Chapter Three – Teresa

First was the bread. As close to centered between the points of the diamond as I could make it, right onto the ground. The milk went in too, closer to us. Just within arm’s reach. Leaning forward, we put our hands right up against the chalk and pushed. Above each line, the air began to shimmer. Wavering like the light was coming through a sheet of old glass, so much more intense than when we’d tried at home. The trees that still had branches around us started to shift in a wind that didn’t even brush across our skin.

Tam cleared her throat. Then we started.

“Hear us, all that will. See us, all that may. Heed us, all that must.”

The air felt heavier and the back of my neck started to itch. I twitched as the wavering light bent, streaks of cloudy white racing along the outermost circle.

Our voices stayed steady.

“We’ve bread for those who hunger, milk for those who thirst. We offer these things freely to those that were the First.”

The bread and the cup both shuddered, then they twisted. The cup shifted sideways, closer to me, and the bread cracked in half as it flipped to align itself like an arrow pointing into the unknown. Inside the cup, the milk began to swirl. It was draining away so, so slowly. The spray of crumbs never hit the ground, dissolving into motes of light that faded as we paused to breath.

Inside the cup, the milk bubbled. Cloudy and uneven colors flashed to the surface, gone too fast for me to see. The pressure around us intensified. So did the itching, like something was watching.

“We call to you to bargain, we call to you to deal. We call for recognition, for the lifting of the veil.”

Outside, lightning flashed within the clouds. The sound never came. Our voices synced up as the ritual grew. The archaic rhymes should’ve tripped us up, but the words flowed smoothly, not-quite echoing.

“We seek to know what shaped us, and all that may have been. Gone but not forgotten, let us know your ken.”

The outer circle calmed. No more white streaks darted across it, but the land beyond faded out of focus anyway. My eyes were drawn to the farthest circle.

“First came Earth, the solidness of stone. The soil and silt that blend into bone.’

The chip of jade shuddered and worked its way upright. It rolled end-over-end around the rim of its circle, a spiraling track that was mesmerizing to watch. In time with my heartbeat, deep viridian light shone from it. A striated, varied glow, brighter and brighter as it approached the center. The entire circle shook as it sank halfway into the ground.

“Second was Water, the timeless shifting sea. The lifeblood and the heartbeat that will never cease.”

The bowl shattered. Its pieces flew out of the circle, fading into the distance as the water spread out into a black mirror bounded by the chalk. It reflected waves crashing endlessly against stone, flecks of pearlescent foam flying out and falling back without even a ripple. There wasn’t a sound, or at least not one I could hear over the pounding heartbeat in my head.

“Third came Air, the birth of sound. The aethereal shroud in which we are bound.”

It felt like something smashed my chest in. There was a short, strangled gasp before my lungs forcibly emptied themselves in one long, crackling exhale. A cloud of black seeped from my mouth, twining tendrils of it tracing their way to the circle at my feet. They didn’t ruffle my clothes, didn’t even nudge the chalk or the remnants of ash on the ground as they filled the circle.

It just kept pouring out. I couldn’t breathe – weight on my chest wouldn’t let me. The world started to dim from the outside in, even the pulsing green from the jade starting to darken as my heartbeat slowed. I should’ve been panicking, but all I could do was watch as the water began to creep past its circle. Two streams, tipped with crests of foam that dashed against invisible walls, crept along the diagram’s lines, connecting their circle to the next. Where the wavefront passed, only mirrored onyx remained.

As one, they reached the end. The weight didn’t release, but the black mist stopped flowing. In the circle for air, it whipped itself into a thundercloud, distant, muted claps and the sound of driving rain barely making it past the sudden ringing in my ears. In the one for Earth, the jade settled into a faint emeraldine glow. Shoots of grass crept in from the edge of the circle, bending toward the gemstone.

They grew slowly, so slowly, and a small voice in my head said they wouldn’t reach it in time. It got louder and louder as my eyes started to burn, but I couldn’t even blink. I had to watch.

There was barely any light left when it made contact. Suddenly, we could breathe again. But there was no time. Things were speeding up and the water kept moving.

