Chapter Text
“Remind me again why we’re driving out to this depressing-ass place in the dead of winter?” Ronan said.
Gansey's fingers tapped against the steering wheel of the Pig, thrumming with an excited energy. The were reaching toward the end of winter break, and a colder one than usual, at that, but the snow on the ground and the perpetually grey skies didn’t do anything to dampen his mood.
“I’m telling you, I think I found something,” he said. He’d made the discovery a couple of days ago, and had excitedly informed the others—Henry hadn’t been able to come, as he was staying with family for the winter, but the other three had agreed to come and investigate things with him on the first day they all had the time available. He was surprised they had agreed, in truth. Delighted, of course, but he’d been rather expecting that, after all the times they’d found very real magic, something so small as this might not really seem of interest anymore. But they’d all agreed nonetheless, and, despite Ronan’s current complains, were all on the way to check out—
“A tree. You found a tree.” Ronan rolled his eyes.
“A tree with all of its leaves, fully thriving, with everything else dead,” Gansey insisted. “That’s got to mean something, right? What if it’s a sort of…Cabeswater straggler? Some last remnant that managed to survive?” His fingers tapped against the steering wheel again, patternless but soothing. They hadn’t really had time to properly discuss what it was Gansey had found, exactly, beyond that it was a tree, out in the woods near the old church. On the ley line, even. That part excited him a great deal.
“I don’t think that’s how the deal worked,” Adam said from the backseat. “I don’t think stragglers are possible.”
“Yeah, and this isn’t even where Cabeswater was, right?” Blue added.
Adam shrugged. “That’s not really important. Cabeswater’s rules of operation in terms of placement in space were always weird. This spot’s close enough to the ley line that I could see a surviving piece of it being here if there were such a thing, I’m just saying I don’t think that anything could have survived.”
“Oh,” said Blue, quietly.
A pause loomed, for a moment. Gansey held his breath, wincing. “Um,” Adam said, quietly, shoving his hands into the pocket of the pullover hoodie he had on under a battered winter jacket, “That’s not—that’s not to say what you’re saying is…wrong, or…It’s just.” He swallowed. “It’s a magic forest, is all I’m saying. Things can be weird.”
Another pause. Ronan and Gansey exchanged a pained look. The empty space between Adam and Blue in the backseat wasn’t all that big, all things considered, but it loomed cavernously.
“Well, in any case,” Gansey said, in his most aggressively diplomatic tones, “It’s got to be worth investigating, even if it turns out to be completely nonmagical. It’s still interesting, isn’t it?”
“Evergreens are a thing,” Ronan said.
“This wasn’t an evergreen, it was a—honestly, I’m not sure what kind of tree it was, actually?” He turned onto the road leading to the old church, dirt and gravel crunching under the tires. “I’ve never seen one like it. It certainly looked a lot different from any of the other trees nearby.”
“Different how?” Adam leaned forward, visibly grateful for something to focus on other than avoiding eye contact with Blue.
“It was…hm. How to describe it…” He stumbled, the words dancing at the tip of his tongue, refusing to coalesce. How to convey the feeling of finding the tree, stubbornly thriving in the dead of winter, all intricately woven roots and leaves so thick they looked more like a cloud than a tree? How to describe the immense feeling of belonging and rightness he’d felt when he had laid his hand against it? The life that seemed to thrum through it, like a century-slow heartbeat?
The truth was, ever since he’d, well…Since he’d died. Again. He’d felt deeply unmoored from himself and from the world at large. He was deeply, uncomfortably aware that he wasn’t quite the same as he had been before then. He was something pulled together from the memories of those who loved him, and while he was fairly certain he was the same person, he still often felt scattered. Unfocused. He had managed alright at school, albeit not without a great deal of effort, but focusing on anything in particular for long had been a challenge. It was exhausting. Spending time with Blue still helped him feel calm, but even with that, he so often just…felt restless, directionless, endlessly uncertain.
And then he’d gone out for a walk near the old church, just for old time’s sake, and had found the tree, and it had stuck firm in his brain. It was an anchor, at long last. Something solid and real that he could latch on to, in the same way he’d spent years after dying the first time mooring himself to the anchor of the hunt for Glendower.
After thinking for a moment, he said, “The bark texture was different, certainly, and the roots seemed to loop and knot in on themselves in strange patterns.”
“You could see the roots?” Ronan said, incredulous, gesturing out the window at the snow covering the ground outside.
“Exactly!” Gansey said. “And the leaves on it were all sort of…something was strange about them, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“That’s rare,” Blue said, grinning. “You, lost for words.”
Gansey snorted softly. “Well, that’s how you know it must be magical, then, isn’t it? Even I can’t quite find the words to describe what I saw, it just…it felt like Cabeswater, to me. I know it’s important, it must be!”
“Alright, alright, man, we get it,” Ronan said. “You better be able to find it again, and not just lead us tramping around in the snow for hours.”
“I will, I will,” Gansey promised. “I know I’ve been struggling a bit lately with remembering some things, but come on, have some faith in me.” He pulled the Pig to a stop, put on the parking brake, and pocketed the key. “Alright, come on, all! Excelsior! One more adventure, shall we?”
With sounds of varying levels of annoyance, everyone piled out of the car, following after as Gansey led the charge into the woods. Blue quickly ran to catch up to him, wrapping up her layers of clothing closer around her. She didn’t much care for the cold, it seemed, and was easily the most bundled up of all of them, complete with a pair of mittens she’d knitted herself and a scarf that Gansey understood to be a very treasured final gift from Persephone, one that they’d discovered already wrapped amongst several others, buried amongst her possessions. Gansey had yet to see her without it ever since receiving it the month before.
He checked over his shoulder. Ronan and Adam were following, some distance behind, talking quietly to each other. He nodded at them out of habit—entirely pointless, they weren’t even looking his way—and turned back around.
“I thought you two made up?” Gansey said, softly, without looking directly at Blue.
She froze for a moment.
