Before anyone could react, Taeral disappeared and Raphael flew upward, his wings stretched and flapping frenetically. Riza gasped, noticing the way the rest of the crew scattered, thanks to the very winds that Taeral had thrown at them to help slow them down.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh God!” I croaked and covered my mouth, watching with an even mix of terror and hope as Taeral succeeded in teleporting himself midair—he caught Varga and vanished again, reappearing next to Riza, Herakles, and Eva. I wound up screaming with delight when Raphael shot through the sky and snatched Acantha and Nethissis just twenty feet from the ground. Riza, in turn, teleported up in the air and gripped Fallon by the back of his neck. A moment later, they were back on the ground, and Fallon was panting, pale as a sheet of paper and likely scared out of his mind. Not that I could blame him.
As soon as he landed them both safely, our crew was reunited, breathing a collective sigh of relief. Lumi gradually released the trees from their cushioning position, the trunks groaning as they resumed their upright reach for the heavens, their crowns shuffling and wiggling and stretching to cover the starry sky.
“Oh, man, it is so good to see you all!” Taeral exclaimed.
Varga’s entire crew was understandably astonished. We didn’t care, though. We rushed and hugged each of them, breathing in familiar scents. Acantha and Nethissis weren’t spared, either. Lumi held them tight in her arms, kissing their cheeks and thanking them for accomplishing such a difficult spell.
“What in the world are you guys doing here?!” Varga asked. “How did you get here?”
“We’ve been on Mortis all along,” I said, laughing. “And we had no freaking clue!”
“How… How is that even possible?” Eva replied, her yellow eyes big and round and filled with wonder and amazement.
“The pink waters. They’ll take you where you ask to go. We only just fully understood this ourselves. Until now, we thought they were so-called ‘portals to the gods,’ as in portals to somewhere, but we didn’t know for sure that we had any control over the destination,” I said, then measured each of Varga’s crew from head to toe. “We’ll tell you all about it, but first, are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”
Lumi checked Acantha and Nethissis carefully. She cursed under her breath. “These two are worn out. They overexerted themselves.”
Nethissis wiped her bleeding nose and smiled. “We’ll be okay. It was just extremely difficult to first get off Calliope, then steer the spell down onto Mortis.”
“What happened? How did the light bubble break down like that?” Lumi asked.
“We’re not sure. It began faltering shortly after we breached the atmosphere,” Acantha explained. Dark rings had settled around her eyes, unnatural for a healthy Bajang. Lumi was right. They’d exhausted themselves up there. “It lost its direction, and we couldn’t control it anymore. We depleted the serium batteries, but still, we couldn’t do much.”
“We gave them all the energy they could get out of us, too,” Varga added. “It still broke.”
“What matters most is that you’re here,” Lumi said, cupping his face. She kissed his forehead and smiled. “Don’t you ever scare us like that again.”
I wanted to bask in this momentary relief for as long as I could, but I knew that the interplanetary spell failing like that was no coincidence, and that, as Lumi had mentioned earlier, there was the risk of more Reapers coming after us. She’d made it quite clear that the Word wasn’t to be fully relied upon, and I worried…
I worried that our troubles were still in their incipient phase. That the worst was yet to come.
Lumi
Despite my smile, dark questions piled up inside me.
After the brief outburst of the Word earlier, which had been powerful enough to scare off those three Reapers, I could no longer feel it. My connection to the Word was still there, but… it sounded like radio silence. Like whoever had been on the other side of the line had stepped out for a moment, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why or what had possessed the Word to react like that, in the first place.
And while I was thrilled for our team to be reunited and even enriched by the presence of Acantha, Nethissis, and Fallon, I worried. The interplanetary spell wasn’t supposed to react like this. The light bubble was meant to be impervious to atmospheric pressure and friction. As my apprentices told us about what happened the moment they took off from Luceria’s platform, a startling truth began to form in the back of my head.
