Chapter Twenty-three

“God?” I asked, my gaze jumping from Raysh to Alder.

Alder stood stock still, the mana radiating from him like the smoke off a bonfire.

Raysh turned his head to me. “Yes. God. What did you think the guardians were? Merely powerful spirits? What are all-powerful spirits if not gods?”

My skin grew cold to the point of numbness. I thought of the deer spirit who could make earthquakes, the turtle spirit who kept the rivers and brooks chilled, and the hawk spirit who created the blue smoke of the Blue Ridges.

Of course. If there were nature spirits, why couldn’t there be nature gods? Especially ones that were powerful enough to affect the physical world.

If I understood it right, Raysh was calling Alder a god as well. My gaze slid over to him and almost everything about him made sense now. He wasn’t just a conduit for the mana to flow into the physical world. He was the human embodiment of the valley.

It was why he could use all the elements, why he could give mana to humans, and why his mana contained the essences of the Smokies.

“You’re a god,” I whispered, brushing the back of my hand against my lips—lips he’d just kissed.

Alder closed his eyes, his chest rising and falling in one giant sigh, as if he was resigned to this moment. The moment where I found out the truth and rejected him.

Or hated him.

Or got angry at him for not telling me.

I waited for those emotions to come, but they didn’t. I waited to feel rage or even disappointment at his lie by omission, but all I kept seeing was his face as he admitted to me that he’d been lonely.

It made sense now. His reactions and worries to things I hadn’t quite understood. He’d thought his god status would drive me away. He’d thought I’d be scared of him.

But I wasn’t.

If anything, the only thing I felt was an indescribable sadness as I realized that the barrier between us grew taller and thicker. Dating a spirit had felt impossible enough. But a god? It was unfathomable.

I shoved all the feelings away, locking them up until I had time to take them out and examine them. To truly process the fact that I might, just might, be falling for a god.

“So, wait, what did you mean when you said he had condemned me?” I asked, feeling like my brain was trudging through quickly drying cement.

“The fire gate and its god are not like the others,” Raysh said. “It is pure energy and therefore the mana has no physical connection to the physical plane. So it requires an anchor.”

“What kind of anchor?” I asked, the scars on my lower back beginning to throb strangely. Meanwhile, Alder had backed against a tree, his wide eyes staring at the ground.

“All of the other gods can exist in the ethereal plane, a plane that is still bound to the physical world. Think of how they affect the physical world. It means they’re connected to it, but the fire god exists only in the astral plane. Tethered to nothing and no one. So the god takes a human soul tied to the valley—a human who possesses the heart and soul of these mountains.” The fox paused and tilted its head, green eyes holding mine. “In other words, a little girl who befriended a nature god.”

At that, Alder winced. “I can’t…I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t. If you had, you would’ve stayed away from all humans. You would’ve never shared your mana with one of them. Why do you think we needed you to infuse the keys with your mana? The girl”—Raysh nodded toward me—“is the fire gate’s anchor. Or at least, she was supposed to be.”

My mother. Nausea threatened to overtake me, and I drew a shaking hand to my mouth.

“You couldn’t know or else the fire god would’ve never possessed its anchor,” Raysh continued, as if he hadn’t just dropped a Titanic’s worth of guilt on me. “And without the fire god tied to the valley, without all four elements, the ethereal plane would cease to exist here.”

I remembered what Alder had said before. “Do you think if I’d known all this, that I would’ve let any of this happen to you?”

Alder hated that it was his relationship with me that had caused a spirit to come after me to begin with, but now he was struggling with the knowledge that the legend he’d so despised had actually come to pass when he’d tried so hard to prevent it.

Raysh jumped from the rock he’d sat upon. “Well, regardless what spirit, or god for that matter, is after you, we still need to open those gates and get your mother back, and we are running out of time.”

“Hold on,” Alder said, coming out of his shock. “If we get her mother back, the fire god will still want an anchor. They will try to take Briony in her place.” Alder looked at me, his jaw tight and his eyes full of worry. “It’ll be too easy for them to take you, Brye. Think of all the visions you’ve had. The nightmares of fire. It’s the gate. It was the fire god who marked you, and when they did, they established some kind of spiritual connection. The gate has been calling to you this whole time.”