“I’m not—I don’t mean to be accusatory,” he clarified, flashing a nervous smile. “It’s just—back in the car, you two seemed a bit…tense?”
Blue sighed. “You know, I thought so, too,” she grumbled, tugging her knitted cap a bit further down on her head. “I think we did. I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.”
Gansey pulled a face, and then looked over his shoulder again. Adam was laughing softly at something Ronan had said. They were still not paying any attention to Blue and Gansey. “Is…is that wise?”
Blue’s eyes rolled, and she crossed her arms. “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna casually bring it up months later. ‘Hey, Adam, remember how messed up things got between us months ago, what was up with that?’ Maybe I can remind him a little more about how we dated that one time and it ended badly. Really just get that knife in there and twist it.” She stared at the ground for a minute. Gansey waited, listening to the sound of the snow crunching beneath their feet. “Gansey,” she continued, sounding a lot sadder, “I think he just…doesn’t wanna think about it. I don’t wanna push him.”
One more time, Gansey checked over his shoulder, and dropped his voice even lower. “I mean, he hurt you, too, it wasn’t a one-sided thing…”
“And I’m over it. It’s fine. I just wanna be friends again.” She gave him a weak smile. “Gansey, it’s sweet of you to worry, but I’m pretty sure this is just a phase. We’re…we’re learning how to be around each other. It’s just a rough patch, and we’ll work through it.”
“If you’re certain,” Gansey said, giving her an uncertain smile of his own.
“Well, I—Woah,” Blue said, stopping short, staring ahead. Gansey followed her eyes and felt his heart nearly leap out of his chest. They stood, silent, awestruck, almost not hearing Gansey and Ronan catch up to them.
“Gansey,” Adam said, slowly, “I thought you said it was just one tree?”
“It was,” said Gansey, his voice a breathless, excited whisper.
What stood before them was…from the outside, it looked like it must’ve been a single, tightly-clustered grove, but looking between the trees, it seemed to stretch on into eternity. A number of thick trunked trees, matching the description Gansey had given, complete with full canopies utterly unmarred by snow, stood tall and strong. Their roots weaved patterns just a bit too precise to look fully natural, almost woven together, yet still too complex to look purposefully designed, either. Leaves crowded together so thickly, the shape of any individual leaf couldn’t be made out; they all seemed like one great, cloudlike mass.
The arched branches were woven together so tightly that very little light crept through. Looking between the trunks was like looking down a long, arched hallway. Shadow and mist prevented anyone’s field of vision from extending very far, but it was very clear that the other side of the grove, which ought to have been perfectly visible, was nowhere in sight.
“Think I gotta give you this one, Gans,” Ronan said. “This place is magic as shit.”
He spun around, glowing, feeling more like himself than he had in months. If the first tree had been an anchor, then this was a port city, an island, a continent, a, a—it was a sign was what it was, something real to latch onto, something beautiful and wondrous and inescapably magical. “We have to go in, right?” he said, gesturing toward the tunnel through the trees with a sweep of his arm. “I mean, it’s Cabeswater, or whatever’s left of it, we have to—we have to at least look around, don’t you think?”
The others all exchanged a look.
“It’s definitely something magic,” Adam said. “I don’t know about Cabeswater.”
“I saw Cabeswater every time I slept for years, man. That’s not what it ever looked like.” Ronan shoved his hands in his pockets, glaring at the trees like they’d insulted him.
Gansey’s heart fell. It must have shown on his face, because Adam and Blue both rushed to speak, and Ronan at least had the decency to look slightly apologetic.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t wanna go in,” Blue said, accidentally cutting off Adam without apparently noticing. “I mean, I can’t speak for the others, but I definitely wanna go in. If there’s another magic forest, I’m gonna see it. Besides, maybe you’re right, and one of the tree lights is taking shelter in there somewhere? Artemus was able to hide in the tree behind my house, after all.”
“Maybe…" Adam said, cautious. “It probably won’t hurt to look around for a little while, regardless. Besides, now that we’re here, I’m…a little worried about someone else finding it. We should at least know what’s in there, and if others finding it will be dangerous.”
“Right,” Gansey said, catching his second wind. “Right! Exactly. It’s—we’d be irresponsible not to at least take a look around.”
“Ronan?” Adam asked.
Ronan was quiet for a long moment, still staring down the trees. Gansey was about to speak when Ronan sighed. “Your heart’s really set on this one, huh, Dick?”
Gansey held his breath and nodded.
“Alright,” said Ronan. “Yeah. Fuck it. I don’t have anything better to do today, why not.”
“If you don’t want to go—“ Gansey started, but Ronan waved him off, already walking underneath the shade of the trees.
“I said whatever, man, let’s just go.”
Adam shrugged at him while passing by, rushing to catch up with his boyfriend. Gansey smiled to see Adam tangling his and Ronan’s fingers together, and let out the rest of the breath he’d been holding.
There was an immediate difference in the feeling of the air; it was not stagnant, but much stiller than outside, and full of the smell of things growing, with something mustier in the undertones. The ground beneath their feet was a little hard to walk on, with the roots entwined so thickly that there was no way to avoid stepping on them. Not so much as a single snowflake decorated the ground.
Gansey felt alive. The place hummed with an incredible potential energy. The further in they walked, the taller the trees seemed to become around them, arching up ever higher—in fact, the canopy may have been staying at the same level; the ground seemed to slope downward, almost as if it was making room for the ever taller trees. The shadows should have been ever darker, too, as the leaves high above them grew together thicker and thicker, but there was some sort of ambient glow to the place, a pale blue light that made seeing quite easy. He found himself eagerly rushing ahead, forcing the others at times to rush to catch up, and yet often stopping to note the increasingly fantastical particulars of the place—plants growing around the bases of the trees, the likes of which he was fairly certain no one had ever seen before and wasn’t entirely sure should be possible; animals darting high above them through the tree tops, impossible to see clearly aside from wide, glowing eyes and long, bushy tails; glowing moss that seemed like it was possibly the source of that ambient light of the place, the same light blue color, increasingly common as they wandered in.
