Luckily for her, the magical defenses did not activate. The land just grew distant. Not literally, but she felt the ethereal roots leading to the soul of the forests suddenly becoming surrounded by stone.
It was almost impossible to describe how discordant the differences between her mundane and magical senses became. Her eyes saw verdant clouds of leaves, each changing colors as it caught light and blocked it for another. She smelled earth, and loam, and clay, and the moisture that passed through them. There was a breeze against her skin and grit in her boots. But she. Could. Not. Feel. The. Forest.
It was like watching a high-resolution TV. Everything looked real as could be, but something was missing, and it filled her with terror.
In a surge of fear, Shilloh realized what had happened. Whatever had been out there, claiming land, had taken action. The Limb Stealers had caught its attention during their wild chase, or it had noticed Wade and her. Now, it was coming, and it was monstrous.
“Wade!” she yelled, stepping further from the shack.
With a sense of terrified disassociation, she raced towards the Were and strained to touch the forest.
It existed, it was there. But her soul felt nothing but a bleak, hard wall. She thrashed against it, drawing recklessly on her magic. She would not have fought half so viciously if someone had cut off her leg and was waking away with it.
She closed in on Wade, and her magical thrashing began to pay off. It was difficult to sense, but the texture and rhythms of the forest were still there. They were just hidden behind a thin layer of frictionless, glass-like ice that had frozen over a leaf.
She pushed out, spreading her power wide. The magic crashed against the barrier to no effect. Something had claimed this place on a profound level. So she switched the frequency of her magic, approached it from angles she could feel but not describe.
“Wade, something is wrong!” to punctuate the statement, she drew her handgun and started firing in the general direction of the cryptos, charging toward them. Honestly, she cared more about not hitting Wade than about hurting the limb stealers.
That was a miscalculation. He was used to bullets. Her clip ran dry, and he hadn’t even flinched at the sound. There was nothing to do but try to run faster.
She got closer to the bane and the magic. The wall blocking was not actually that much like glass. Looking closer, it was like trying to touch an apple, but needles had been shoved in until they made a halo of metal her fingers couldn’t fit between.
Finally, she tried switching approaches again. She left behind her human understanding and desperately reached for the well of instinct and intuition. As was the way of her people, push away a little of her humanity, of the small, self-contained, malleable, logical her-ness that stopped her from hearing the deep truths of Dryad power.
The world around her slowed down. Wade’s head was twitching in slow motion, letting her know he had heard her yell. Her running became slow motion frame by frame.
Not knowing how or why, her fight for the magic hazed into a wild, primal, instinctual mist. It followed winds that were not there from directions that did not exist in three-dimensional space. Her efforts expanded. Not just the land around her, not just the area she was in. Wider. Her grasp was so wide now that she wasn’t even trying to touch the Croatan, that massive, sprawling edifice visible from space. This call was addressed to the life of the entire ecosystem. The mega-being that spread so large that state lines and rampaging leviathans barely mattered.
There was a faint taste of blood as her jaw clenched, and she bit her own tongue. But, with a final surge of effort, she felt a greeting. It was warm and timeless. Cold and enduring. It was gargantuan, nourishing, and something that she had always been an inextricable part of.
And, through that link, she ran her mind through all the connections between that thing that existed on a geological scale and zoomed in on the forest she was currently surrounded by.
At the exact moment she reached Wade, the power she had been clawing for arrived. That profound, unnatural, existential aloneness left as she once again made magical contact with the natural world.
It was intoxicating. So much so that she barely felt herself pick up a large metal thing that looked like a three-dimensional asterick—like the jacks that kids played their bouncy ball game with. This one just so happened to be eight feet tall and made of steel I-beams. She had a vague recollection of it being placed on the beaches of Normandy to stop tanks or something.
Either way, her perception of time returned to normal. She grabbed the giant metal thing, her fingers dimpling the steel even as the earth gripped her feet. Without that extra grip, her impossible strength would have punched through the dirt up to her knees or sent her flying.
The small woman spun like an Olympic hammer thrower and launched the many hundreds of pounds of metal into the ferny-maw of an approaching limb stealer.
Wade didn’t so much as blink when it soared from behind him and into the beast. Before it had hit the ground, he raised his sword over his head and sliced it down. A plane of cutting force blasted forward and sheered off a third of the monster's arms before it could unpin itself.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Back!” he ordered.
But Shilloh ignored him and tried to find words that explained what she had sensed. “The owner is gripping so hard that reality is hardened. We need to run!”
“What?”
“Something magically owns this place and is coming to do a fucking smite!”
“Son of a—just get to the shack and cover your eyes!”
“It’s too strong!”
“The defenses are stronger!”
At that point, the monsters were so close that he took a step in front of her, sword raised. The bane exuded a palpable sheen of magic that beat against her face like the heat from a forge.
