Teagan lost all sense of time in this unending landscape. The stars were still bright and her mother’s voice still whispered, but she gritted her teeth and tried to forget about the dreams. Even the dust of crushed coranderis petals, usually a potent repellent to magic, wasn’t enough to completely mask her mother’s voice. Coranderis plants were hard to find, as past Wystirans had nearly driven them to extinction, intent on destroying the sole means of rendering their power useless. Many who followed the Goddess’s teachings of balance and sacrifice, of only using magic for good, saved the flowers and replanted them. They were carefully cultivated now by the High Council, and only those with special licenses like Maradin were allowed to have them and use them as they saw fit.
Teagan was grateful for the clearheadedness the petals allowed her. To distract herself from the allure of the starry sky, she recited the different areas of the Shadow Realm.
Past the Bone Way,
Where the dead rest hungry;
Through the Sky of Lost Dreams,
Where souls wander forevermore;
Down the River of Sorrow,
Where water drowns the mind;
Up the Desolate Mountain,
Where monsters roam the halls;
To the Deathly Palace,
Where the Shadow Princess waits within.
But underneath the recitation were more whispers. Teagan, world-renowned innovator, has created an invention so marvelous she’s being awarded the Inventors’ Guild Genius medal for it. Echoes of applause rang in her ears. Teagan has done it again! She’s found a way to bind moonlight to power engines. Other whispers sounded like Cress. Come home, darling, I’m waiting for you. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to ignore them.
She kept her head down as she walked, and she almost missed the shimmering mirage of a stone archway on the horizon. Teagan nearly wept with relief. She was almost out of water and her legs were aching, her feet sore, and her face burned in the heat. She’d prepared for the desert, but she’d underestimated how long it’d take to get out of here. She wondered if Cress had fared any better. How long had it taken her to get through the desert? Had she even gotten through it? What if Cress was wandering the sandy shores even now, laughing with a dream-Teagan and living her dream-life? She couldn’t think of that—she had to keep going and hold onto the hope that Cress was safe, wherever she was.
A voice to her right drew her attention. It was more solid than the whispers had been. Teagan paused for a moment and listened. The voice was high and cheerful, like a person speaking to a close friend. Teagan took a deep breath to brace herself before she chanced a glance over her shoulder. Someone else was wandering in the hot sands, talking to themselves. Could it be Cress? Had Teagan already caught up with her? She ran to the figure, but before she’d taken more than a couple of steps, she truly took them in, without her need to see her wife safe clouding her senses. Their clothing was different. It wasn’t Cress.
For a moment, she stopped, disappointment settling in her stomach. But Teagan knew what those dreams felt like, and she couldn’t very well leave this stranger in them. Teagan shouted at them, “Hey! Don’t listen to the dreams, they’re not real!” but they didn’t move or wake up.
Teagan knew it could mean trouble if she stepped off the path, if the stars got hold of her again. She’d only been able to survive so far because she hadn’t been able to let go of the very real pain of losing her mother. But she hadn’t been raised to turn away from someone in need, no matter how afraid for herself she might be. So Teagan stepped onto the sand and marched over to the person lost to the stars’ dreams.
The closer she got to them, the more she could make them out. They were definitely not a mirage. They wore a threadbare light blue shirt and black trousers spattered with holes. They were facing away from her, and she placed her hand on their shoulder, hoping to draw them out of their reverie. “Don’t listen to them, it’s not real,” she repeated. When they didn’t turn, Teagan went around front.
She reeled back in shock. The skin of their face was sunken in so far that it looked skeletal. The parts of their body that were exposed to the heat, that weren’t covered by tattered clothes, were shriveled and dry, and the eyes. Oh, the eyes! Teagan shuddered. They were wide open, but they’d been burned out long, long ago. This soul was already dead and gone, and Teagan could do nothing for them. She considered waking them; was it worth it? Would it make any difference, if she could? If she were in their shoes, she’d want to rest. She’d want peace. She’d want to be in the spirit realm with the Goddess.
According to Cress, magic couldn’t be used in this place: the Shadow Princess wouldn’t allow anyone to ease their journey in that way. But she could try to call this person’s spirit home to the Goddess’s realm; it was the least she could do. Teagan placed her hand a breadth away from the person’s forehead. “Traveler, you’ve been away from home for far too long. Your Goddess is waiting for you. Go to her and be free of this place.” As she said the words and moved her fingers down their face, their skin peeled and their bones crumbled. By the time she’d gotten to their toes, they were dust mixing with the gritty sand. It was a melancholic sight. She was hopeful they were with the Goddess now.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” she whispered. She felt sad about their death as she walked back to the brick road. They’d been so close to the end of the Sky. They’d almost made it.