There was no telling how long they walked, only that they’d been going for long enough that the roots on which they walked were large enough that a single one could serve as a bridge for them all to walk along, single-file. They tangled across each other in a complex web, a net, through which the ground could no longer be seen. The moss was everywhere, as was a series of increasingly large fungi, also growing with the same pale blue light. Gansey felt a growing sort of urgency, a feeling like something incredible was just up ahead, pushing him onward, but he was prevented from going on by a tug at his sleeve.
He turned around, confused, to see Adam, looking at him somewhat annoyed.
“Gansey,” he said, his voice hard, “Ronan’s been trying to talk to you. Don’t just ignore him.”
He blinked. “I—what?” He looked over Adam’s shoulder, to see Ronan looking equally annoyed, and Blue just looking worried. Blue had shifted over to a different root than the one the rest were standing on, and after a moment, Gansey realized she must have moved over to make room for Adam to pass her, since he’d been further back. “Oh. Oh! Sorry, I didn’t hear, I was—“
Ronan’s expression took on a tinge of concern. “Didn’t hear me over what? This place is dead silent. You alright, Dick?”
“Never better!” He said, with all sincerity. “I don’t—I think I was just distracted, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to ignore you.” Now that he thought about it, though, Ronan had been talking, hadn’t he? Everyone had been talking; he’d just been tuning a lot of it out. “What is it you were saying?”
“I think we should go back,” said Ronan. “I’m—I don’t like this.”
“What? Why?”
Ronan kicked at some of the glowing moss. “I don’t—I don’t know, man, this place just—it feels like a fucking corpse,” he said. Gansey felt his brow furrow, and opened his mouth to ask why, but Ronan continued, “It’s like—everything’s quiet here. The trees aren’t even fucking trying to talk to us, for one thing. I don’t think they can. And it’s still as shit, and there’s these damn mushrooms everywhere, we’re probably inhaling all kinds of fucked up toxic spores and it’s…I don’t like it.”
Gansey struggled to understand. The whole place was positively thrumming with life, wasn’t it? He could feel the energy rolling up through the roots beneath him, a small but steady vibration felt even through the thick soles of his shoes. It was true that the place didn’t look much like Cabeswater, but it felt like Cabeswater, all mystery and wonder, with the very air heavy with potential.
“I don’t follow,” he said, tipping his head to the side.
Kick, kick, kick. The moss probably didn’t deserve Ronan’s abuse, but Gansey held his tongue. “Look,” Ronan said, still not looking at him. “I don’t know how else to explain it, alright? This place is a fucking grave, and we shouldn’t be here. No one should be here.”
“Oh,” said Gansey. That energy still called him, whispering, just a bit further, almost there…It shouldn’t have hurt the way it did, for Ronan to be so against being here, but it did. He bit his lip, thinking. “Are you certain?” Gansey asked. “I just—I just want to see a little bit further, is that alright?”
Adam fixed Gansey with one of his most penetrating looks, eyes narrowed, but said nothing.
Gansey gestured back the way they’d came, at the way the trees formed almost a hallway. “I mean, it’s not like we’re likely to get lost. It’s a straight shot back.”
Ronan kept kicking at the moss. “For now, yeah,” he grumbled.
Gansey sighed. “Alright, alright, how about this. We go forward for, oh, quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at most, and then, no matter what, we turn right back around. Is that fair?”
That should be enough. He knew it would be enough, he could feel it.
Everyone looked at Ronan, who turned his own stare toward the nearest of the trees.
“Fine,” he said, grumbling.
The situation agreed upon, Gansey bounced on his heels and surged forward again, moving faster to make up for the new time limit. He just barely heard Adam start to say something and cut it off in an annoyed sound, but he couldn’t bring himself to think on it much. Already, the forest’s call was drowning out all of his worries.
It turned out, it only took five minutes to find what had been calling out to Gansey. He stopped short, his breath caught, awestruck.
They stood upon a precipice into the most wondrous space Gansey had ever seen. Just in front of him, the hallway of trees opened out and the pathway of roots dropped down some twenty feet into an utterly massive space, containing trees larger than Gansey could have ever imagined. Massive branches the size of freeways stretched out impossibly far above their heads, holding up leaves clustered so tightly, they almost looked like an entire sky was held in their branches. Massive glowing mushrooms as tall as houses sprouted from spots here and there, and platform mushrooms grew from the trunks of some of the trees. The air seemed thick, hung with glittering motes and pale mist, casting everything in glorious, unearthly light. Far, far away, the shadow of some massive creature moved through the fog, it’s shape nothing but a dull, blurred shadow.
“I’m going down there,” he said, not so much as looking at the others.
“Gansey,” said Adam, but Gansey was already trying to find a safe way to clamber down the wall of roots.
Most nights—for all of his life, but especially after dealing with the demon—Gansey didn’t sleep very well. Talking to Blue on the phone helped, but even with that, sometimes, he just couldn’t get his mind to stop racing from thought to thought long enough to get a breath in. But sometimes, on the nights where he did manage to drift off, he dreamt of strange trees he could never quite remember the shape of in the morning. It was all impressions, senses of scale and of majesty that, while dreaming, felt immensely real, but which slipped away in the hazy space between sleep and wakefulness no matter how hard he tried to hold on to him. The only thing he did remember completely was the way that they made him feel.
These giants, standing before him like the very pillars of the world, made him feel the same way: like he belonged amongst them, like he’d finally come home.
He was awestruck. Mesmerized. This was where he’d been called to, he could feel it, something here had been drawing him in, and it was—
“Gansey!”
Adam’s voice, sharp and angry, cut through his thoughts like a hot knife. Annoyance burst from the imaginary wound. He turned around, taking a moment to spot the others, some distance away. Blue and Ronan were much farther away, clustered together, Ronan fussing over Blue. Adam, closer, had his fists balled up and a furrowed brow.