With hoarse voices we went on.

“Fourth came Fire, the first spark of light. The devouring Blaze that shattered the night.”

The candle had faded away in the darkness. It alone had been left outside its own circle, unlit. But between blinks, I found that it was inside the chalk, half melted and blazing away as if it’d been lit for hours. The flame reached impossibly high – taller than the candle, then taller than a person, then up, up, further than I could see. I couldn’t even tilt my head back to look for where the pillar of crimson, edged in roseate gold, ended. The entire diagram shuddered, but then the water converged. The flames shrank, a cloud of steam encasing the flickering light inside them. Color strobed across the rest, too fast to focus on. Blazing red, budding green, shining blue.

“From Fire’s heat was stolen Blood, the first stirrings of life. The unbreaking chain of hands that would forge this knife.”

The metal warmed. It began to glow, not just reflect the light. I knew what I was supposed to do, but my body still moved on its own.

“A tool of ritual, and of strife. Anointed in birth, in death, in life.”

The tip sank into my palm. I didn’t even feel it, but the first bead of blood clung to the tip of the blade. Scarlet and shining, a piece of me. The true offering.

“One for the Earth.”

The knife flicked forward. The blood flew, hanging for long seconds in the sky as a burning, beautiful, scarlet jewel. Then it splattered onto the jade. The grass bloomed into flowers and the pulsing light stopped as the stone turned black.

“One for the Sea.”

The tip scraped across my palm, picking up another drop. Another flick, another brilliant arc, and then the mirror turned red. The angle was wrong, but I still saw my face. Laughing, crying, snarling. A thousand expressions in less than a second, before it settled on an all-too-wide smile with dark streaks leaking from my mouth.

“One for the Sky.”

Into the cloud. A bright flash, then nothing.

“One for the Blaze.”

The candle flared brighter, burning away the mist of steam. But the drop turned to ash before it could land.

That wasn’t right, but I couldn’t stop myself. We were rushing, Tam and I, in perfect sync as something guided us through the movements.

“One for the Past.”

It flew over my left shoulder.

“One for the Present.”

Over the right.

“One for the Future.”

The knife fell to the ground. The last, beaded drop of blood fell from the wound and into the nearly emptied cup. The liquid writhed. It definitely wasn’t milk anymore.

“We give of ourselves to the world that was, is, and will be. We offer the first deal once more. Bereft of debts and strings, of boundaries and trivial mortal things...”

“Help. Us. See.”

It echoed. Again and again and again, until the air trembled and even the circle began to shake. The shadowy depths that had replaced everything beyond the circle rushed in, sweeping away the rest of the ritual. Fire bent and curved before going out, where the other circles just vanished. The dark fog of my breath faded, taking with it the lines of chalk and even the feel of the ground and Tammy. For a moment I saw brilliant strands of unnamable colors crisscrossing the world, but even they faded.

Only two things were left. The faintly glowing cup that had been swept into my lap, driving away the darkness just enough to see myself by. Time fell away. Colors swirled in the cup, shaking and begging to be seen, but I couldn’t focus on them. Because around me, deeper and stronger than even them, something shifted.

Dust covered wings and patchy fur wrapped around me. Each brush was a shock of static as faint impressions of old and broken things flared into being behind my eyes. Ash, dust, and long-ago pain. All-consuming and bottomless sorrow poured through with every drifting brush of warm, soft fuzz.

Each one cut me to the core. Too deep to comprehend, too overpowering to focus enough to even try to understand. Everything else was forced, piece by piece, from my head, and what was left didn’t fit.

It overflowed, an endless stream of tears dripping off into the void and splashing into the cup of swirling, untamed magic. I couldn’t scream out its pain through a throat sealed in anguish, but I could cry its tears. I could shake like I’d grabbed a live wire, twitching and tensing in ways that I knew should’ve hurt. But physical pain felt far too shallow.

