.

And then, a presence. A spirit had answered her call.

There was no flash of light, no sparkles, nothing at all to indicate that something had arrived from beyond the mortal realm. There was just a presence, warm and comforting. Belinda looked up at the cloudless blue sky. “Thank you,” she said humbly, “for answering my call.”

“Miss Belinda?” Lucius asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“Let her be, boy,” Ferael hissed. “If you can’t feel the presence of that thing she just summoned then consider yourself lucky. It’s making my skin crawl.”

Belinda ignored them both. “Do you have the power,” she asked the spirit, “to protect our dreams when we sleep?”

The spirit answered not with words but with feelings. Fear. But also courage. And wisdom: strength in numbers.

“I understand,” Belinda said. Then she rubbed her hand into the dirt, erasing the sigil that she had drawn, releasing the spirit of Light.

Belinda stood up and turned toward Lucius. “We just need summoning sigils. A lot of them. If we surround ourselves with spirits of Light, then the Horned One can’t get to us.”

“So your new plan to make it safe for us to fall asleep is... nice ghosts,” Lucius said.

“Friendly ghosts,” Belinda agreed.

“I don’t know if...” Lucius paused, as if he were trying to find the right words. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to be summoning spirits. At all. After what happened back there.”

“When you broke into my house,” Ferael said.

“Yes,” Lucius said. Then he turned to Belinda. “You’re, uh...” He took a deep breath. “You’re radiant! And full of Light! And you might attract something again. I bet there are a lot of spirits that are lost and looking for the Light.”

Belinda felt a strange and not unpleasant tingle in her stomach. He called you radiant. He said that you are full of Light. She already knew that about herself, of course. So why did it make her so happy just to hear him say it? But she didn’t have time to ponder that question at the moment. She needed him to know that she could keep her promise to him. That she could keep him safe when he fell asleep. “My magic isn’t Dark magic,” Belinda said. “I won’t attract any lost souls.”

“I hope you’re right,” Lucius said.

“Will you trust me?” Belinda asked. “Please?”

“I believe in you,” Lucius said, quietly but with emphasis.

“Better get going,” Ferael said suddenly, carefully packing up the last remaining bits and pieces of the creature that he had butchered. “Best to get to King’s Bay before dark. Safer in the crowds, sometime, than out here on these deserted roads.” He pulled one last item out of his bag. It was a wooden mask, which covered the worst of his face. The mask did little to hide the fact that he was dead, but it did quite a lot in terms of replacing the repulsiveness of his appearance with an intimidating aura.

They walked further down the dirt road, now beginning to pass farmhouses and trading outposts. A few wagons rolled past them. Nobody paid any attention at all to the undead creature and the  two young humans walking down the side of the road.

The landscape turned from sparsely-populated countryside to crowded town almost as soon as cobblestones appeared in the road.

Belinda tried not to openly stare. She had grown up in a city, of course - Ranhorn was the most populous city on the continent - but even Ranhorn was nothing compared to this. Humans and forest creatures and beastmen walked through the cobbled streets, past storefronts and stalls where shopkeepers hawked and shouted about their exotic wares. Belinda soaked in a cacophony of sight and sound. She could smell roasting food and ale and ocean breeze. She marveled at the fact that absolutely nobody seemed to be reacting to Ferael’s presence at all.

Belinda saw two of the falcon tribe, one with a fledgling strapped to her back, haggling over prices with a human selling jewelry from a cart. She saw beastmen from tribes that she didn’t even recognize, some with horns and some with whiskers, mixing in with the crowd of humans and other creature, creatures whose velvet-covered horns and pointed ears indicated that they were beings from Yggdrasil’s forest.

Belinda glanced over at Lucius, and saw him staring agape at a woman from the lion tribe walking down the opposite side of the street from them, pulling a cub by his paw. Belinda wondered what Lucius was seeing. Any enemy of the kingdom? A future foe on the battlefield? Something else entirely?

“Lucius...?” she asked, her real question unspoken.

He seemed to suddenly realize that he was staring, and he quickly looked away. “Sorry. I know it’s rude to stare.”

“I can’t stop staring, either,” Belinda said. “This place makes me feel like a peasant.”

Lucius laughed at that, and Belinda felt relieved that she had finally made him smile.

The lion woman and her cub crossed the street and started to walk toward them. The cub was still holding his mother’s hand with one paw, but he suddenly reached out and swiped the claws of his free paw across a wooden post.

“Lew!” the lion woman admonished. “What did I say about scratching in public?!”

“But mom, my claws are all itchy—”

“You can scratch when we get home. That post doesn’t belong to you.”

Apparently deciding to be defiant, the cub swiped his claws across the wooden post again, leaving deep scratch marks. Then he suddenly yowled in pain and surprise.

“See?” his mother sighed. “Now you’ve got a splinter.”

The little cub’s jaw started to tremble. “It – it hurts!” he said, his voice quivering with the threat of imminent tears.

His mother sighed. “I’m sure it does. I’ll pull it out as soon as we get home. Look, we’re almost there. Just—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Lucius said, stepping toward the cub and then kneeling down next to him. “If you don’t mind, I think I could help right now.”

Belinda heard Ferael make a growling sound in his throat, expressing his impatience. But he made no move to stop Lucius. Belinda wondered if that was because he had decided that the argument would not be worth the effort. She wondered just exactly how many arguments there had already been between Ferael and Lucius during the times that she had been passed out. But then Belinda banished that unpleasant thought. She watched Lucius gently take the cub’s paw in his hands.

“It will come out more easily with a good pair of tweezers,” the lion woman said. But, like Ferael, she made no move to stop Lucius.

“My fingers are smaller than yours, and I bet I can pull out that pesky splinter,” Lucius said, looking directly in the cub’s eyes, “just like that. It’s just a little thing, but it hurts a lot, doesn’t it?”

The cub nodded tearfully.

“Look, it’s right here,” Lucius said, gently pulling apart the cub’s stubby, clawed fingers. “Right there, in the cuticle. Do you know what a cuticle is? It’s the part where your claw comes out of your finger. When you get a splinter in there, it hurts a lot. But the good news is, that makes it easy to pull the splinter out! Just… like… that.”

The cub stared at Lucius, his pupils widening. “It’s gone!”

“And look! No blood,” Lucius said. “But you’re going to get another splinter unless you listen to your mother,” he admonished gently. Then he let go of the cub’s paw and stood up.

“Thank you,” the lion woman said. “Really. That was very kind of you.” 

The lion woman and her cub went on their way. Lucius stepped over toward where Belinda and Ferael were waiting. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Belinda said.

But Ferael grunted impatiently. “We’re running late,” he said. “Follow me.”

Ferael led them through the winding, crowded streets toward the sound of the waves and the scent of the ocean. “Be on the lookout,” he said.

“For what?” Belinda asked.

“For our customer. He has a tendency to—“

“Ferael!” The creature leapt from a rooftop and landed nimbly right on top of Ferael, sinking his claws into Ferael’s shoulders to grab purchase. “What do you have for me today?” He sniffed at Ferael’s cloak, his nose twitching, his tail wagging excitedly. “Abyssal poisons? Human blood?”

Belinda touched the part of her cloak that was concealing the wound on her shoulder nervously. Human blood.

“Vurk,” Ferael hissed, “get off me!”

Vurk sank his claws into Ferael’s hood and pulled himself up, so that he could get a good look at Lucius and Belinda. He sniffed curiously at them. “And you two would be friends of Ferael?” Vurk asked.

“Yes,” said Belinda. “No,” said Lucius.

Vurk laughed, a sound which came out more like a bark. He was a dwarf-sized creature covered in fur, with a long snout and large ears and very, very sharp teeth. He carried an enormous, overstuffed bag on his back. The bag was likely filled with all sorts of treasures and trinkets, most of which rattled as Ferael tried to shake the creature off his shoulders.

“Vurk!” Ferael snarled, threateningly.

Vurk seemed to finally take the hint. He leapt from Ferael’s shoulders onto the cobblestone street. Then he turned his curious gaze toward Belinda, and in that moment, Lucius stepped in front of Belinda, his hand on his sword hilt.

“Stand down, boy,” Ferael said. “Vurk is not your enemy.”

“Did this boy fight in the war?” Vurk asked. “Well, that doesn’t matter now. There are no grudges in King’s Bay. Just treasures.” Vurk was still curiously fixated on Belinda. “Aha. That blood smell is coming from you. However you get yourself hurt, I hope you got treasures that were worth it.”

Ferael glanced around the crowded street. “We need somewhere less exposed to do business,” he said.

“So you do have something good!” Vurk said, excitedly. “There’s a place over here!” Vurk ran into a narrow alley between two buildings, his overstuffed pack rattling and clinking as his claws clattered across the cobblestones.

They followed him into the alley, which was indeed dark and quiet, and there were no windows overlooking it. At the end of the alley was a stone wall. Vurk scrambled on top of the stone wall, which put him nearly at eye level with Ferael, and held out his claws expectantly. “Give give give! You have Hypogean poison! I can smell it from here.”

“I’m not letting you touch it until I know that you can pay for it,” Ferael said.

Vurk looked insulted. “Have I ever not paid you? You know I only steal from enemies. Never from allies.”

“I need a special type of payment today,” Ferael said.

Vurk twitched his oversized ears toward Ferael. “I’m listening.”

“Vurk,” Ferael said solemnly. “This human girl is Belinda. She is from the Temple. She is stupid and reckless and always barging her way into places where she doesn’t belong, like you. This human boy is Lucius. He is from Ranhorn. He is stupid and reckless and always barging his way into places that he doesn’t belong, like you.” Ferael squinted his yellow eyes at Vurk. “I know you have extra tickets for the Nuyina. You’re going to give two of those tickets to them.”

Vurk nodded immediately. “That’s fair,” he said.

Ferael seemed slightly taken aback by how easily Vurk had agreed. “Just like that?”

“Why do you think I have extra tickets? To use them for bargaining.” Vurk laughed his barking laugh again. “Gold from the mines, spices from the Enclave, jewels from the Desert Queen’s treasury, tickets for the Nuyina… These things aren’t valuable to me. I brought them to trade for things that are real treasures.” He scratched one of his oversized ears, then asked, “How far do these humans need to go?”

“All the way,” Ferael said. “To Ranhorn. The final port.”

“That’s the most expensive fare,” Vurk said. “More expensive even than my fare. I only go as far as Esperance. That’s where all the rarest treasure are. Then after Esperance it’s back—” He mimicked running with his small paws. “Through Sanctum, then back to the Enclave.” Vurk suddenly leapt from the top of the stone wall back onto the ground. “Guess that means I’m going with these humans as far as Esperance.”

“Thank you for helping us,” Lucius said to the pint-sized beastman. Belinda silently marveled that Lucius seemed to almost immediately trust Vurk, despite him having been totally unable to bring himself to trust Ferael. Well, Vurk had neither used Dark magic in front of Lucius nor shot Belinda with an arrow. That was probably why.

“I’m not helping,” Vurk insisted. “This is payment to Ferael.” He turned his greedy gaze toward Ferael. “Give give give!”

Ferael carefully removed his delicate wares from his bag. A pouch of teeth. Vials of blood, neatly wrapped in leather for protection. Something else wrapped in a leather package that was faintly glowing. Those had to be the eyeballs.

“Is that stuff actually valuable?” Belinda asked.

“Of course it is!” Vurk said, waving his tail excitedly. “The rarest poisons of all from the rarest creatures of all. Blood and bone from another world.”

“Let’s hope they stay rare,” Lucius said quietly.

“Mix together blood from a Hypogean flapper,” Vurk continued excitedly, “and sap from a spiny cactus, and BOOM! That’s how you can make a powerful bomb from the smallest possible amount of liquid.”

“Why would you ever do that?” Belinda asked.

Vurk looked at her curiously, as if surprised by her question. “Because sometimes, you need a bomb,” he said. He slung his bag off his back and then began stuffing his new treasures into it, causing its seams to stretch threateningly. Then Vurk said, “The Nuyina sails at dawn tomorrow. Passengers can board tonight. We’d better go now if we want to get a good spot on the passenger deck.” He hefted his bag onto his back.

“When you’re on board the Nuyina, stick close to Vurk,” Ferael said. “If you prove yourself useful to him, he’ll pay you back in his own way.”

“You’re not coming with us?” Belinda asked. “At least to the harbor?”

Ferael shook his head. “We are done with each other, girl. This is where we part ways.”

“But—“

“Miss Belinda,” Lucius said. “He wants us to leave.”

“Farewell, Farael,” Vurk said. “I will see you again next year. Unless...” Vurk trailed off, then scratched his ear again, uncomfortably.

“Unless it’s not safe?” Belinda asked. “Unless the war gets worse?”

Vurk suddenly laughed his barking laugh again. “Safe? Safe?! Leaving the burrow isn’t safe. Leaving the Enclave isn’t safe. I don’t care about being safe. But... That bad place in the East. That place with the big cracks in the earth. That place is something different. That’s probably the best place in the world to hunt for Hypogean poisons, but I wouldn’t risk going near there for anything, not even for flapper blood. That’s why I let Ferael hunt the flappers for me.” Vurk’s snout twitched, and Belinda had no idea what emotion that was supposed to be expressing, but she guessed that it wasn’t something good. “If that place with the cracks in the earth splits open all the way, then… I won’t see you again, Ferael. This human kingdom will be the first to fall. I think you know that.”

