Fox and Fibber might have been fast asleep, but beyond the Elderwood – over Fool’s Leap, through a grove of nightcreaks and up past a rotten swamp – in the heart of the Bonelands, a harpy was very much awake.

Morg sat on a crumbling throne in the antechamber of a long-forgotten temple. Her new wings, built from a shadowspell that had taken nearly two thousand years to conjure in Everdark, after Casper Tock had destroyed her original pair, were folded by her sides. They had done what Morg had hoped they would: carry her from Everdark to Jungledrop. But that had been a long journey – she had crossed worlds to make it.

The harpy’s strength was now restored and you could see it in the black feathers that covered her body and glistened like oil, in her eyes, which burned yellow through the sockets of the phoenix skull she wore over her head, and in her talons that shone like polished bone. All this was thanks to Jungledrop’s thunderberries and the tears of the animals her Midnights brought her.

But Morg’s wings were paper-thin and ragged, like scraps of burnt paper. It would take more than berries and animal tears to restore them to their former glory. Her hopes rested on the Forever Fern renewing their power and, because a harpy’s wings hold her darkest magic, Morg vowed to stop at nothing until she found this fern.

Finding it, though, was proving harder than she had bargained for.

‘Bring me the girl and the boy who have come from the Faraway,’ the harpy spat. ‘I cannot risk them finding the Forever Fern before me.’

It wasn’t immediately clear who Morg was talking to. The ruined antechamber no longer had a roof, so the night’s darkness fell about it, filling every corner and covering the vines and weeds that grew over the flagstones.

But at Morg’s words a shape shifted in the shadows and a gravelly voice answered. ‘I will send more Midnights over Fool’s Leap to hunt for the children.’ There was a pause. ‘But, if you listen now, you might be able to hear from our latest arrival down in the crypt, an arrival who, I hope, might provide you with even more power.’

Beneath the flagstones, and the silence, the faintest sound could be heard: a rattling, clanking noise – that of two little fists shaking prison bars – and then sobbing as the child behind those bars begged again and again to be set free.

‘Your increase in strength has allowed the Midnights to break through the Lofty Husks’ protection charms and the ancient phoenix magic into Timbernook,’ the gravelly voice went on. ‘And now we have an Unmapper boy whose tears may possess even more magic than Jungledrop’s animals.’

Morg leant forward. ‘Bring me the child Unmapper’s tears. For if I am to kill the Faraway children and find the Forever Fern, then my wings must contain some dark magic before the fern restores them to their full power.’

The shape in the shadows shifted again and then it walked on two dark, furred legs out of the antechamber and down a flight of stone steps into the crypt. And when the giant ape – for that is what this creature was – came back up, minutes later, a small glass bottle tucked into its palm, Morg’s wings twitched.

She rose up on her talons, her wings outstretched, then she snatched the little bottle containing Iggy’s tears and swallowed the liquid in one greedy gulp. The harpy sat back in her throne and smiled darkly. She could feel the magic of the Unmapper coursing through her veins.

‘Bring me more Unmappers, Screech.’ Morg’s wings shimmered as they drank in Iggy’s magic. ‘Bring me more.’