“Finally,” he said, shifting his weight back. “Gansey, what the fuck? Are you seriously just not hearing us, or are you ignoring us on purpose?”
“What are you talking about? I was just—“
“It’s been more than twenty minutes, Gansey,” Adam said. For a moment, Gansey was confused; what did that have to do with anything? Twenty minutes since when? “You promised us, remember? Blue nearly fucking fell down into who knows what,” he gestured downward, and as Gansey followed the motion, he noticed for the first time just how the gaps between the roots seemed to spiral dizzyingly into a cavernous darkness, “thank God Ronan managed to catch her in time, and Ronan’s jumping at shadows, and frankly I’m getting pretty nervous, too, with how you’re acting.”
“Wh—oh, oh no, is—Blue, are you alright?” Gansey tried to look over Adam’s shoulder. Blue shot him a shaky thumbs up, but Adam stepped closer, purposefully blocking his view.
“I’m not done,” Adam said. “Gansey, you’ve been behaving fucking weird ever since we got here. We’ve been putting up with a lot, but this is getting ridiculous. We’re leaving.”
He felt a tinge of panic. “I—Adam, come on, you can’t be serious.”
“Your girlfriend,” Adam hissed, “nearly fell down a bottomless fucking hole.”
“So, anyone who’s nervous can go back over to the higher ground,” Gansey barked back. It was—some part of him knew Adam was right, but something about the way Adam was talking, he was—the vitriol on that word, ‘girlfriend,’ like he was picking at the old scab without drawing outright attention to it, it burned. He tried his best to shove it away, surely he must be imagining it, but it stuck under his skin anyway. And anyhow, there was something about the way this place made him feel, something so strong, he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving just yet—“Blue’s tough, she’s fine. We’ll just be a bit more careful. And anyway, she’s—” He bit that one off himself, startled at the words that had gathered almost before he’d caught them. He wasn’t going to go there. He wasn’t.
Adam’s eyes narrowed. “She’s what, Gansey?”
“Nothing. I’m not—“
The whole world jolted beneath them, stopping the argument short. Something rumbled through the forest, creaking and heavy and boundlessly loud. Everyone froze. Blue yelped and clung to the root she stood on as it shifted, slightly, a few inches to the side. Adam nearly got pitched off his own spot, barely managing to clutch onto a raised up root for balance.
As quickly as it’d started, the rumbling stopped. They paused, breathing hard, looking at each other.
“Is everyone—“ Gansey started, but his shaky voice was cut off by a huge mass of tangled roots surging upward with a sound like ancient branches straining against a mighty wind. The sound, the roar, was too loud to even hear properly, so enormous it bypassed the ear entirely and was instead felt in the bones like a horrible grinding pulse.
Gansey was knocked backwards, only barely managing to find purchase on the gnarled wood to avoid falling. A pitch black hole between a Gordian knot of roots, tall enough for Gansey to have stood on Ronan’s head and still not have been able to reach the top of it, appeared before him. He stared into it, horrified, as a light began to glow from within, white and primordial and frightening—and moved, as this mass of roots, this creature of unfathomable size, stared him down.
“RUN!” The yell burst out of his throat with very little input from himself, and nobody wasted any time in reacting as something unspeakably massive and built out of a writhing mass of roots hauled itself out of the ground. Gansey quickly lost sight of the others, the beast’s mass blocking out just about everything else, as he desperately scrambled to get away without falling into the unknown depths below the roots. He felt a great wind nearly threaten to blow him over as a massive gnarled claw passed just a foot over his head, forcing a fearful sob out of his throat.
He was mere feet away from the trunk of one of the massive trees, the echoing cries of the beast booming all around him, when something latched onto the collar of his coat and shirt in a firm grip. He desperately tore against it, but was firmly pulled back into a natural divot in the tree’s shape, a hand clamped over his mouth. Ronan, breathing hard, took only a moment to glare at Gansey before he turned his attention back to the creature. Gansey felt something not exactly like relief, not with the sounds of the creature tearing itself free from the surrounding roots still so loud and unmistakeable, but close to it. It was distant enough that even without looking, Gansey knew it must have lost track of the two of them. He breathed deep for a moment, letting himself relax just the slightest touch, only to stiffen again and rip Ronan’s hand away from his face.
“Wait,” he whispered, straining to stay quiet but still be heard over the ruckus, “Wait, Blue and Adam, are they—“
“Down the gaps between the roots,” Ronan hissed back. “Sh, stay quiet. It’s looking for them but it can’t find them. Can’t find us for now, either, I don’t think.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure enough that I’m not letting you run back out there until the thing leaves. Shut the fuck up before it finds us!”
Gansey rolled his eyes, but stopped talking.
It seemed altogether far too long before the sounds finally quieted, the monster apparently chasing at shadows in the distance. Gansey could feel his heart in his throat, desperate to check on if the others had managed to find safety, like Ronan said.
“I think it’s gone,” Ronan said, finally. Gansey was out of the gap before he’d even closed his mouth.
The whole of the area where the beast had been lurking was devastated, a yawning crater sitting where once a net of roots had sat. The ground was, somehow, still not visible entirely below, only a long, dark hole, but scraps of earth could be seen clumped in between the surviving tangle of roots on the side of the gap. A mess of broken wood and upturned mushrooms revealed the path the creature had taken as it stormed away, messy and wide and terrifying. Tree sap dripped from broken limbs and roots, catching some of the floating motes, lighting up the grisly scene in the same ambient glow of the entire space.
There was no sign of Blue and Adam.
“Where did you see them go?” Gansey said, looking around, frantic. He kept his voice in a stage whisper, unwilling to risk shouting and re-alerting the beast, in case it was somehow still near.
Ronan clambered out beside him and rushed off without directly answering, razor-focused on a point on the opposite side of the center of the destruction. Gansey followed behind, nearly losing his balance again on a particularly precarious stretch of roots and upturned soil. Every tree now seemed like a potential threat, another promise of more monsters climbing out to menace them.