“I do know that,” Ferael said. He had already climbed on top of the stone wall upon which Vurk had been perched moments ago. “Then farewell, Vurk of the Durri. We will likely not see each other again.”

“Wait!” Belinda moved on instinct, reaching out to grab at Ferael’s arm. She closed her hands around his dead flesh, feeling his dry papery skin and the stitches holding it together beneath her sweaty palms.

Ferael glared down at her angrily. “I have been more than patient with you, girl! But you are sorely testing me!”

“I just need to tell you something,” Belinda said. She looked up into his yellow eyes, unafraid and focused, ignoring Lucius watching her worriedly and Vurk watching her curiously. Her words were for Ferael alone. “Whoever brought you back from the grave,” she said quietly, “and whatever they did to you... They did not succeed in tearing you from the Light. Because the Light is still inside you. And if the Barred Gate opens...”

He shook his head at her. “I can’t fight for the Light, girl. Not anymore. Not ever again.” Then his puckered hole of a mouth twisted into a rictus grin. “But if the abyss opens and the demons come, then there will be plenty more prey for my arrows. I will show those pathetic creatures the true meaning of terror.”

Belinda returned his terrifying grin with her own gentle smile, nodded, then let go of his arm.

Ferael leapt down to the other side of the stone wall, and vanished.

To be continued.

Chapter Text

The Nuyina loomed like a giant over the other ships in the harbor. It was the largest carrack that Belinda had ever seen, a wooden behemoth that gave off an impressive aura even with its massive sails furled. “The Nuyina is the biggest ship ever built by humans,” Vurk explained excitedly as he led Belinda and Lucius across the crowded harbor toward the ship. “It goes all the way up and down the coast, back and forth. It’s primarily a cargo ship, but they started accepting passengers about…” Vurk counted on his claws. “Ten years ago, thereabouts. And the captain is—” Vurk pointed. “Quina!”

The captain of the Nuyina, whom Vurk had dubbed Quina, was some sort of creature that Belinda had never seen before. She was too aquatic-looking to have come from the Enclave, with her graceful fins framing the sides of her face and the colorful, jewel-like scales covering her skin. She must be one of the forest races, Belinda thought. What was she doing so far from Yggdrasil’s forest, and captaining a human ship?

Quina was standing near the boarding ramp, talking to a group of humans who might have been crew members. They did not wear uniforms of any sort. The Nuyina surely must have been financed by some source of human wealth, but it flew no flag. At least not officially. Yet another example of beneficial rule-breaking to which King Edwin turned a deliberate blind eye.

Belinda glanced around the harbor. “Why are there so many bears?” she asked. She had only just realized. Among the many sailor and traders and travelers on the harbor, there seemed to be a lot of beastmen from the bear tribe.

Vurk suddenly leapt onto a conveniently-placed barrel, so that he would be at the right height to whisper low into Belinda’s ear. “They’re refugees,” he said. “They must have run away when the centaurs attacked the bear fortress. Any of the bears who didn’t escape would have been killed or made slaves.”

Belinda glanced toward Lucius, whom she knew must have heard what Vurk said, and saw the horrified look on his face.

But Vurk shrugged. “The Enclave is like that,” he said. He leapt back down onto the ground. “Time to board.”

Belinda and Lucius followed Vurk toward the long boarding ramp connected to the Nuyina. A hulking, horned beastman was standing guard at the bottom of the ramp. Vurk ran right up to him and tossed a folded-up piece of parchment and a bag of coins into his huge hands. “One fare to Esperance, two to Ranhorn.”

The beastman opened the pouch and slowly counted the coins. Then he stepped aside. “Passenger deck is to the left,” he said. “Spots are first come, first serve.”

Vurk scrambled up the boarding ramp. Belinda and Lucius followed.

Belinda stepped onto the main deck of the Nuyina and barely had time to marvel at everything she saw before Vurk veered sharply to the left and scrambled down a ladder into the lower decks. “Down here!” Belinda heard him call out.

Belinda started to carefully climb down the latter, then felt the wound in her shoulder twinge painfully. “Ah,” she gasped.

“What is it?” Lucius asked, worriedly. “Is it your wound? Does it hurt?”

“Yes. A little. Doing this makes it hurt a little.”

Lucius frowned. “We need to change your bandages. As soon as we can.”

Belinda climbed the rest of the way down the ladder, and Lucius followed. The passenger deck was a large open hold, with no openings for sunlight save for the entrance through which they had just climbed, lined with neat rows of vertical wooden beams between which were suspended canvas hammocks. There was a long wooden table flanked by wooden benches in the middle of the hold. There were extra hooks on the walls for passenger belongings, lanterns swinging from the ceiling beams to provide light, and not much else.

Many of the hammocks had already been claimed by other passengers. Belinda saw a mix of humans and beastmen, of all ages. Some were already snoozing in their hammocks, their arms wrapped around their scant belongings or using their own bags as pillows. A woman whittled, a young man wrote with a quill pen in a journal, a beastman with large ears and long whiskers was carefully counting dried herbs and arranging them in pouches, and two old men were sitting at one end of the long table and playing a card game. It was oddly quiet on the passenger deck. The conversations that were happening were barely the volume of whispers, even between the two men playing the card game. Everyone there seemed determined to mind their own business, and paid no attention to the new arrivals.

Vurk sniffed around for a bit, then scurried toward the right. “Here,” he said, stopping beneath two unoccupied hammocks. “There’s a crack in the ceiling. Better ventilation.” Vurk quickly climbed up the wooden poles and onto the ceiling beams. He slung his bag off his back and onto the joint where two of the wooden ceiling beams intersected. “I’m sleeping up here. Human boy, you sleep down there and guard these treasures from thieves. In exchange…” Vurk climbed partway back down the wooden hammock poles to address Belinda and Lucius. “I’ll share food with you. And procure any other supplies that you need.”

“We don’t get meals on board this ship?” Belinda asked.

Vurk laughed his barking laugh again. “Two pieces of bread! One in the morning, and one at night. That’s all that the passengers get. If you want more food, you have to barter for it. And what could you possibly use to barter with, Temple girl? You have nothing.”

“Two pieces of bread is enough for me,” Belinda said. She was used to fasting, after all.

But Lucius was shaking his head. “No. You need to be eating properly if you want your wound to heal. And we need other things, too. At a minimum we need bandages to change your dressing. You should have a clean blanket instead of having to sleep in that cloak. And we need to make your magic sigils out of something. But Vurk is right. We don’t have any money, and we have nothing to barter with.” He held out his empty hands. “So it looks like we’re bodyguards now.”

“Treasure guards,” Vurk corrected him. “I don’t need body protection. Just treasure protection.” He finished climbing down to the floor. He held his clawed hand out to Lucius. “Deal?”

Lucius took the tiny clawed hand in his huge one and shook it. “Deal,” he said. Then, suddenly, he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Belinda asked.

“I’m just thinking about how furious Father would be if he knew that I just agreed to work for a beastman,” Lucius said. Then he looked down at Vurk and said, “I think we need an advance on our first payment. Miss Belinda badly needs for her wound to be cleaned and dressed.”

“Bandages. Salve. Needles for pus,” Vurk said, ticking off on his claws.

“Wait,” Belinda said quickly. “There’s something more important than that.” She knelt down on the wooden floor so that she was at eye level with Vurk. “I need something to write with, and something to write on. It’s very important.”

“For magic?” Vurk asked. “You’re doing magic now?”

“Yes, I have to do magic now,” Belinda said.

Vurk nodded, then ran off. Belinda stood up, and immediately wobbled on her feet.

Lucius was at her side in an instant, steadying her with a hand on her shoulder. “You’re in no shape to do summoning magic now,” he said quietly. “At least eat something before—“

“It will be dark soon, and people down here are already sleeping,” Belinda said, her voice equally as quiet but full of urgency. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Lucius glanced around the passenger deck. “You think that we might be putting everyone on this ship at risk?”

“We won’t be putting anyone at all at risk if I can just— Ah, thank you.”

Vurk had already reappeared with a quill pen and several sheafs of parchment. Belinda did not bother to ask whether these items had been bartered or stolen.

Belinda stepped away from Lucius and knelt down on the floor again. She found the Light and let the pain of her wound and the sick heat in her body and the aching in her empty stomach flow out of her, leaving only peace and serenity. Belinda thought of Diedre’s scream piercing the night, but filled with the Light as she was, the memory conjured not fear or guilt but only a purposeful sense of determination. Not again. The Horned One will not touch anyone near me ever again. She called to the Light as she drew on the parchment paper. And the Light answered.

Belinda’s hand was trembling slightly as she set down the quill pen. “Thank you,” she whispered to the spirits who had answered her call.

Vurk had climbed back up onto the roof beams and was watching Belinda curiously. “What is she doing?” Vurk asked.

“Conjuring ghosts,” Lucius said.

“Did it work?”

“They’re invisible,” Lucius said. “I guess friendly ghosts are invisible.”

Belinda stood up again, and this time did not wobble on her feet. “Vurk,” she said. “I need your help.”

“I don’t help humans for free,” Vurk said.

“Then I’ll pay you.”

Vurk snorted. “With what?”

Belinda was still filled with Light, but she suddenly felt very tired. “The payment,” she said, “is that when you fall asleep tonight you WON’T get your mind eaten by a nightmare demon from the abyss beyond the Barred Gate.”

Vurk suddenly looked as though he were reconsidering his decision to sleep near Belinda and Lucius. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Very serious,” Belinda said.

Vurk twitched his ears. “Well. Commerce is one thing. But survival is also important. I’ll help you, Temple girl.”

She handed him the paper on which she had drawn her summoning sigil. “I need you to put these all over the ship. Preferably where people can’t reach them or mess with them.”

Vurk snatched the paper and also the quill pen from Belinda. Without another word, he scurried back up to the ceiling beams. Belinda heard the scratch-scratching of the quill pen as Vurk began to graffiti her sigils onto the wooden beams above their heads.

Belinda sat down heavily on the floor, leaning against the wooden beam that Vurk had just climbed up. Lucius was immediately kneeling beside her. He touched her head. “You’re feverish,” he said.

“It’s too hot down here,” Belinda mumbled. Then she closed her eyes. “I can feel them, Lucius. The spirits are growing stronger. It’s working.” She opened her eyes again. “I think I just need some fresh air. Can you help me onto the main deck?”

“I’d rather get you some water, dress your shoulder, and then help you into that hammock,” Lucius said.

Belinda smiled at him. “You’re the best,” she said. “But could we do all that after we get some fresh air? Maybe we could watch the sun set.”

She climbed back up the ladder and onto the main deck, Lucius a step behind her. Belinda walked toward the starboard side of the ship, which faced the open ocean, and stood still for a moment, just breathing in the fresh air. She immediately felt less tired. The sun was setting, the sky was glowing crimson and gold, a gentle breeze was blowing from the ocean, and the spirits of Light were blessing their ship, protecting their dreams.

Belinda turned away from the ocean and glanced around the deck. More passengers were coming on board. Belinda saw a huge bear woman helping two cubs climb down the ladder into the passenger deck. She saw a man with a lute strapped to his back say something to one of the crew members carrying a large crate to the cargo hold, who then laughed jovially.

Belinda saw a boy, the same age as Lucius, standing a bit further down the starboard side of the deck. Their eyes met briefly. Belinda saw that underneath the boy’s cloak, he was wearing the uniform of King Edwin’s army. Belinda knew that the boy must have seen that underneath her cloak, she was wearing the unmistakable white dress of a Devotee. The two of them immediately averted their eyes.

Is he a deserter? Belinda thought. He must think I ran away from the Temple. Despite the warmth of the evening, Belinda pulled her cloak tighter around her. Everybody here must think that I ran away from the Temple.

“Feeling better?” Lucius asked.

“A lot better. Thank you.” Belinda turned toward Lucius. “I—“

“VURK!!”

Belinda turned toward the sound of the voice. Captain Quina was standing in the middle of the deck, glaring angrily up at Vurk, who was halfway up the mainmast and scribbling with his quill pen. “Get down from there!” Quina yelled at Vurk. “What did I tell you about climbing around on my ship?!”

“You said not to climb!” Vurk shouted in response. Then he stuck the quill pen into his mouth, dug his claws into the mainmast, and climbed even higher. He stopped near the top of the mast and started drawing another sigil.

“Vurk!!” Quina yelled again, clearly exasperated.

Belinda wondered if she should intervene. The Captain clearly knew Vurk, but she didn’t know Belinda. How would Captain Quina react if Belinda stepped forward in that moment and explained that Vurk was drawing a sigil that she had created to protect the ship from a nightmare demon that had promised to torment anyone near her? Probably not well, Belinda thought. But saying something was nevertheless the right thing to do. Belinda stepped toward the captain and was about to speak when Vurk suddenly shouted, “Done!” He then quickly scrambled down the mainmast, his claws doing visible damage to the wood as he descended.

Quina sighed. “Do I even want to ask what you were doing?”

“Probably not,” Vurk said, running right up to her.

Quina squinted up at her damaged mainmast. “Are those... magic sigils? You do magic now?”

