I collapsed beneath a sprawling ficus. My knees sunk into the loamy soil as I crawled closer to the protective embrace of the tree’s vast trunk. I curled up and let quiet, shaking sobs overtake me. The forest didn’t seem to know what to say, and so lay quiet.

Nol had tried to kidnap me. I told that to myself over and over. He used magic against me. He tried to kidnap me! Yet I could not stop myself from seeing my sword flashing against his palms. I could not stop thinking of the streak of red it left behind.

Swords weren’t meant for people. They had been built to battle skogg, then reused for defense against wild animals or fending off monsters when all other options had failed.

They were meant to protect people, not harm them. Not dehumanize them.

I cried into the grass, knees hugged tight against my chest. Every sharp breath hurt like the slashing of bronze blades. My thoughts burned with an intensity that scared me. Faewild, you’re going faewild. You’re feverish. You’re going to die. Blight in your chest, poison everywhere. Your mother died in ten days, you’re racing to finish yourself in a week.

My tears eventually ebbed, and I slowed my breathing out of necessity. It hurt to cry, but otherwise the blight left me alone until my grief had faded to something more manageable.

It’s okay to be scared, I decided. As much as I admired Dero the Dark, I was not him. The peka’ri monster proved that, and now so had my fight with Nol.

I sat up, drying my eyes so I could look around. The forest was darkening, the sun’s light no longer gilding the canopy overhead. No roads or lanterns marked a path through the trees. Worse, I was still wet from the river. I had no food. No shelter.

I pushed myself to my feet. If I didn’t start moving, another blightlung attack could kill me. If the fever didn’t first.

~*~

I lost track of how long I had been walking. The lambent sunset had left long ago, abandoning Lorelai to the night. The undergrowth grew close together, and the trees formed a ceiling overhead that hid the forest floor from the night-moon’s view.

Something rustled in the bracken to my side, so dark I saw only shadows jostling each other. I told myself it was a harmless kobo or jungle fowl, and nothing more. The thing moved again and made a chittering noise as if to snicker at me. I walked quicker.

Monsters in the night watched from every corner, lured by my defenselessness. The Tatter Man and all those other silly specters of nightmares and adolescence crept around at the

edge of my vision, but when I looked, I saw only vines, branches, and the trunks of trees.

Edible plants, fungus, and insects probably surrounded me, I realized. Not monsters. Lorelai was one of the most plentiful regions in Kol Viri, after all. The Keléri thrived here with a fraction of the farms Eletha sustained. If I had my slingshot, I’d even be able to hunt small game.

I realized then I didn’t have to be completely alone, nor blind. The nature spirit wouldn’t be able to talk to me, but for once I wished for the company of its floral glow. I’d expected to come across a lantern by now, but it was as if I wandered the same untouched forest the Keléri had awakened to a thousand years ago.

I pushed, and a soft lilac luminescence blossomed in the shadows beside me. I smiled. Its light helped little, but at least now I felt as though I traveled with a friend.

“Do you think Elani is okay?” I asked the spirit. My voice sounded wrong, but the words themselves surprised me. After everything, I still considered Elani a friend.

The spirit gave no opinion, nor sign it heard me. Pale mist wrapped it like a cloak that fell away as it moved. When I moved, for it followed me at a distance and made no explorations of its own.

“I guess I never need a torch again,” I chuckled. “As long as I like the color purple.”

My chest twitched, a short spasm like the beginning of a cough, as the blight reminded me of its presence as well. If I could find a road, I had a chance at being found if I passed out. The Keléri Tribe was practically nocturnal, so the late hour was not entirely a detriment. Some of their villages even eschewed the standard day, waking up at dusk and not sleeping again until dawn.

I’d caught glimpses of Elani’s night vision before, her eyes masked by an unsettling, multicolored sheen in the dark. Maybe if I could see in the dark, I wouldn’t need to keep my thoughts running as a constant distraction. I’d be less scared of –

Something moved in the brush behind me. I planted my foot carefully and stood still, straining my ears for more information. Standing in the center of my little aura of light meant I could see, but it also meant I was a beacon to everything else in the woods.

