Eliska braced herself to walk away from Yann. She did her best to keep her posture casual, but the longer their conversation went on, the more it hurt to walk away.

She shouldn’t have gotten so attached to him. She kicked herself for that now. She couldn’t even remember when or how it happened.

Some force she couldn’t describe drew her to him. She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to keep talking to him—about everything.

She had to leave, though, so she better bite the bullet and get it over with sooner rather than later.

Hanging around and dragging it out would only make it harder. She sensed that. She would keep talking to him. They would keep sharing details about their lives.

He would keep trying to be nice to her. She would keep doing things to help him and make his path easier.

All those things would only make the parting harder later—as if it wasn’t hard enough already.

He got to his feet and faced her. He didn’t say goodbye—not with words. His eyes said it.

She would probably never see him again. Wesh wouldn’t be able to keep these helpless Watchmen alive in the Coil—not for very long.

Eliska didn’t want to stick around long enough to watch Yann die. She wanted to be hundreds of miles away and preferably several Layers away when it happened.

Then she would be able to pretend that he wasn’t dead when he was.

She tore herself away. She planned to cross the stream over the stepping stones, climb the opposite bank, and enter the trees over there. She wouldn’t have to walk past the Watchmen or say goodbye to any of them or to Wesh.

Just then, for no reason she could figure out, the Watch Commander strode down the bank to where she and Yann stood talking.

The Watch Commander pulled up next to his son and squared his shoulders at Eliska. “I understand why you feel you have to leave, Eliska, but maybe there’s another reason you might consider staying—and I don’t mean so you can protect us. We all know you have the power to protect us and we would be so much better off with you with us than on our own. That isn’t what I mean. There may be something we can give you—something you can’t get by yourself—something that would make it worth it to you to stay with us and travel with us.”

She tried not to raise her eyebrows too much. “Really? What would that be?”

“Companionship. You don’t have to live alone anymore. You could have people in your life—people who want you around—people who care about you as much as you care about them. You’ve spent all these years alone. I’m sure you’ve met some truly terrible people in the Coil, but not everyone is like that. Things could be different if you found the right group.”

“And you think you and your Watchmen are the right group for me?” She snorted at him. “I don’t think your man up there agrees with you.”

She did her best to block Yann out of her awareness when she said this.

The Watch Commander’s words hit her hard, but not because of the Watchmen.

There was a right person here she could feel that way about. She could feel that way about Yann.

If any right person or people existed in the world, he was one of them. She felt that to the marrow of her bones, but she couldn’t take him by himself. She would have to sign up for the whole group, including rat-faced Rien.

Yvan read her mind. “Rien is only one man and he has his own reasons to dislike those who live in the Coil. I’ve already spoken to him and Barsali about being rude to you. I give you my word they won’t do it again. You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to live alone like this with your back against the world.”

“Yes, I do,” she snapped. “You don’t know enough about the Coil. You wouldn’t say this if you knew anything about it. Anyway, I’m already leaving, so it’s too late. Goodbye and thank you for nothing, Watch Commander.”

She turned to Yann, but the prospect of saying anything to him hurt too much.

The temptation to fall into deep, penetrating, heartfelt conversation with him became unbearable. She had to leave now or she wouldn’t be able to leave at all.

She turned to face the stream and put out her foot to step on the first stepping stone.

At that moment, it started to rain, but this was no ordinary rain. Pelting shards of hail hurtled out of a clear blue sky. No hail could have come from there because the sky didn’t have any clouds in it.

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The landscape changed in a split second. A wall of wind, ice spikes, and flying splinters smashed in from the side to Eliska’s right.

The tempest hit her hard enough to make her stagger. Yann and his father stumbled, too. The other Watchmen scrambled to get to their feet.

The hurricane wiped the blue out of the sky in an instant. The hail elongated until each piece stretched into an arrowhead.

Thousands of these projectiles hammered down from the sky, but Eliska still didn’t see any clouds up there.

The wind erased the blue and stripped the sky aside to reveal the whirling shadowy colors of the Coil’s most dangerous Layers.

The hail spikes stabbed downward at impossible speed. They fell from the highest atmosphere gathering speed as they came.

Omer roared in pain up on the bank. Wesh shrieked when three shards slashed down his face and left him bleeding.

Eliska heard the Watchmen yelling at each other as they crowded together. They raised their arms above their heads to protect themselves, only for dozens of the shards to stab into their arms.

Eliska fired her staff into the air and formed a dome of protection over herself.

