Page 83 of Wings of Starlight

What was hedoinghere? And where was he going?

“Milori!”

She chased after him. But no matter how quickly she moved, no matter how far they traveled, he never seemed to get any closer. The darkness churned around her, the shadows slithering and swimming and closing in.

A shift in the air pressure. Then, something lunged at her.

Clarion ducked, barely dodging the snap of teeth as they closed over her head. She fired a bolt of starlight at it. Whatever it was shrank back, hissing its fury at being thwarted.

Her heart pounded in her throat; her hands, set aglow by her magic, trembled. How was she supposed to fight when she could hardly see her enemies? But she could not dawdle here; she could not lose Milori in a place like this.

When she looked up, she saw him standing in the near distance, staring at her with those piercing gray eyes. Clarion charged toward him. The closer she got to him, the more the world began to take shape around her in shades of charcoal.

Silhouettes of trees loomed out of the dark. Grass sprouted, waving in a wind she could not feel. Her feet knew exactly where to carry her, which obstacles to step over, as though this were a dream she had wandered through many times before.

This wasn’t Winter anymore.

Milori turned and walked away from her with purpose, heedless of what the heat would do to him. No, she thought. What it hadalreadydone to him.

She could not watch this happen again.

Clouds gathered overhead, limned by a sinister violet glow. It felt like the moment before a lightning strike—like the moment before a Nightmare attack. Every hair on the back of her neck rose, and her skin crawled with a formless anxiety. Her mind had emptied of every thought butI have to stop it.

The air thickened and settled heavily in her lungs. It smelled like decay: a foul, sickly-sweet vegetal smell that made her stomach turn. She recognized this place now: the last stretch of woods before she would reach the river that divided the Pixie Dust Tree from Summer.

As she pressed onward, she would have sworn she heard screaming.

Briars surged from the earth, barring her path. Clarion shoved her way forward and tripped, her boot catching on an upturned vine. She sprawled across the ground, skimming the skin clean off her hands. Blood welled on her palms and dribbled down her wrists. But the pain hardly touched her. When she looked up, what she saw rooted her to the spot. It made her entirely numb with horror.

The Pixie Dust Tree was rotting.

Viscous black liquid dripped from the ends of its branches, and all the leaves had gone slick with decomposition. A sickly rot licked up the sides of the trunk, bubbling and oozing. But worst of all, it had put out feeble new growth: wispy clusters of rhododendrons and black roses, barely managing to unfurl.

Danger,it said.Despair.

Help me.

Pools of Nightmares rose from the spongy ground at its roots, clawing their way toward the Pixie Dust Well. Everything about the fairies’ world depended on the survival of the tree. Without it, there would be no pixie dust. No home. Nowhere for newborn fairies to land. Pixie Hollow would be gone—and without Never Fairies, what would happen to the Mainland?

“No,” Clarion choked out. “No, no, no.”

Clarion forded the shallows of the river, nearly frantic in her desperation. She was sweating in her winter coat. Why was she wearing a winter coat at all? The few Nightmares she saw, she blasted insensately, hardly even looking to see whether her blows landed or if they stayed down.

When she reached the other side, she grabbed the first fairy she saw by the shoulder. “What happened?”

He recoiled from her, disgust plain on his face. There was something in his eyes that she had never been confronted with: hatred. It contorted his features into a horrible rictus and set his eyes aglow. The sight of it rattled her to her very core.

“You did,” he spat.

Me?

He wrenched away from her. Clarion whirled around to find that a small group had gathered behind her, huddled close as they watched the heart of their queendom putrefy. All of them glared at her with pure loathing. Mutters spread through the group, low and baleful. She could pick out a few words here and there:

Cold. Uncaring. Undeserving.

Mistake, mistake, mistake.

It rang in her head: the confirmation of all her worst fears.