Gates of Thread and Stone

CHAPTER 12

THE GARGOYLES STOPPED.

It wasn’t me—I hadn’t touched time yet. Since I couldn’t hold on to the threads for long, I had to plan it just right.

One of the gargoyles lowered its head, luminous yellow eyes flicking between me and the dead gargoyle at my feet. A tremor went through its frills, and the other gargoyles backed away. The rest of them lowered their heads as one.

I licked my dry lips, my bravado ebbing. They didn’t look as if they were determining how best to eat me. If anything, they looked wary, but what did I know about reptiles?

Maybe they hadn’t expected to lose one of their own. Honestly, I had no idea how I’d even killed the other one, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t cut it deep enough. Their tawny gazes were unflinching. I held their stares. I couldn’t show them weakness, even while my heart pounded in my ears and my breath came in frantic pants.

“Come on,” I breathed, lifting the knife higher. The threads glittered around me. “If we’re going to do this, then let’s do this.”

After a moment, it dawned on me that they weren’t looking at me at all. They were looking at the knife in my hands.

Avan groaned behind me. I heard the rustling of underbrush.

“Stay still!” I shouted without checking to see if he listened. “You’re—”

“Fine,” he said.

He appeared beside me, brushing off his torn tunic. I didn’t dare look away from the gargoyles to inspect his injury.

“What are they waiting for now?” Avan asked, raising a broken branch that I doubted would be much of an obstacle for their claws.

The gargoyles looked at Avan, then back at the knife. Suddenly, in unison, they slunk away. They kept their heads down and their bodies low, sliding over root and bush until they had melted into the forest.

I waited, fear and adrenaline still pumping beneath my skin. Why would they just leave? Was this a trick? Maybe they were circling to attack from behind.

“I think they’re gone,” Avan said. “That was pretty strange.”

He lowered his makeshift weapon. I barely heard him.

“Kai.” His fingertips brushed over my knuckles, coaxing the knife from my rigid hands. I had to remember how to uncurl my fingers.

Once Avan had the knife, all the energy drained from my limbs. My body folded. Avan caught me around the waist before my knees hit the dirt.

“They left,” I said, sagging against him in disbelief. I didn’t think I could have fought off a whole pack.

“You okay?” he asked, setting me down. “Hurt anywhere?”

Everything hurt. But I shook my head because I could still move, which probably meant nothing was broken. And we were alive. Amazingly.

“What about you? How’s your arm?”

His hair was mussed, and bits of leaves tangled in the dark strands, but his expression was composed. I touched his shoulder tentatively. My hands passed down his arm, at the spot where I was certain it had been broken, but I felt nothing.

“What? I thought . . .” I ran my hand back up to his shoulder and then trailed my fingers down his chest, searching for injuries. I must have seen wrong—I had been reeling from the crash and panicking about the gargoyles.

He cleared his throat. My fingers stilled over his stomach. He gently pushed my hands away and stood. “I’m not hurt.”

I gripped my shirt. My knuckles stung in protest. “Sorry, I didn’t—” I’d practically groped him. “I was worried. I could have sworn I— I’m sorry.”

He flicked hair off his face, leaving a streak of dirt on his forehead. “I’m glad you’re not hurt.”

I gathered my wits, which currently lay scattered with the debris from our crash landing. We’d have to leave the Gray behind. It was useless now. Same with the energy stone, which was all but spent. Avan kept the branch; a crude weapon was better than none. Then we gathered up our bags, and I took out the map to determine our location. But after our blind charge into the trees, I couldn’t be sure which direction we needed to take without a compass.

Looked like we were on our own.

We walked for hours. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I ate to keep up my strength. Avan took the lead. I placed the knife in my bag, within easy reach.

The forest looked exactly the way the history texts described it. I was happy to know that some places had successfully recovered after Rebirth. Everything was green. Alive. The trees near the border with the Outlands had been brown and brittle, but the deeper we traveled, the taller and healthier they grew. These looked as tall as the towers in the White Court, and the branches grew so thick that they blocked out the clouds.

I drew in lungfuls of air, relishing the scent. The decay lingered here as well, but not like in the city. This kind of decay promised new life. I wanted to memorize the smells of the earth and the moss and the dampness, and keep them with me to revisit on nights when nothing but the rusting metal walls of the Labyrinth closed in around me.

That is, if I ever saw the Labyrinth again.

Once I found Reev, once he was safe, then I could deal with everything else.

The forest was humid. I wasn’t expecting that. I had to braid my hair and tie the end with a strip of cloth torn from the hem of my shirt. But flyaway strands still stuck uncomfortably to my forehead and neck. Sweat blackened the hair at Avan’s temples, and he pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, giving me an almost unobstructed view of his tattoo.

It snaked down his bicep, a jagged black bramble at once lovely and primal. I decided it was a tree. The lines on his neck were the branches—I assumed more spread across his chest—and the roots twined down his arm in deliberate knots and turns. Like the trees in Ninurta, its branches were bare. It probably meant something, but the symbolism escaped me.

I was letting myself get distracted again. My focus returned to the forest. I picked a broad, veined leaf and held it between my fingers. The texture felt strange: soft and rubbery, but delicate as well. Someday, I told myself, I would share these wonders with Reev.

I strained to listen to the forest and heard nothing but our footfalls. Not far ahead, Avan’s foot snapped a twig, and the sound echoed in the branches.

I felt something, an aura pressing in around me as surely as the darkness had in the Outlands. Dread seeped beneath my skin.

Moments before, the canopy had been alive with the calls of birds, none of which I could identify. Now, the wildlife fell silent. Nothing moved, not even the leaves. The air was still, like when I grasped time.

Avan and I exchanged a look. He felt it, too.

We pushed on, breaking through the ferns and overgrown weeds, until both of us came to a sudden stop.

The forest ended abruptly, and the ground dropped four feet into a vast plain of blackened earth. For as far as I could see, nothing remained but a monochromatic landscape: black dirt and gutted gray trees. A few boulders peppered the plain, but it was otherwise empty. Dead.

The Void.

This was what Rebirth had done to the world.

After centuries of unchallenged power, the mahjo had felt threatened by the growth of science and technology. The advancements had spread into the world’s armies, providing countries with weapons that, for the first time, were efficient enough in speed and scope to stand a chance against magic. In order to stop an industrial and military revolution, some mahjo leaders staged an attack on one of their own sacred cities. This became the perfect excuse to declare war against the industry as a whole. Nobody predicted what would happen next.

Both the mahjo and the military leaders, refusing peace, catapulted the war into something irreversible, a war so devastating that they wiped out each other and plunged the world back into darkness.

This particular patch of land remained the most prominent relic of the Mahjo War, renamed Rebirth by those who survived. It bore the deepest scars, gouged into the earth by powers beyond the imagining of anyone still alive. Nothing had grown here since.

“Looks inviting,” Avan noted.

I adjusted my bag against my back and jumped down into the Void. The dirt was so loose and dry that a black cloud rose around me. I coughed and waved it away. “Like a bed of hot coals. But DJ said we’d find the Rider in the Void, so there has to be something out here.”

“Hopefully nothing gargoyle-like,” Avan said as he hopped down beside me and kicked up another black cloud.

“Don’t worry.” I grinned. “I’ll protect you.”

Avan smirked and started walking.