She wouldn’t let that be her. She sped toward the arch. It bore the same elegant calligraphy as the other arches, but she didn’t stop to read it. She just wanted to be as far from this strange and alluring desert as possible.
She stepped through and stood in a silent forest. There was no birdcall, no cracking of twigs as animals rushed through, no rustling of leaves in the wind. A rotten smell hung in the air, and the trees looked sickly. Their leaves were wilting, their branches broken and trunks gnarled, a gray hue to them like they’d been poisoned. It was as if everything was dead in here. Teagan hurt, seeing it. She’d always been taught to respect nature, to give it the care and attention it deserved. To take care of plants and animals because they were all sacred to the Goddess. They all had their uses and importance. But this wasn’t like anything she’d seen back in Wystira.
She grew a little homesick as she walked along the new dirt path. Even dead, the forest felt familiar to her. It reminded her of Lefora and their little house on the edge of the wood. She put her cloak back on, as the air was cooler here than in the desert, thank the Goddess. Soon, the trees thinned and she could hear the rush of water. Her eyes widened as she came to a river. It wasn’t silent or stagnant, like the forest; it was bubbling with excitement and life.
A small wooden boat was moored along the rocky shoreline. Teagan stopped for a moment, mouth drying out at the sight of the clear blue water of the river. She was so thirsty. But she knew this place; it was the River of Sorrow. If you drank from it, you’d never stop feeling sadness. Never stop crying. It was a task meant to break even the strongest of humans who wandered into the Shadow Realm. Teagan looked around, hoping to find some other source of water that wasn’t part of the river, hoping to quench this thirst, but she knew it was futile. There had been no pools, no small creeks in the unnatural forest. The path led her right to the boat. Despite the thirst burning in her throat, she had no other choice but to continue.
Teagan wasn’t a fan of boats after the time she and Cress almost smashed into the rocky cove outside Lefora. The usually calm sea had suddenly shifted, a storm took them by surprise, and they’d nearly crashed. Still, Teagan straightened her shoulders and walked toward the boat. At least she could sit for a bit. Rest her bones. Prepare for the next step on the journey to the Shadow Princess’s Palace.
She untied the boat and jumped in, using the oar to push herself into the river’s current. It was slower than she’d anticipated, but it carried her along so consistently that after a while she could set the oar down and let it pull her along on its own. She took out Cress’s book to pass the time. She found the indexes where Cressidae had gone to the effort of noting every creature of the realm. There were the virampi with their sharp eyesight and even sharper sense of smell. They were night birds, and Teagan was worried. The sun was high in the sky now. Would they come out when it went down? They were mostly vultures; at least they only attacked if provoked.
There were also insects in this forest that would steal your soul’s light if you weren’t careful. Teagan looked at the illustration and shuddered; with those huge spikes on their backs, she could only imagine stealing her light wasn’t the only thing they did. She was grateful her time in the forest had been brief. If she kept to the river, she’d be safe from them. They didn’t like water.
Teagan’s heart skipped a beat when she turned the next page. She almost put the book down, but she needed to face it again. It was the grisleck; a terrifying horned animal with long teeth that were perfect for crunching people.
She knew, because that was the creature that sank its fangs into her arm. In tiny, neat handwriting, Cress wrote: Its venom is lethal. Teagan wished they hadn’t found that out in the way they had.
When emotions threatened to overwhelm her, she closed the book. The flow of the water was calming, but it just made her thirstier. She pulled her flask from her pack and cursed when she felt how little water was left. She drank the last of it, but it wasn’t enough. A part of her desperately wanted to scoop up a handful of river water, but Cress had thrice underlined in her notes that one mustn’t drink it.
She sighed and forced her gaze toward the horizon. A stretch of blue framed by the greenery of the forest on both sides, as far as she could see. She wondered where the river ended, and as she reached for the book again to find out, the boat hit an underwater rock. It tipped over perilously and threw her hard against the side. Stunned by the pain blooming across her ribs, Teagan could do nothing as the oar fell into the water and Cress’s notes with it. She watched in horror as the book slipped beneath the now choppy waves. All of Cress’s hard work, weeks of blood and sweat and tears, gone within an instant. But the oar was sinking fast too, and without it Teagan would be at the mercy of the river’s whims. She flung her upper body over the edge of the boat and stretched as far as she could to reach. Her fingertips just grazed the edge of the oar as the boat bucked again and her head plunged into the icy river. She screamed, inhaling water, panicking for a moment before breaking the surface. She scrabbled for the railing of the boat to pull her upper body out of the water. She fell back into the boat, breathing heavily, the oar clutched tightly in her wet hands.
But it was too late. She’d drunk from the River of Sorrow.