The plant bug's crystals made a frantic hum beneath them that Catherine felt more than heard. They zoomed above the waves of fog at an astounding speed, wind blasting them as they went. Catherine kept her face turned away from it, trusting the bug's compound vision. Eight overlapping circles of the world stitched together into something vast and warped, with color drained to greens and grays. To say it was disorienting would be an understatement.
Azela's arms were locked around Catherine’s waist from behind, and she was shouting with excitement, the sound ripping from her throat the moment it formed and vanishing behind them, devoured by the rushing air. It made Catherine laugh, though she never heard that either.
The fog spread endlessly below like an ocean. They soared faster and straighter than any bird could manage, passing entire mountains that rose from the gray depths. Those were Catherine’s landmarks. She had mapped the journey in her head before they left and had braced herself for the time it would take, but now that math was unraveling with every passing minute. They were covering entire days worth of travel in only a few hours.
She felt the danger before she saw it: a cold displacement in the air, a wrongness in the pressure.
To the right, a massive, familiar black tentacle was already moving toward them as it rose from the myst.
Then it swung. Even with the plant bug's speed, it was difficult to avoid, and came within mere inches of striking them. Catherine drew her sword and stood upon the plant bug's back, holding one of the vibrating crystals to balance herself. The wind tried hard to take her, clawing at her coat, whipping her hair across her face.
The tentacle came at them again, trailing wisps of myst as it arced through the air. But Catherine was ready.
A black shadow shot out from her blade as she swung, colliding into the tentacle with a sound like a snapped rope. It knocked the horrid thing away and sent it sliding back down into the myst, but as it did so, a second tentacle rose up in front of them, wider than the first and moving faster. Catherine saw it through the bug's eyes, but the gap between seeing and reacting was a fraction too long. She couldn't maneuver fast enough to avoid it.
As the tentacle reached out, Azela increased her weight and forced the bug downward with a lurching drop that sucked the air from Catherine's lungs. The tentacle curled itself above them, finding only the empty space they had left behind.
Catherine flung another shadow upward, this one slicing the tentacle in two with a clean efficiency that surprised even her. The severed end tumbled away, spinning slowly as it disappeared into the gray below. What remained of the limb thrashed in pain, spasming in wide arcs, no longer precise or aimed, just suffering.
But its suffering had weight to it. The thrashing end caught the side of the plant bug hard, and the world inverted. Catherine lost her grip on the crystal and her footing, then felt the horizon tilt and keep tilting as the bug spiraled downward in a nauseating corkscrew. She grabbed a ridge along the bug's back with one hand and kept the sword in the other. Pouring herself back into its senses, they worked together to steady their descent.
They slowed it.
They couldn't stop it.
The myst closed over them, gray and total, swallowing the sky whole. The world above vanished. Inside, the air had a thickness to it. Not a smell, not quite a sound, but a quality, like the feeling of being watched from a direction that didn't exist. Catherine's skin prickled. The cold was immediate and specific, settling at the back of her throat and in the hollow of her ears.
A massive lumbering shadow was behind them, enormous in the bug's distorted vision, its shape suggesting something ancient and unfinished, like a body assembled by something that had only heard bodies described. Several tentacles began to enclose them from multiple directions, converging with slow and inevitable geometry, far too many to avoid their fate. Catherine swung her sword to release another arc of shadow, but none appeared. The gaps between the tentacles narrowed.
At the last possible moment before they were enveloped, Azela snatched Catherine and leapt off of the plant bug's back and through a tiny opening in the tentacles, no wider than a doorframe, already closing. Catherine tucked herself without being told to, and they were through it, falling free, the shadow of the creature swelling above them like a storm.
They fell through the myst with no ground in sight. The gray offered nothing to read, no texture, no depth, just the sensation of motion with no destination attached to it. Catherine repositioned herself into a lying position in Azela's arms and set the sword across her lap to free both hands. She reached for the knife in her boot, then used it to cut through her pants and carve a symbol into her own leg. Her jaw tightened once and released. She brought her hands together with the knife between them, closed her eyes, and sang.
The sound was small against the nothing around them. The sigil on her leg burned dully, feeling the magic as it ignited in her own flesh. Despite everything, her voice came out steady.
The plant bug appeared below them, as shocked to be alive as Catherine was at successfully teleporting it. There was a single suspended moment where all three of them simply existed in free fall together, then the bug rose as Catherine and Azela fell onto its back with a jarring thud that rattled Catherine's teeth. She grabbed on. Azela was already holding her. The bug lurched but held, and then they were moving again, driving downward and forward, away from the mass of darkness above.
They broke free from the myst, to everyone's surprise, not long after. The sky returned all at once, pale and overcast but solid, real, and Catherine exhaled something between a breath and a scream that she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Below them was a dense forest. Catherine instructed the bug to land, steering it down through the canopy's edge to a small clearing where the soil was soft and the light was the color of late afternoon.
Once they had settled to the ground and dismounted, they stood side by side and gazed nervously at the wall of fog behind them. It rose almost endlessly into the sky, like a cloud that had fallen to the surface. Within it, not far inside, lightning flashes revealed a towering shadow. Its tentacles moved slowly through the gray, sweeping back and forth with methodical patience, grasping at the spaces where its prey had been.
"Why doesn't it leave the myst?" Azela asked, curious in the way she was about most things that should frighten her.
"I don't think it can," said Catherine. "Our plant bug here is similar. It can't see or breathe very well outside, like a fish pulled from the water. Even in the myst there are only small patches where it can find comfort. But if we were to enter one of those patches, the toxic air would probably kill us."
"Shi-Yon told me that the myst connects to other worlds," said Azela. She crouched beside the bug, who had curled its legs beneath itself and was trembling faintly, and placed her hand gently along its side. "You don't belong here, do you?"
Catherine crouched on the bug's other side and pet it as well, running her fingers along its moss. The trembling slowed slightly. "Other worlds, huh? That explains a lot, actually. I've seen its world in its memories and those of the other bug. It's a traveler that's a very long way from home." She looked up at Azela across the bug's back. "It can't stay long out here, so I'm letting it go. It’ll find a way back into the myst that's far away from that giant monster."
Catherine stood, gave the bug one final affectionate touch along the top of its head, and reached back into the connection between them to release it. The bug stirred, raised itself, and climbed into the air with a low, sustained hum that faded steadily as it rose. They watched it shoot forward and skim the side of the myst for a distance, gradually sinking in. Its shrinking silhouette faded into the gray. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Azela asked, "Do you know where to go from here?"
"Southwest, which is..." Catherine turned slowly, reading the angle of the light through the trees and the lean of the moss on their bark. She pointed. "That way, I think. We must be near the coast if we're this far down and outside of the myst. The hills this way should be clear of it as well. The parts that aren't roving, anyway." She said this in the same tone she might use to say the weather should hold, as if it weren’t anything worth dreading.
Azela looked at Catherine's leg with a worried expression. The cut was visible through the parted fabric. "Did you have to do that to yourself?"
"I didn't cut deep," Catherine assured her, already adjusting her stance to test the leg's comfort. "'Tis just scratches. But did you see what I did? I'm a true conjurer now!"
"You know I don't like to see you hurt," said Azela. Her eyes hadn't moved from the cuts. "Especially by yourself."
"It was a life or death situation," defended Catherine. "And now I know that I'm capable of teleportation! Over a short distance, but I did it!"
"I'm happy for you," Azela said without enthusiasm. She straightened up and looked toward the trees ahead.
Catherine glanced back at her, opened her mouth, then thought better of it. She turned and started walking. "Come on, we're wasting daylight. The rest of the way should be easy compared to what we just went through."