Vurk twirled his quill pen proudly. “That’s Temple magic,” he said. “I just did a blessing for your ship.”

“So it’s you who summoned all these spirits?” Quina asked softly.

Belinda, who was still eavesdropping on this conversation, realized that she was not surprised to hear that Captain Quina could feel the presence of the spirits of Light. She must have been from Yggdrasil’s forest after all. Now Belinda was even more curious about how this forest guardian had ended up captaining a human-built ship.

“I’m not the one who summoned them,” Vurk admitted to Quina. “That Temple girl summoned them.” Vurk turned and pointed right at Belinda and Lucius. “She and that boy are running from some sort of nightmare demon, or something.”

Quina turned to look at the both of them. Belinda wasn’t sure whether to wave or say something. Then Quina immediately turned her attention back to Vurk, as if the two humans that he had just pointed out were not even worth her notice or care, and the idea of a nightmare demon was not worth her concern. “No more climbing, Vurk,” she said sternly. “If I catch you climbing all over my ship again, I’ll tie you down and file off your claws myself!”

Vurk laughed his barking laugh. “I get it, I get it! The Nuyina is Quina’s most valuable treasure.”

Unbelievably, Quina’s scaly face softened into what might have been a smile. “You know it is,” she said.

Belinda wanted to stare at the strange captain some more, but at that moment, Lucius touched her shoulder and said, “If you’re feeling better, we should go back down. At least let me look at your shoulder.”

Belinda reluctantly followed Lucius across the main deck, back toward the ladder. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the boy in the cloak again, standing very close to and talking quietly with a panther girl who looked not much older than he did. Ah, Belinda thought. So that’s it then. Belinda watched as the panther girl reached out and took the boy’s hand in hers. The boy’s cheeks flushed bright red. That was all the story that Belinda needed.

Once Belinda and Lucius climbed back down the ladder to the passenger deck, they discovered that the bear woman and her two cubs had claimed the hammocks next to them. The two cubs had already climbed into their hammocks, but the bear woman, who was far too heavy for her hammock, was making herself a makeshift bed from their bags and blankets.

“Hi!” one of the bear cubs, a little girl, said when she saw Belinda. “Are you all right? You smell like blood.”

“Nuzz!” the bear woman admonished. She turned toward Belinda and Lucius. “I’m so sorry. She’s—“

“She’s right,” Lucius said. “My friend got hurt and she won’t let me treat her wound.”

Belinda glared at him.

The bear woman looked down at Belinda with genuine concern. “You should treat your wound, girl,” she said. “It does smell wrong.” She opened one of her bags and pulled out a small pouch and some carefully-rolled strips of fabric. “Here, child,” she said.

Belinda was so touched by this act of kindness from a total stranger that for a moment she didn’t know what to say. “I can’t accept—“

“Thank you,” Lucius said, gratefully accepting the bear woman’s offered gifts. “Really. We can’t thank you enough. Ms....?”

“Meve,” she said. “The little ones are Nuzz and Arko. And don’t mention it.” Her voice lowered. “You two look like you might be running from something too.”

“I’m Belinda,” Belinda said, “and this is Lucius. We’re not running, actually. We’re on a quest.”

“Is that how you got hurt?” The boy cub, Arko, asked. “Did you get hurt on your quest?”

Belinda sat down at the wooden table in the center of the passenger bay, but faced the two bear cubs watching her from their hammocks. “That is what happened, yes.” She took off her cloak, exposing her torn dress and naked, bandaged shoulder. She realized that everybody in the passenger bay could see her, but she didn’t feel particularly embarrassed since the bears seemed to be the only ones paying attention to her. And besides, it wasn’t like she was being immodest or exposing any more of herself than her upper shoulder. “I was shot by an arrow,” she explained.

“Wow!” Arko exclaimed, his eyes wide and shining.

Lucius sat down beside her and began unwrapping her bandages. “Are you going to tell them the whole story?” he asked. Belinda did not fail to notice that he had positioned himself so that his body was blocking her from the view of most of the other passengers. He didn’t need to do that, she thought. But it was kind of him nevertheless.

“Tell us the whole story!” Nuzz exclaimed.

“I’ll tell you the whole story,” Belinda said, already spinning in her head the more cub-appropriate version that she wanted to tell them instead. “There was a monster. A huge monster with big horns. He kidnapped my friend and locked her in a castle. So I asked Lucius to help me save my friend...”

Belinda wove her tale, keeping her eyes fixated on the wide-eyed bear cubs, She purposefully avoided looking at her own wound as Lucius unwrapped it. She purposefully ignored the little hiss of breath that Lucius made when he saw the state that her shoulder was in. She purposefully forced herself to stay focused on her story so that she would not flinch with pain when she felt Lucius squeezing her wound. She knew what that squeezing pressure meant.

Suddenly Meve was next to Belinda, handing Lucius another small pouch. “Put this powder on it before you wrap it again.”

“But—“

“I have plenty,” Meve said. “You can take this much. It’s just a little bit.”

“Thank you,” Lucius said again. Then, “You’re a truly good person, Ms. Meve.”

“I appreciate that you think that,” she said, in a low, quiet voice. “Kindness is not a currency where I come from. And I know full well that kindness is not a currency where I’m going. But at least my cubs have a chance to grow up on Esperance without being killed or enslaved by centaurs.” She lowered her voice even further. “I see that you covered the hilt of your sword, boy. I assume that you’re concealing the crest of some human clan. If you fought in the war against my homeland, I will not judge you. I only hope that you were able to kill a few centaurs before you deserted.”

“I didn’t fight in the war,” Lucius said quietly. “I’m not a deserter.”

“Ah. Then you will fight in the war,” Meve said. “In that case, you can repay my kindness by spilling some centaur blood on my behalf. Tell them that the bear fortress sends their regards.”

Lucius wrapped Belinda’s shoulder with the fresh bandages that had been gifted by Meve, and said nothing.

Lucius helped Belinda cover herself with her cloak, then let her stand up and walk over to her hammock. He helped her climb into it - an embarrassingly awkward process, as Belinda had never even been in a hammock before - then gently tucked the edges of her cloak around her as if she were beneath a real blanket. “I’ll get you some water,” he said.

Thank you, Belinda meant to say, but it came out as “Mmm” instead. Suddenly she was so, so tired. And her eyes felt heavy. I’ll just close my eyes for a moment, she thought. She might have heard voices - had Vurk come back down into the passenger bay? - but a moment later, before she even realized it, Belinda was asleep.

She slept through the launch of the Nuyina the next morning. She found out later that this was because Lucius had thought that she badly needed to rest and had decided not to wake her.

--------------------------------------------------

The days passed rather pleasantly on board the Nuyina. There was not much to do save for enjoying the ocean breeze on the main deck, swapping tales with the other passengers, learning card games from the old men who played them every day, and listening to the bard practice his lute. Some of the passengers were friendly, others kept to themselves. Belinda felt the spirits of Light surrounding her during the day and protecting her dreams at night. She could feel the Light’s strength, and she could feel her wound healing. But she also could not stop thinking about Diedre.

When she had nothing else to do, Belinda laid in her hammock, feeling the ocean waves rocking the ship, thinking about her next steps.

She awoke late one morning, and instantly realized – from the fact that the passenger deck was mostly deserted - that it was late in the day. Again. Lucius kept “forgetting” to wake her up, and nobody else on the passenger deck was ever loud enough to startle her out of her deep sleep. But Arko and Nuzz were still there. Belinda saw Arko and Nuzz eyeing the bag of treasures that Vurk had stored on the ceiling beams above them. “I bet I could climb up there,” Nuzz said.

“Bet you can’t,” her brother taunted her.

“I bet he’s got all sorts of stuff in that bag,” Nuzz said.

“I bet—“

“Hey,” Belinda said, loudly but not accusatorily. “Have you two seen my friend Lucius?”

“No,” Arko said. “But he’s probably up on deck with everyone else. Mom’s up there.”

Belinda climbed out of her hammock, something which she was still unable to do gracefully. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m going up too. Will you come with me?”

“Nah,” Arko said.

But Nuzz was looking up at Belinda curiously. “You look messy because you sleep too much,” she said.

Belinda tried to run her fingers through her hair, but didn’t get very far before she hit a mess of snarled, matted tangles. “I guess so,” she said.

Nuzz patted the pile of bags and blankets upon which her mother slept. “Sit down here,” Nuzz said. “I can braid your hair. That way it won’t get all tangled up when you hibernate. Mom taught me how to do it.”

Belinda sat down and let Nuzz start working her claws through Belinda’s hair. “Thank you,” Belinda said. “Your family has been incredibly kind to us.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Arko asked.

“Absolutely.”

“How come you don’t sleep in the same hammock as your mate?”

“Oh, he’s not my—“

“Good morning, good morning, sleepyheads!” Vurk said, running across the floorboards toward them. Lucias and Meve were right behind him. “Payment for your services today, Temple girl,” Vurk said, pressing an apple and a piece of bread that smelled much nicer than the normal ship rations into Belinda’s hand.

Belinda took the apple and the bread, feeling more than a bit guilty that she hadn’t really been doing a good job of guarding Vurk’s treasures. It was a good thing that Lucius was mostly taking care of that.

“Look, Mom!” Meve said proudly. “I can do human hair too! I can do it just like you taught me.”

Lucius knelt down next to Belinda. “That looks good on you,” he said.

“Thank you. I have an expert stylist, after all,” Belinda said. “How’s the weather up top?”

“Perfect.” He glanced over at Nuzz, then back at Belinda. “Shall I meet you up there when you’re finished?”

“I won’t take much longer,” Nuzz assured him. “I’m almost done.”

Lucius went to back up to the main deck, and Belinda followed him as soon as Nuzz finished weaving her hair into one long, thick braid. Belinda found Lucius leaning over the railing on the starboard side of the ship, gazing out at the ocean. “Hey,” she said. “I know that we haven’t even made first port yet, but I think we should talk about what’s going to happen when this ship arrives at Ranhorn.”

Lucius turned to look at her.

“I mean, what we’re going to do,” Belinda said. “We need to make a plan.”

“Well...” Lucius turned and gazed out at the ocean again. “By the time we make it back to Ranhorn, it will be well past the time that I was supposed to have reported for duty at King’s Manse. So I’ll likely be arrested for desertion.”

Belinda felt a sick feeling of guilt in her stomach. “Lucius, I—“

“Oh, it’s no big deal,” Lucius said quickly, trying to reassure her. “My father will definitely know the right person to pay to make it go away. But... Once that happens, I have to go. You realize that, right? If I walk away from my duty a second time, then I really will be a deserter.” He turned to look at her again, his eyes full of regret. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you save your friend,” he said. “But at least I can escort you back to the Temple.”

Belinda bit her lip, and thought hard, as if she were reading a particularly difficult book on magic theory. But trying to untangle the trajectory of this boy’s life was far more difficult than decoding any ancient spell she had ever found in the Temple library. “Lucius,” she said slowly, “What if... What if we didn’t—“

“What if we didn’t go back home, what if instead we tried to go to the forest again?” he finished for her.

She walked up next to him and stood by his side, also leaning on the starboard railing, waiting for his response.

“I think...” He trailed off, as if he were still searching for the kindest possible way to say what he was about to say. Then he shook his head and said, “No. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The forest guardians didn’t just reject us from the forest, but they threw us in the ocean and through a portal that carried us to the other side of the continent. I think that makes it pretty clear, doesn’t it? You and I aren’t worthy to approach the Yggdrasil tree. That’s the whole reason that we ended up on this ship in the first place.”

“Do you still think it’s because we were being selfish?” Belinda asked, remembering what he had said the day that they had woken up on an unfamiliar beach.

“I don’t know,” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair, the clearest gesture of frustration that she had ever seen him make. “I just don’t know.”

“I refuse to accept that it’s selfish to want to save my friend,” Belinda insisted.

“No, it’s not. But do you really have to try to get to the Yggdrasil tree again?” Lucius asked. “You came up with this idea of summoning Light spirits to repel the Horned One all on your own. I didn’t think that it was a good idea, but I was wrong. Maybe this magic that you’re using to protect the ship could also save your friend. And if not, then I’m sure you’ll figure out another way. I don’t know anything about this nightmare demon, but I do know you, and I know that you’re capable of doing magic the likes of which I’ve never seen before.” Lucius turned toward her, reached out, and gently grasped both of her shoulders. “You don’t have to go back to the forest, Miss Belinda,” he said, his voice quiet but full of fervent conviction. “There has to be another way to save your friend. I know that you can do it. And I wish with all my heart that I could help you with that. But I know that you can do it without me.”

She looked up at him, really looked up at him and into his eyes, feeling the strength and warmth of his hands touching her, feeling the Light overflowing from his heart. “Can I say something selfish?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“I don’t want to do it without you,” she said.

He smiled at her, that beautiful warm sad smile, accepting her feelings but unable to say what he knew she wanted to hear. Unable to pledge himself to her again. Not for a second time. Belinda realized, in that moment, that she had already lost him to the garrison at King’s Manse.

He doesn’t belong there, the Light said.