The bushes rustled again. It was larger than a kobo or jungle fowl. Larger even than a fat peka’ri. Large enough to be dangerous if it wanted to attack.

I reached to the small of my back, gripping the hilt of my sword. I didn’t pull it out, lest the metallic ring of the weapon provoked the animal.

The undergrowth rustled again as the animal moved ponderously through the thick foliage. It was coming closer. I inched the blade from its sheath and stepped backwards.

Something else chittered behind me. A shiver of fear shot down my back and I pulled my sword free, spinning to put the sword between me and the second creature. I grit my teeth, lips pulled apart in a snarl.

A shadow moved, distinguishing itself from the still darkness of the underbrush. It was as tall as my knees, moving slowly, just beyond the range of my kavi’s glow. A single, segmented leg arched up in silhouette.

Spider.

Adrenaline surged through me and I stumbled away from the massive arachnid. It stalked toward me, keeping its distance. Light from my spirit reflected back at me from eight eyes. I told myself that Lorelai giant spiders were docile, even friendly. The book on my shelf at home said so. Elani had said so.

I ran anyway. The forest laughed at me, it seemed, as the spiders’ chittering vocalizations hissed all around me. The sound came from everywhere, from a dozen spiders lurking just out of sight. Sharp clicks from fanged mandibles punctuated the susurrus laughter.

I pushed ahead as fast as I could, ducking branches, leaping roots, and twisting between hanging vines. The spiders were either too slow or too few to catch me.

I might outrun them, I thought. They hunt for prey through ambush. As long as I move quick enough, they can’t catch me.

A taut net of webbing materialized in front of me, ensnaring me before I knew it was there. I screamed through my teeth. A sticky wire dug into my chin, holding my jaw firmly shut. I threw myself backward with my free leg, only to bounce back into the web’s clutch.

A spider chittered behind me, so close I heard the crunch of leaves beneath its feet. A cold, bristle-covered claw touched my calf as the spider investigated its catch.

I slapped at it blindly with my sword, but the bronze-wrought weapon felt no deadlier than a gnarled stick. The spider hissed quietly in response but seemed content to wait until I tired.

I pulled away from the web again, digging my free heel into the soft earth. The sticky strands tore from my cheeks and the front of my shirt like glue.

And then I was free, stumbling backwards, the spider screeching in surprise behind me. I spun, swinging at the creature, forcing some distance between us. Its allies crept closer through the trees.

I whipped my sword around, rending the spiders’ net, then dove through the hole I’d made. A dangling thread snagged my heel and I dropped. My sword flew from my hands and fell in a patch of sodden leaves where a spider stepped from the shadows and blocked me from the weapon.

I lunged toward the blade, ripping my ensnared ankle free at the same time. A spike of pain ripped through my chest, but I was rewarded by the warm leather of my weapon’s grip in my palm.

The spider guarding it hissed loudly and I twisted aside. It struck a moment later, its fangs clicking shut in empty air where my hand had been. Its mandibles gnashed in irritation.

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I rolled to my feet and attacked, but the spider was quicker. It scuttled backward, easily avoiding the descending blade. A more aggressive animal would have retaliated, but the spiders were cautious, relying on stealth and surprise instead of strength. I had no doubt a more aggressive animal would have killed me already.

Fighting the spider was a waste of time, so I fled in a different direction. Every root and stone threatened to drop me back on the ground as I hurtled through the purple obstacle course. My lungs burned with pain greater than any sprint or race had ever caused me. I couldn’t shake the pervasive dizziness away, and sweat dampened my clothes.

A yellow-orange glow emerged in the distance. A lantern’s flame, I hoped, from the way the forest flickered and shuddered around it. Ferns and branches leapt and shivered in its light, the unsteady shadows turning leaves and twigs into hundreds of crawling hunters.

If it marked a road, then I could escape without risk of blundering into a tree or any of the hundreds of aerial roots hanging from high branches. If my lungs could withstand the duress I put on them, anyway.

The lantern moved, sweeping me with rays of light. Not just a road, but a traveler!

