A girl with light brown hair was carrying a handful of sticks across the grass. As she saw us, she stopped and stared, then dropped the bundle of wood with a clatter and shouted. “Vari, Vari!” Then she ran towards me.
“Hey, Luna,” I began. “We—oof!”
Luna crashed into me, hugging me tight. I staggered back and immediately Luna was backing off, apologetic. “Sorry, sorry. I know I shouldn’t—wait a sec.” She held out a hand and the threads of half-seen silver mist which had clung to me from the touch slid away, sinking down into the earth. “Vari!” she shouted over her shoulder, then turned to Anne. “You’re okay? You’re both okay?”
“We’re fine,” Anne said. “And we got what we came for.”
“Screw what you came for! I thought you were never coming out!”
“Luna, relax,” I said. I’d been enjoying the attention—it was kind of touching—but it was still a funny overreaction. “We said we’d be back.”
Luna laughed. “Yeah, I guess you did.”
Variam came running into view through the trees. As he saw us he slowed to a walk, but his eyes flicked sharply over Anne. “You’re all right?” he demanded.
“We’re all right,” Anne said.
“Wow,” I said, looking around. “You guys have been busy.” When we’d left, the clearing had been scattered with the remains of the thornlings and those flowers. All of them were gone now: a blackened heap marked where the bodies had been burned in a pyre, and off to the right was what looked like a makeshift campsite, with the supplies we’d left back on the hilltop. Both Luna and Vari must have worked like crazy to get all that done so fast.
“What’s that?” Anne asked.
I turned to see that Anne was staring at something to the right of the clearing. It looked like a small fallen tree with a sapling growing nearby. “What’s what?” I asked, then when she continued to stare, I looked at Variam and Luna. “Guys?”
Luna and Variam looked at me, then Luna turned to look at Variam. “I told you,” Variam said.
“Um,” Luna said. “So. There was a slight problem.”
“A problem with . . . ?” Anne started to ask, then her eyes went wide. She started to walk towards the tree.
Luna fell in beside her. “Okay,” Luna said as she walked. “First of all, I’d like to point out that this was not remotely our fault.”
My heart sank. I recognised that tone of voice. “Luna, what have you done?”
“I said, it wasn’t our fault.”
“What did . . .” I started to say, then trailed off. Looking around the clearing, I could see the remains of the pyre, and Luna and Variam’s campsite. But there was something I wasn’t seeing that I should have been seeing. “Luna?” I said, and this time there was a warning note to my voice. “Where’s Karyos?”
Luna and Variam looked at each other. “You said you’d tell him,” Variam said.
“I’m trying, okay?”
I started to answer, then shot a sharp look at the remains of the fire. A big fire. Too big to have been fuelled only by the thornlings we’d killed. “Vari!”
“What?”
“Did you burn Karyos on that?”
“No!” Variam said indignantly.
“Of course we didn’t!” Luna said, then hesitated. “Well, not most of her.”
“Not most of her?”
“Let me explain,” Luna began.
“Wait,” Anne said. She’d been crouched over the fallen tree, studying it, and now she turned to Luna and Variam. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Pretty much,” Variam said.
Luna rounded on Vari. “Will you shut up and let me explain?”
“Because you’re doing such a great job.”
“Anne?” I said. “Can you explain what’s going on here?”
Anne pointed down at the tree. “That’s a cocoon.”
I frowned. “You mean—?”
“A regeneration cocoon?” Anne said. “Yes.”
I stared at it for a second. Now that I looked more closely at the thing, I could see that it wasn’t a tree. It was too round, without enough of a trunk, and the only branches came from the sapling whose roots were twined into it. “You guys used the seed?”
“Actually, that was her,” Variam put in.
“Shut up, Vari!” Luna snapped.
I put a hand to my forehead. “Christ.”
“Well, she’s alive,” Anne said. She knelt down, one hand on the cocoon, frowning. “Or something is.”
I glared at Luna. “The idea was to offer the thing to Karyos. Not use it on her against her will!”
“If you’d let me finish,” Variam said, “the reason I told you that it was Luna was to make the point that you really should be thanking her. If it had been up to me, I just would have fried her.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Okay, you know what?” Luna said. “I’ve about had enough of this. What did you expect us to do?”
“Leave her unconscious until we got back!”
“Uh, yeah, slight problem with that,” Variam said. “She woke up.”
“She—Wait, what?”
“Or started to,” Variam said. “And given how the last conversation went, I think it’s safe to say that her mood would not have been improved by finding out what we’d done with her pets, right? So we had a choice between letting her finish waking up, and getting a fun and exciting lesson about weaponised dryad magic, or cutting things off early. We voted for option number two. Only question was how.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Anne said, frowning. “That spell should have kept her sleeping for at least eighteen hours. More like twenty-four.”
Luna and Variam stared at Anne. Luna opened her mouth to speak, and then an odd expression crossed her face. “How long did you spend in that other shadow realm?” she asked me.
Anne and I looked at each other. “Forty minutes?” Anne guessed.
“Less,” I said.
Variam and Luna looked at each other.
“What?” I said.
“Alex,” Luna said slowly. “You’ve been gone for three days.”
I blinked. “No we haven’t.”
“Two days, twenty-one hours, and thirty minutes,” Variam put in. “Give or take half an hour.”
The four of us stared at each other.
| | | | | | | | |
Putting the pieces together took a while.
From Anne’s and my perspectives, we’d been gone for slightly over half an hour. Anne assured me that we hadn’t burned enough body energy for it to be more, and the clocks on our phones agreed with her. But while we’d been in that deep shadow realm, the sun had set and risen again three times on Earth and in the Hollow that mirrored it.
Once I’d finally accepted that yes, Luna and Variam were telling the truth, and no, this wasn’t a practical joke, the full creepy implications set in. I remembered passing through those black screens, the feelings of dislocation, and wondered just how much time we’d lost in those moments. Or did time simply flow faster inside the shadow realm than outside? If we’d taken our time with the exploration, stayed in those corridors for hours, then how much time would have passed outside? Weeks? More?
Of course, while we’d been gone, Luna and Variam had had more immediate problems. They couldn’t go back to Earth out of fear that we’d try to use the gate stone while they were gone, so they’d been stuck in a shadow realm full of hostile monsters. And it turned out that while the vampire flowers and the bushes weren’t a threat with Karyos gone, the same was not true for the thornlings.
“They didn’t do any more coordinated rushes,” Luna explained. “But they didn’t give up either. They just kept stalking us, and with you and Anne gone it was really hard to spot the bloody things.”