So Belinda reached up, gently, and touched Lucius’s cheek. “Listen to me, Lucius,” she said, holding his gaze with her eyes. She remembered the way that he hadn’t even hesitated to help the lion cub in King’s Bay, she remembered the way that he had laughed as he had shaken Vurk’s hand, and she remembered the way that he had quietly but earnestly told Meve that she was a good person. He didn’t have the conviction to fight King Edwin’s war against the beastmen anymore. She could see that as clearly as anything. “You can still come with me to the Temple. It’s not desertion if you pledge to join the paladins. You can—“

“No,” Lucius said. He shook his head, rejecting her touch on his cheek, and dropped his hands from her shoulders. He stepped away from her. “No. I can’t do that. I have a duty... No. I have an obligation. To my family name. To the kingdom. To Athalia. Please don’t ask me again.”

“But Lucius, we could—“

“I know we could fight for the Temple together!” he said. “And I want that! The first time that you said it to me, that night in the forest, I was thinking about how badly I wanted that! The moment that you said it, the moment that I first imagined it, it just felt right. And all of a sudden I could see myself actually giving up my name and walking away from the war and following you to the Temple and it scared me how easily I could imagine myself doing that. I just wanted to be able to do something that was right. I wanted to be able to do something that wouldn’t fill me with doubt. I wanted all of the answers to be simple, and clear, and easy. I was thinking all those thoughts when...” He trailed off. He ran his hand through his messy hair again, that strange gesture of frustration and helplessness that Belinda had never seen him do before this very conversation. “I was thinking those thoughts when the forest rejected us. So, there you have it. I think that makes it pretty clear that running away from the war would be the wrong thing to do.”

Belinda stared at him for a long, long moment. Oh, how her heart ached for him. “All right, Lucius,” she said. “I won’t ask you again. But, just to be clear: I don’t think it’s selfish to want to do something that you know is right. And there’s nothing easy about being a paladin. You would end up fighting the beastmen anyway if they attacked us. But at least you wouldn’t have to fight for a king that cares more about his pointless war games than he does about the Light.”

“Miss Belinda—“

But she turned and walked away from him.

She wanted to go back down into the passenger deck, and maybe climb into her hammock and curl up beneath her cloak and pretend to be asleep so that the cubs would leave her alone. She felt like she needed to be alone, in that moment. But she was suddenly distracted by the sight of a small crowd gathering at the aft end of the main deck. She started walking toward them, drawn by the sound of chords being strummed on a lute.

“Are you going to play that thing for real, or are you just going to keep practicing the same three chords forever?” somebody asked the bard.

“I was waiting,” the bard said, “for a perfect day like today.” As if on cue, a seagull cried out, and the bard strummed his lute with a dramatic flourish.

“You’d better know some good songs!” somebody else shouted.

“Then gather round, ye of restless feet and paws! Whether you have a peg leg or two left hooves, I have a tune that will make anybody dance their cares away!” The bard paused for one moment, holding his lute, building up anticipation. Then he snapped his wrist, and his fingers began flying across the strings.

The music was frantic and thrumming, like a crackle of lightning across the sky. It was completely different from the languid notes that the bard had spent the past few days idly plucking on his lute. The bard’s fingers flew and his music pulsed through the air. The crowd began to cheer and clap, stomping their feet to the rhythm of the song. One of the old men who loved card games so much grabbed a woman and began whirling her around on the deck.

“Whooo!” Belinda cheered with the crowd as the impromptu couple danced. Now members of the crew were wandering over to join the spectacle as well, and other passengers were climbing out of the passenger deck to see what all the fuss was about.

The crowd was laughing, clapping, and stomping. Passengers and crew began to pair up and dance across the open deck, a mix of styles and steps that barely matched the rhythm of the music, a fact which hardly seemed to bother the dancers. Belinda saw the young boy that she had spotted on the first day, still wearing his enormous cloak despite the warm weather, waltzing with the panther girl up and down the length of the deck. Suddenly the panther girl grabbed him by his waist, dipped him low, then pulled him back up and let go of him. She shook her hips and threw her hands in the air, showing off a strange dance that Belinda had never seen before. The boy laughed, then tried to imitate her dance. He was bad at it, but he was grinning with stupid, joyful delight the whole time.

“Go, Captain, go!!”

Belinda turned her head and saw Captain Quina dancing a jig in the center of the crowd, her hands on the center of her steadfast hips as her boots flashed furiously across the floorboards. The passengers and crew began to clap wildly. The bard strummed his music even faster. But Quina kept up with his increasing tempo, seemingly effortlessly.

Then Belinda saw Lucius, standing at the edge of the crowd, laughing and clapping with the other passengers. She made her way toward him. She was feeling frustrated with his stubbornness, at least somewhat, but a part of her suddenly wanted very badly to—

“Dance with me!” Nuzz said, holding her paws out to Lucius.

“Anything for a lady,” Lucius said. He bent down and grasped Nuzz’s paws, then whirled her around in a circle so fast that her feet lifted off the ground.

Nuzz squealed with delight. “Again!”

He lifted and twirled her again, then smoothly began to waltz with her across the deck. She matched his movements easily, laughing the whole time.

Belinda watched Lucius dancing with Nuzz, his cheeks flushed and his eyes shining, seeming to enjoy Nuzz’s delight more than he enjoyed the act of dancing itself. Belinda realized that she had stopped clapping along with the crowd and was openly staring at him. Then, with her cheeks suddenly feeling as though they were burning hot, she turned away from Lucius and started clapping again, losing herself in the rhythm of the crowd.

The dancing, clapping, and stomping continued until the bard wound down the crowd with a few stanzas of decreasing tempo, then finished his performance with a thrumming flourish. He bowed dramatically as the passengers and crew applauded thunderously.

It did not, however, take long for the crowd to disperse. First the crew returned to their duties, then the passengers began to wander away.

Nuzz held Lucius’s hand as she walked toward Belinda. “Sorry I borrowed him,” Nuzz said to Belinda, sounding not sorry at all.

Belinda saw the confused look on Lucius’s face, and laughed.

Nuzz let go of Lucius’s hand and walked away. Belinda watched her go, then turned and looked at Lucius. She turned her head to look at Nuzz again, then turned back toward Lucius, giving him a knowing look.

“Don’t,” Lucius said.

“I’m not saying anything.”

Lucius looked out at the ocean again, as if seeking answers on the horizon. He sighed a terrible, weary sigh that made him sound much older than he was.

I’m not going to ask you again, Belinda thought. And she didn’t.

But then Lucius said, quietly, “I’ll think about it.”

That was enough for Belinda. She reached out and took his hand in hers. The two of them walked, hand-in-hand, to the spot at the railing on the starboard side of the deck where they had been standing earlier. Belinda leaned her head on Lucius’s shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to the seagulls crying above them, listening to the Light telling her to trust him to choose the right path.

--------------------------------------------------

Belinda actually managed to wake up early on the morning that the Nuyina was supposed to make port at Honastown. Lucius was already awake, as usual. He was speaking to Vurk in a low, quiet voice while the bears were still asleep a few feet away from them. “Are you sure?” Lucius was asking.

“Certain. No mistaking it.”

“No mistaking what?” Belinda yawned and climbed out of her hammock. She adjusted her ragged, wrinkled cloak around her shoulders. That was about all the morning routine that she had to do anymore.

“Vurk saw a flapper,” Lucius whispered, his voice low and urgent. Then he grimaced at the sound of his own words. “Sorry. I wish we knew what else to call it.”

“Call it a flapper,” Vurk said, as if he didn’t see any reason to object to the term. “I was climbing over mainstays to... borrow. Yes, borrow. Borrow gun powder from armory. I saw one right off the starboard side of the ship. There’s no mistaking those glowing eyes. It was definitely watching the ship. I would have shot it if I’d had my bow with me. It flapped around for a little while, then it flew away.”

Belinda and Lucius met each other’s eyes, each thinking the same thought. “The other shoe,” Belinda said.

“A flapper stole your shoe?” Vurk asked.

Belinda took a deep breath, calming herself. “Lucius. You should go up to the main deck and watch for signs of anything else unusual. Vurk and I will do a quick pass down here to make sure that all the sigils are still good, then we’ll join you as soon as we can.”

Lucius nodded, and Vurk scrambled up to the ceiling beams to begin his inspection. But before Lucius left for the main deck, he turned to Belinda and said, “Those Light spirits that you summoned are still here, aren’t they.”

“You don’t sound like you’re asking.”

“I... don’t think I am asking.” He looked to the left, then to the right. Looking for spirits that he could not see but that, for the first time, he appeared to be able to feel. “They’re still here. All around us. They feel like they’re... I don’t know how to say it. It feels like there’s something here that’s at peace with itself.”

“Why, Lucius Lanward,” Belinda said. She grinned at him. “I knew it! I knew you had magic in you. I mean, usually people don’t just spontaneously open their inner eye unless they’re in a situation of extreme duress or some other unusual circumstance,” she gushed, ready to fully nerd out about magic theory for the second time during their quest. “But I’ve read about cases like this! You should—“

“All right, all right, I get it!” Lucius laughed, despite the potential seriousness of the situation. “We should stick with your plan, though. Let’s finish that part before we start talking about anything else.” He turned around and climbed up to the main deck.

Belinda walked toward the center of the passenger deck, and put her hand on the long wooden table at the center. Most of the other passengers were either still sleeping or going about their morning routines, paying her no mind. Belinda closed her eyes and listened to the Light. She felt the spirits of Light swirling around her. They were strong, and they were many. That was good.

“All the sigils are still here,” Vurk reported from a ceiling beam above Belinda.

Belinda opened her eyes. “Good,” she said. “I can feel the spirits... They’re still here. But just to be safe, can you check the other sigils that you drew? Especially the ones that might be in places where people could reach them.”

“I’d better check the ones I drew in the galley,” Vurk said, and he scurried off. Belinda wondered if he was just giving an excuse to possibly steal food from the galley. Then she realized that, as a benefactor of Vurk’s potentially stolen food, she had no right to judge him.

Belinda climbed up onto the main deck. The early-morning sunlight illuminated everything with a warm, brilliant glow. The sky was blue and cloudless. Even the sea was unusually calm. The threat of the Horned One seemed far, far away. Belinda found Lucius at their usual spot, leaning slightly over the starboard railing, scanning the sea and the sky for any signs of trouble.

“My sigils are still here, at least that we’ve found so far,” Belinda told him. “And I can still feel the Light spirits with us.”

“Good. There’s no sign of trouble up here,” Lucius said. “For what it’s worth, nothing feels wrong. At least not to me.”

“I hope we’re just over-reacting,” Belinda said.

“By the way, are we just going to ignore the fact that Vurk is stealing explosives and likely storing gunpowder right near where we sleep?” Lucius asked.

“I intend to just ignore that fact,” Belinda said.

“Speaking of, we should probably go back down to the passenger deck. We should be doing the job that he hired us to do,” Lucius said.

Belinda closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the warmth of the sunlight on her face, listening to the sounds of the ocean surrounding them. “Let’s stay up here just a few more minutes,” she said.

They stood side-by-side at the starboard railing, watching the crew go about their morning business, watching the other passengers begin gathering on the main deck. The passengers were laughing and chatting, trading jokes and bartering pieces of fruit and canteens of spirits to supplement their morning rations.

Vurk scurried along the starboard railing toward Belinda. “All the sigils are there,” he said.

Belinda heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Vurk.”

Vurk scurried away. Lucius seemed to visibly relax, just a bit. He turned around and gazed out at the ocean again, but this time with a gentle expression on his face instead of the watchfulness that Belinda had seen just moments ago.

Belinda watched him watching the ocean waves, his hair blowing gently in the sea breeze, that peaceful smile on his face. “You look...” She searched for the right words. “You look like you’ve decided something,” she said.

“I have,” he said.

“Is it about what you’re going to do when we get back?” Belinda asked him.

“When we get back to Ranhorn?” Lucius laughed. “I’m going to be in the biggest trouble I’ve ever been in my life.”

“I mean about the war.”

“Oh.” He gazed out at the ocean waves. “I’m not going to fight in the war,” he said. “It’s just so pointless. I can see that now. I can see what a waste it all is.”

“So...” Belinda tried to hide the excitement in her voice. “So, are you thinking about... you know...?” She had promised that she wouldn’t ask him again. But it was suddenly very, very hard not to.

“I’d like to stay with you,” Lucius said simply. “If we could serve together, that would be nice. I think that would be right.”

Belinda felt her cheeks grow hot. “I would like that too,” she said. “I’d like to stick with you, too. If possible.”

“Hmm,” Lucius said. He was still staring at the ocean waves. Belinda wished that he would turn and look at her. “What about you?” he asked, still not looking directly at her. “What are you going to do when we get back?”

“I’m also going to be in the biggest trouble I’ve ever been in my life,” Belinda said.

“I mean about your quest.”

“Oh.” Belinda sighed. “I should try going back to Yggdrasil. Whatever the thing was that called me there, I know it still needs my help. But in the short term I might be able to stay at the Temple and try to help Diedre with my summoning magic. If it works. I hope it will work.” Belinda hated being so full of doubt.

“What does the Light tell you?” Lucius asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Belinda admitted. She glanced up at the cloudless sky. “But for now—“

A piercing, blood-curdling shriek suddenly cut through the air. Belinda whirled and saw a woman collapse, writhing in agony. Her eyes were open but rolling in their sockets. Her hands were clawing at the air.

Just like Diedre, Belinda thought.

Oh, no.

