by DM Fike
Ladybug evaporated into nothing. Then the temple began to oscillate in and out of view. Braellia’s cackling rang inside Avalon’s ears as she jolted fully back into the real world.
By the time Avalon regained her senses, all five Guardians had shadowy claws wrapped around their throats. Their magic subsided as they struggled to free themselves from the intangible dark magic. Seizing the opportunity, Braellia struck Symphony first with her green whip. The fairy seized up in shock, gasping like a fish on land as the light engulfed her in flame. Then she crumpled over, and the light intensified with a thread of wind magic, zipping back over to Braellia and merging with her. Braellia shouted with delight as she grew taller, absorbing Symphony’s essence back into herself.
“You defeated me once,” she screamed. “Never again!”
The whip hit Shivant next. Avalon ran forward, intending to save him, but he had already gone limp. The light exploded in her face, sending her sprawling backwards as Braellia absorbed his energy next.
Braellia absorbed Colin and Halicia in rapid succession, growing ever larger as the Guardians fell one by one. She paused only before J.T., who looked like he was trying to say something to her past the pressure in his throat.
“Poor J.T.,” Braellia clucked. “I did love you too. Once upon a time.”
Then his body too erupted in light, and he went limp. Scawale straightened, causing all the shadows to recede back into her boot.
Avalon crawled over to Shivant, the nearest Guardian. His eyes stared as if he had seen the most awesome and terrible sight, but he did not move. Avalon placed two fingers on his bruised throat and found a weak pulse.
“C’mon,” she whispered. “Get up!”
“They’re gone now,” Braellia answered when Shivant did not. “No one can help you.”
Scawale lurched forward again, her shadow zipping across the dirt to grab a prone Avalon by the throat. She fought against it, clawing against a darkness she knew she could not grasp. Her lungs grew taut and heavy, begging for air.
“Die, false Child,” Braellia taunted, crouching over her for a better view. “And take that wretched gremlin with you!”
The lightning strike came out of nowhere, causing the world to go blind in a flash of brilliance. Scawale let go of Avalon, allowing her to grab grateful gulps of air. As she gasped on her hands and knees, Avalon glanced over at Colin, wondering if he’d regained consciousness, but he had not moved since falling to the grass.
Translucent fairy wings planted themselves in front of Avalon. As she lifted her head, she saw the crinkled uniform of a heaving Covert K knight and sweat-drenched chestnut hair. Thrusting his sword in front of him, a second bolt of lightning sparked down the length of the steel and hit Scawale, striking her in the chest. The Aossi soldier staggered backwards, tendrils of smoke lingering in the air.
“K-Kay?” Avalon stammered.
“Stay behind me, Avalon,” Kay hissed, putting himself between her and Braellia.
Braellia laughed at his defiant form. “You don’t even have the powers of your parents. What do you hope to accomplish here?”
“I won’t let you harm her!” he declared, readying his sword for another swipe.
The earth beneath them rippled to life. Avalon wobbled while Kay took to the air, aiming for Scawale. Scawale parried, while above her, Braellia sent a fireball exploding inches from his body. Kay turned to the side, missing most of the blast, but it knocked him backward before his wings could steady him.
“You cannot defeat me!” Braellia roared, both green hands extended before her, creating a wind that smacked Kay even farther before he could counter with his own wind magic. The two fought each other for a few precious seconds, equals at this, before the air chilled. Ice daggers rained down on the knight.
“Kay!” she yelled. “Look out!”
A few sliced superficially along Kay’s limbs before he could dodge the rest, sending up a second wind that blew them all harmlessly to the side. He had to relinquish his initial blast. Braellia used this opportunity to summon a gale which blew him across the forest. He smacked into a tree, then landed in a heap on the ground.
“NO!” Avalon cried.
“What did you think you would do here, little fairy?” Braellia mocked as Kay struggled to get back to his feet. “Save the girl? Upstage your parents? How could this not end in anything but your death?”