“Hey, Parrish, Maggot, you okay? The thing fucked off,” he heard Ronan say, ahead of him, while he stopped to catch his breath.
Silence.
“Adam?” Ronan’s voice again. “Blue? Guys, don’t fuck around, where—“
“Ronan?” Gansey said, dread creeping up on him as Ronan turned around.
“They’re not here,” he said, looking shocked. “I’m—I know I saw them go down right here, I know I did—“
“Look, it’s—it’s a big space, maybe it was a different one,” Gansey said back, panting, not believing it himself. “We’ll just—we’ll look around a bit more.”
“It couldn’t have—“
“Of course it didn’t,” Gansey said, determined. “They’re—they’re around here somewhere, surely. Come on, we just need to look. Maybe they’re stuck.”
Their progress across the already treacherous web of roots was hampered even more by the destruction, but Gansey and Ronan picked their way along the mess as frantically as could be managed, desperately looking for the lost two. Gansey pulled a flashlight out of his bag after a while, and shone it down first the gap Ronan had noted initially, then every gap around it, and then just in between every nook and cranny between the layers of wood, desperation clawing at his throat ever stronger by the minute. They had to be here somewhere, they had to be okay—
It was no use.
Gansey and Ronan were alone.
So, it turned out, there was ground underneath the web of roots, after all. Blue was sure of this now, on account of, after a long tumble down a sloped tunnel in between several of the branching wooden tendrils, hitting it face-first. Definitely dirt down here. Ugh.
She sat up, shaking her head and spitting; there wasn’t any doubt in her mind that the creature wouldn’t be able to reach her this far down. It was too big. There was no way. She looked up, grumbling to herself, expecting to see nothing but more roots and maybe a glimmer of that faint blue glow to show where she’d come from—
What met her, instead, was a completely different looking forest. The distant canopy was just as impenetrable, high above, the trees just as massive, but the blue mist and bioluminescent glow was gone, replaced with a pale fog and trees of dark, rough bark. Blinking, she glanced around, furiously. She knew she’d come from somewhere, but, how—there was a sort of tunnel, behind her, that looked like a rabbit hole, albeit scaled up to a size that’d fit even her, but there was no sign of it being made of roots, and it went down, not up, and…
And, even as she watched, it seemed to shrink in on itself, then finally collapse and disappear.
She gulped.
Well. At the very least, she was likely well away from the monster.
Slowly, she stood, shivering a little despite the layers of winter clothes. She swallowed, hard, looking around at the hopelessly unfamiliar trees.
“Guys?” she said, her voice feeling small and somehow wrong in the seemingly endless space. “Is…Is anyone else here?”
She wasn’t sure if it was safe to shout, or not. She wasn’t sure if safe was a thing that existed at all in this place. The initial shock was wearing off, and a cold dread was sinking in to fill it. The monster’s appearance and outright hostility toward them had shaken her.
Cabeswater could be dangerous, sometimes, she knew. There’d been that stampede, when Adam woke the ley line up. But it had always been friendly, in its own way. It’d never been hostile, not to them, not to her.
But here, something had literally crawled up out of the ground and sought to swallow them whole.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it hadn’t been attacking; it was so big, it could’ve just been getting up and seemed like it was aggressive due to its sheer size. Maybe…
She pulled off her remaining mitten—one had snagged on some rough bark when she’d fallen and been lost—for a moment and rested a hand on the trunk of a massive tree, hoping to feel…something. Some hint of the life and warmth of Cabeswater, some suggestion of the forest’s beauty and magic and welcoming presence. She was half tree-light, the trees should welcome her, right?
But the bark was cold and rough and unfeeling under her fingers.
Blue felt very, very alone.
“Guys?” she yelled, louder, shoving the mitten back on. They had to be around somewhere, and at the very least, it was obvious that she was nowhere near the monster that’d separated them. So, steeling herself, she wrapped Persephone’s scarf more tightly around her neck and stomped forward. “Anyone? Hello!”
She wandered a while, shouting out each of the boys’ names in turn, making sure to leave visible footprints as she did, just so that she wouldn’t get completely lost. Hopefully. Who knew, with this place. The thought of marking trees with her switchblade briefly crossed her mind, but was immediately shaken off. If a bunch of roots could come to life at a moment’s notice, she really didn’t wanna test what could happen if she actually marked the trees themselves.
Still, it was a nerve-wracking set of minutes she spent walking until she finally heard a response in the form of a cautious, “Blue?”
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered. “Adam, is that you?” she called out, walking toward the noise.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, rounding a tree and nearly crashing into her. “I’m—Are you alright? Um.”
“Fine, yeah,” she said, taking a step back and looking at the ground a moment. Glad as she was to see someone, she did wish it hadn’t been the one person she felt like she could barely talk to.
Ever since they’d broken up, things had been tense. Sure, they’d had their moment, of a sort. Made up in the hospital. At least, she thought they’d made up. At the time, she’d been hoping that meant that they were in the clear, and that all the anger between them would clear up and they could just be friends again. But it turned out that with all that anger and hurt mostly gone—although there were moments, like the one in the car, when she couldn’t tell if he wasn’t still mad after all, or if she was just reading too much into it—all that was left was…nothing. Just an empty void where a relationship should have been.
She wanted to be friends so badly. She missed him. She wanted to be able to just hang out, and be friends. She wanted to be able to ask him if the black pullover hoodie he had on under his coat that was blatantly several sizes too big for him was Ronan’s. She wanted to talk about Gansey with him. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted. But they’d dated, and they’d broken up, and she was pretty sure Adam didn’t want to talk to his ex about his current relationship, and in any case she didn’t know how to ask, and she couldn’t think of anything else to talk about that didn’t feel forced.
She still knew him, but she didn’t know how to talk to him anymore. She hated it.
“Do you know where the others are?” she asked, after a moment. Her stomach dropped when he shook his head.