She only realized a second too late that she was leaving Yann and his father defenseless outside it. She didn’t usually have to think about protecting anyone but herself.

She sprang over to them. The hail spikes bounced off her dome, shattered, and each strike made a small crashing sound that built into a deafening, drumming din around her ears.

Wesh finally erected a similar dome over the other Watchmen. The rain put out the fire before the whole landscape descended into chaos—the same scene of chaos they had all just seen through Wesh’s window.

The shards tore branches and needles off the trees. All those spikes acting together shredded the canopy and ripped the forest apart.

“Follow me!” Eliska bellowed to the two men nearest her. “Stay with me! Don’t get too far away!”

They both understood and Eliska headed up the bank to rejoin the Watchmen. She wanted to combine her power with Wesh’s to give the party the best chance of getting out of this alive.

Yvan grabbed his son and dragged Yann up the slope. Wesh had his hands full dealing with so many Watchmen. His dome was barely big enough to contain them all.

Rien, Barsali, Omer, Niyazi, Neils, and Vidal crowded body against body under the dome. They all held onto each other trying in every possible way to prevent any of them from accidentally sticking a body part outside.

Every man bled from multiple razor cuts to their heads, faces, arms, shoulders, and backs. Eliska didn’t dare to check on Yann—not yet.

Wesh got stuck on the other side of the group. He didn’t see Eliska coming toward him with the last two Watchmen sheltering under her dome.

When Wesh did see them, he tried to get the others to move closer so they could join up. Wesh and Eliska could combine their magic to create a bigger dome—big enough for all of them to fit under and maybe heal the Watchmen’s injuries.

Wesh couldn’t get all of them moving in the same direction at the same time—not without risking their lives.

That left Eliska, Yann, and Yvan to cross the last dozen yards to Wesh’s dome.

Eliska cast one last glance behind her. The hail was rapidly hammering the forest into the ground.

As soon as the hail finished tearing the trees apart, all those millions of sharp projectiles would erode the ground under the group’s feet. The Island would collapse and then…..

In that moment when she looked behind her, she spotted something in the Layers beyond where the treetops had been until just a few minutes ago.

The shadowy vapors between Layers separated. Dark shapes materialized from the background.

Some of those vapors whipped and snaked through the colored swirls. The shapes didn’t disintegrate. They became more distinct.

Their movements became more deliberate….and then a torrent of Darkness poured down from the sky toward the devastation where the forest used to be.

The wave hit the ground with an earth-shaking boom and all that Darkness erupted upward to form monstrous, towering figures studded with spikes and tentacles. Ten massive Darklings shot upward fully formed around the two pathetic domes.

Eliska spun around and raised her staff to confront them, but the constant drum of the hail shards on the dome above her head changed her mind.

She wouldn’t be able to fight the Darklings from under this dome. She wouldn’t be able to protect Yann or Yvan in the middle of fighting those Darklings.

The minute she stepped outside—the minute she fired her very first assault against them—the dome would collapse.

Then the shards would kill both men right here. The shards would tear them apart so much quicker than the shards tore apart those trees.

She made a split-second decision, spun her staff around, and stabbed the end into the ground at her feet.

She discharged a massive jolt of magical power into the soil. The ground fractured from the impact. Fissures cracked and forked through the grass.

The landscape quaked and rocked. The Darklings bellowed in rage and took a dozen menacing steps closer to the party.

Eliska raised her staff above her head, summoned all her power, and slammed her staff down harder this time.

It worked. The ground completely caved in. It buckled in an avalanche of bedrock, soil, tree roots, torn grass, splintered tree trunks, and falling bodies.

All the Watchmen yelled in unison. Even Eliska yelled as the whole party tumbled through the breach into an open space under the ground.

They fell into another vapor Layer, but this time, an even more brutal wind struck from the left side.

It pummeled everyone with such force that they couldn’t fall downward. The wind caught everyone, spun them through the Layer, and Eliska hit what felt like a curtain of water.

She broke through into a completely different Layer with bluish-purple and green vapors. They burned her skin when she fell through them.

The wind didn’t blow here at all and the whole party instantly started falling again.

She lost track of how many Layers she passed through. Different kinds of magic operated in each one. In some, what looked like vapors slashed and cut a person’s skin. Others didn’t do anything and some actually felt pleasant and velvety soft.

She and the others barely entered each Layer before the shadows started to reform into Darklings. They lunged for the party and tried to attack.

Only the group’s continuous falling and changing Layers saved them from each attack. The Layers changed rapidly from one to the next and the Darklings always reformed in each one.

End of Chapter 8.