The path is safe so long as its sanctity is never broken.
But something had broken it, Kindred saw, at least enough to leave cracks in the barrier between path and Forest. The light from the lantern bearers snaked curling fingers in toward the path, and Kindred moved carefully. A few lantern bearers had even put hands and fingers through, reaching out from the darkness of the trees, reaching for Kindred.
The world shook again, and Kindred saw the cracks in the barrier light up for a brief moment, brought into sharp relief by the tremor.
Whatever was happening with the battle above, whatever magical attacks Cantrev’s forces were launching against the Once-City, it was beginning to break things down.
Kindred ran as fast as she was able, dodging around intruding sprays of light and the reach of claws rimed in silvers and whites coruscating in the darkness.
Kindred ran past faces familiar and strange to her, through the miasma of their voices, cloying and pleading and grinning, all of them whispering the same words, inviting her in to see, to know. Inviting her precisely as she hoped to be invited and for precisely the right reason.
“Go,” she said to herself, voice hoarse as she puffed for air and strained for more speed. “Go, dammit.”
Along the path they wound, and Kindred knew it was only Little Wing’s bare existence over the last several span that was allowing her to stay ahead. The Little Wing with a half-decent meal in her stomach, the Little Wing who hadn’t had to bear the horrors of a solo journey back across the Roughs before turning around and coming back—that Little Wing would long since have caught and killed Kindred.
Kindred ran.
No plan formed in her mind as she dodged lantern bearers and stuck to the increasingly narrow path. Only a vague idea, something unclear and intuitive.
“I go to lose myself,” she whispered to the Forest, thinking back to the last time she’d seen her grandmother here, the last sorrowful look the Marchess had given her before fading back into the darkness. “I’m coming, Grandmother. I just need your help first.”
Kindred rounded a curve and there she was.
Other lantern bearers had gone wild with the tumult and tremors, raging against the failing barrier like animals, but the Marchess was serenity and calm embodied. She did not blaze with reckless light like the others, and she did not press herself to the barrier.
She stood in darkness and watched Kindred approach.
Kindred, for her part, slowed her steps, thinking it was because she intended it and wondering if it was because her muscles and lungs were giving up. Before her, the Marchess smiled and nodded.
“I go to lose myself,” Kindred whispered, and so, too, did the Marchess, echoing Kindred’s words.
Behind her, Little Wing closed the distance, and Kindred could hear the impending victory in Little Wing’s gasps, the surety that this was it.
And it was.
Kindred neared the Marchess, and Little Wing closed behind, and the Marchess watched all of it, serene and implacable.
“Now,” the Marchess said, her voice floating out from eternity, and Kindred didn’t know if she jumped before the Marchess spoke or if she jumped because the Marchess spoke. But she jumped, leaping into the darkness, taking the leap she had meant to so many days before in her prison cell.
She leapt toward her grandmother, or the thing that looked and spoke like her grandmother, and she leapt toward a darker, deeper forever.
A buzz of light and pressure passed over her skin as she moved through the barrier, and then she was free, flying or falling through darkness, out and away from the path, toward the Marchess, who opened her arms and somehow caught Kindred.
In the weightlessness of that jump, Kindred saw the shape of this place, caught a glimpse of its form. It was not a forest, not truly, not simply another level in the Once-City. The trees were not trees but great lengths of plants, bigger and stronger and wilder than anything Kindred had ever seen, growing up from somewhere, somewhen else. Any illusion that this was merely a flat space being crowded by an impossible army of trees was shattered. The Once-City had been invaded by the Sea, had been reclaimed by the true wilderness of the prairie, which longed to correct the mistakes of those who lived there. This was not a room in a house holding monsters; it was a doorway through which another world, a truer world, was creeping through.
Despite the surety she’d felt only a moment before, Kindred winced and closed her eyes, knowing she had misjudged, knowing she had only been fooled by a particularly clever lantern bearer.
But the strike never came, and no claws cut into her body.
She opened her eyes to find the Marchess looking down at her, the Marchess’s smile kind and sad and somehow far away.
“Oh, child,” the Marchess said, her voice pure melody and music, a voice that gave purpose to song. “So brave. And so foolish.”
Kindred looked past the Marchess, above—for she had fallen, down into darkness removed from the path—to where Little Wing stood on the edge of the path.
But Little Wing no longer hungered for Kindred. Instead, she stood at the break in the barrier that Kindred had created, face to face with her own lantern bearer, a figure of cutting contrasts between dark and light. Her lantern bearer’s body shone with pinpricks like stars and then rippled as if playing host to a night that had never known light. She was a storm of opposites, and she stood before Little Wing, nodding and speaking words Kindred could not hear.
Tears coursed down Little Wing’s cheeks, and Kindred saw a smile on her face. It was a smile not for callous victory or bitter defeat, but a smile of pure, childlike joy, the smile of one who knows herself and rejoices in that knowledge.
Kindred felt tears on her own face as she saw Little Wing laugh, just for herself and the lantern bearer, and it was enough to wash away the strain and pain in Little Wing’s face, the trials she had endured, all of it. She laughed and reclaimed some part of herself that had been missing, had perhaps never been there at all.
The lantern bearer didn’t attack, and Kindred was surprised to see other lantern bearers holding back, as if they didn’t dare invade such a solemn and important moment.
“We long only for harmony,” the Marchess whispered, as if she knew Kindred’s thoughts, could read her frustration in the tension of her shoulders, the catch of her breath. “We are agents of the deep, come to wreak peace, come to sow order.”
Kindred shook her head, confusion and exhaustion slowing her thoughts.
“But the bearers are so . . . monstrous,” she said, waving her hand at a group of them lingering off in the darkness, their ghostly smiles etched in flickering lights, their clawed hands cutting air.
“For those who live in a monstrous world and call it home, any creature of order is a monster,” the Marchess said, smiling down at Kindred. “The bearers, all of us, are only reflections, child. Shadows of the whole, desires and fears and hopes and power and weakness—all of it made manifest in shadow and light. For the woman who hopes to grow big and strong enough to protect those around her, a bearer taller than the trees. For the child wishing to see his parents one day, a two-voiced, two-faced bearer capable of showing the child’s greatest fears and desires.