Daphne had heard of people doing remarkable things in stressful circumstances. Lifting cars, running into burning buildings… it was a well-established fact that human beings were capable of achieving the impossible, when faced with an appropriately catastrophic scenarios.
So when Mark responded to the looming threat of a Rabid Daydream not by running away, but by wrenching his hand out of hers and charging straight at the horrific creature, Daphne couldn’t say she was surprised.
Impressed? Sure.
Even more in love than ever? Absolutely.
Mad as hell? Yes. Very-much-so yes.
But not surprised.
What surprised her was her own reaction.
“Fuck off!!!”
The swearing scream was uncharacteristic enough to shock her. The fact that she followed it up by lobbing the shriveled ‘E’-fruit straight at the Rabid Daydream’s head was another remarkable, un-Daphne act.
But the real impossibility was the accuracy of her aim. She, Daphne Green, useless failure of every team sport in the history of public school gym classes, launched a projectile… and actually hit the target.
Maybe there’s a car around somewhere I could lift, she thought. Better keep a lookout.
The Rabid Daydream was more surprised than hurt, but it was enough. While the monster stooped to pick up the now bruised ‘E’ letter, Daphne grabbed Mark’s arm, stopped his charge, turned, and took off in a mad stumbling dash along the edge of the trench.
“What were you THINKING?” she hissed as she pulled him along. “I said RUN!”
“I’m a Reader!” Not only was the beautiful oaf actually dragging his feet, but he kept turning his head back to look at the creature. “I’m supposed to fight!”
She gave his arm a sharp tug. “You need word-chains to fight, remember? And we don’t have any! Move!”
It was no good. The Rabid Daydream had already recovered from its surprise (and probably gobbled up the exceptionally nutritious vowel, worse luck). The ground under their feet shook as the creature lumbered after them, its long legs covering more ground than they did in each stride.
Still, they ran. Mark even took the lead, channeling his burst of bravery into a blistering pace. Daphne could barely keep up, but he had her hand again now, and the iron grip assured her that he wouldn’t let go. He wouldn’t let her fall.
On and on they ran, fueled by sheer adrenaline. That was the only explanation for the fact that several minutes later, they were both still upright and somehow still ahead of the monster. Three times, Daphne felt a terrifying rush of air at her back, like the Rabid Daydream had made a lunge with one of its long arms and missed them by millimeters.
Once again, she marveled at the demented awfulness of her own imagination. It would be better if the Rabid Daydream would roar, or hiss, or make some noise to indicate its proximity and intentions. But no. She had devised an absolutely silent monster, designed only for consuming. No eyes, no ears, no nose. No senses except touch and taste.
No senses meant no chance of reasoning with it. Any second now, her and Mark’s miraculous limitation-defying energy spurt would wear out, and that would be it. They’d just be two thought-lollipops for her own brain-child, drained of all their stories and discarded as mindless husks…
Daphne’s breath caught in her chest. Her throat was aching. A strange warmth was burning into her side, like a cramp —
No. Not like a cramp. Like a buzzing: the warm buzzing of her very alive, very powerful fountain pen.
The Prism.
Daphne reached her right hand inside her pocket. The pen seemed to leap into her fingers, vibrating with such force that she didn’t think she’d be able to keep hold of it, especially considering her own current shakiness. But it fused to her grip like a magnet, sending a shockwave of warmth and energy up her arm — across her chest — all the way to her brain stem.
She actually felt the jolt, like a jumper cable to her nervous system. Suddenly, she was in the lead, sprinting so fast that she and Mark were practically airborne. Even better, everything seemed sharper. Her sight, her mind. She saw where they were going, and she knew what to do when they got there.
Just a little farther…
The jolt must have traveled through her other hand to Mark because he saw their destination at the same time she did.
“Daphne!” he rasped. “The tree! The pool!”
In front of them were the withered remains of the Speech Tree, still rising from the middle of what used to be the Pool of Eloquence. Once full of crystal clear water that imbued the drinker with clarity of thought and word, the pool was now just a pit, as barren as the surrounding plains. Trenches like the one Mark and Daphne were following radiated out from the dried-up pool in all directions, like spokes on a wheel. Before the Wordmaster, those trenches would have been streams, carrying the eloquent water out across Euloban to supply the cities and nourish the word-gardens that grew on either side.
