I dreamed about a sharp, buzzing thing. A presence, floating in the space I used for my thoughts like the pins-and-pixies of a numbed limb. If it had not been there, I would not have been aware of anything at all.

The sensation intensified, like anxiety and restlessness coalescing in a physical form somewhere next to me. It pained me to be near it, but I couldn’t get away.

I looked for the source of the buzzing. It looked like a cloud. I expected something white like the color of blight, but instead it was black, with streaks of angry red jolting chaotically through it like kavi in a storm. It was the only thing I could see. All else was the dark emptiness of deep, dreamless sleep.

When I looked at it, the thrum grew louder. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move.

The entity reached out to me. A wisp of vapor, like a spider’s leg articulated with too many joints, extended from the cloud.

I yelled at it, told it to leave me alone. My voice sounded like it came from underwater, distant and muted, and the incessant droning drowned it further. More of the misty spider’s legs twisted from the black mass, turning the cloud into a crawling thing sparking with electricity the color of blood. It screeched, the thousand needling splinters turning to knives.

Then, it was gone.

Relief flooded into me. I would have sighed, but I didn’t have the energy for even that. It was as though the pressure of the droning hum was all that kept me in one piece. I felt empty again. Blissfully hollow, floating peacefully.

My lips pulled apart in one last smile. That was all I remembered before I drifted apart.

~*~

Something tart and bitter dripped into my mouth. I groaned and tried to ignore it, but despite my attempts to return to oblivion, I was awakening. I cracked my eyes open, enough to see but not so much I couldn’t refuse reality and return to some semblance of sleep if I chose.

I was indoors, in a fashion. I couldn’t tell if I was in a room or the inside of a tree. Warm sunlight filtered through a ceiling of leaves the color of young rice plants. Dappled shade moved around me as a breeze stirred the branches, caressed my bare shoulders, kissed my cheeks. A few scattered tapestries of eggshell-white cloth fluttered

The voice resolved itself into a woman’s, I thought, as gentle hands at my back helped me sit up. “No use feigning it anymore, you’re awake. Come on, up-up-up, that’s it. Welcome back.”

The voice reminded me of my mother, and of napping while she worked the garden in the cozy sunlight and a drowsy breeze. That was impossible, of course. Unless –

“Am I dead?” I asked. The moment I finished my sentence I flushed with embarrassment. I was too sore too be dead, my voice too hoarse. The plains of the dead were said to be dark, while I was in a bed in an airy room with a roof like the inside of a tree’s canopy.

The hand at my back receded and a Keléri orderly stepped into view and adjusted the blankets. A maroon ribbon swished back and forth at the end of her braided black hair.

“No,” she said, “you’re not dead. But it was a near thing.”

Not dead. The buzzing thing from my dream nagged at my thoughts.

“I… I was in the forest. I had a friend, a Keléri woman with red hair a little older than me – ”

“Elani has already recovered,” my attendant said. She signed do not worry as she crossed to the other side of the bed, then added, “you are both safe. It’s been several days since she brought you here. You are in Forest’s End.”

Forest’s End. We made it. I brought a hand to my chest and noticed a bracelet strapped to my wrist. A clear, polished crystal shone from its center.

The orderly chuckled. “We have already administered the elixir for your blightlung. It was, as I said, a near thing. A very near thing. Your case was advanced, and we did not have any of the medicine left in reserve.

“But your friend had somehow found dozens of moth’s wings – they make the potion with those, you understand – and we were able to produce several cures’ worth of bluemoth elixirs. Those wings saved not just your life, but likely several others’ as well across Kol Viri.”

I nodded, remembering the many hundreds of fragile, papery wings littering the floor of Verdegath’s lair. The sad fate of the bluemoths had been discovered at last. In an indirect way, the monster had been my enemy since the moment I discovered Amaranza’s lack of medicine.

“And this?” I asked, wiggling the bracelet around on my wrist.

“Spell crystal. Your friend mentioned you’d built up quite a little bit of spellplague. Keep that on for a few days to draw it all out and you should be fine.”