Avalon knew Kay was doomed as the earth beneath his feet rose to trap his bottom half, pinning him to the spot. He tried to claw his way out of it, but the earth continued to layer over him, covering his waist and then his chest. He knocked some of the dirt off him with wind, but more earth rose to greet him.
It would only be a matter of seconds before he would be buried alive.
Avalon did the only thing she could do. She reached down into herself for magic, any magic, that would counteract Kay’s burial. She bypassed the elemental threads, knowing it would be no match for the Indulia. Instead, she focused on that oneness, that overwhelming feeling emanating from Braellia herself.
Pain immediately ripped through Avalon. She watched the Miasmis bruise spread like wildfire up her arm and down under her tunic where she couldn’t see, creating a path of agony as she tugged on that magical oneness.
Don’t use magic! Ladybug screeched in her brain. You’ll die!
“Everyone dies!” Avalon screamed. Then she focused all that energy on Braellia at full force, even though it tore her insides apart.
Braellia and Scawale were so focused on burying Kay that they didn’t notice Avalon’s magical attack until it was too late. It surrounded them in a shimmering haze. Braellia gave one final scream as a portal enveloped them and closed, transporting them far, far away from Emerged Falls.
The searing pain overwhelmed Avalon. She drowned in it, trying to claw her way out, but it was everywhere, unbearable. The torment all but consumed her. She did not know how she could bear it.
Until suddenly, she didn’t have to. Everything went numb. Avalon floated away, ending somewhere above her unmoving body. The Miasmis bruise had spread so thoroughly to every corner of her skin, an ugly green black, she almost didn’t recognize herself. Kay, covered in a layer of dirt, crawled next to her, pure panic underlying his scramble. He shook her, yelled, tears running down his face, but she couldn’t hear him.
In fact, Avalon couldn’t feel much of anything. The world grew dark around the corners of her vision as Kay lifted her up in his arms and rocked her back and forth. The numbness became all consuming. She knew she should care, but she didn’t.
She must be dying.
You made your choice, Ladybug whispered in her head.
The darkness enveloped Avalon. Death actually felt peaceful. Her last thought was of her mother, wondering if she had experienced something similar at the very end.
CHAPTER 29
THE HOSPITAL ROOM, like all hospital rooms, had a sickly pale sheen to it, as if lighter colors could somehow stave off the inevitable. It smelled of disinfectant mingled with store-bought flowers. Little beeps on the monitor next to the bedside marked each passing second, reminding anyone within earshot that time stood still for no one.
Especially not the dying.
Avalon sat in a hard plastic chair, clutching a disposable cup of coffee, not really thirsty, but it was at least something to hold onto. Next to her, wrapped up in bandages and tubes, her mother’s chest rose and fell raggedly underneath the hospital nightgown. That familiar Miasmis bruise, the one that now covered Avalon’s own body from head to foot, cast its pall over her mother too, creeping up one arm and onto her chest. A visible manifestation that could not be overcome.
Avalon’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears. Death would come soon.
“There’s a time to cry.”
Avalon lifted her head sharply, finding her mother’s eyes crack open. She shoved the coffee cup on the table so she could grasp her mother’s cold hand through the hospital bed bars. Her own bruised arms brushed up agai
nst the tubing running from the IV.
“Mom,” she whispered.
“There’s a time to cry,” her mother repeated with a rasp. “And a time to fight. I’m fighting for my life.”
Avalon couldn’t bear this conversation. Not again. “Mom, please don’t talk.”
Her mother struggled in the bed, lifting her opposite arm. She managed to slap it over their two joined hands and squeeze just enough so Avalon could feel her paper-thin skin.
“Choose to fight,” her mother whispered.
Then the monitor flatlined. Avalon didn’t even stir as her mother’s hands disconnected from hers, limp and lifeless. She merely sat there with unshed tears, listening to the one-tone note that declared to the world that her mother had died.