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Once an eternity, the darkness parted. Memories of umber seas and obsidian skies, fuchsia wings and burning eyes. Fire, everywhere. My own vision faded, my existence shrinking down to make space for the emptiness older than I could even imagine. It was warm, it was fuzzy, and it had never been and would never be human. Despite the size difference, despite the unfathomable void between us, it clung to me like I was the last floating board of a sinking ship.

I was losing myself. Drowning as it tried to pull itself up, ‘legs’ digging deep into my own pain.

The call about Grandad’s death.

The trip home.

The nights spent crying.

Freezing up whenever I saw his things, laid out and covered in dust.

It pulled back. Just a little. And I found my voice.

“I – I can’t fix this. Nothing can. But you can’t let it define you.”

The soft darkness turned hard. Prickly, pressing against me, but not pulling me down. My words fell flat, but I kept going.

“Dwelling on it forever – it can’t help. I don’t think anything will. I’ve lost things. Lost people. Grandad…he was healthy. Invincible. He was all we ever knew, all we had. And then he was gone. But there’s always pieces left. Memories. Mementos. Magic. All of this, me being here…it’s like his last gift to us. The ritual, this place? Even the house? It all came from him. We…”

I talked.

And talked.

And talked.

Memories, small as they were, about growing up. Good things and bad things, it didn’t matter. Planting trees in the yard when we were seven, how Tam lost a tooth in the doorframe when we were nine. The funeral, the pain, and the urge to just…shut down. Draw into myself to not get hurt again, then Tam shaking it into my head that that wasn’t a way to live. Whatever this was, it listened to my life story. To the small lessons I’d learned, to the dreams I had that felt like they barely even mattered.

It heard it all, and the prickling faded. The velvety embrace came back, more intense, deeper, softer. Something that I could project caring onto, rather than hostility or a blank, immense indifference. There wasn’t a bigger change – I honestly didn’t think I could’ve done that. I couldn’t even tell if it was alive. Or if that distinction even mattered for something like it.

The glowing cup drained, slowly going dark as it emptied. The light streamed out into the void, color fading until it was gone. Some of the entity’s warmth stuck with me in sparks of fuchsia and umber as the rest slipped away into the distance. With a beat of unfathomable wings, the darkness broke and a diffuse grey light came through the cracks.

The first thing I noticed was that I was shaking. Then that a thin layer of ash had settled across me, tracks trailing down my cheeks and my chest where tears had washed it away. The ritual circle had stained to a splotchy grey, bits crumbling even as I watched into more of the dark ash. The smaller circles had emptied – a black lump in a bed of wilted flowers was all that was left of the earthen circle. Mud in the water and air, and a spray of melted wax for fire. The bread was gone and the cup sat empty in my lap, cracked and crumbling to dust as I shakily started to move.

The first thing I consciously did was suck in a heavy, heaving breath. With the ritual over I could think again, and I was terrified.

What. The. Heck. Was. That.

I could still feel the ache in my chest. Fading feelings of pain and terror. But nothing else felt different – had I even actually been talking? It had felt like so long, my throat should’ve been raw and bleeding. But it felt…fine.

I felt fine, physically. Better, even. And looking closer, I could see that things had changed. Where the ash was gone, my skin shimmered with an inner, grey-tinged black light that pulsed off-rhythm with my heart. I didn’t have names for the colors that sluggishly wove through my flesh on top of it. That same light crossed the sky in glittering, rainbow streams. They wormed from the clouds to the towering trees, then back again.

When I reached for my magic, a prismatic flow went down my arm and burst through my palm in a spray of glowing wind.

It was beautiful. It was…

My vision started to swim, lost in the colors. Bile started to burn in my throat. Too much, too bright – the trees were…

Cool fingers on my shoulder broke me out of it, alongside a whispered, “Tere?”

I screwed my eyes shut and pulled in a few slow, deep breaths. The ground and her hand were what mattered. Focus on that, not the overload of colors and motion and foreign memories. Tam squeezed my shoulder, but didn’t take away the hand. It took a second to realize she was talking – the blood rushing in my ears was drowning everything out.

“Dial it back a bit, it gets easier. Let me know when you’re good.”

