Eliska climbed another hill and looked down at the line of black dots in the distance. The Watchmen snaked from one valley to another heading inland from the water course where they started.
She stood on the hilltop watching them for a while. She leaned on her staff while she decided if she should keep following them.
She shouldn’t. She should leave right now if only to save them the trouble of dealing with her. No one in their right mind would want her poison around.
Some force she didn’t understand kept her going. She climbed down the hill, passed through another valley, and climbed a second hill a little closer to the Watch.
She didn’t understand her need to be near them even from a distance. She could protect them from the Dark by staying away from them.
She had nowhere else to go. That was the problem. No one and nowhere else in the Coil held any obligation, influence, or even any appeal for her. She didn’t belong to anyone else or care about anyone else.
Her whole life seemed to be tied up with these people now even if she never became anything to them but a shadow on the distant horizon.
She followed them for a few more hours before they stopped in a valley full of trees. She couldn’t tell from here what they were doing down there. She didn’t want to know.
Marine got a lot closer to the group than Eliska did. Marine kept darting forward. She almost joined the Watch a few times before she scampered away and then came back.
Eliska couldn’t tell what was going on with Marine and didn’t really care. Marine was gone—the Marine Eliska considered a friend. That crazed wild animal down there wasn’t Eliska’s friend.
Eliska wouldn’t have wanted Marine to see her like this anyway. Eliska couldn’t have tolerated the real Marine getting all hurt and upset and worried about Eliska’s Darkness.
Part of Eliska relaxed in relief that Marine didn’t see her like this. Eliska would have been very happy for the men of the Watch never to see her like this, either. She hated herself like this.
She hated herself for snapping at Yann and turning her back to Neils’s food and being rude to the Watch Commander.
She couldn’t stop herself. The Dark ate away at her. She couldn’t get rid of it. It turned everything to poison—everything about her.
Just being herself made her sick, but the Watch offered her one glimmer of hope. Yann was right. She still cared about them. The Dark couldn’t poison that out of her.
She ached for one of them to do something—anything to take this burden away from her.
That would never happen. Anríq knew better than to try. She wouldn’t want him to try. She would never wish for this curse to poison him the way it poisoned her.
She already was poisoned before she ever met these people. She could carry this curse. Anríq was too good and kind and innocent.
She had to carry it. She chose to carry it when she took it from Barsali. Now it was all hers.
She climbed onto a hill looking directly down on the Watch. Omer sat next to the Watch Commander and kept a firm grip on his jacket the entire time.
Yvan kept yanking from one side to the other trying to see invisible Darklings.
Eliska overheard the Watchmen’s conversation about Yvan. She heard what Anríq said about Yvan being whole.
She also heard him suggest that this area of powerful magic might be able to heal her.
She would have taken Yvan’s Darkness, too, if he had any. She would have taken it all to spare these people the fate she was going through right now.
She turned away gulping down the sting of bile in her throat. The sight of those people made her sick, but she just couldn’t tear herself away. They were all she had even if she never spoke to any of them again.
That was the moment when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. It came from behind where she’d just been standing. She wouldn’t have seen it while she looked down at the Watch.
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Now she saw a wave of shadow advancing across the countryside. It came from the north—from across the stream system where the Watch camped these last few days.
This shadow didn’t look as black as the Darkness Eliska had been getting so used to lately. The wave didn’t behave the same way.
It crawled across the landscape consuming everything in its path. She didn’t need to see exactly what it was.
She fired a blast of light into the air to warn the Watchmen of the danger. She didn’t go down there, though. She could protect the Watch better from up here.
The wave kept coming. It obliterated everything before it.
As it got nearer, she noticed plant shoots squirming, growing, and twining in a mass of other shoots. They knotted themselves together in a solid wall of thorns like the thorn landscape the Watch traveled through when they first left Middleborough.
The wave covered the horizon. The thorns swallowed forests, covered hills, and buried streams and rivers under the tangled carpet of twisted trunks. The thorns stabbed into other stalks and impaled them to form an impenetrable mass of wood.
The wave flowed over the landscape getting closer to the Watch. She couldn’t wait any longer.
She took a running leap and launched herself off the hilltop. She fired her staff into the air and surrounded herself with a ball of magic to hover there above the landscape.
