“Fritzichen!”
Dieter’s voice rings through my skull, but it’s…younger. It’s the Dieter from my memories, from my childhood, and as I waver to my feet, I blink, and the pool glade vanishes and is replaced with a different forest—
I’d know the trees around Birresborn anywhere.
Strong oaks and thin birches, their steady trunks cutting gray columns of shade against the burning sun.
My head rings with the wrongness of this place. I shouldn’t be here. I was—I was somewhere else. With someone else. I’m not—
It’s summer.
It’s summer, and I’m hiding by a fallen log, hands smashed to my mouth to stifle my giggles. Every quiver of my tiny body trudges up the scent of the forest floor beneath me—musty crushed mushrooms, earthy moss, damp dirt.
“Fritzichen!” my brother calls again.
He’ll never find me here. He always overlooks this rotting log. He’ll never—
A noise pierces the air. Like a scream, quick and jarring and high-pitched.
“Fritz—Fritzi! Come quickly!”
I’m on my feet in an instant, my airy, summer-light kirtle swaying around me, smeared with dirt stains, pockets stuffed with fragrant mint leaves from a plant I’d found a few paces away.
I spin in a circle, eyes stealing through the trees, the columns of shade and light, shade and light.
“Fritzi! Hurry!”
My body takes off like a shot, yanked toward him, I’m coming, Dieter, I’m—
I skid down the side of a hill, round a thick oak, and see my brother kneeling on the ground next to—to something.
My brain doesn’t see it at first. It’s a mound of dirt, bits of fuzzy mold.
Only that isn’t mold.
It’s fur.
It’s a cat. One of Mama’s cats. Something jagged has torn right down the side of her body, spilling dark blood across her orange fur.
I drop to my knees across from Dieter. “Oh, no. Oh no. It’s Kleines Mädchen! Mama will be so sad!”
The tiny cat’s stomach quakes still, lungs greedily dragging at a few last breaths. Her front paws twitch in futile kicks at the air.
“She’s alive!” I start to stand. “Mama can save her—”
Dieter grabs my wrist.
I’m grounded in this moment. In staring into my brother’s eyes.
Nothing else exists.
Just him. Those swirling, vicious blue pools that seize every spark of fire in my body and hold me captive as Mama’s newest kitten lets out a mournful howl between us.
“It’s too late for Kleines Mädchen, Fritzi,” Dieter tells me. And he grins.
“No, it’s not! Mama can—”
Dieter raises his other hand. He’s holding a knife.
Why does he have that? What’s he going to do?
I pull against his grip. “Dieter! Let me go! I have to tell Mama!”
“Mama, Mama,” Dieter singsongs. “Mama! Hm. I don’t think she can hear us.”
He lifts the knife over the kitten’s head.
And brings it down in a single, powerful swoop.
The blade crunches into the cat’s skull, bone popping, the dirt beneath sucking the knife in with a wet plop. But the noise that comes out of the kitten’s mouth, a warbling squawk—it palpitates in my ears, echoes on every heartbeat.
I scream. Dieter’s grip on me clamps tighter, his knuckles vividly white, the veins in his neck bulging.
He cuts his empty eyes up to me, grinning.
“I needed to lure you out, didn’t I, Fritzichen?” he says, teeth as white as his knuckles. “That’s all I needed to do. Lure you out. And now I’ve won our game.”
The Birresborn forest wavers, trembling at the edges of my vision, a vision quickly blurred by tears. I blink, blink, trying to clear my sight, but the fog of everything coalesces around me, and when I manage to see again, Dieter and I are standing.
Reality crashes through me, and I feel every bit of terror that the memory had repressed—it wasn’t real, just a memory; but it had been real, and we’re back in the pool glade in the Well now, I’m safe now—
Only Dieter isn’t here. He’s a dream still, a figment of memory.
He has to be.
My lungs ache from breathing so fast, that tight pinch in the back of my throat like I’ve been sobbing.
How did I forget that memory? But I feel it, deep in my mind, extracted from where I’d buried it under fear that hardened into scar tissue. Survival, denial, because he was my brother, he was my brother, and I loved him.
Dieter is in front of me now, somehow, holding his hand out to me. Beckoning. An apparition and a dream and—he isn’t real, this isn’t real—
The barrier is thinning. How many people has he killed to beat it back since we parted ways?
Does he even really need to do that to harness wild magic?
Does he realize how much we’ve all been lied to?
Distantly, I hear Otto shouting for me. I feel his hands on my arms, prying at me, but I’m staring at my brother, part of my brain still mired in memory and dreams.
Dieter beams, that smile I used to think was all confidence. Now, I see the holes in his facade, the madness he hides behind a veil of certainty.
“I will stop you,” I tell him, pushing the words against the sourness of my shaking disgust and horror. “I don’t want to save you. Not after everything you’ve done.”
His smile widens. He’s all teeth and twistedness, all horror and poise.
“You can’t be here,” I say, my voice rising. His silence is unnerving. “You can’t get past the Well’s barrier. Can you? Not entirely.”
I don’t know how to get out of this spell he’s pulled me into. I’m frozen there watching him, this echo of him, that cruel smile, those callous eyes.
Dieter’s smile bends, showing some of that cruelty unrestrained. “Oh, Fritzichen. You misunderstand. I don’t need to get in yet—I just need to get you out.”
My fear starts to crack, panic slithering up through me, and I try to buck backward, to Otto. I strain, pulling, but this spell has me, whatever he’s done. I stepped into it somehow, a snare, a rope tightening around my body and shackling me to him.
“Just like Kleines Mädchen,” he coos. “I only need to lure you to me.”
He snaps his hand shut.
I hear the crunch of the skull. The whimper of the cat.
I hear Otto screaming for me, frantic, one final claw of his fingers on my arm.
And then the whole world shatters into darkness.