Still fueled by that spark from the Prism, Daphne saw it all vividly. Both the paradise this place had been, and the desolate wasteland the Wordmaster had made it.
That I made it, she thought, with a sudden stab of cold in her stomach. I made the Wordmaster, after all. I made the Rabid Daydream. I made it all… and I made it all go wrong.
The Prism gave another jolt up her arm, shocking her out of the guilt-spiral and back to the perilous present.
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“Get ready!” Daphne yelled at Mark as they sprinted the last few yards to the pit’s edge. “I’m going to make a word-chain!”
“What?”
“Get ready!”
In the annals of the Under Library, the Speech Tree was described as the heart of Euloban. All the richness of all the land’s stories flowed from and to the Pool of Eloquence, carried along by the streams in beautiful harmony. That meant the area around the Pool of Eloquence had been the largest word-garden of all.
Daphne didn’t need Aesthetics to tell her what was under the soil here, any more than she needed Intelligence to tell her this was their only chance. Even with a measly 2 in Wisdom, she was also fully aware of all angles of the situation, and knew that it was a desperate chance. What she was about to attempt had been an incredibly difficult feat for Amelia, her main character, even at Level 5.
Daphne was still only at Level 1. It was ridiculous even to think about trying.
But she had the Prism. Maybe, with the remaining dregs of remarkable, catastrophe-induced, car-lifting abilities, that would be enough.
It has to be enough.
Daphne squeezed Mark’s hand, bringing them both to a halt right at the edge of the dry pool. Before he could protest or ask what the hell she was doing, she released him and dropped to her knees. Drawing the Prism from her pocket, she uncapped it, stabbed its sharp point into the dusty soil, and shouted the first Words of Truth that came to mind:
“Even this will not unmake me!”
Then she stood, pulling the pen out of the ground as she did so.
To the surprise of all concerned, the Prism brought something with it from the dirt: a long chain of root-like letters, even more wizened than the ‘E’-fruit, but also more durable, strung together to form the words Daphne had just yelled.
It was so shocking that this could happen — that anything good could happen in this barren hellscape — even the Rabid Daydream stopped short. Its gaping hole of a mouth twitched as if in confusion. For a few crucial seconds, it stood there, towering over them, staring at the word-chain dangling from the Prism’s point.
Those seconds were all Daphne needed.
“Here!” She tore the word-chain from the Prism and thrust it into Mark’s hand. He reacted instinctively, turning and swinging the connected letters at the Rabid Daydream in one fluid motion, keeping hold of one end like a cowboy lassoing a stubborn calf. The chain wrapped around one of the monster’s long arms, caught, and clasped on.
“Hang on!” Without stopping to see the creature’s reaction, Daphne fell to her knees again and stabbed the Prism into the dirt, the next line of the word-chain already springing from her lips: “No master can outmatch my heart!”
This time, the pen resisted, like the words were reluctant to stir from their long, dry sleep beneath the soil. Daphne didn’t care. She pulled harder, straining physical and mental muscles she didn’t know she had until the Prism popped free, another word-chain dangling from its point.
This time, Mark was ready. As soon as the letters were loose, he grabbed the string and lashed it towards the Rabid Daydream, this time catching one of the creature’s legs. Mark kept hold of one end of both word-chains, gripping firmly but giving himself a healthy three feet of clearance.
Daphne allowed herself an instant to see the monster’s reaction. The Rabid Daydream seemed to still be in a state of shock, as if nothing like this had ever happened before. With a sinking feeling, Daphne realized this was probably the case. It sure didn’t seem like any humans or griffins were about to keep the Rabid Daydreams in check, not to mention the Devouring Winds.