She looked down at the wave from above and fired her staff one more time. She erected a barrier to hold back the wave, but its Dark power overcame her in seconds.
The barrier shattered and the wave bore down on the Watch just as fast. Her magic did nothing to stop it.
Anríq sprang in front of the Watch and raised his club, but he wouldn’t be able to hold back the wave, either. No one could.
Marine rushed up the channel trying to get to Anríq in time, but it was already too late. The Watchmen swiveled to face their doom. How puny and pathetic their weapons looked compared to the size of that wave.
Eliska released her spell and plummeted toward the ground at terminal velocity. She had to get there before the Dark overtook the Watch.
Anríq saw her coming and charged back to the Watchmen. Marine rushed into their group just as Eliska slammed into the ground full force. She drilled her staff into the soil at their feet and exploded the Island.
The Watchmen yelled out in alarm and fell through the crust just as the thorns raced over their heads and closed off the opening completely.
Everyone fell through multiple Layers and crashed down hard in another wasteland.
Eliska dragged herself off the ground and immediately felt something wrong—something more wrong than the Darkness inside her.
She looked down at the staff in her hands—the staff Yann made for her. It didn’t vibrate with any kind of energy. It felt dead and cold.
She yanked her hand away and dropped it. It hit the ground and she rubbed her palm against her side to get that feeling off, but nothing would take it away. Her magic was gone again.
Marine stood a few feet away in her ruined dress. Eliska saw right away that Marine was back to full sanity. She stared around her, stunned, and then glanced down at her hands.
The Watchmen got to their feet. Yann’s eyebrows shot up when he saw Eliska’s staff lying on the ground. She squirmed under his questioning gaze. She couldn’t tell him her magic was gone again. She couldn’t go through that again, but it sure looked like she was about to.
Yvan distracted everyone by yelling out in a cracked undertone, “Get away from me! Get off me! Stop! Leave me alone!”
Omer must have let go of him when they fell through the Layers. Yvan scrambled to his feet, spasmed multiple times, slapped at different parts of his body, and batted his hands to fight off something attacking him.
He probably would have attacked the invisible Darklings with a weapon, but he didn’t have any. He was too out of his mind to try to get one from the other Watchmen.
Eliska couldn’t look at him. When she looked away, she saw the landscape in which the group landed this time.
Bones lay everywhere on a dry plateau, but the bones didn’t lie in mounds covering the whole world. They scattered at a distance from each other with wide spaces between them.
A few scraggly trees struggled to raise their bare branches to an empty, white-blue sky. Eliska even spotted a few birds and other small animals moving around in the landscape.
Marine’s eyes lifted to survey the landscape and her features crumbled in misery when she saw it. “No!” she sobbed. “No! It can’t be!”
She buckled onto her knees and burst into bitter tears.
Yann took a step closer to her. “What’s wrong?”
“NO!!” Her voice rose to a yell. Her swimming eyes stared at everything through her tears. “No!! It can’t be! It can’t!”
“What’s wrong?” He squatted down next to her and tried to touch her shoulder. “What’s the matter? Tell me!”
She shot away from him without seeing him, but she didn’t lose her mind over invisible Darklings.
She took a few steps away, turned from one side to another, and searched the landscape. She raised her hand and pointed. “I…..This place…..it was beautiful….and green! It was overflowing with life….and there was a river……over there…..”
She stumbled toward Yvan, but he didn’t see her.
“How can you tell there was a river there?” Niyazi asked. “It’s perfectly flat.”
“Those hills….that valley over there…..They’re the same…..but all the life is gone.” She broke down in a pathetic sob again. “It can’t be! It can’t be!”
Yann glanced at Anríq. “Can you tell where we are?”
“Our magic is gone again,” Anríq murmured low. “I won’t be able to tell you anything about it, but this is the same landscape I saw before. Everything is in the same shape—this plateau, those mountains….it was all thriving and green before—and there was a river over there. Marine is right. The landscape must have changed.”
The Watchmen exchanged glances. Yann turned back to Marine. “How do you know this place?”
She didn’t hear him. She stumbled forward onto the plateau and kept going.
End of Chapter 18.
? 2024 by Theo Mann
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