I swallowed down the urge to sass her and tried. We’d gotten what we wanted. Just – a little bit more came with it. The instructions had talked about this – I didn’t have to see this much, or hear my own blood and the rustling of the unquiet ground around us. The colors stopped dancing behind my eyelids, and when I blinked them open again they were muted. I could look deeper if I tried, reality unfolding to show me things that made a headache flare up.

I nixed that idea. I could fiddle around with that later.

When I tilted my head back, I was met with a filthy – and very much topless – Tam grinning at me with indistinct, glowing eyes. The same paradoxically bright black as the fog in the ritual – which now that I had time to think was weird. It hadn’t mentioned the color in the handbooks.

The distraction didn’t change that I was way, way too close to Tam for comfort.

“For the love of God, put a shirt on!”

The rapid move to turn and cover myself nearly toppled me. My legs were just a single step above completely numb and didn’t do much to help me keep upright.

Tam laughed. “Yeah, you’re definitely ok.” Crunching footsteps and rustling fabric rang out behind me as I maneuvered onto my knees. “You were out of it for a lot longer than me. Didn’t even move the last few times I shook you, I was getting worried.”

I looked down. There was just the one handprint on the dusting of ash across my shoulders.

“If you’ve been up that long, why aren’t you dressed already?”

“I uh, got distracted. The clouds are beautiful and I was looking at the magic veins. I realllllly want to get them as tattoos now. Then the different shapes for the different spells, tracking what changed…”

“You didn’t even try to wake me until I started gagging, did you?”

There was a muttered reply that I couldn’t really make out.

I snorted, “You’re a terrible sister. Toss me my stuff – screw the ash, I’m ready to head back.”

The neatly-folded bundle fell onto my head in pieces, and then my shoes bounced off a few feet to the side. Wriggling into pants with my legs in the pins-and-needles stage of waking up was excruciating, but it was worth it to get some dignity back. Even if shimmying into them made me feel like a chicken that couldn’t decide which leg to stand on. Through it all Tam kept muttering, still too indistinct to understand. The gentle wind scraping through the branches of every dead tree near us definitely didn’t help. How did something already burned even move like that?

There were three things missing when I double checked it.

“Stop pacing and give me my bra already. You can keep the socks but I’m not walking back through those hills without it.”

Tam protested, “Hey! I threw everything you had over. I’m not even pacing!”

“Liar! It was right on top of my bag. And I can hear you moving!”

“Wait, you mean that isn’t you?”

I shrugged the shirt on in a rush. The crunching was still going, but when I turned all I saw was Tam. Her arms were flung wide and she was sitting still, a half packed bag between her legs. The crunching and the murmuring both were still going. Getting louder.

I didn’t see anything, but a fresh dose of immensely personal fear poured into my veins. It didn’t feel safe here.

The Roads were in the Woods. The Faerie Woods.

I couldn’t quite hide how worried I was as I rushed to pull on my shoes and get over to Tam. She was starting to look spooked, too. Without a word, we packed everything. The sounds got clearer as we went. Louder, maybe. Closer?

“…enhancement, do you think?”

“Nae, they’ve little need.”

“There are two of them, yet one of these. Status, perhaps?”

“The quiet one missed it. The blue one led the way.”

The words ebbed away into an indecipherable murmur. The tones were high and tittering, muted laughter ringing out in stilted beats between the words. Tam’s face tightened as we started moving back to the shimmering tear of the portal.

“…was out quite a time.”

“Aye, ‘twas watching too. Boorish.”

“Ignorant! Mortals don’t Pass that long when touching the Weave.”

Another swap. Another set of voices, drifting in a circle.

“…supposed to be!”

“Patience. Even a paltry offering…”

Oh no.

That’s what we missed. Everything for the ritual, but nothing for after. I was weighing whether digging through the packs and trying to fix it now was best, or if Tam and I should just run for it.

And then a voice boomed out, snapping like a gale as it sheared limbs from trees. Icy terror flooded me, cutting down to my bones and locking me in place.

“Do you twits even have eyes? They have been standing there, listening to everything you say.”