The Hermessi had been strong enough to push the spell bubble off its trajectory, nearly keeping it grounded. It had taken great effort from Nethissis and Acantha to get it up and off Calliope—enough to make their bodies suffer. The damage to their biological systems would pass, but I hadn’t seen exertion like this in millennia. It wasn’t natural. But it was also eye-opening, as connections began to form in my head.
Maybe this was why the Word had intervened earlier. The Hermessi’s powers had grown to the point where they could tamper with swamp witch magic—previously indestructible spells were now at risk… This wasn’t natural. And it certainly wasn’t okay. There was supposed to be balance in nature, and the Hermessi had blown that up in the pursuit of completing their ritual.
“Vampire blood didn’t help, either,” Eva told us. “I gave Acantha and Nethissis a significant amount, yet they were still weak, their recovery a little too slow for what we needed inside that spell bubble.”
I nodded slowly, giving both swamp witches a loving smile. They were like my daughters, as apprentices, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. Acantha seemed to notice my concern. “We’re okay, Lumi. We’re just worn out. That’s all. At least we made it down here without splattering all over the place.”
“Yeah, I’m perfectly okay with not turning to mush,” Fallon added.
“You’d have broken some bones, but you would’ve recovered, especially from that altitude,” Amelia replied.
“It was still scary. I doubt any of us want to be incapacitated at this point in time,” Fallon said with a cool smirk.
“The Hermessi’s power is becoming dangerous even to the swamp witches,” I said, reducing the entire team to a most saddening silence. It was finally sinking in, this truth I’d been processing for the past couple of minutes. “The closer they get to the five million fae they need for their ritual, the stronger they are. I fear that their retaliation will only get more violent, going forward.”
“And the Reapers here aren’t helping, either.” Taeral sighed. He brought Varga and the others up to speed on everything that had happened since we’d reached this world, including his own experiences with the scythe and Baethal. Amelia took a moment to notify Phoenix that we were back together again, after which she put the pink water issue to rest, once and for all.
“Until now, we only had theories as to how the primordial fluids work. We understood that the pink waters reacted to us, and in several instances responded to our needs. However, we had zero certainty that we could simply think about our desired destination, and then poof! We’re there. However, looking back now, it does make sense. Thinking of Hellym, without even realizing it, got us to Hellym. Thinking of Death… well, it brought us here. So, now, we know for a fact that the pink waters are timeless wormholes whose destinations we can actually control.”
Nethissis smirked. “You could’ve taken it all at face value and tried your luck either way. In hindsight, it’s better that you didn’t. At least we’re all together now, and in the right place.”
We were still at a stage where we had more questions than answers. However, our resolve remained indubitable, unshakeable. In fact, we were more determined than ever to see this to the very end, while I kept most of my Word-related concerns to myself. There was no point in troubling them with this—not until I figured out a few things, first.
“So, she lives up there?” Riza asked, nodding at the waterfall building.
From where we stood, even with the trees surrounding us, we could still see it rising in the distance between branches and gaps in the foliage. “That’s the general consensus,” Taeral replied.
Varga came up to me, wearing a sheepish smile. “Lumi, I have a favor to ask,” he said. “You’re the most powerful here, in terms of energy. Can I syphon some off you? My legs are jelly, and I think we need all the strength we can get for what comes next.”
“Of course, young prince. Take as much as you need,” I replied.
Invisible tendrils penetrated my head. I could feel them reaching deep inside my mind, suckling raw energy. Fortunately for him, I was full of it. I motioned at the others in Varga’s team. “The rest of you need to have at least one of the healing potions you brought with you. I assume Acantha and Nethissis prepared some of the blue bottles, not just the Druid concoctions, right?” I asked, and the swamp witches nodded. “Good. Use those. They’re our proprietary blend. They don’t just repair damaged tissues, they also replenish energy levels.”
“Oh, natural tonics?” Herakles grinned.
“Pretty much.”