He still didn’t get it, though. The thing coming was not just powerful; it was reality twisting. It had managed to separate her from something that she was a part of. It had stolen rights to the area. Mind you, not the forest as an entity, but certainly to the very fucking space it existed in. In an impossible show of force, it had some measure of authority over the molecules that made each bit of life, the coordinates on the map, and every breath of air that moved into its territory.
This was deep magic. Profound magic.
And the presence doing that deep magic felt vengeful, domineering, and saturated in death so great that its weight pushed down on the fabric of the world.
Shilloh did the only thing she could. She let her adrenaline pour, stopped trying to calm her heart, absolutely gave up on any notion of security or diplomacy, and borrowed more power from the world around her. With that strength, she picked up Wade in her arms and sprinted away.
He thrashed. She let her muscles petrify into wood from an Iron tree. He twisted side to side. A human would have toppled from someone so much heavier moving like that. Shilloh could not be knocked over any more than a healthy oak would be felled by a bear cub scratching its back on her bark.
And when Wade screamed at her, she summed up everything in a single word.
“Nope.”
“We can—”
“Nope!”
“It can’t be that—”
“It is! So I repeat: hell no!”
Shilloh Methuselah kept running, holding Wade just as he had held her minutes ago.
~~~
Within seconds, she realized it was a wise choice but not a very smart plan.
She didn’t get far before the limb stealers caught up to her. Over a long distance, no one could outrun a dryad in the woods. Her people’s stride would stretch longer than it should have, and they would seem to jump forward each time their shape was obscured by the trunk of a tree. They never fell except when it made them faster, never tripped unless the tumble helped, and only grew tired when going slower would stop them from being waylaid.
The problem was that Shilloh did not get even a few seconds to let the old magics touch her flight. The injured limb stealer was on her ridiculously fast. It keened with panic that she instinctively understood. It was damaged and needed to feed on her strength. If it incorporated new limbs and new abilities, it would be stronger for entering this fight. If she got away, then it would be critically wounded and risk weeks or months of weakness where it would likely be killed.
Despite being the most injured, its desperation meant that it came at her the fastest. It held nothing back, and she was forced to draw in on the evergreens around her when she saw a frosty reptilian maw sprout from the ferns.
The magical breath attack it had stolen erupted like water from a geyser. It crashed against her back, and her skin gained an olive tint while her nails became like bark. For a moment, she was more tree than person, and she weathered this concentrated winter with the grace and indifference of a pine weathering a frosty day.
Wade cried out at some tendrils of weapons-grade cold brushed against his legs. She tightened her grip and tried to keep running. But, at the moment, she was still very tree-like. In fact, from a magical perspective, her energy was almost exactly that of a tree. That was why the world treated her as one, and cold could not damage her. Unfortunately, the world also did not allow trees to be fast runners. Not until she could borrow the essence of something else.
Shilloh reached out for Kudzu and deer. Agile foxes and flies that were impossible to catch in hand. The second the onslaught of cold ended, she would switch gears and—
With a thump, something heavy rattled with a wooden thunk from behind her.
It was a thorny spear. It had passed two feet from her head and struck a post sticking out of the ground with a mark spray painted on its side.
Before she had time to react, Wade yelled at her, “Get us to the shack; the defenses are on!”
“We need to run!”
“The defenses will kill you!”
“I thought the defenses couldn’t attack us!”
“They can’t attack me!”
Oh hell.
“Turn it off!” she yelled, sighting the shack.
“No!”
“The thing coming is too strong,” she panted even as she started running towards the temporary shelter.
The problem was, she wasn’t moving in a dead sprint where she would pick up speed. She was forced to take a zig-zagging and irregular path or risk getting hit by a thorn spear.
Worse, she could feel the grip of the thing that had claimed this land tightening its fist. Random bursts of magic discharged around them. Small flickers of heat haze where its power wrenched the air.
As she ran, Wade glared over her shoulder, no longer trying to escape her arms. His sword was still in his hands and trailing behind them.
Within yards of the shack, the air changed. The bane’s power spoke, and everything went thick and sticky like it had during their descent from his leap. Wade thrashed with enhanced strength and did some weird wrestling maneuver that left her stumbling forward while he dashed back toward the limb stealers.
She turned around, dumbstruck by the idiot sprinting toward the four cryptos. Two of them circled wide even as the injured one raced directly towards them.
But that was only three out of four. Where was the fourth?
That realization shocked her enough to see that the final creature had turned to regard the boundary of the property. In fact, it was looking at the road they had arrived on as a familiar truck being piloted by a familiar shark-eyed bane shrieked into the clearing.
And, behind Jasque, was the fifth and final crypto. This one had familiar limbs that were a mix of gorilla arms and driftwood, animated by an evil fire.
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
Piracy Notice: If you’re reading this anywhere other than Scribble Hub, Royal Road, or my Patreon then this is pirated. Please let me know by going to the Jeffrey Nix website’s contact area so I can get really annoyed, complain to my cat, have her tell me this never would have happened if I had just gone back for a Ph. D, send a takedown notice, and get back to writing.