One by one, seven figures resolved themselves out of the distance. Silver silk and blackened leather faded out of the ashen ground and charred trees. Streamers of drifting ash turned to hair, each strand whipped in a non-existent wind. Flesh, pale or dark, both shone with a grey light so deep and pure that it was blinding. When I blinked that away, their faces were almost human. But far, far too perfect.

The Fae.

“So, now they See us? They Hear?”

“Yes, yes they do. Look at them, see the fear?”

The voices bounced around as they circled in, closer and closer. I never saw the one that spoke.

“They should tell us of its purpose.”

One circled by, holding up my bra. Laughter rang out as I tried to make myself move, only feeling the blood rushing to my face.

“They must explain their trespass.”

“And why they reek of the Corpse Flower.”

“The Grower’s deal was for an heir…”

“Quiet.”

The same sharp, crackling voice rang out, and the others fell silent. They stopped circling, rooted in place as my mouth snapped forcefully shut. I couldn’t open it.

One stepped forward, directly in front of us. Her dress, out of all, was the most understated. Long and flowing, with silver bands cinching it at the waist and the wrists. A twisted branch held her hair up, and with each movement of her limbs the trees around us shifted.

“I am the Lady of Sighing Boughs.”

Her words echoed. Wood on wood scraping reverberating unto eternity, as the ash around her stirred, drifting into four ghostly wings behind her.

“You have trespassed against the Ashen Court. You bear no offerings of your own worth. You seek the eldest deals yet pay but half the price, draw on a power greater than your own and offer precious little back.”

Each charge – and there was no other way to word it – struck like the crack of a whip. On the last, her eyes fell on me. There was a near physical weight to her attention, before she flicked back to Tammy.

“What have you to say for yourselves?”

Our lips unsealed at the same time, judging by the synchronized gasps. I threw an elbow out towards Tammy before she could say anything, but it froze again at a glance from the Fae, earning titters from the watchers.

Still, she stayed silent. And with the way they were looking at us, letting that last wouldn’t end well.

“Uh – Your Radiance…”

The wind howled and took my voice away. My mouth kept moving, but no matter what I did it didn’t make a sound.

“We are no vain fools of Summer.”

Before she could go on, the others cut in. Their interruption drew a stare from the Lady, but no reprimand.

“Such flattery is as empty as the shell that birthed you.”

“You bear the mark of the Grower, and of his Flower.”

“Hollow.”

“Mockeries.”

They bounced the words around, again.

“Incomplete and empty. Barely bound by pact and oath.”

“The Grower’s passing has come and gone.”

“He bargained for an heir, but two claim the Leafless Crown.”

I glanced at the rippling air, like a sheet of twisted glass, that was just a few steps away. I didn’t like where this was going…

“Your eyes are as subtle as the excesses of Spring. Should there be defiance in deed, the oath is as meaningless as mortal lives.”

The Lady of Sighing Boughs frowned, ever so slightly, as one of the others stepped forward from her side and berated us. A spear of twisted charcoal tipped with gleaming silver pointed between Tammy and I.

“Now – which of you is the heir to the Corpse Grower, Seedlings?”

I tried to answer. I really did – I could see the trap, but a gust of wind tore the words away. Which left Tammy to fill the silence.

“We just…” The spear shifted to her, and she gulped. “I’m…”

Six mouths opened into many-toothed grins. Twelve luminescent eyes locked onto me.

“My Lady?”

The wind blew again. Low and mournful, a dying gasp of a sigh.

“Witnessed, in deed and word and blood. A boon is owed.”

Six heads tilted to the side. A trinket of burnt and twisted wood melted out of the ash at Tammy’s feet. Her mouth hung open as a clump of severed hair drifted to the ground, the spear that had severed it quivering in the ash. Its shaft brushed against my ear as I jerked back the instant my body unfroze.

Every instinct I had told me to scream, but the rising panic froze it in my throat. The numbness in my chest poured out, pressing the panic further from my core and leaving my fingers and toes tingling as a distant, echoing urge to run came through.

I darted for the portal. I could almost touch it when the ground fell away and the world went dark.