But it was the middle of the day. It didn’t make sense. The woman who collapsed hadn’t been sleeping. Moments ago, she had been wide awake.

Belinda saw other passengers rushing to help the woman. One of the crew members grabbed the woman and tried to hold her in his arms, trying to keep her thrashing head from slamming against the floorboards of the deck. “Get the Captain!” he shouted. “Somebody get the Captain!”

Belinda stared at what was happening for a long moment, transfixed, horrified. Then she turned toward Lucius. “I don’t understand!” she said. “My sigils should have kept the Horned One away from this ship!”

“They would have,” Lucius said, “if I hadn’t drawn a more powerful summoning circle in the cargo hold.”

Belinda stared at him. “Wh... What?”

“You were clever to ask that Durii to leave your sigils in places where no human would be able to reach,” Lucius said. Calmly. Almost serenely. Not reacting at all to the sight of the poor woman screaming in terror on the floor of the deck. “But not clever enough. Because your spirits are only just strong enough to stop Lord Ezizh from entering dreams. There’s no way that your little wisps of light could prevent the great Lord Ezizh from manifesting through a proper summon.”

Another scream. Somebody else collapsed to the deck floor. The other passengers were starting to panic. The crew were shouting orders. But Belinda couldn’t hear any of them. They were all distant sounds, echoes from far away. All that she could see and all that she could hear was Lucius. His calm words. The relaxed stance of his body. The peaceful, serene expression on his face.

“What have you done?” Belinda whispered to him.

“I have found my purpose,” he said. “I understand, now. I understand everything. I’ve seen how pointless the war in the human realm is. And I’ve seen how feeble those who continue to devote themselves to a deceased goddess have become.” He took a step toward her. “But I meant what I said yesterday, Miss Belinda. You’re not like the others. You’re so radiant. You’re so strong. You and I should serve Lord Ezizh together.”

The ship shuddered and lurched. Belinda stumbled and lost her balance. Lucius caught her in his arms. She immediately flailed and pushed away from him. He let her go. Belinda could hear more screaming, now coming from the lower decks. “What have you done?” she asked Lucius again, horrified.

“I followed my Lord’s instructions,” he said. “I drew a summoning circle in a place where nobody would find it. I waited for the right moment. And now...”

He turned back toward the ocean, gazing out at the waves that were beginning to froth and churn.

The ship shuddered again.

“Now I have brought us salvation,” he said.

The Nuyina gave another shuddering lurch, and this time Belinda fell flat onto the deck, as Lucius did not bother to catch her. Brisk winds were pushing at the full sails, but the ship was being held fast in place. The Nuyina’s timbers groaned threateningly as opposing forces warred over the ship, the wind pushing it forward and something unseen holding it back. Belinda managed to stand up again. Then, acting on a sudden, instinctive urge to get away from the sides of the ship, she stumbled her way toward the center of the deck. She leaned against the foremast for balance.

“Did we run aground?” somebody was shouting from the aft forecastle. “Did we hit something?!”

“Was it a whale?”

“Why aren’t we moving??”

“MOVE ASIDE!” Captain Quina pushed her way through the panicking crowd on the deck. “Anwen! Fulli! Take your screamers into my quarters and hold them down! Somebody find that Temple girl so that we can perform an exorcism! Roberts! Take your crew below deck and prepare to man the cannons! PASSENGERS! Clear the main deck and return to your quarters! This isn’t the first time the Nuyina has been rammed by a whale, and it won’t be—“

“NOT A WHALE!” Vurk came tearing down the middle of the deck, shouting at Captain Quina frantically. “Not a whale! You can see it from the artillery deck! It’s—“

Something erupted out of the ocean on the starboard side of the ship.

Something erupted out of the ocean on the port side of the ship.

This is a dream, Belinda thought. This can’t be happening. He can’t be here. Not in the real world. Not in broad daylight.

It was a hand. Two hands. Two impossible, enormous hands rising out of the ocean. Hands made out of some blackened, hardened, nightmarish substance, hands that were all claws and no fingers. They were the same hands that Belinda remembered from her nightmares. The same hands that had squeezed the breath out of her, crushing her bones and organs. The same hands that had dangled her broken body above the fiery abyss of the Horned One’s great gash of a mouth.

Wake up, Belinda! she told herself.

The two impossible hands closed down on the sides of the Nuyina, grabbing at the ship, crushing parts of the hull as the enormous fingers curled into a vice-like grip. Then the two nightmarish hands pulled down, and the ship began to sink into the churning ocean.

“ABANDON SHIP!” Captain Quina ordered, her thundering voice cutting through the din of all the screaming, all the panic, all the terror on the Nuyina. “GET TO THE LIFEBOATS! ABANDON SHIP!!”

The ship shuddered violently as it was pulled down, and Belinda fell to the deck again. She managed to lift her head and immediately saw that several lifeboats had been crushed between the fingers of the gigantic hand gripping the starboard side of the ship. She doubted that the port-side lifeboats had fared any better.

Wake UP, Belinda! she thought again, frantically. Wake up wake up wake up wake up WAKE UP—

Belinda felt herself lifted off the deck floor. Meve swung Belinda’s body over her shoulder like a sack of flour. “Faster!” Meve shouted at someone - her cubs? whoever else was helping her? - as she carried Belinda toward the center of the deck. “Grab anything that you can! Anything that’s buoyant! Untie those barrels! Pull up those planks!”

“Help!” someone shouted. Not at Meve, but at Belinda. It was the crew member who was still holding the first woman who had collapsed. The woman was no longer screaming, but she was twitching and convulsing, her unseeing eyes rolling in their sockets. “Help her!” The crew member pleaded with Belinda. “You’re from the Temple, aren’t you?! Do something to help her! Please!”

But it was too late. It was too late to grab something buoyant. It was too late to help the poor woman. It was too late to save anybody.

The Nuyina was pulled beneath the churning ocean, although what poured into the holds and onto the deck was not freezing cold water but rather swirling black sky. They were not sinking. They were falling. Falling through an alien sky into an endless, endless nightmare. Falling into the abyss.

Night sky poured over them like a deluge. For a sickening moment, Belinda felt completely weightless, her stomach in her throat. She could see nothing but blackness. She could hear nothing but screaming. She could feel nothing at all, not even Meve’s soft fur. Was Meve even holding her anymore? Did Meve even exist anymore? Belinda clawed at the darkness, unsure if she was even falling anymore, unsure if she could even feel her own arms or legs.

Lucius she thought, reaching for the memory of his face and his voice through her terror. Lucius. Lucius! I’m so sorry. I’m so so so sorry. I couldn’t keep my pr—

Belinda was only aware of the briefest flash of pain at the moment of impact. Her body shattered upon contact with the ground, and she knew no more.

To be continued.

Chapter Text

Belinda awoke flat on her back, looking up at the stars. Only the stars were wrong. They were in the wrong places in the sky, and the wrong colors, each pulsing with a strange red or yellow glow. There was no moon. Belinda could smell burning charcoal and feel hard, sharp rocks beneath her back. She pushed herself up, slowly. Every cell in her body screamed with pain. But at least she was alive.

Once she had managed to sit up, Belinda tried to look around. There was not much to see. Obsidian ground rent by glowing, fiery red cracks. Dead trees reaching with twisted branches toward the moonless night sky. Belinda felt a hot wind on her face. She closed her eyes for a moment, listening. She couldn’t hear any screaming. She didn’t know if that was a good or a bad sign.

Am I the only one here?

Belinda wasn’t sure which answer would be worse.

She stood up, shakily. She felt whole and intact. Strangely, even the wound on her shoulder seemed healed. She took off her cloak and tossed it to the ground - it was too hot in this hellscape to bother wearing a cloak anymore - and reached out to touch her bandaged shoulder. She felt old scar tissue beneath her bandages. Huh. A strange side-effect of being killed and brought back to life inside this nightmare dimension, she figured.

She stumbled across the black earth. She felt blinded by more than just darkness. She couldn’t feel the Light in this place. She hadn’t felt such a total absence of Light since the night that the Horned One had first entered her nightmare, what felt like ages ago.

Belinda stopped beneath one of the twisted, black trees. She looked up at the alien sky. The stars seemed like eyes looking down at her, full of malevolent intent. But also waiting. Patiently.

She knew the Horned One’s name now. So she turned to the darkness surrounding her and spoke it. “Ezizh,” she said.

He was in front of her then, his body made of scarlet smoke and uncanny flesh, his twisted horns curling out from the side of his head, grinning at her with his red gash of a mouth. But he was small and human-sized, as if he had come to have an intimate conversation with her. “Devotee Belinda,” he said, his rasp of a voice imbuing Belinda’s name and title with a sound that made Belinda’s skin crawl. “What joy it brings to me to hear you say my true name. Tell me, girl. Did you enjoy dying inside my nightmare? I can let you experience the exquisite agony of death and resurrection many times over if you would like.” He oozed closer to her. “You were correct when you once surmised that it was difficult for me to kill the minds of those trapped in my nightmares, lest I risk shocking them awake. But now that your physical body is a part of my world, little girl, the rules have changed. I trust you understand why.”

Belinda did her best to glare at him, to let him know that she was not beaten yet. “Where is the Nuyina? What have you done?!”

He laughed, a sound like fingernails screeching across metal. “What, you aren’t going to ask me about that boyfriend of yours?”

Belinda felt her fists clench in anger. For a moment her fury was so great that she trembled with the force of it, barely able to contain it. But somehow, she managed to choke out the question: “How long?”

“Since the moment that he fell asleep in the ghost-whisperer’s lair,” Ezizh said. “Before you came up with the idea of your barrier. Such a clever girl. So gifted. So brilliant. But a barrier cannot keep out what is already inside of it.”

Belinda seethed with rage, listening to his words. Rage, and guilt, and heartache, and burning humiliation. All of the emotions that were darkening the Light inside of her, weakening her magic, and weakening her mind. In her mind she understood what was happening but in her heart she was drowning in righteous fury.

“Oh, child. This anger that you feel. It’s... delicious.” That screeching laugh again. “And foolish! You rage because you were outwitted by a being so much more powerful than yourself! I told you, girl. You are a cub who thinks she is a she-bear. You were never going to win against me.”

Belinda still glared at him, refusing to look away from him.

“Do not be so hard on yourself, child,” the eyeless thing said, words that would have been kind if they had not been dripping with vinegary contempt. “I remained in hiding most of the time, deep down inside of him. I mostly just waited. And feasted. Day in and day out, gorging myself on all of his delectable pain. His mind was such a cornucopia of delights! Thanks mostly to you, of course. Oh, how you tormented that poor boy, Miss Belinda. You tortured him better than any nightmare I could ever have come up with.”

“You’re wasting my time,” Belinda said. “I know that you’re lying. You’re just saying whatever you think will get under my skin. I never hurt Lucius.”

“Oh you are a TREASURE!” Ezizh rasped, then shrieked his laughter at the sky, the terrible sound of it echoing through the wasteland surrounding them. “What a delight you are, child! What a feast your mind will be! It was so, so worth it to bring you here!” He leaned in close, his loathsome, impossible body flowing toward her. “Tell me, Devotee girl,” he said. “What did it feel like, having your true colors exposed? What did it feel like to realize that you are incapable of true selflessness? What did it feel like to covet someone so greedily that your dry little cunt got wet just thinking about him?”

“I’m done wasting my time with you!” Belinda declared. She whirled and walked away from him. “I’m going to find a way out of this nightmare.”

“What, before you’ve even given me a chance to offer you the marvelous gift I prepared just for you?”

Belinda did not dignify this with a response.

“Take a good look, foolish girl,” the eyeless thing said, and then Belinda felt something push at her back while at the same moment, the ground disappeared beneath her feet.

For a moment, she felt that sickening feeling of weightlessness again, and she flailed her arms in a panic. She twisted her body and then somehow – because of her panicked flailing, or because of some instinctive reflex – she managed to grab the edge of the sharp, rocky precipice that she had just stepped off. She pulled herself partially up, managing to get her arms over the edge. Her hands scrambled for more, better purchase on the sharp rocks as her legs dangled over a deep, seemingly endless abyss.

Belinda grasped and clutched at the rocks, trying to pull herself further up. But the sharp stones were cutting her hands, the wind was strong, and her shoulders were throbbing with pain, sapping the strength from her arms. She felt herself losing her grip. She wondered what it would feel like to plummet down into that abyss and die for a second time. It likely wouldn’t be any different from the first time, would it? Just a long weightless fall, a splat, and then nothing. At least not until the Horned One decided to resurrect her again for his continued amusement.

“Miss Belinda!”

She looked up, and saw Lucius leaning over the edge of the cliff. “Take my hand!!”

Belinda couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Please no. Not this. Anything but this. Let me face the Horned One instead. Please.

“Miss Belinda, please!” Lucius begged her.

And that was the hell of it, wasn’t it? How much he still cared about her. How desperate he was to save her. How the Horned One had left those parts of him intact and untouched, just to torment her.

She made the mistake of looking up at him, into his eyes, into the sweet kindness of his face. “Please,” he said again.

Belinda knew that she was making a mistake. But nevertheless, she reached for his hand.

He pulled her up easily with his incredible strength. She stumbled, found her footing, then pushed away from him.

He looked hurt. “You won’t even let me hold your hand anymore?” he asked.

