“Oh my gods,” I growled to no one in particular. “I am so going to punch her in the godsdamned tit the next time I see her.”
The only response I got was the calling of birds in the trees, the singing of crickets in the tall grass that swayed back and forth.
There was a large hill in front of me, rising up and out of the forest floor, trees having grown around it. I thought it’d be best to climb it to get above the canopy and hopefully see the lights of the City, or at least some town or village where I could go to find out exactly where she’d sent me. Maybe I was closer than I thought I was. I hoped that was the case. The Dark Woods were an expansive thing right in the heart of Verania. I don’t know that any human had actually ever reached the true middle, though many had claimed to. And with those claims came stories of Dark creatures that caused insanity if one but laid eyes upon them. Bullshit, probably, but compelling bullshit nonetheless. Maybe I could ask Dimitri the next time he tried to make me marry him.
The hill, though. I would get to the hill and find a way to get the hell out of here.
If I hurried, it had absolutely nothing to do with being in some unknown part of the Dark Woods in the middle of the night. I just wanted to go home.
The closer I got to the hill, the more the wind groaned through the trees.
The more gooseflesh prickled along my skin.
The more I had the uneasy feeling of being watched by something.
The air felt lightning-struck, like electricity crackling unseen.
Like magic was building.
From the ground rose pinpricks of light, green and gold and white, and it felt like mine, it felt like it belonged to me. The lights flitted around me, slow and heavy like cumbersome fireflies late in summer. I raised my hand to them, and they brushed along my fingers, warm and weighted.
But it was more than that. This was magic, purer than I’d ever felt before, and it wasn’t coming from just me. If it was my magic, it was reacting to something already there. If it wasn’t mine, I was reacting to it.
I looked back behind me to see the lights trailing after me. Each footstep I’d left in the soft earth was illuminated and flickering, the little lights landing upon them one by one.
I felt… safe, oddly enough.
Like nothing here could hurt me.
Like I had no reason to worry. These lights, whatever they were, wouldn’t allow any harm to come to me. I didn’t know how I knew that. I just did.
And so of course, that’s when the little lights began to tremble and dim.
The wind picked up until it sounded like it was growling through the trees, like the Dark Woods were a thing that was alive.
Except… that didn’t sound like the wind.
I turned back around.
For a long second, nothing happened.
Then the large hill in front of me moved up.
Then down.
Up and down. Up and down. Slowly and with great deliberation, like the very ground beneath my feet was taking in a lumbering breath and—
A chill crawled down my spine like ice.
“What is that?” I whispered as I took a step back.
Because the earth wasn’t breathing. No. That wasn’t possible.
But the gigantic thing in front of me was.
And now that I was closer, I could see it wasn’t a hill at all. What rose from the ground wasn’t made up entirely of dirt and grass and brush. There was growth upon it, as if it’d lain where it had for centuries and the forest had continued on around it. But through the vegetation there was something else, something mottled white.
Something scaled.