popped. Rel landed beside her, and for a sickening moment she thought he must have collapsed, but he turned his head and met her gaze, face locked into grim neutrality.
She scrunched her eyes shut and pushed her face into the stone, still waiting for the oncoming ferals to strike whatever it was she'd produced by her desperate act. She could still feel the flimsy, fibrous webwork of it, spreading out to the cave walls, filling the open space. Something shot through, a weapon from the Separatists, but either it wove between the strands of her shield, or she made space for it.
Either way, while it felt like someone had pulled a threaded needle right through from the back of her brain to her forehead, it didn't feel like paralysing, incapacitating pain and the end of her consciousness. When the wave of feral Second-Realm awareness struck from the opposite direction, she clung to that sense of passing through, and the Wildren became like ghosts, leaving a chill trail in their wake but not destroying her.
More uncomfortable was the rising heat of the air itself. It prickled on her cheeks, made her clothes feel heavy, left her brow sticky with sweat. Her blood roared and pounded in her ears, and her headache deepened as her pulse clashed with the wild rhythm of the strife among the Wildren. She tightened every muscle she could, fighting to resist futile reflex attempts to mitigate the myriad discomforts.
Just as it all reached the brink of overwhelming her, Second-Realm logic gave under the strain. The image of a cave exploded and collapsed, all at once, closely followed by the sensations that had made it up. Even the bulk of the headache and fatigue seemed to fade, leaving Pevan nothing more than a racing pulse and the tight-chested feeling that if she didn't move, she'd die.
And yet, there was nothing to do. Anything she did would be more likely to attract the attention of some Wilder or other than to get her to safety, if indeed there was safety anywhere near. It felt a lot like logic burnout, but she still felt conscious and whole - there was too much lingering pain for anything less. Not to mention there might not be a Four Knot ready to answer.
"Come on, move!" Rel's voice, close by and crisp as frost against the void. She was about to protest when the darkness shuddered and a pair of straight, glowing lines speared across it. It could only be Atla's Gift at work, imposing just enough First-Realm logic on the world to give them a route out.
Pevan threw herself at those lines, flicked half-remembered wings and shot into flight. Colours too bright and mad even for a rainbow swirled up and down within the narrow confines of the light, but she pushed them away with ever-stronger wingbeats. Bones strained against each other for a sickening moment as she realised she couldn't tell whether she was a bird or a dragonfly, but then the darkness brightened and the question fell away, forgotten.
She slammed into something bony and hard. Arms clamped around her, and the blessed, ordinary colours of an ordinary scene spun as she flailed into a sprawling tumble. The sharp jab of an elbow into her flank told her it was definitely a person she'd hit. Still, she scrambled away from him as fast as possible the moment the fall ended in thick, short-cropped grass.
Flopping over onto her back, she pulled her scattered wits back together. The sky above was a colour somewhere between pink and grey, flecked with black stars. Craning her head to one side and then the other, she found herself on an undulating, flowing hillside, rising towards a copse of leafless, green-trunked trees on the right, dropping away to something too chaotic to make sense of to her left.
Rel entered her field of vision from down-slope, leaned down to offer her a hand up. "You alright?" His words barely flickered past his lips before vanishing.
It took them two attempts before she was back on her feet, and longer still before her breath recovered enough to let her speak. "I'll live. You?" Looking past him, she saw no sign of Atla, and for a moment her heart seized up all over again, but Rel must have seen something in her face; he pointed behind her, and sure enough, the Guide was standing a few feet away, staring uphill.
"We're fine." Rel's tone betrayed little relief, but then he'd never been good at graciously accepting help. "You had us worried for a bit. What did you do back there?"
"Hell if I know." She turned to where Chag was still lying on the floor, groaning quietly. Must have been him she landed on. "You alright down there?" The question slipped, ghost-like, past her lips and gusted away towards the hilltop.
He waved a hand in a gesture too vague to make out. Probably he was just trying to put a brave face on whatever bruises she'd left on him this time. She crossed over to him in two long, quick strides and grabbed the arm before he could lower it. He didn't fight as she hauled him to his feet.
The look on his face was more grim than dazed, and with both Rel and Atla safe, there was no excuse for that. She reached a hand around the back of his head, letting her fingers tangle in his unkempt, lanky hair, and pulled him to her. He had time for the slightest of startled clucks before she pressed her lips to his.
She lifted her other hand, rested it on his shoulder, as he caught on and his arms went around her back. The coldness went out of her. She closed her eyes and lost herself in the kiss for a moment, just happy to touch, to hold. It was nice to kiss someone without having to tilt her head back at all - they really were a good match.
Not that it was a very good kiss. Chag's lips were soft, and more than a little bit limp with it. He held her, but not tightly, not with the kind of passion she expected after all his advances over the last month. Maybe he was a bit dazed, after all.
Pevan pulled back, not letting the little man go, but giving him a moment to recover wits that were clearly scattered - his mouth hung open as she turned to glare at Rel. Not that she needed to check, but her brother was glaring at her, his face set tight with a mix of confusion and disapproval.
"Something got up your nose?" The quip came out of her lighter than she'd meant it to, and she didn't even feel it escaping her lips. She'd wanted to sting him into turning away, but instead all she got was his scowl softening a little and turning inwards.
After a moment, he raised an eyebrow and said, "Just wondering if this is really the best time?"
"None better." She turned back to Chag, whose eyes were still wide, his gaze jumping all around her face. "You weren't expecting that either, huh?" Her words slipped out of her mouth sideways, as if stolen by a stiff breeze blowing uphill.
"Huh." He nodded. From the sound of his voice, he'd probably been trying for a word, but it stuck somewhere in his throat. He swallowed, licked his lips and tried again. "This is really... I mean..."
"Relax, we'll work it out." She leaned forward again, kissed the corner of his mouth, rested her forehead against his so their noses were touching. His wavering breath tickled her top lip. She closed her eyes.
"Uh, guys?" The tone of Atla's voice brought her head up and round sharply enough that she almost headbutted Chag. The Guide was standing a little way up-slope, hands pressed to his temples, face screwed up tight with pain. "We need to get out of here. Some of those Wildren are coming back."
***
About the author
R. J. Davnall has been telling stories all his life, and thus probably shouldn’t be trusted to write his own bio. He holds a PhD in philosophy and teaches at Liverpool University, while living what his mother insists on calling a 'Bohemian lifestyle'. When not writing, he can usually be found playing piano, guitar or World of Warcraft.
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