Chills danced over my skin and wound down my spine. He was right. Every fire vision I’d had, every face in the flames I’d seen, it was the fire god calling to me.

They might hold my mother for their anchor, but their mark was still on me.

Raysh made a tsk noise. “And so you would just leave your mother there? After she’d sacrificed years there for you?”

Ever since I’d found out she’d gone to protect me, to save me from whatever spirit had been after me, I’d tried not to focus too much on what that meant. On what it meant that her spirit was trapped in this astral plane with nothing but a terrifying fire god to slowly consume her…

I shivered, my whole body seizing and shaking. Nausea made my gut churn and my knees wobble. Dropping down to the grass, I buried my fingers into the green blades warmed by sunlight.

Was this the fate I was walking into? An eternity spent in an astral prison?

It’s the fate Mom had accepted, and I wouldn’t condemn her to it a moment longer. It’s not like I wanted to spend one hundred years in some spirit cage, but the idea of leaving her there… I couldn’t live with myself if I turned my back now.

“Raysh is right.”

“Hell no,” Alder growled, taking a step away from the tree, fists clenched.

“Alder, I need you to open the air gate,” I said as calmly as I could, standing and pulling out the feather from my pocket.

He shook his head. “No, Briony. I told you I wouldn’t let anything take you away—god or spirit.”

“Alder, I’m saving my mom. Tell me you wouldn’t do the exact same.”

Alder looked from me to the feather, his gaze hard and concentrated, as if he was thinking through his options.

He seemed to have come to some conclusion, because without a word, he wrapped an arm around my waist and took the feather from my hand. One spirit wind tunnel later, we were back in the physical world in a meadow of wildflowers. It reminded me of the meadow in which I’d seen my mother’s projection. Where she’d told me to save her. If she’d known that I would have to take her place, would she have told me to open the gates and free her? Somehow I doubted it very much.

The light evening breeze rustled through the tall meadow grass, blowing the blossoms of the wildflowers in its direction. Alder’s arm brushed mine, and I looked down at his hands that cupped the key. They were trembling just slightly. Placing my hands over his, I squeezed them, as if to reassure him.

This was my decision.

He closed his eyes and silver light spread from his fingertips, ending in a vibrant flash.

When he opened his hands, a few dandelion seeds had taken the place of the feather. A simple breeze pulled them into the air, and they were carried away, becoming one with the wind.

It was already late in the evening and the wisps were beginning to come out, which meant we had only this night to find the fire gate and open it. As the dandelion seeds disappeared, the wisps around us changed color, becoming silver. Silver like the mana of air.

“Alder—look!” I pulled at his shirt, pointing to the wisps as they changed color, and then suddenly their lights fell out of sync, no longer illuminating simultaneously, but each breaking apart and exploding into a silver cloud of mana, blowing and swirling into the air.

Moving it. Influencing it.

Turning it into a wind storm that ripped through Firefly Valley.

Alder threw himself over me as gales swept like comets streaking through the valley. With one arm wrapped tightly around my waist, he buried his other into the ground beside me. I imagined him holding onto the tree’s roots, gripping them tightly as branches broke off and flew over our heads. Meadow grass flattened, and shredded plants and flowers and splinters of wood soared through the air, caught in the tempest that we’d unleashed.

…

With the air gate now open, Alder took us back into the ethereal plane. Raysh was already there, waiting on us.

“It’s the wisps,” I murmured, still in awe of what I’d just seen, how they had taken on the mana of the air gate and created the squalls. Had that been what happened with the landslide and the rain storm? Had the wisps initiated the opening of each gate? I supposed it made the most sense. Alder had explained to me once that the wisps were evidence of spiritual planes in this valley.

In the clearing, after the winds had calmed down, I’d been able to see that there were fewer wisps around. I had to assume it was because their mana had been used up to open the gate—their glow transforming into silvery mana that dissolved into the air.