I opened my mouth to shout for help, but my blight-matted lungs wouldn’t cooperate. Something leapt from my throat, forcing a cough instead.

A second later, a spider lurched from a pair of waist-high roots in front of me. I jumped aside, slamming into the scaled bark of a palm tree. A dull roar of pain shot through my shoulder, but I ignored it and threw myself at the spider. My blade swung in a deadly arc and snapped through a retreating leg like a woodsman’s axe through a sapling. The spider screeched in pain and alarm, and I shoved past it.

I honed in on the lantern. Its owner must have heard me, for they had stopped. The torch jumped abruptly, nearly throwing me off-balance as the shadows shifted maddeningly aside. I was close enough now to see why. The figure was battling spiders of their own.

“Elani?” I croaked.

The torch stole through her red hair, illuminating it like a second flaring lantern. She had one fist cocked back like a boxer’s, her knife throwing firelight. She turned as I neared, and her weapon dropped in surprise as she recognized me within the telltale violet glow.

“Elani, I – behind you!”

She dropped to a crouch, pivoted, and stepped away from the approaching spider in a practiced motion. The torch bobbed, shadows leaping, as she intercepted the spider mid-lunge with her knife. The blade punched through its thorax and she slammed it to the ground, her wrist dangerously close to its reaching fangs.

I stopped within her sphere of torchlight and doubled over, each breath as painful as those Elani had stabbed me instead. I surveyed our surroundings as best I could, and saw the corpses of several dusty brown spiders, their limbs curled inward. The largest of them was the size of a barrel.

“Ren, I thought you – blight it!” Elani lunged forward as a spider stepped toward me from my right. She kicked it, hard, snapping one of its legs. “I thought you were in Poro Duku!”

The spider turned to her, its front legs held upright and its fangs bared, just before Elani plunged her knife to its hilt in the spider’s abdomen. The creature screamed for only a second before Elani silenced it.

The spider tumbled over, twitching, and its legs folded in on themselves like all the others. I moved to cover Elani’s back and we circled together, her with torch and dagger, me with sword in both hands and kavi at my shoulder. The animals stayed outside our ring of light, for now.

“I thought you were in Duku Village,” Elani said again.

“I, erm, changed my mind. Is Forest’s End close?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Going home,” Elani said. “Then the spiders ambushed me. I stole this torch from the road, thinking the spiders would be afraid of it. I was wrong.”

“I wouldn’t have found you if I hadn’t seen the flame,” I said.

“Then it had some use. Here, take it.”

“Why do they wait?” I asked, shifting my sword to my right hand and accepting the torch. “I saw dozens of them, but they hardly made an effort against me.”

“The young, impatient ones will,” Elani answered. She kept one eye on the skittering shadows beyond our light as she ripped another knife from her boot. “You can see how well that worked out for them. The rest are wiser. But this isn’t normal behavior. They don’t bother Tribesfolk, and they certainly don’t hunt in packs like this. The forest is practically overrun.”

Elani motioned with the tip of a knife into the woods, toward firelight reflecting like dancing kavi from dozens upon dozens of sets of eyes. The chittering rose again, a language of mandibles and tongueless mouths.

“Are they kro’daka?” I asked.

“No, at least not that I can tell. But they’re docile, normally. You can pet them. Something’s very wrong.” She spared me a brief glance. “You look awful.”

“It’s a miracle I’m still alive. I’m sorry for earlier.”

“Save it.”

I nodded and bounced my sword in my grip, moving its blade in tiny circles to get a feel for its weight. It was nothing like the wooden staves I’d spent hours practicing with, and I’d certainly never fought with a torch before.

Yet, what else had I practiced so many hours for? Surrounded by dangerous predators, armed with torch and blade – my fantasies were finally reality. Now I wondered how I ever could have wished to be in a situation where one wrong move could kill me.

I swayed on my feet just as several spiders burst from the trees. Two came for me, while a third lunged at Elani.