I laughed mirthlessly. I really was trying to perish as quickly as possible.

“You’ll want to take it easy for a few more days anyway, of course,” the attendant said, standing to leave. “I’ll be checking in on you in the evening. If there is anything you might need, simply tap your fingertips on the stone on the desk beside you a couple times – firmly, you know – and someone will come see to you. But, for now, rest.”

I thanked her, the remnants of the tart liquid she had given me flavoring the goodbye with something like sour banana.

I needed to ask Elani what had happened in the lair after I had fallen unconscious, but the comfort of the bed pulled me down. My eyelids grew heavy as I watched the leaves overhead sway in soft circles. Before long, they closed altogether.

~*~

Hunger woke me with an urgent grip on my stomach. The beige tapestries I had seen earlier now surrounded the room like curtains, forming rudimentary walls. The ceiling remained open but for the leafy canopy, but night had fallen within the room. The night-moon hid from my sight somewhere beyond the branches.

I took a deep breath. That ached, but it was only a dull stiffness. My room smelled of meat cooked in savory oils, and I cramped with hunger.

“Wow, that woke you up fast,” Elani said. She sat on the floor in a corner of the room, balancing a rectangular, wooden plate of food in one hand.

“Well, I haven’t eaten in…”

“Probably three days or so. How’s that liquid diet treating you?”

My stomach rumbled despite the memories of the sour medicine.

“Yeah, I didn’t like it either,” she said.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I smiled. “You’re okay.”

She returned the grin, her canines flashing. “So are you.” She stood up and climbed onto my bed. “Here. Eat something real. I’m finished, anyway.”

The plate looked like raw tree bark, but it was sturdy and polished in my hands. It seemed like something my Dad would enjoy making. I could bring him one for the inn, I thought, as a souvenir from my first trip to Lorelai.

I popped a cube of what tasted like marinated peka’ri into my mouth. “I can finally go home.”

“Thanks to that trick you pulled with the flashrock.” She looked down at her lap, then said, quieter, “you saved our lives, you know.” I’m impressed.

“What happened, though? How did we escape? I thought that was my last breath.”

“I picked up your sword and drew its attention. It charged me. Next thing I know, the whole world’s gone silver and I can’t hear a thing except for a skull-splitting ring.

“But I wasn’t looking at the flash, at least. It blew up behind me, or maybe above me – not sure. The kro’daka wasn’t so lucky. I managed to gut it without getting squashed.”

I nodded along as she explained the rest. She’d found me after her vision returned, unconscious in a pile of bluemoth wings. A dozen of the spiders returned to investigate, but rather than attacking us they helped dig us out. Elani had dragged me out of the lair and into the fresh air before collapsing.

“I was there for an hour, probably, before a troop of Rangers found us. They were investigating the spiders, apparently, since the roads had gotten so dangerous. Lucky there was a medic with them,” Elani said, reaching to pluck a morsel from my plate. “They got you breathing again, somehow. Plus, I had that green kavi you bothered me into capturing from the bamboo forest. I imagine that helped your body fight off the infection somewhat. It certainly reduced the fever.

“Anyway, the rest is pretty boring. They got us to Forest’s End, the apothecaries started on the elixir, and then we spent the next three days administering it to you while you slept and I recovered from my own wounds.”

I finished the food and put the plate down, then licked the marinade from my fingers. Elani had not mentioned my sword. It was in bad condition when I last saw it, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Verdegath had crumpled on top of it as he fell.

“Enough excitement for a lifetime, isn’t it?” I said after a moment. “I guess monster-slaying isn’t really my thing, after all.”

Elani pulled a leg up against her chest and rested her chin on her knee. She watched me from the corner of an eye. “Will you go back home, then? When you’re better?”

“I don’t know if that’s possible, actually.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Well,” I said, “I think I realized what my kavi does.”

“You managed to use it?” she said, twisting to face me. “What happened?”

“I think I did, anyway. I think… it let me talk to things with my mind. The kro’daka called himself Verdegath, by the way.”

