Not every gathering contract is a lovely afternoon of spitting flowers. Some of them try, with real commitment, to eat you.
[Contract: Harvest Ironcap mushrooms from the Sunk Hollow.]Reward: 5 silver.]Note: low ground. Mind the water.]
The Sunk Hollow was a drowned patch of old forest, dead trees standing black and bare in still black water, and clinging to the rotting trunks just above the waterline grew the Ironcaps — fat, grey, ugly, and precious, because Ironcap dust was what the frontier smiths worked into leather and mail to harden it against claws. We waded in knee-deep and got to work, prying caps loose in the green underwater light.
I felt it before any of the others could have. My Beast Sense, which out here was usually a warm blur of distant life, suddenly rang — one enormous presence, close, below, rising from the mud under our feet where it had been waiting, patient and cold and vast.
"OUT," I said, already grabbing for Lila. "Out of the water, now, something's under—"
The Sunk Hollow's keeper rose in a wall of black water and older air: a bog-serpent, thick around as a wine-barrel, its jaws unhinging into a pink cave lined with hooked teeth. And it came for Lila first, because she was smallest and slowest in the sucking mud, still half-turned toward the sound of my voice.
Vera moved before I did. Before any of us did. She threw herself sideways through the water and shoved Lila clear — and took the serpent's whipping coil full across her ribs in Lila's place.
The impact slammed through the Pact and into me a single heartbeat later — and I doubled over in the black water, gasping, my own ribs screaming with a pain that wasn't mine, that had never touched my skin, that my body insisted on feeling anyway. The echo. The dampened, ghost-blow echo of what she'd just taken. I wasn't hurt. Not a mark on me. And I could barely breathe for the shape of her pain wearing my body like a borrowed coat.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
What happens to one, I thought, folding over the water, happens to all. I understood, then, in a way no System box could have taught me, exactly why Vera and Bruno threw themselves in front of the rest of us without hesitating — because they knew we'd feel it either way, so they'd rather it be their bodies and our echoes than the reverse.
We killed the thing. Bruno's blade found the base of its skull; Lila poured fire straight down its open throat from a foot away; I hauled Vera bodily out of the water by her collar while the coils thrashed and stilled. But Vera came up out of the Sunk Hollow grey-faced and wrong, three ribs cracked, her breath coming in shallow sips — and for two days after, I felt the ghost of every one of those breaths as a knife under my own arm, the echo refusing to fade, a constant dampened reminder of what the bond meant.
That night, fevered and stubborn and refusing to lie still, she let something slip. In her pack, wrapped tight in oilcloth, was the rest of it — not the single burned page she'd fed to the ritual, but the whole stolen sheaf it had come from. Older than the page. Denser. Every margin crawling with the same symbols we'd found carved into the bedrock under Odo's cellar.
"I've been reading it," she admitted, when she caught me looking. "Every night since Ashlow. Trying to understand what I actually did. What I actually reached into the dark and pulled out." She winced as she breathed. "And Adrian — I don't think the ritual grabbed the nearest warm body and called it close enough. The more of this I read, the more I think it chose. Reached across whole worlds and chose you, specifically, on purpose, for a reason I can't read yet." Her eyes found mine in the dark. "And I still don't know if that's the best thing that ever happened, or the worst."
[Rank E: progress 31%.][Open thread: the Second Scroll.]
"Rest," I told her, because I had nothing better and nothing truer. "Your ribs first. Cosmic destiny second."
She was already asleep. I sat up the rest of the night, my own phantom ribs aching in time with hers, and watched the cabin door until dawn.