I swung the torch in a wide arc, forcing my adversaries to keep their distance. Behind me, Elani screamed, and I turned to see her foe tug her off her feet, its chelicerae clamped down on her calf. The beast was already oozing from several cuts as Elani kicked at it with her free leg. It pulled her away from me, toward the shadows.

“Ren! I can’t reach it!”

I cried out and spun to help. The two spiders at my back hissed as they advanced, forcing my attention back to them. Somewhere beyond the torch’s light, the sounds of Elani’s struggling receded out of earshot. She screamed once, and then was gone.

I cursed. “Elani! I’m coming!”

I leapt forward and swung at one of the spiders before me, but the blade’s edge glanced off its hardened exoskeleton. Undaunted, I stabbed forward again. This time, the blade punctured clean through, but the attack left my right exposed. The other spider rushed forward as I ripped the sword out of its dying ally.

I slashed just as the spider made an attempt at my leg and my sword tore a gash in its mandibles just above the fang.

The spider hissed in anger as its wound spurted ichor. Its mouthparts opened to reveal a fleshy, dripping throat.

I grimaced, then brought my sword down and silenced the creature. Even against bloodthirsty predators, I did not enjoy the feeling of my sword finding flesh.

Two more spiders had snuck between me and the direction Elani had disappeared. A third descended from a nearby tree. I leapt aside as one lunged, then struck as hard as I could. My blade bit deep into its abdomen, and I was rewarded with a chilling scream that gave the other pause.

One down, two more. The spiders behaved uncharacteristically aggressive, but they were still ambush hunters; they had little to defend themselves with against my blade. So long as I attacked them, and kept moving, I seemed to have an advantage.

Provided the adrenaline kept me from passing out from fever, suffocation, or both.

I swung wildly at the remaining two with the torch to give myself some room. The pair separated, the one from the tree moving right and the other left. I threw myself at the spider to my left, bringing my sword down in a vicious diagonal cleave before the two had a chance to strike at me from both sides.

The blade threw firelight as though it were aflame as it sliced through three legs and part of a thorax. I’d no sooner returned to stance when a burning flare of blightlung-induced pain overshadowed the success.

I grit my teeth, groaning from the pain. I had to end this, or the blight would stop me altogether.

I lunged at the second spider with the point of my blade, as fast as I could manage, heedless of my own defense. The spider reared backward, evading the clumsy strike, then launched forward.

It slammed into me, shoving me to the ground. The torch flew from my hand from the impact, and a moment later the spider’s claws bit into my chest and my sword arm, pinning me. Firelight reflected like demons in its unreadable black eyes. Unlike the kro’daka from Udoro, this animal seemed devoid of emotion or thought.

I tucked my knees and dug the toe of my shoes between two of the creature’s legs. I pushed as hard as I could, ripping its scrabbling claws from my shawl as I heaved it away. I rolled forward into a crouch, but the spider gave me no time to stand.

It rushed me and I spent what little breath I had to tumble backwards in a roll. Struggling for air and desperate to keep the spider from pinning me a second time, I swept my blade wildly in front of me.

It had worked against Oman in the Pebblewood, and it worked again here. Only this time, I had a real weapon. I cut the spider’s forelegs out from under it.

Good one, I thought, remembering Oman’s praise.

The spider scrabbled away as I pitched forward, unable to breathe. My sword tumbled from my grip. For a moment, even the purple glow of my kavi faded as my vision darkened.

I thumped at my chest over and over. Something in my lungs popped, and my breath rushed back in a wheeze, my lungs filling so slowly I thought I might suffocate before I filled them. I coughed deeply, expelling the hard-won air.

Thus the cycle began, as each struggle for breath ended in a wracking cough. I crawled, shuddering, to the torch. I lifted it uselessly, unable to tell whether the dots in my vision were predatory eyes or my dizziness. The fever’s onslaught made the forest seem as cold as the northern tundras.

I squeezed my own eyes shut. I remembered Udoro and the small spatters of red and white on the grass. This time, I was certain there wouldn’t be any green left beneath the mess I expelled. The taste of the filth filled my mouth.

By the time my lungs had finished tearing themselves to shreds, the torch had guttered out in the damp Lorelai soil.