“I was hoping you did,” he said, still staring at the ground. He sighed. “They’re…probably fine. I think the thing was more interested in chasing us. They were together when I saw them, at least.” He looked up, pensive. “Anyway, there’s not much we can do about it from here. I don’t think we’re anywhere near them.”
“How so?”
He ran a hand through his hair, now looking up instead. “I mean, aside from the fact that we’re not standing under a whole bunch of roots, I think…I think space doesn’t work like it should in here. We already knew it had to be bigger on the inside, since the glade looked pretty small from the outside, but…we fell down. Now we’re here. It’s…probably safe to assume the forest dropped us somewhere else entirely.”
“Great,” she said. She kicked the ground. Kicked it again. “So what do we do? We have to find them and get out of here.”
“I’m thinking,” he said, still looking up. “Maybe some of the trees will—“
“I already tried,” Blue said, miserable. “These aren’t tree lights. I don’t think they care that we’re here at all.”
“Oh,” he said, his voice soft. Blue flinched. Had her voice been too sharp there? She was irritated at the situation, not at him. She should tell him. She should just—just talk to him.
She didn’t know how.
For the first time since entering the forest, she felt real wind, an icy breeze clawing across the ground and rattling the leaf litter. She shivered, and stared out into the forest. The trees loomed all around them, gathered like silent, judgmental spectators.
“And you’re sure this is where you saw them drop down?” Gansey’s voice echoed above Ronan through the network of roots. He grunted, rolled his eyes, and adjusted his grip on the rope. Because of course Dick had brought a rope in his fucking bag to explore a fucking forest. This wasn’t supposed to be a huge expedition, it was just supposed to be some sort of—chance to properly say goodbye, or at least that’s what it had been to Ronan, but now here he was climbing down a fucking hole made out of roots with a flashlight trying to find out if his boyfriend and Gansey’s girlfriend were alive after getting attacked by a ridiculous fucking root monster—
“Yeah, Dick, I’m dead sure, because it’s so easy to tell the difference between all these goddamn holes,” he snapped back. He squinted, shining the flashlight’s beam down as far as he could. It was just more roots. No sign of the ground. Which was stupid, he knew there was ground, because there were real big clumps of it where the monster had hauled itself up, and yet, everywhere else, nothing but goddamn plant to the core of the fucking planet. What was this. This was bullshit. “I’m guessing, okay? I think this is where I saw Sargent fall down—“
“Fall? I thought you said they jumped!”
“No I didn’t, I said I saw them both wind up in the damn holes, man,” he glared upward. “I’m pretty sure it was only half on purpose and it wasn’t the same one for both of them. We were all running. Shit happens.” He found a solid enough looking root to stand on and leaned against another, catching his breath for a second. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he muttered. He’d only agreed to come along with all this because Gansey’d been so fucking excited about that first fucking tree. He’d been off-kilter for months. This was the first thing that had made the guy seem properly like himself again in ages, enough so that saying no would’ve made Ronan feel like an ass. It was just supposed to be something to help Gansey perk up again after all the shit that’d gone down, and now everything had gone to hell, and he was pissed.
Something about the look of this place had given him a real bad feeling right from the start, and the unease that had been haunting him ever since they arrived had grown tenfold. He hadn’t felt this unsafe in a forest since he’d been hunted by his own fucked-up nightmares, and even then, he’d had nothing to fear from the trees themselves. He didn’t know what fresh hell they’d wandered into, but no fucking way was it Cabeswater, no matter what Gansey thought.
Gansey was babbling something back to him, and Ronan was stubbornly ignoring it. They’d been arguing about this for the better part of twenty minutes, now. The beam of the flashlight carved an arc as he sat back, aimless, largely going on for seemingly forever into utter darkness, only occasionally catching on the thick branching roots and—
He stopped short. Moved it back. What was that flash of color…?
“Hold on,” he called up. “Hold up, give me some more rope, I think I saw something.”
After a bit more tedious clambering, he had his hands around what he’d spotted. Brightly colored yarn sat in his hand, simultaneously granting him hope and dread.
“I found one of Sargent’s mittens,” he yelled over his shoulder.
“I—what? Ronan, you’re too far down, I can’t hear you, what did you say?”
He rolled his eyes. “Just hold on, I’m coming back!”
A moment later had them both staring helplessly at the lost bit of clothing. It was definitely Sargent’s. She’d been the only one of them wearing mittens, instead of gloves, and even if that hadn’t been the case, it definitely wasn’t anyone else’s style, and far too small for any of them to wear, besides.
“So she must’ve gone down here, right?” Gansey said, looking down the hole himself.
Ronan shifted. “Seems that way, yeah.”
Gansey nodded, and, without another word, started adjusting the rope with practiced ease so that it could help support the both of them on their journey downward. Ronan, every bit as anxious to find their missing friends, still found himself hesitating.
He hadn’t said anything before, because coming here seemed like it was doing Gansey some good, but he’d had a bad feeling about this place since he’d first seen it. The more time they spent here, the more sure he was that Gansey was wrong about it being a remnant of Cabeswater. Cabeswater had loved them. Him, especially. Even with his own nightmares chasing him down, Cabeswater itself had never felt like danger to him; it was a friend, a protector, it would do anything for them. It had given everything for Gansey in particular, all because they’d asked it to. He could make the place bend to his will with a thought, and even the others could affect it just by their general intent.
This place wasn’t like that. It didn’t care what they wanted. Best case scenario, it didn’t care about them at all. They were just a bunch of tiny animals wandering around to these trees, tall and uncaring and silent.
The worst case scenario was that it saw them as foreign invaders in its bloodstream to be actively hated.
That wasn’t exactly his impression, though. He was increasingly sure, looking out at the shadows, the glowing mushrooms, the air heavy with mist and spores and God knew what else, that the place wasn’t alive enough to give a shit. It was a damn corpse. The final twitches of something already dead. They were walking through a grave, and the forest was judging them accordingly.
Everything was so quiet. Not even wind stirred the trees. There was the extremely sparse scuttling of some small animal, but that was it. Everything else was dead quiet, the air was still, and they were not supposed to be here.