It had been strange to not have the wisps there at night. Without the glow of the fireflies, it no longer felt like the same place. The special place where spirits dwelled. I’d grown accustomed to their presence. They were a part of the valley just like its trees.

“Indeed.” Raysh was lying on the rock, his head on his paws lazily.

Now that it was dark, I really was panicking now. We had so little time before the solstice began. “Let’s get moving, Raysh. One more gate to open, right?”

“Oh, our job is done here.”

Alder and I exchanged a confused look.

The fox rolled his eyes. “Fine. Here is your final lesson. As I’ve said, the fire gate is not like the others. It might need an anchor to the valley, but it has no key. Rather, the key is not protected by the fire god, because it needs no protection.”

“Raysh, spit it out,” I snapped.

He finally lifted his head off his paws, showing a row of white teeth. “Do you still not get it? Humans are so ignorant. I’ve an idea to help you learn. How about a riddle?”

Something was off about Raysh. He’d been irritating and snooty since I met him, but this attitude now felt mockingly cruel. My stomach clenched tight as the fox stood on the rock he’d been lying on and swished his tail. “I open the gate every morning, and every night I lock it.”

Time seemed to slow to a snail’s crawl as I put two and two together, like that final clue in a crossword puzzle.

“The sun?”

An amused laugh floated up from Raysh. “Yes, it’s what makes life in this valley possible, after all. The rising sun will mark the beginning of the solstice, and, incidentally, unlock the fourth and final gate. Convenient, isn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe my job as your emissary is officially done. Give my regards to your mother.”

Before Alder or I could say another word, Raysh hopped off the rock and began to trot away. Just as I was beginning to process this information, the relief that I had knowing I was no longer under any time limit to find a fourth key, a now familiar growl echoed through the grove.

I jerked around to see Ashka emerge from the underbrush and tackle Raysh, claws out and fangs bared.

The two animals rolled across the grass, snarls and yips and growls cutting through the silence of the ethereal forest. My instinct was to save Raysh, but when I started forward, Alder threw out an arm to stop me.

“Look,” he whispered.

For a minute, I was confused, but then I saw sparks of mana fly from the fox’s body. As the spirits fought, Raysh’s mana surged upward in a column of gold astral energy, engulfing the fox in a bright inferno made entirely of mana. His body began to morph, growing even larger, taking on the size and muscles of a raging bull, while his tail swept the ground, brushing the leaves and growth and making green mana scatter into the wind.

The cougar jumped backward, spitting and hissing, away from the monstrous fox that now stood before us.

“You’ve doomed us, Raysh,” Ashka snarled, whiskers quivering while her fangs seemed to grow in size before my eyes. The cougar’s body grew, too, not as big or as powerful as Raysh’s, but more the size of a tiger.

“Stay out of this, Ashka.”

Ashka glared at Alder and me, yellow eyes flashing. “And you two, are you even aware of what you’ve done? What you’ve condemned your world to as well?”

In that moment of distraction, Raysh slashed out, drawing his claws down the arm of the cougar, leaving a fresh red gash. Ashka let out a roar and shrank backward, wounded.

Alder dropped to his knee and touched the earth. At once, roots burst from the ground, wrapping themselves around Raysh’s arms and legs, and neck and torso, pulling him to the ground. Being in the ethereal plane meant he was no longer just a translucent spirit in the way that he was in the physical plane. He could be caught.

“We need one final lesson,” Alder’s voice boomed through the trees. “What is Ashka talking about?”

Raysh only snarled and snapped and pulled at the roots that bound him.

Ashka limped back, licking the bleeding wound on her arm. “The barriers, you fools,” the cougar said. “Now that the gates are unlocked, the barriers between worlds on the solstice won’t just become thin, they will be nonexistent. All three worlds will become one.”

“No, no, no,” I breathed, a terrible, freezing sensation seizing my whole body. “No, Raysh said that the gates were like dams. The energy just evens out.”

“And what happens first when dams break?” Ashka snarled. “It floods.”