A weight settled on her shoulder. Avalon didn’t acknowledge it, staring unblinking at her mother’s dead body. Then someone pulled the plug on the monitor.
The horrible silence snapped Avalon out of her reverie. The weight moved off her and she followed it to find a scrub-clothed Dr. James Skog, hands in his pockets. His shoulder-length silver hair framed sharp cheekbones, eyes full of empathy.
“Don’t,” Avalon cut him off as he opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t what?” he asked.
“I remember what you said afterward. How much she meant to you. How much my whole family meant to you. But it was a lie, wasn’t it?”
James leaned against the counter next to the sink. “It wasn’t a lie,” he said softly.
Avalon snorted. “Give me a break. I know who you are. You’re Bedwyr, last of the dryads. You used me and my family to get what you wanted, the Child of the Statue.”
James surprised her by nodding. “Yes, I did.”
Rage built up inside of her. “Then you can’t have it both ways! You can’t claim to care about what happened to us, then use us like lab rats in your little games.” She tried to jump to her feet but found her muscles would not support her weight. She would have collapsed on the floor if James hadn’t grabbed her.
“Get your hands off me,” she hissed as he gently placed her back in the chair.
Once she was stable again, he backed away, once again putting his hands in his pockets. “I truly am sorry, Avalon, even if you do not believe it.”
The room melted away at the edges. Her mother, the room, and all the medical equipment disappeared. New surroundings popped out of the ground. Worktables bounced into neat little rows. A computer station rolled into place, asking for login information. But what caught Avalon’s breath was the reclining chair that solidified before her, wires twisting off it like vines and a metal dome above, eager to latch onto the head of the person underneath.
It was her father’s lab, his Entelegen. The machine that had broken Braellia free of her bonds.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Avalon sneered at James, who stood off to one side. “You love experimenting on me.”
“I’m not choosing any of these forms.”
“Forms?” Avalon repeated. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying this is all in your head.”
Avalon paused at that. She tried to grasp the last memory she had before entering the hospital room. Braellia versus the Guardians. Scawale’s dark magic. Kay being buried. Her final magic, and then a sense that all had ended.
“Am I dead?”
“Not dead but not exactly alive either.”
Avalon chuckled. “So my life’s flashing before my eyes? These are the happy memories I choose to dwell on? You of all people are the last person I wanted to see?”
James shrugged. “You made your choice.”
For an instant, Avalon shivered. She swore she heard Ladybug’s voice echoing behind him.
“I must be dying,” Avalon decided. “I wish I would hurry up.”
“Is that truly what you wish?”
Avalon clawed past the pain that still lingered throughout her tired body. “No, of course not. I just don’t understand the point of hanging around this”—she shivered at the empty Entelegen chair—“this thing with you.”
“Maybe you need some peace before you move on.”
Move on. Those words triggered another image in her mind. As a Miasmis patient, she’d dwelled a lot on death. She wished she had the confidence of other people to trust in what lay behind that curtain, but she’d never had that sort of conviction. Life seemed too cruel to guarantee any certainty in the end. But she had always liked the idea of some sort of redemption, a purgatory where she could finalize those things left undone, a chance to sort them out.
“There is something that has always bothered me,” she said. “I never knew my father’s knowledge of your real plans. Did he…?” She let the words trail off, unable to even voice the thought aloud that her father might have willingly injected her mother and herself with Miasmis.
To her relief, James shook his head. “No, he did not know.”
Of course, there was a gaping loophole in all of this. “If you’re a figment of my imagination, then that’s what I’d want you to say.”
James cocked his head to one side. “Does that bother you?”
Avalon paused. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“And why is that?”
Avalon shifted in her seat, every muscle aching. She wished the void would overtake her, but she hung onto this conversation. If these were her final moments, she might as well let it play out. “Because you’ve been through a ton of pain too.”
The room shifted again, her father’s research lab blending into a room with a tall ceiling and grand windows overlooking the Wasatch mountains. An enormous mahogany desk with vines running along it appeared before her chair. The bright sunlight of a Utah summer sky lit up the room, emitting a twinge of warmth.