“Ronan?” Gansey’s voice rang out from beneath the roots. “Come on, we can’t wait here for long.”
“Yeah,” Ronan said. “Yeah, sorry, I’m coming.”
Gansey paused and waited, because of course he did, staring in a way that felt way too judgey under the current circumstances. “What was that about?” he asked, as Ronan passed him.
“Nothing,” said Ronan. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”
Adam kept his eyes trained on his own feet.
The only sounds to be heard were the faint rustling of evergreen needles high above and the gentle crunching of leaf litter and underbrush beneath their feet. Blue had said, eventually, that she could at least navigate back to where she’d landed after falling in the run from the monster, since she’d made sure to leave clear footprints, so they were backtracking to that spot.
She’d also said that the hole she’d fallen through had closed itself up just after she’d exited. There was probably no way back to where they’d been that way. But it was all they could think to do. They needed to find Gansey and Ronan, for their own sakes as much as for the others’.
Adam twitched his eyes up to make sure he was still following Blue—he couldn’t be sure just by sound, anymore, not with only one working ear—but otherwise kept his eyes on the ground. Maybe conversation would’ve quelled some of the uneasiness prickling at his skin, but he was loathe to try. It seemed like every time he tried talking to Blue lately, he came off as harsh, or implied the wrong thing, or otherwise stumbled headlong into discomfort for the both of them.
The simple fact was, Adam wasn’t actually sure what they were now. They’d started out from the beginning as…maybe not quite boyfriend and girlfriend, but he’d wanted to be that, and then things had gotten very messy, and now they weren’t anymore. Gansey had said something a month or two back that he was glad that they were trying to be friends again, but Adam didn’t know what friendship with Blue meant for him. They had never been friends, they’d just dated, and then they had stopped dating and started being bitter exes forced into the same orbit by mutual friends, and then Blue had snuck around behind his back with his best friend—
No. He wasn’t hurt about that anymore. He’d made the decision to move on from that, and anyway, he’d been pretty awful to her right back. And he had Ronan now. Ronan, who made him feel happy and peaceful and like he belonged in a way he never had before. Ronan, who was out here somewhere in this forest, who he needed to find.
It was okay. He could get through being alone with Blue for a while. She was probably just as anxious to get back to Gansey.
A new noise rang through the trees, too distant to properly recognize it; a soft, low moaning that Adam hoped was distant wind. It sent a chill through him either way.
“What the hell?” Blue said, suddenly, stopping short.
“What is it?” Adam looked up, shaken out of his thoughts.
“It’s snowing,” Blue said, turning around to face him. Their eyes met only for the briefest of accidental seconds, glancing away again like repulsed magnets.
“It’s winter, Blue,” Adam said, blinking snowflakes out of his eyelashes. Now that she’d pointed it out, it was starting to come in thickly.
“Yeah, but the trees are so thick, it shouldn’t even be able to reach down here, right?” she said, looking up. “I mean—oh, come on.”
Adam blinked, looked at her for just a moment, and then looked up himself.
They still couldn’t see the sky, somehow. There was still a weird sense of being enclosed. But they couldn’t see a canopy, either. In fact, it looked like the leafy trees of before had been replaced by pine and spruce, reaching infinitely up into the vast expanse, fading into colorlessness with the distance.
…It’d been evergreens for a while now, hadn’t it? Why hadn’t he noticed the shift?
The snow was falling even faster, just in the time since they’d paused.
“Crap,” Blue said, “I’m gonna lose my trail.”
“I think that’s the least of our problems,” Adam said, the cold seeping through the battered denim of the old pair of jeans he’d thrown on. “If this keeps up for long, we’re gonna need to find shelter.” How had the temperature dropped so quickly? He got the impression that it must have done so over time, felt certain it had, and yet at the same time like it had been instantaneous. It was the same effect of watching Ronan dream; one minute there was nothing there, and the next, something out of Ronan’s mind was in the room and always had been.
“Right,” Blue said, tugging her scarf a bit tighter around her neck, “Yeah, that’s true. We’re not really gonna be able to find Gansey and Ronan if we freeze to death.” She looked at a massive pine tree, its lowest branches a full building’s distance above her. “How do we do that, though?”
Adam looked around, too. There was some scrubby underbrush scattered around, but all of it too thin to be useful in constructing anything, and with the branches of the trees so huge and high above them, they weren’t going to be of use either. They’d need to find something natural. “We look around, I guess,” he said. “Stick close, since the snow’ll make it hard to find each other again if we do get separated, but we should look for a…I don’t know, something enclosed enough that we can…” He held back a grimace. Intellectually, he knew that what they probably needed to do was huddle up for warmth. Unfortunately.
Blue saved him from having to actually finish that thought, apparently on the same page. “So we get lucky, basically,” she said, rubbing her hands together. Adam noticed for the first time that she’d lost a mitten, and felt a pang of sympathy at the already red fingertips on her exposed hand.
“We’ll find something,” he said, firm. “We have to. Can’t just leave Ronan and Gansey bumbling around out here on their own, right?”
“Yeah…” She trailed off. Adam bit his lip and looked away.
That sound from earlier rang out again, louder this time. It wasn’t wind. It was chilling, a long, low, distant wail that rose and fell.
“Oh, great,” he muttered, glaring at the trees, as though it were their fault. “That’s the last thing we need right now.
Blue looked up. “What is?”
“Wolves.”
She listened for a moment, her brow furrowing as it went on.
“Wolves aren’t dangerous to humans,” she said, firmly. “Not unless they’re really desperate or the humans start it. Wolves are really important to the ecosystem, and there’s been no recorded cases of a healthy wolf pack killing a human in centuries. We’re fine. They’re not gonna hurt us, Adam.”
It took every bit of strength within him not to roll his eyes and snap back something mean. “Yeah, well, how about you try telling the wolves that if we see them? This is a magic forest, Blue, and we’ve already had a bunch of roots try to kill us, I don’t trust wolves not to.”