“Lucius.” She remembered him standing by the starboard railing of the Nuyina, watching calmly as the passengers fell over screaming, not showing even the smallest sign of concern for any of them. “Lucius, where is everybody? Are they... Are they here?” She raised her voice. “Did you bring the entire ship here?!”

“Of course not,” Lucius said. “I don’t have the power to do something like that.”

Belinda felt the first bit of relief that she had felt in a long time.

“All I did was summon the great Lord Ezizh into our world,” Lucius said. “Lord Ezizh was the one who opened the portal into his dream-world for us.”

The feeling of relief vanished.

Belinda raised a hand to the side of her head. Despite everything, the braid that Nuzz had woven into her hair was still intact. Belinda thought of Nuzz braiding her hair and Arko listening to her stories. She thought of the bard strumming his lute and Captain Quina dancing her jig. She thought of the old men playing cards and the deserter boy who was so obviously in love with the panther girl. She thought of Vurk pressing an apple into her hands. She thought of Meve grabbing her off the floor of the deck even in those final moments as the ship went down, selflessly trying to save the life of a girl that she barely knew.

“Where are they?” Belinda asked.

Lucius shrugged.

“How could you?” she whispered. Then she answered her own question: “You’re not really Lucius.”

He seemed confused by the accusation. “Yes I am.”

“The Lucius that I know would never have just stood by while those people were hurt and suffering.”

“If anybody suffers in this place, it is only because they choose to do so,” Lucius said. “That is what the great Lord Ezizh taught me. To embrace the Darkness is to know peace. To cling to the Light is to know only fear and suffering. And look...” Lucius swept his arms around, indicating the hellish landscape visible beyond the edge of the cliff. The twisted spires of a castle rising into the swirling dark clouds, the boiling river, the cracked and steaming earth, the trees surrounding the castle that were not dead and twisted but instead writhing with malevolent life. “Look at this, Miss Belinda! Look at this miracle kingdom of dreams made manifest! Look at the great Lord Ezizh’s wonderous gift to his followers! In this kingdom all are welcome. In this kingdom, all who accept Lord Ezizh have a place to belong. Forever.”

Belinda took one horrified step away from him.

“Think about it, Miss Belinda,” he said. “Think about all of the poor souls on that ship whom Lord Ezizh just saved. The bears who lost their homes. The pilgrims who lost their way. And the boy,” he said quietly, “who never thought that he could be anything more than what his father told him to be... And who turned out to be capable of such powerful magic. Magic so powerful that he was able to summon a savior into our world.”

Belinda stepped away from him, again. “You don’t need the Horned One to use magic, Lucius,” she said. “You could still come to the Temple with me. We could study the Light, together.”

He stepped toward her. “Is that really what you want?” he asked her. “Is that really the only thing that will make you happy? To stay at the Temple and to study the Light? To pretend to be selfless and to suffer the rest of your life living in a delusion?”

Belinda shook her head. “No. No! I’m not suffering. All I need is the Light. As long as I have the Light, I have—“

“Nothing,” Lucius said. “You have nothing. You worship a dead goddess. You live in constant fear of attack from Annih’s followers. You tried to resist Lord Ezizh and you failed. If you keep resisting, you will only keep failing. Again and again. But if you embrace Lord Ezizh with me, then you can have everything that you ever wanted. You can have the Darkness. You can have all the secret knowledge the Temple kept hidden from you. You can rule this miracle kingdom as the most powerful sorcerous who ever lived. And...”

He stepped toward her again. This time she didn’t move.

He stepped closer to her. So close. He put one hand behind her back. Such a sweet, gentle touch. He reached out with his other hand and tenderly touched her chin, gently tilting it upward. He leaned down toward her, so warm, so comforting, so full of sweetness and devotion.

“You could have everything that you desire,” he whispered to her. His lips were so, so close to hers.

She trembled at his touch. She thought of parting her lips slightly, inviting his mouth into hers, accepting his pledge and his devotion. She thought of him throwing away his enlistment papers and turning his back on the war and instead choosing her, protecting her, fighting alongside her, staying by her side forever. She had never wanted anything so badly, so selfishly, so greedily in her entire life.

And then, she raised her hand to his chest, and pushed away from him.

He dropped his hands away from her, letting her go. “Miss Belinda...”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. For the first time in her long journey, for the first time in this terrible nightmare, she felt tears hot tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. “You can’t give me what I want,” she said. “Because you’re not the Lucius that I want.”

“Please, Miss Belinda,” Lucius said, resorting to begging again, his voice desperate. “If you won’t accept Lord Ezizh then he’ll torment you for all eternity and I don’t—“ His voice cracked with emotion and there it was again, the hell of it, the true evil of what the Horned One had done, the feelings that were all too real. “I don’t want to see you suffering!”

“Then you won’t,” she said. “Because I’m getting us out of here.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Watch me.”

He drew his sword from its scabbard. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I can hurt you. A lot. Especially since in this paradise, your death can be undone. So I’ll stop you if I have—“

Belinda took a swing and felt her knuckles connect forcefully with the soft flesh and hard bone beneath his stupid, chiseled chin.

Unfortunately, he didn’t lose his balance. He didn’t even flinch. And he didn’t hesitate to swing his sword in one vicious, powerful downward stroke.

Belinda would have been cut in half if not for the projectile bolt that slammed into the blade of Lucius’s sword, throwing off his swing.

More crossbow bolts flew toward him. He dodged and swung his sword defensively. “You little SAVAGE!” he snarled. “Come out here where I can see you!!”

Vurk had already scrambled onto Belinda’s shoulder and pulled at her braid, urging her as if she were a horse. “Run, Temple girl! Hurry!! Run with your long human legs!!”

Belinda stumbled into a run, but Vurk was too heavy for her. Fortunately, Vurk leapt off her back, and then the two of them were running across the terrible cracked earth, running for their lives.

Something howled, an unearthly cry that echoed across the wasteland. Something was coming for them. Belinda could feel something coming for them. Closing in. Getting closer by the moment.

“RUN!” Vurk urged Belinda. “Follow me! To the safe place!”

Dark clouds of flapping wings blotted out the pulsing, alien stars in the night sky. Flashing green eyes filled the sky above them.

There’s too many, Belinda thought. We’ll never outrun them! She turned her head left and right, frantically, looking for a place to take shelter. Then she saw the tall figure cloaked in shadows, raising its twisted staff toward the blotted-out sky. It howled again, commanding the flying horde.

Belinda acted on instinct, changing direction, pounding across the ground toward the howling thing. She acted before she could let herself stop to think twice. She used her momentum to her advantage, and leapt into the air, kicking the creature squarely in what might have been its stomach. It went down, shrieks of surprise and rage emanating from its shadowy hole of a face. Belinda grabbed the staff from its gnarled hands, forced herself to grip the staff tightly despite the revolting sensation of Dark magic coursing through it, and raised the staff toward the flapping creatures swooping down from the sky.

Just because I can’t feel the Light in this place, she thought, doesn’t mean that it’s not here. She was here. Vurk was here. The rest of the Nuyina was here. They still had the Light inside of them, even if Belinda could no longer feel it. It had to still be there.

With every ounce of her being, Belinda called to the Light.

The staff came alive in her hands, shining with Light, glowing brighter and brighter until its brilliance illuminated the entire sky. The glowing-eyed creatures shrieked and retreated in a panic.

“Good! Now more running!” Vurk said, not even stopping to acknowledge the miracle that Belinda had just pulled off. “No stopping until we make it to the safe place!”

They ran until Belinda felt a bolt of pain in her side and she fell to the ground. Vurk was at her side in an instant, tugging at her dress. “Hurry!”

Belinda looked up, and saw that the scenery around them had changed. They had been running over bare rocky ground. Now they were surrounded on all sides by those dead, twisted trees. “Vurk!” she gasped. “There’s no point in running if—“

“Don’t worry, Temple girl,” Vurk said. “Quina knew that the nightmare would change shape to prevent us from getting to the safe place. But Quina gave me a forest relic.” Vurk reached into his cloak and pulled out a teardrop-shaped stone pendant on a leather strap.

“Dowsing magic?” Belinda asked. “That’s beginner stuff. I don’t think it will work against—“

“It already worked. It’s how I found you.” Vurk suddenly looked up at Belinda solemnly. “I promised Quina that I would bring back the Temple girl and her friend. But...”

“I know,” Belinda said. She stood up, hefting herself on the weight of the staff that she had appropriated from the shadow-mage, refusing to let her emotions get the better of her. “Lucius is my problem now. I’ll deal with him later.” She clenched her new staff in her hands, hard enough so that her knuckles turned white.

Vurk nodded, instantly understanding. Then he held out the stone pendant, let it swing for a moment, then watched it suddenly stop and hover, pointing toward their left. “This way,” Vurk said.

They made their way as quickly as they could through the dead forest, then up and over undulating waves of obsidian rock that might have once been lava flows. Belinda followed Vurk over the crest of one of those frozen waves of rock, and then she saw the Nuyina.

The magnificent ship was intact, a fact which immediately caused Belinda to feel a wave of relief. The ship hadn’t been dropped out of the sky. Hopefully that meant that nobody had experienced the terrible falling death that Belinda had experienced. Yet the Nuyina had capsized on dry land, and was now lying on its side like an enormous beached whale. Belinda saw that the sails had been removed from the masts and re-purposed to turn the side of the ship into a makeshift shelter.

“Hurry,” Vurk said, “before more flappers come!”

Belinda followed Vurk toward the Nuyina. Within the shadow of the capsized ship, beneath the sails that had been jury-rigged as a shelter that served little purpose other than to blot out the sight of the pulsing red and yellow stars in the alien sky, the passengers and crew of the Nuyina huddled together in a protective mass.

The panther girl ran out from beneath the sails to meet Vurk when she saw him coming, holding a musket, ready to shoot down anything that might be coming after them. “Durii!” she called out. “Where’s the other one?!”

Vurk ran past her without answering. Belinda saw the panther girl scan the black sky anxiously, still looking for signs of movement. Then she turned and darted back beneath the sails. Belinda didn’t understand. If these people were so afraid of being attacked by the flappers, then why did they think some flimsy canvas sails would protect them?

Belinda followed Vurk through the crowd, feeling all of their eyes on her, watchful, hoping. She was suddenly self-conscious of her torn dress and exposed, bandaged shoulder for the first time. But nobody spoke a word. The hush was unnerving, but at least there was no screaming like there had been before the Nuyina had entered this nightmare. Belinda hoped that meant that the two victims whom the Horned One had first touched were now awake. Not that being awake inside a nightmare world was much better than having their minds trapped inside one.  

Belinda risked glancing around once, and saw Meve, with Arko and Nuzz clinging to her. Arko and Nuzz stared straight ahead, their eyes wide and haunted. Arko was clinging to his mother with one paw and nervously sucking on his other paw. Nuzz stared straight ahead at nothing at all. Meve met Belinda’s eyes, once, and nodded slightly. Belinda wasn’t sure what that nod meant, but she hoped that with her return gaze she was able to project even a fraction of the steely determination in Meve’s eyes.

The crowd parted, and then Belinda saw what everyone had been gathered in a silent, reverent circle around. It was the reason why beneath the Nuyina’s sails they were protected from the flap-flaps. Captain Quina was kneeling on the rocky ground, and a part of her had taken root. There was no other way to explain what Belinda was seeing. The Captain’s left arm had split itself into a mass of thick brown roots that plunged into the ground, pulsing with protective energy, pulsing with forest magic. Her right hand clutched a faintly-glowing wooden totem to her chest. Her eyes were closed and she was chanting softly beneath her breath. She was in pain. This transformation was causing her terrible, terrible pain. But Belinda could feel the powerful magic radiating from the spot where the Captain’s left arm and the cursed ground became one. Around Captain Quina, the nightmare was at least somewhat cleansed. Around Captain Quina, the flap-flaps could not approach and the shadow-mages had no power. For the time being.

Vurk approached her, slow and quiet on his little paws. “Quina,” he said softly.

She opened her eyes. For a moment she stared right through Vurk, her eyes cloudy and unfocused. Then her gaze cleared. “Vurk,” she said. She looked up, right into Belinda’s eyes. “You’re back. Where is...?”

Belinda shook her head. “The Horned One took him. But I’ll get him back. I promise.”

“Good. Because we’re getting out of here, and I’m not leaving a single soul behind. Not even a passenger.”

Belinda stared at Quina’s arm. “How are you...?”

“Old forest magic,” Quina said. “As you can see, my particular species is ill-suited for this type of magic.” Her voice was straining under the weight of her physical pain, but the graceful fins framing the side of her face flaring almost defiantly. “I could protect us better with aquatic magic. But there’s no water here. Not even underground. And I had this totem with me, so... This is the best that I can do.” She looked up at Belinda, her eyes bright and clear, searching. “Devotee girl. If my forest magic can find the weakness in this nightmare world, will your Light magic be able to destroy it?”

Belinda clutched at her staff. “It can’t be that easy.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy. But it is simple,” Captain Quina said. “Vurk. Tell her your theory.”

“Those big hands grabbed the ship and brought it here,” Vurk said, “because your nightmare demon has no power in real world. So, the source of power must be here. Your nightmare demon’s most valuable treasure. It would be a shame... if that treasure got stolen.”