“Verdegath can suck my foot, then. How did you figure that out?”

“Well, Verdegath was a spider – he didn’t have the right kind of mouth to speak Kolu. But he kept talking to me, and seemed to know what I was thinking, too. I realized I had also heard the peka’ri monster’s thoughts when it had attacked us, only at the time I thought I was imagining it. It was much less articulate.”

Elani crinkled her brow. “Kind of a weird use for a spirit,” she muttered. “Kro’daka speech. Why would that be valuable to anyone? It’s not like the kro’daka are reasonable, even if you can talk to them.”

“There’s something else, though,” I added. “I don’t think it’s just kro’daka speech. There wasn’t any blight in Verdegath’s lair, do you remember?”

Elani laughed. “Thank Gala. I think I’ll let you experience blightlung for the both of us.”

“No, no. Follow along for a second. Kro’daka come from blight, right?”

“So they say.”

“Well, I think that might be wrong. There was no blight in his lair. And besides, wouldn’t kro’daka have blightlung like me if they’d been exposed?”

Elani tapped her lips with the tips of her fingers. “I… guess so… but maybe they’re warped some other way? Some other kind of infection, like an open wound, or –”

“That’s the thing, though – the reason I don’t think kro’daka come from blight. It doesn’t fit the pattern. Remember the godstone in Udoro? I think I was using the spirit there – I felt something in the godstone and I tried reaching out to it, and that made my kavi appear. Or in the Green River, when I was bathing. I saw dozens of blue spirits following the current, but when I tried to show you, I couldn’t see them anymore.”

“Your spirit was next to you when I came to join you,” Elani nodded. “It disappeared when I startled you, so you probably lost your concentration, or something. Oh, or the spirits in the Festival lightshow, remember? I made some comment on how powerful the magic they used for one of the lights was, but you seemed to be able to see the kavi up there.”

“Exactly! So how could kro’daka be made from blight, when my kavi seems to be connected to other spirits?”

“Wait, are you trying to say kro’daka come from spirits?” Elani exclaimed.

“Yes! Right after I blinded Verdegath, I passed out. Then I dreamed. Only once, but it was vivid. I saw something like a kavi, only it turned all twisted and spiky. It lingered for a bit, then vanished.

“I think my purple kavi linked me with the messed-up kavi that made Verdegath into a monster, just like how it had been letting me talk to him when I was awake – just like it let me sense dormant spirits in the godstone, or see the kavi making lights in the sky over Amaranza.”

Elani spoke slowly, organizing her thoughts as she spoke them. “Okay. So you’ve been unintentionally talking with the two kro’daka we found, which is probably because of the new spirit you have. You could also sense kavi in a godstone, just like you could with Verdegath’s twisted spirit in your dream. So kro’daka are probably caused by spirits, somehow, and not blight. And when I killed Verdegath, that spirit appeared to you while you were dreaming, because you still had your spirit. Am I getting it so far?”

I nodded.

“Keth take me, I should have brought my notebook. Okay. So you’ve been using your spirit’s passive effects this whole time without knowing it, which seems to be the ability to sense and talk to other spirits.”

“Exactly.”

A look of sudden understanding came over my friend then. “Oh, Gala’s groves. That explains why Akor Shi’kai wants a purple kavi so badly. He wants to wake up the Ancients. He wants to speak to them!”

“Who’s Akorshi Kai? Are you talking about the Masked Stranger?”

“A-kor Shi-kai,” Elani enunciated. “That’s his name. I thought you worked at an inn – don’t you hear about politics all day?”

“Everyone just called him the Stranger. Or any of his other half-dozen nicknames.”

“Huh,” she grunted, then hopped off the bed and grabbed my finished plate. “Let’s talk about it later. Get some rest, your voice is getting ugly again.”

I let her leave without comment, grateful for the chance to rest. I wasn’t sure how I could be tired after three days of nonstop rest, but as Elani left the room and I settled back into the blankets I found that sleep came effortlessly.