“God, whatever, let’s just—find a stupid shelter, already,” she said, turning on her heel and marching off in a seemingly random direction. Adam almost complained, but then remembered that he didn’t know the layout of the place any more than she did, so they might as well just start walking and hope for something.
They did their best to hunt out something, some sort of outcropping or rock or fallen tree that could at the very least offer some shelter from the wind, as the snow fell ever thicker all around them, but to no avail. Adam focused on the sounds of the snow beneath their feet, and tried to ignored the distant howling. Tried to think, instead, about Gansey and Ronan—were they alright? He did feel fairly confident that they had gotten away from the monster, but the forest was…
He shivered. Ronan had been reluctant to admit how badly the place affected him, at first, but Adam had known something was wrong fairly quickly. Ronan should have been just as excited as Gansey about finding a pocket of magic like this, even if he would inevitably show it in a very different way. But the moment they’d stepped under the trees, Adam had picked up on the apprehension coming off of him.
Frankly, Adam didn’t particularly like this place, either. It was strange and quiet and felt…not hostile, exactly. Ronan had muttered to Adam, after some prodding, that he felt like this place hated them, but to Adam, it felt more like it didn’t care at all. To him, after having Cabeswater live in his mind for months, the idea of a magic place’s only response to their presence being cold apathy was far more frightening.
Something that cared would only try to hurt you on purpose. Something that didn’t would do it without even noticing.
Blue stopped short, listening to the howling, which was louder now. “You know, I don’t think those are wolves,” she said, slowly.
Adam shrugged. “I mean, probably not. This place is weird. Monsters shaped like wolves. The idea of a wolf. Who knows.”
“No, not even that. Listen.”
He huffed, irritation boiling under his skin, but he tipped his head to one side anyway, granting his good ear better access to the air.
Adam had never really heard wolf howling before, so he couldn’t be sure what she was talking about, but he would begrudgingly admit that it didn’t quite fit what he’d always imagined. There was something almost musical to it, not single notes but melodies of a sort, and, if he really strained to hear, a faint sort of clicking sound woven in and out at odd tempos.
He shook his head. “I really don’t think it makes a difference, Blue. We don’t wanna run into it either way.”
“There is,” Blue said, stubborn. “I told you before, if it’s wolves, we have nothing to worry about—“
“Ugh.”
“—And if it isn’t, then we’re in trouble. Wolves won’t hurt us but this sounds like something else.”
Adam was very tired.
He was tired, and cold, and he wanted to be safely back at the barns with his boyfriend, tangled up and comfortable and safe and not in a frightening landscape with what he had now decided were definitely wolves just to spite Blue.
“Blue, can we please just drop the wolves thing?” he said, dragging a hand down his face.
She stared back at him. “I’m just—I’m trying to help,” she said, crossing her arms. “We need to have an idea how much danger we’re in, right? So—“
“Whatever,” Adam said, and pushed past her. He was not going to lose his temper out here, he was not going to lose his temper out here, he was not going to—
“Adam, wh-wait! Wait up!” Blue yelled after him. He did not wait up. The snow was getting higher, already up to the ankles, and it was leaking through his old sneakers and soaking the bottom of his jeans. He was going to find shelter, quickly, so that they could hopefully both not get frostbite, and he was going to not talk to Blue unless absolutely necessary until they found their friends, and that was going to be the end of it.
Unfortunately, the wailing sound was louder than ever, unmistakably close. It seemed like no matter which way they turned in their attempts to avoid it, it got louder. Right when it seemed impossible not to come across whatever the source was, it stopped short. Blissful silence hung over them, all sound muffled by the snow. It would have been a relief if it weren’t for the ever-dropping temperature.
After a while, they edged toward a small clearing of sorts, only for Adam to see movement ahead of them. He grabbed Blue by the back of her coat and tugged her behind a bush taller than they were, dead and leafless but still thick enough to hopefully hide them from view.
Blue looked at him, and swallowed thickly. “Adam, we should get out of here. I don’t like this.”
“I’m just gonna look,” he said, peering through the dead branches. “See what we’re dealing with here. Then we can go.” Since Blue had been so sure, after all. He was proud of himself for not saying that bit. It was far too nasty, and, he tried to remind himself, it wasn’t Blue’s fault they were in this mess. They were just getting on each others’ nerves, that was all.
There was some sort of large creature on the ground, dying but not yet dead, and a number of smaller beasts gathered around it. The bigger creature’s flanks stuttered and heaved, its body twitching occasionally, as the smaller creatures did…something. Adam couldn’t see very well through the foliage between them, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to risk making any noise just to get a better look. But the smaller creatures—and even they seemed the size of a large dog—didn’t seem to be…eating, exactly. There was a sense of feeding, but he wasn’t sure that their mouths were moving…
“Adam,” Blue hissed, urgently.
“Shh, quiet,” he whispered back, still watching. “I don’t wanna make any noise, they might notice us.”
Blue tugged determinedly on the back of his coat. “I think it’s a little late for that,” she said, in a voice that filled him with dread. He looked at her, and then, following her own stare, looked up.
Clinging to the side of the very tree they’d been hiding behind was what must have been one of the smaller creatures.
In fairness to Blue: it was not a wolf. You couldn’t call if a wolf. Wolves didn’t have six legs, or pseudo-wings, and they didn’t glow, and they definitely didn’t have long tongues with some horrible looking stinger at the tip.
The creature, the weird moth-wolf, slowly tilted its head at them, a clicking sound echoing out from its throat. Adam could just barely see beyond them that some of the ones still gathered around the fallen beast seemed to pause in the motions they’d been making. He could just imagine them all staring their way.
The tongue of the one watching them started to retract back into its mouth in a way that reminded Adam far too much of a spring loaded weapon, tension visible in the red, glistening skin. He ducked out of the way just in time to feel that horrible stinger whizz over his head, missing by inches, even with the creature at least five feet away.
He grabbed Blue’s hand where it still clutched his coat, turned on his heel, and bolted.