“Vurk,” Quina said.

“Fine, fine. Or blown up.”

Belinda nodded, slowly. What Vurk was saying made sense. At least, she wanted it to make sense. It fit with everything that she had read in the Temple library books. Find the source of the Dark magic and destroy it was usually the right course of action, no matter how overly-obvious of a course of action it might be.

When Belinda thought of the books in the Temple library, another memory surfaced.

The paladins are searching for the Nightmare Tree, Sister Cecilia had said.

Rotten fruit, rotten fruit, rotten fruit of the Nightmare Tree, the Horned One had taunted her, wearing Kieran’s face.

Go to the tree, the little blink of light had begged her.

Go to the tree, the Light had told her.

Belinda stood frozen, her heart stopped in her chest, her breath dying in her throat.

Go to the tree, the Light had told her.

For a terrible moment, she felt the full weight of the awful, awful mistake that she had made threatening to crush her completely. She had been so wrong. She had been so spectacularly wrong. She hadn’t been listening to the Light at all. She had only been hearing what she wanted to hear. She had been charging into the wrong direction from the very beginning. And Lucius was the one who had paid the price for her mistakes.

Belinda felt a stab of pain, bringing her back to reality. She realized that she had been clenching her jaw so tight that it hurt. No. I can’t freeze now. I just have to do what I was supposed to have done from the beginning.

Belinda took a deep breath. In and out. Somehow, she found the ability to speak again.

“I think I know what it is that we need to find,” Belinda said. “But I don’t know how to find it.”

“Take Quina’s relic,” Vurk said. He held it out to her.

Belinda took the pendant from him, and knew in that moment that she would be completing her final task alone. Vurk was not going to leave Quina’s side again.

Belinda turned toward Quina and said, “If we’re right about this, then when I destroy the right thing, this nightmare will break apart. We should all be sent back to the real world. But I don’t know where, or how, or even when we’ll end up. There’s a strong possibility that we might end up in the middle of the ocean beneath a capsized ship. If that happens...”

Captain Quina grinned defiantly, even though her eyes were glassy with pain. “Water is my element, Devotee girl. I was prepared to do what I needed to do when I thought that the Nuyina was going down. I’m ready to do the same now. Nobody drowns on my watch.”

Belinda nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She held her staff in one hand and her dowsing pendant in the other. “I’ll see you all on the other side. I promise.”

Nobody said a word of farewell. Nobody wished her good luck. But as Belinda walked out from beneath the shelter of the sails of the Nuyina, she could feel their hope and their fear almost palpably in the air. She held the dowsing pendant in the air, watching it swing back and forth until it suddenly stopped, hovering and pointing straight in front of her. I have to hurry, Belinda thought. Captain Quina probably doesn’t have much time left. Neither, for that matter, did Lucius.

She walked across the cracked earth and through the dark forests, undeterred when the scenery shifted around her, letting the small stone pendant imbued with powerful forest magic guide her way. Belinda took every step cautiously, worried that the ground would simply vanish beneath her feet again. But it never did. Of course it didn’t. The Horned One had more amusing ways to torment her than making her fall off a cliff, after all.

“Now what are you doing?” Lucius asked, appearing beside her. He glanced at the dowsing pendant curiously. “Playing with toys?”

“It points me toward what I want. And it’s not pointing at you,” Belinda said. At least not while you’re like this. “So take a hint.”

“You’re fooling yourself about what you want,” Lucius said, undeterred. “And I’m not going to leave you again. You’re the one who asked me to come with you in the very beginning, remember?”

Belinda stared straight ahead, ignoring him.

He kept pace with her, stubbornly staying by her side. “Why are you going this way?” he asked.

“Because I’m leaving. This is the way out.”

He laughed. “There’s no way out of here! Besides, why would you choose to walk away from the marvelous gift the great Lord has offered you?”

“What, you mean that big creepy castle that you showed me?” Belinda rolled her eyes. “Ruling as queen over this wasteland? Getting to keep the hollow shell of a boy that I care about by my side like some sort of pet? Forcing a handful of travelers and refugees to worship me as my subjects? And all for the low, low price of letting a nightmare demon devour my soul and turn me away from the Light forever?” She shook her head. “Sorry, but none of that sounds particularly appealing.”

“But the great Lord—“

“Let me tell you something about your great lord,” Belinda said. “The Horned One is a baby. He’s a great big dumb baby playing pretend with his toy kingdom and his toy victims. He’s a cruel child who is incapable of granting anybody’s true desires, because all that he has to offer is dreams and make-believe. He is a powerless wisp of nothing that pretends he has the power of a god.” Belinda sincerely hoped that the Horned One was listening to her every word. “He couldn’t give Lucius what Lucius really wanted, so the Horned One had to twist up all the parts of Lucius that really mattered until he had a toy doll that was willing to play along with his little games. And he can’t give me what I really want, because—“

Lucius suddenly grabbed her by the arm. “Don’t,” he said. He was squeezing her upper arm painfully, deliberately. But Belinda refused to cry out. “Don’t speak about me as if I’m not here.” There was something in his eyes that Belinda had never seen before, something dark and angry. “I am nobody’s toy, Miss Belinda.”

“Then stop hurting me,” Belinda said.

He did let go of her. She winced, once, at the sudden throbbing pain in her arm. She realized in that moment that he was strong enough that he could have snapped her bone if he had wanted too. Well. That was certainly going to make her next step a lot harder.

Belinda held out her dowsing pendant again. She watched it swing, then point. She followed its pointed tip again.

“You’re still following that thing?” Lucius asked.

“You’re still following me,” Belinda pointed out. “And you seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble to dissuade me from going this way. So I take that as a sign that I’m probably going in the right direction.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Miss Belinda,” Lucius said. “It will never work. You’ll just waste your time and waste your magic. Just like you’re wasting your life by pledging yourself to a dead goddess and the impotent magic of the Light.”

Belinda didn’t bother to respond to his insults, because at that moment, she stepped into a clearing in the middle of the dark forest, and saw her goal right in front of her.

The twisted remains of the Nightmare Tree stood alone in the center of an open clearing in which the earth was black and hard, and nothing else grew. The tree looked as though it had been torn open from the inside, its trunk split into three pieces that peeled away from each other, the same way that the skin on a piece of rotten fruit would burst and separate from itself. The split trunk and twisted branches sprouted no leaves and grew no fruit. The tree should have been long, long dead. And yet it still stood, a corpse of a tree that was somehow still alive and somehow still pulsing with a strange, Dark magic. It was the silent heartbeat of the creature that it had birthed, the tether that connected the nightmare they were trapped in to the true dreamworld of the Nightlands, and the umbilical cord that connected the Horned One to the powers of the abyss from which he drew his strength. The Nightmare Tree was the tree that the little blink of light, and that the vast endless Light itself, had been telling her to find this whole time. The Nightmare Tree was what Belinda needed to destroy.

Belinda lifted her staff. Maybe this would have been difficult to do in a dream. But with her physical body manifested right in front of the Nightmare Tree, this was almost going to be too easy.

But then Lucius stepped in front of her, blocking her. Of course he did. “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “Destroying this tree won’t accomplish anything. The great lord Ezizh—“

“—seems VERY determined to stop me from destroying this tree,” Belinda finished for him.

He glared at her, and she saw that ugly anger on his face again. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he snapped at her. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Step aside, Lucius. Or I’ll make you step aside.”

He stared at her. “Are you serious?”

She tightened her grip on her staff. “I’m serious,” she said. “I’m going to destroy that tree, Lucius. So either get out of my way, or fight me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I weigh twice as much as you do. I have a sword that can cut through bone, and you have a stick. It won’t be a fair fight.”

“Try me,” she challenged him again.

He narrowed his eyes and peered at her, as if trying to gauge whether she actually thought she could win against him. “Wait a minute...” he said. “Is this a trap? Is that little rodent hiding somewhere?”

Belinda rolled her eyes at him. “Obviously I wouldn’t tell you if it was a trap!”

He drew his sword. “Then—“

But Belinda had no intention of letting him get into a fighting stance. He was right, there was no way for there to be a fair fight between the two of them. So Belinda did not intend to fight fair. She flipped her staff around in her hands, adjusted her grip, and thrust the narrow end of the staff right at Lucius’s stomach. He was unprepared for the blow and let out a surprised “oof!” of breath. But it wasn’t enough to knock him back or even to slow him down. He swung his sword toward her, and she barely managed to dodge the killing blow.

She was at a disadvantage then, scrambling backwards, and without a shield to protect herself or a blade with which to block his blows. He was fast, his movements were precise, and he had the size and weight advantage. Belinda knew that she had used up her luck dodging his first two swings. She did not manage to escape his sword a third time.

She felt the blade sink into her chest, rip through her body, and erupt from her lower back. She felt the force of the blow knock her backwards. She stumbled, regained her balance, managed to avoid falling backwards, then sank down to her knees.

The pain was incredible, worse than any she had ever felt before. She could feel every inch of the steel blade skewering her body with every horrible, horrible beat of her dying heart. Blood trickled from her chest and oozed from the exit wound in her back. But the blood wasn’t flowing from her in a torrent. Not yet. Not so long as Lucius did not pull the sword from her body.

And he did not. He let go of the handle of his sword, his hands trembling, his eyes widening in horror. “Miss Belinda... I...”

She coughed, and felt blood dribbling from the side of her mouth. “It hurts,” she gasped.

He seemed utterly petrified for a long moment, frozen by the horror of what he had just done. Then he suddenly rushed to her side and knelt down beside her. “Miss Belinda!” he gasped, his voice trembling. He pried one of her hands off her staff and held it in his own, clutching at her hand almost desperately. “Miss Belinda, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to... I didn’t want to have to hurt you...”

She was sorry, too. She was sorry that in this very moment the Horned One was using her death to torment Lucius, just like he was using Lucius to torment her. It’s all right, she wanted to tell him, but she did not. I knew I wasn’t going to win against you. Of course I knew I wasn’t going to win against you. All I had to do...

She squeezed his hand. She opened her mouth, trying to speak, but all that came out was a dry croak and another dribble of blood.

“Miss Belinda?”

All I had to do was...

She tugged on his hand, as if she wanted him to lean closer, as if she desperately wanted him to hear her dying words.

And he did just that. He squeezed her hand tightly, and leaned in close, his face a twisted mask of grief and regret.

“H-hold...” she gasped.

“I’ll hold your hand! I swear! I’ll stay right here and hold your hand until the great Lord brings you back!”

She smiled at him, gratefully, with her bloody mouth. “Thank you,” she whispered.

All I had to do was make let your guard down. Even if just for a moment.

He was leaning in close to her, fixated on her face and her bloody smile, clutching at her one hand. He never even noticed that she still had one hand on her staff. He didn’t realize that she was lifting the staff until he felt it touch his temple. He didn’t have time to react.

Sometimes, you need a bomb.

Belinda unleashed the Light.

There was a flash of Light, blinding in its brilliance. An explosion of Light magic erupted from the end of her staff and swallowed the world in a white blaze, radiating shockwaves that flattened the dead trees and leveled all the creations of Dark magic surrounding them. All save for one.

Ah... it wasn’t enough.

She had put everything that she had in that blast. Every prayer that she had ever prayed, every hope that she had ever hoped, every sweet memory of her father and her mother and Diedre and Kieran and Sister Cecilia and every, every bit of love that she felt for Lucius, all of her selfless desire to save him and all of her selfish desire to keep him by her side forever, all of it pouring out of her and into her staff and into him and exploding outward to illuminate the entire nightmare world all at once. She had called on the Light in every form that she knew it could take and she had unleashed it all into the darkness.

But it wasn’t enough.

When the Light had vanished and Belinda’s eyes re-adjusted to the darkness of the nightmare, she saw that the ground around her was flattened, Lucius was lying face-down beside her, and the Nightmare Tree was still standing, its twisted branches reaching up to claw at the alien night sky.

The Horned One loomed over the Nightmare Tree, laughing and laughing and laughing. The shrieking sounds of his obscene laughter echoed across the desolate landscape. He was nearly howling with his victory.

IS THAT THE BEST THAT YOU COULD DO, LITTLE GIRL?! his voice thundered, shaking the ground, reverberating Belinda’s skull. A LITTLE FLASH OF LIGHT? WAS THAT IT?!

“No,” Belinda groaned.

Slowly, painfully, she stood up. The sword was still inside her, running all the way through her. She didn’t dare pull it out. She had dropped her staff, and she couldn’t risk bending down to pick it up again. She was dying, and she could feel herself dying. But at least with the Light magic coursing through her veins and the sword running through her body ironically holding parts of her together, she was dying a bit more slowly than she would have otherwise. As long as her spine was still intact, she could still walk. But she didn’t have much time.

“I’m not...” She gasped for breath, feeling more blood trickle out of the side of her mouth, taking one stumbling step toward the Nightmare Tree, then another, then another. “I’m not... done...”

The Horned One loomed over the Nightmare Tree, a gigantic visage that blocked out the night sky. His bloody gash of a mouth widened into a terrible grin that stretched from horizon to horizon. He made no move to stop Belinda, because he didn’t have to. OH CHILD. OH YOU DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS FEAST OF A CHILD. LOOK AT YOU, INFLICTING SUCH POINTLESS TORTURE UPON YOURSELF. WHAT A GLORIOUS ETERNITY YOU HAVE CHOSEN IN THIS NIGHTMARE.