James approached her from behind his Saluzyme office desk. “That matters to you?”
“It doesn’t erase all the awful things you did, all the innocent lives you stole. But it does matter. I saw how much you cared for your people.”
A tree sprouted between them. A beautiful Aossi woman surrounded by five-petaled flowers rested peacefully inside the ropey bark. James drew a sharp breath at the sight of her, and his clothes shifted from his scrubs to a tunic and cloak, his ears now exposed at its tips.
He had become Bedwyr.
Avalon’s heart sank at the despair written on his face. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
Bedwyr ran his fingers through her hair. “I love her still.”
Avalon thought of Kay, racing toward her at the end, unwilling to let her sacrifice herself even though he knew it would mean the death of so many others. A realization hit her. “It’s not the pain that matters. It’s that love.”
The dryad woman and her tree prison vanished, leaving them inside the mostly empty Saluzyme office. Bedwyr regarded Avalon with a guarded look. “Do you want me to ease your suffering?”
“Why bother asking when you’ve never cared before?”
Bedwyr crossed the distance between them, putting his hand on her shoulder. She recognized it as the weight she had felt at her mother’s bedside. “Because this time is different. I need your permission.”
“Sure,” Avalon said. “Do whatever.”
Bedwyr laid his other hand on her opposite shoulder. A strange sensation flowed through her, akin to dipping into a hot tub after a long day of exercise, both pleasant and painful. A searing light stung all her senses. It sapped what little energy Avalon held onto to stay alert as it hummed in her veins. She slid back toward unconsciousness.
“James,” she whispered as his face flickered in and out of her view.
“Yes?”
“I don’t quite forgive you, but I understand you now.”
The soft hint of a smile graced Bedwyr’s lips. Then he vanished, Avalon sinking down into a soothing ache of a bright abyss.
CHAPTER 30
A CHUNKY LAYER of something moist covered Avalon. Strangely, it also warmed her core. Some drifted in
to her eyes as she opened them, and she winced against the sharp sting. Pushing herself upward into a sitting position, it fell in dark clumps from her torso, exposing her upper half in a sleeveless white robe. She managed to rub it out of her lashes even as it clung to her unruly hair. It looked like potting soil, the kind her mother bought in heavy bags every spring for her petunias. Avalon had been lying down in a trough of it, covered from head to foot as if planted into it. She drew her knees to her chest and more balls of earth dropped from her body, only her bottom and feet still covered.
Avalon tried to determine where she was. To one side, lanky trees created a wall and dimmed most of the light with their enormous branches. On the other side, more gnarled trees grew, but shorter than those at the perimeter, a grove of younger trees inside a denser forest. A hand poked out of one such stubby tree, the profile of a sleeping face in another.
Avalon sucked in her breath. She was inside Bedwyr’s grove of hibernating dryads.
She recalled the strange dream she’d just had with Bedwyr. “I guess I’m not done yet.” She swung her legs over the side of the trough. She glanced down at her arm, finding a small greenish yellow spot. “At least the Miasmis bruise is back to normal.”
“Oh yeah!”
A royal blue blur shot out from behind a tree. Not much taller than a housecat, he stood tall on two legs, yellow eyes blinking while his forked tail swished back and forth behind him. He held out white mitten hands to Avalon in greeting.
“Vimp?” Having been recognized, he bounded over to her on all fours, launching himself onto her dirty lap, pushing his head against her chin.
Avalon stroked his back. “What are you doing in Hamad?”
Vimp leaped back onto the ground. “Ee!” he cried, then scurried away into the darkness of the dryad forest.
Avalon steadied herself, wobbly at first. Slowly, as blood returned to her legs, her footing became surer and though she could not run as fast as Vimp, she followed at a decent clip. Vimp matched her speed, pausing to wait at the far end of small pathways before darting back into the trees again, leading her deeper into the grove.