In fact, a single glance at the dry wasteland was enough to confirm the fear she had voiced to Mark earlier: this was not just an apocalyptic world, it was a devastatingly advanced apocalyptic world. Judging by the state of the Speech Tree alone, she could tell that Euloban was definitely in far worse shape overall than she ever envisioned in her books. Even when she had set out to chronicle all the havoc wrought by the Wordmaster’s evil deeds, she imagined remnants of life in the landscape. There should have been pockets of resistance — patches of wild word-gardens — even a tame Daydream or two roaming the Silent Plains.
This isn’t all my fault, she thought. I never planned for it to get this bad. Word-gardens shriveled and buried, Devouring Winds running amok, the Rabid Daydream population out of control… I’m sick, but I’m not THAT sick. Something happened here, something that I didn’t write about.
Daphne’s comforting realization happened at the same moment the Rabid Daydream recovered from its shock. It tilted its head down, staring without eyes at the word-chains binding its arm and leg. The letters were digging in and twisting, tighter and tighter; if Daphne remembered correctly, they also burned, leaving permanent scars when not removed quickly. The Rabid Daydream’s colorless, metallic skin rippled as the horribly large mouth got even larger, stretching and stretching until it took up half the creature’s otherwise featureless face.
“Daphne,” Mark began, but Daphne didn’t get to hear what her boyfriend was planning to say. The Rabid Daydream’s way-too-huge mouth opened to the maximum… and started inhaling.
It was like a vacuum. A ten-foot-tall, malicious, super cranky vacuum. Daphne braced herself against the tug, crouching down and burying the Prism’s point in the dirt even as loose pebbles skittered across the ground towards the monster. The letters wrapped around the creature’s limbs stretched, but since Mark was holding the other end of both chains tightly, they somehow stayed connected and in place.
Mark himself was not so lucky.
“Daphne!”
The Rabid Daydream’s vacuum-breath was pulling Mark forward, thrumming along the word-chains he held firmly in one hand. He pulled them tighter, digging the letters into the creature’s skin and ensuring that they wouldn’t come loose. This bought him a second’s reprieve as the Rabid Daydream paused its inhale. The creature’s head reared back, the gigantic mouth flaring even wider in pain, but it was an all-too-brief respite. The terrible head tilted back towards Mark, this time aiming its tractor-beam vacuum-breath directly at him.
Mark dug his feet in, reaching back with the other hand for something to grab onto, but it was no use. The force of the inhale was dragging him forward, inch by inch.
The Rabid Daydream raised its free arm —
“Force can bend but cannot break me!”
The third line in this Word of Truth tore a hole out of Daphne, like it had been lodged in her heart and done damage on the way out. The word-chain emerged from the earth even more painfully, withered and ragged and missing a few letters at the end.
Daphne couldn’t have cared less.
She yanked the string of letters mercilessly from the Prism and shoved it into Mark’s searching hand, closing her fingers around his as she did so. Then, together, they threw the whole chain — both ends free and sailing — at the creature.
The good news was that Daphne’s freakishly good aim held true. The entire word-chain wrapped around the Rabid Daydream’s neck, which Daphne suddenly remembered was a particularly sensitive spot for any Daydream, rabid or tame. The letters dug into the colorless skin, twisting themselves into increasingly tight knots.
If the creature could have howled, it would have. Daphne still thought she could imagine a high-pitched whine as the inhale stopped abruptly. All ten feet of the creature was frozen, apparently incapacitated by the pain of three full word-chains.
Three full word-chains.
All pulled from dead soil by a Level 1 Wordsmith, and wielded with deadly accuracy by a Level 2 Reader.
Forget cars, Daphne thought. Show me a bus that needs lifting. Mark and me: we can take it. Levels and Lorists be damned. We can take anything.
That same Mark was shaking beside her. She slid her hand up to his shoulder, opening her mouth to congratulate him on their first successful battle.
That was when the bad news kicked in.
The bad news was that the Rabid Daydream still had an arm free and had higher pain tolerance than Daphne expected. Guided by pain and blind rage, it hurtled towards the human holding the other end of the word-chains.
The monster caught Mark in one colorless hand, dragging him from Daphne’s grip. Frozen in horror — as frozen as the Rabid Daydream had been by pain — she watched the offspring of her own demented imagination lift her boyfriend high, high into the air… towards its wide, gaping mouth.