Belinda reached out and touched the Nightmare Tree. She leaned against it, trying to catch her breath. It felt cold against her hand, yet somehow still full of living, writhing Dark energy. It was revolting to the touch. But despite her disgust, despite the pain clouding her vision, despite the sword in her chest, despite the panicky sensation of her heartbeat slowing with every breath, Belinda knew what she had to do.

She closed her hand around a small twig growing out of one of the lower branches of the tree. Then she pulled down.

Snap.

The dead twig snapped clean off. Belinda threw it to the ground, disgusted.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Belinda closed her hand around another twig, one that was even smaller than the first.

Snap.

CHILD, PLEASE. STOP THIS NONSENSE.

She snapped off another twig. Then another.

I TOLD YOU TO STOP THAT.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

The bloody gash of a mouth rushed toward her, breathing hot blasts of fire, full of terrible rage. CHILD YOU WILL CEASE THIS AT ONCE!

“Cease what?” Belinda gasped. Snap. “Doing... this?” Snap snap. Every movement that she made was agony. And yet, there was still enough Light magic inside her to keep her body moving even past the point where her heart had already stopped. But she knew that she had only moments left to live. She prayed it would be long enough.

THIS HAS BEEN AN AMUSING DIVERSION, LITTLE GIRL, the Horned One said, as if he were, strangely, trying to conceal his anger. BUT IT IS PAST TIME FOR ME TO END THIS. SINCE YOU HAVE REJECTED MY GIFTS TO YOU, THEN THERE IS ONLY ONE FATE LEFT FOR YOU IN MY WORLD.

His enormous hand came down out of the sky, reaching for Belinda. She knew what was coming next. That terrible hand would pick up her tiny body, just like it had in the first dream. It would lift her up over the fiery abyss of the Horned One’s mouth, just like it had in the first dream. And then she would be dropped into that hellmouth, just like she had been in the first dream. Only this time, the little blink of light would not save her.

Belinda pushed herself away from the Nightmare Tree. She turned her head upward, defiantly, at the terrible dark hand descending out of the sky toward her.

You miscalculated, she thought. She no longer had enough breath with which to speak. But in an instant, she knew that her gamble had paid off. Foolish nightmare demon. You were so fixated on me that you forgot to pay attention to him.

The flash of light was blinding, and the Horned One’s howls of rage were deafening. The Horned One’s terrible dark hands with their long, long fingers and their sharp, sharp claws tore and tore at the shield of Light that Lucius was holding up. Lucius’s knees buckled, but the shield held fast. The Light of the shield was not just above Lucius and Belinda but around and below them as well, holding the ground beneath their feet steady even as the rest of the nightmare world shook with the force of the Horned One’s fury, illuminating them despite the Horned One’s shrieks extinguishing the stars in the sky, surrounding them with its warmth and its protection. Belinda could feel the Light coursing through her body, healing her wounds, returning the strength to her flesh. She wrapped her hands around the hilt of Lucius’s sword and pulled it out of her body, painlessly, effortlessly. The Light was with her now, filling her with power, filling her with strength.

“Miss Belinda!” Lucius cried out. The Light carried his voice to her despite the Horned One’s deafening roars of rage thundering across the blackening sky. “Hurry!!” His knees buckled again. “I can’t—“

He didn’t need to finish. Belinda knew what to do. She ran toward the Nightmare Tree, grasping Lucius’s sword in her hands, letting the Light guide her movements. The Horned One couldn’t stop her now. The shield of Light wouldn’t let him reach her now. But she was only going to get one chance to do this, so she had to do it with one blow.

She prayed to the Light. She prayed to every Celestial that she could name. She prayed for strength, she prayed for swiftness, and she prayed for the Light to fill her, to use her as its vessel.

She swung Lucius’s sword toward the twisted body of the Nightmare Tree. The sword was a beam of light in her hands, and her swing was imbued with a strength far greater than that of her small body. She felt the sword cleave through the center of the dead tree, slicing through dead rotting wood and living breathing Darkness. She felt the scream of the Horned One tear through her body like a bolt of lightning, a flash of pain that vanished the instant that she felt Lucius grab her hand, the instant that she heard him calling her name. Had she dropped the sword? It didn’t matter anymore.

The tree shattered. The nightmare shattered. Belinda squeezed Lucius’s hand, as tightly as she could, and pulled him close to her, reaching for him as she fell into the Light.

--------------------------------------------------

Belinda fell out of her hammock and landed with a painful thud on the floorboards below.

“Ow, ow!” She stood up painfully.

“Are you okay? Did you have a bad dream?” Belinda heard Nuzz ask. Belinda turned toward the sound of Nuzz’s voice. She saw Nuzz’s eyes widen with sudden shock. “What HAPPENED to you?!”

Belinda looked down at herself. There was a huge gash across the top of her dress, exposing part of her chest. What remained of her Devotee dress was stained and smeared with her own blood.

“I fought a demon,” Belinda said.

Nuzz looked around the passenger deck. Most of the rest of the passengers were still sleeping, undisturbed by Belinda having fallen out of her hammock. “Where?” Nuzz asked. “And when? Just now?”

“I... think so?”

“Miss Belinda!” Lucius whispered. He practically leapt out of his hammock, grabbed a blanket off another sleeping passenger, and then threw the blanket over her shoulders. “Wear this until, uh, we can get you... something else to wear.” Then he leaned close to her, very close, and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

She reached out and touched his cheek. She looked straight into his grieving, guilt-stricken eyes. “You remember?” she asked him quietly.

He trembled at her touch. But he did not flinch away from her. “Everything,” he said. There was a terrible, trembling crack in his voice. “I remember everything. I am so, so...” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “So sorry.”

She shook her head. “I’m the one who should be apologizing,” she said. “What that thing did to you, it did because of me. And in the end...” She reached out with her other hand, resting it on his arm, pressing close to him, hoping that he could feel everything that she didn’t have the words to say. “You saved me,” she said.

“Only because you saved me first.”

“By blowing up a magic bomb right next to your head.”

“To be fair, I needed that.”

She laughed, then, and it felt so good to be able to laugh again. She closed her eyes, leaned her head against his chest, and felt the Light and magic within her mingling with the Light and magic within him. She let him hold her like that for a long, long moment.

“Ooooooooooooo,” Nuzz said.

To be continued.

Chapter Text

“I’ll race you to the chapel!”

Belinda watched Diedre launch herself forward, running fast across the Temple grounds. Kieran was fast, but not fast enough. Diedre laughed as the wind whipped her hair and one of the sisters shouted angrily at her from a window of the rectory. Belinda walked behind the two of them, slowly, not joining in their race but enjoying watching it all the same. She reveled in the smell of fresh-cut grass and burning incense, the warmth of the sunlight on her skin, the gentle ebb and flow of the Light all around her.

“So these are your dreams?” The dream-fairy hovered in front of Belinda, a shimmering mote of friendly light. “They’re so warm. It’s nice.”

Belinda held out her hands, and the dream-fairy accepted her invitation, alighting delicately on her outstretched palms. The tiny fairy curtsied, her butterfly wings bobbing up and down as she did so. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you, too,” Belinda said.

“I’ve met your friends,” the dream-fairy said. “Their nightmare are gone. But they’re worried about you.”

Belinda almost trembled with relief. “You saved Diedre? And everyone else?”

The dream-fairy nodded her tiny head.

“Thank you!” Belinda felt a lump in her throat, she was so overwhelmed for a moment. She could not stop a tear from streaking down her cheek, and she didn’t care to. “Thank you! Thank you so, so much!!”

The dream-fairy shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t strong enough to protect them earlier.” She fluttered her wings again. “But a friend from the forest helped me, and I have wings now. I can move through both the Nightlands and your world. I am much stronger now. And... The one that calls itself Ezizh is much weaker now. Thanks to you.”

“Weaker, but not gone,” Belinda said, sadly.

“Weaker, but not gone,” the dream-fairy agreed. “He moves through the Nightlands still. But he no longer has the power to create his own dream-worlds, nor does he have the power to touch your world in the daylight.” She turned her little head to the left, then to the right. “This is a very nice dream. Will you let me see more?”

Belinda let the tiny fairy fly up to her shoulder and rest there. She turned away from the chapel, walked across the Temple grounds, and approached the place where the outer wall was crumbling and easy to climb over.

Lucius was waiting for her underneath the tree across from the chapel, at their agreed-upon meeting spot. It was the middle of the day and the sun was bright, and Belinda could see that he was wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a bag slung over his shoulder.

He frowned when he saw her. “You are not going dressed like that.”

“What? I have good boots.”

“I mean, your clothes.”

Belinda looked down at the blue dress with the embroidered collar that Lucius had bartered for in Honastown. “You picked this out for me, remember?”

“It does look good on you,” he said. “But it hardly seems appropriate for hiking in the woods.”

The dream-fairy laughed, a sound like the tinkling of small bells. “I get it! Endless adventuring with this boy that you like so much. This is a nice dream, too.”

“Yes,” Belinda admitted. “This is just a dream, isn’t it. My silly, selfish dream.”

“Maybe it is a little bit selfish,” the dream-fairy said, hovering in front of Belinda’s face again. “But it’s also a warm dream. And full of love.”

Belinda awoke in a hammock in the passenger deck of the Nuyina, being rocked back and forth gently by the waves of the ocean. It was still dark, and everyone around her was sleeping quietly.

She turned over in her hammock and watched Lucius sleeping peacefully. She could feel the Light within her, and within him. She could feel the sweet ache of realizing how much she was going to miss him. And she could hear the Light telling her to let him go.

--------------------------------------------------

“Last chance,” Vurk said. “You could still get off here. Esperance is full of treasures. And danger. Since you seem to like danger so much, Temple girl.”

Belinda glanced once at the misty harbor of Esperance Island, and shook her head.

“We have to go all the way back,” Lucius said. “And face the music.”

“Then goodbye, human boy and Temple girl,” Vurk said, hefting his enormous, overstuffed bag of treasures onto his back. “I may see you again someday. But… I probably won’t hire you again.”

Belinda watched Vurk scurry down the boarding ramp. He did not turn around or look back. But Meve, who was standing at the bottom of the ramp, did turn around and wave, once. Nuzz and Arko jumped up and down, waving a much more enthusiastic goodbye.

Belinda laughed and waved back at them. Then she watched the bears walk into the harbor. She watched until they were out of sight. Then she leaned her head on Lucius’s shoulder and sighed.

“Next port is Ranhorn,” Lucius said, stating the obvious.

“Mmm-hmm,” Belinda said. Then she thought of something. “So... What are you going to tell your father about how you lost your sword?”

“The truth,” Lucius said. “That some girl I met turned it into a beam of light, stuck it into an evil tree, and made the tree explode.”

Belinda chuckled softly, trying to imagine Lord Lanward’s reaction.

Then she remembered pulling the sword out of her own chest, feeling the incredible strength of Lucius’s magic flowing into her, all of that Light and love, healing her body and her heart. A miracle that, horribly, could only be accounted for when she considered the reason why Lucius’s inner eye had opened in the first place. It had been forced open, by the nightmare demon that had been hiding inside of him like a parasite.

Well, at least the Horned One had well and truly been hoisted by his own petard regarding that particular choice, Belinda thought with some satisfaction. But now she could hardly blame Lucius if he never, ever wanted to have anything to do with magic ever again.

“So...” Lucius said. “Now that this dream-fairy has confirmed that your friend is all right...”

“No more dangerous quests,” Belinda said. “I promise. At least not until I finish my first round of Devotions and get my real staff.”

“For the record, I never asked you to make that promise.”

“I know,” she said. “But if you’re going off to war, then I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“Miss Belinda, I saw you blow up an entire forest with a barely-functioning magic staff,” he said. “I think you can handle yourself. Just don’t die of starvation or blood poisoning when I’m not around to take care of you.”

“Aw. You’re so sweet.”

She closed her eyes, still leaning against him, and listened to the seagulls crying above them. She thought of the thing with no eyes still lurking about in the Nightlands. She thought of the terrible place that Vurk had described with the great cracks in the earth. She thought of Ferael shooting the creatures from another world out of the sky. She thought of Sister Cecilia telling her that the cult of the Butcher was back and that the Ocean Elemental had gone strange. And she thought again of the brilliant flash of Lucius’s shield, his healing Light pouring into her body, and—

Have faith in him, the Light whispered to her. Trust him to forge his own path. Let him find his way back to that shield on his own terms.

Belinda reached out and took Lucius’s hand in hers. “I do want to say one thing,” she said, quietly.

He nodded slightly, listening. Holding her hand, squeezing it gently.

“If you ever...” She paused, listening to the Light, hoping that it would help her find the right words. And it did. “If you’re ever lost again, or you don’t know what to do, or you don’t have any place to go... Come find me. Please. I know I won’t have all the right answers for you. And I know now that it would be foolish for me to promise to always protect you. But what I can promise you, with every ounce of my being, is that I will be by your side. So that whatever you have to face, you won’t have to face it alone.”

He squeezed her hand, gently. “I promise,” he said.

They stood like that, hand in hand, listening to the cry of the seagulls and the flow of the Light, for a long, long time.