The words and music caressed Kindred, warming away the chill she had experienced upon seeing herself. The song told the story of the gods and goddesses who created the Forever Sea, of their triumphs and falls; it was an epic of great sadness and even greater joy, loves lost and found across time.
The bearer had begun walking beside Kindred, little more than an arm’s length away, and though the lantern showed nothing of the inky ground between them, Kindred saw the way to herself clearly.
She wondered, not so idly, if this smiling Kindred standing in the wood, lighting her own way in the darkness, might know the path she might take in her own life. She thought of her grandmother, also lost somewhere in the dark, and wondered if this bearer might know where she was, might give Kindred the secret of the Sea, of walking out into the green and black, of walking away into the Sea.
And as if the bearer could hear Kindred’s thoughts, she smiled and nodded, gesturing with her lantern, inviting Kindred to follow, to follow and to know. In her smile, Kindred saw self-knowledge, a lantern in the dark.
Kindred reached a hand toward the darkness, and the lantern bearer reached too, her backlit, fiery smile growing, consuming her face, still Kindred’s smile but now predatory, and Kindred grew cold as she reached, grew unsure, grew afraid.
“No!” came a shout from farther down the path, and then a body collided with Kindred’s, knocking her down to the path hard enough to dizzy and shock her, hard enough to slam her teeth together with a definitive click.
In the near-total darkness, Yllstra lay on Kindred, her face kissing-distance away, her eyes furious, her breath heavy.
“What did I say? I said don’t stray from the path. I said eyes on me. I said pay no attention to the lantern bearers.”
Yllstra pushed herself up and then pulled Kindred to her feet. Yllstra’s profile was cut from the darkness by the lantern bearer’s light, though the bearer no longer bore the easy smile and inviting eyes Kindred had seen before.
It had transformed, its smile stretched beyond its face, pulling past cheeks, blurring into darkness at the edges, lips framing teeth that snagged and curled against and around one another, teeth for biting and ripping. The bearer’s eyes slid down her face, one oozing down and over her now-scarred, now-torn nose, the other dripping off her face and out into the blackness.
“You walk off the path, and that’s it for the rest of us,” Yllstra said, pulling her blades out again. They had begun to glow a sullen red in the darkness, as if on fire themselves, and the lantern bearer shied away from their light. “The path is safe so long as its sanctity isn’t broken. Imagine a barrier separating the Path from the Forest—every arm or leg or body that goes through it weakens the barrier.”
In the darkness of the Forest, Yllstra peered more closely at Kindred, calming enough to really see her.
“You’re a new citizen, right?”
“Yes.”
“And this is your first time in the Forest?”
Kindred couldn’t focus on Yllstra—her lantern bearer continued to shift and change in the darkness, a wraith of weird light.
“Yes.”
Yllstra moved to stand in front of Kindred, blocking her sightline to the bearer.
“You’re not scared at all, are you?”
“What?” The lantern bearer was a nebulous outline of light behind Yllstra.
“These lantern bearers call at us. They offer sweet words and promises to trick us into stepping off the path. But once you refuse, they reveal themselves to be the monsters they really are.” Yllstra stepped closer. “And most people are so damn terrified when they witness it that they run back screaming. Even citizens who were born here. Even citizens who have walked these paths before.
“But you’re not scared at all.”
Kindred frowned. That couldn’t be right. It was almost completely dark, and she stood on a narrow path carved through a ghost forest below the surface of the Forever Sea—a forest that swam with the lights of . . . something. Of course she was scared.
Wasn’t she?
“I’m just surprised,” Kindred said, not making eye contact with Yllstra.
But the other woman was shaking her head, half-smiling.
“No, you’re not. Some people aren’t like the rest. Some people don’t see dark and feel terror. Some people—some of us—see dark and feel curious. Some of us see dark and feel free.”
I go to lose myself in it, a voice whispered in Kindred’s head, and that was exactly it: a feeling that had moved through her for so long, instilled perhaps by the Marchess. Or, more truthfully, called forth by her. The joy in looking out over the prairie—that same expanse so many around her saw as a plane to be crossed or a field to be harvested—and seeing a wilderness that held and hid wonders beyond the simple-angled grasp of people.
The prairie was a mystery, and unlike those who refused to truly see it, or who through might or magic wished to break its mystery to their will, Kindred found she longed only to feel the wonder, the sameness of whatever moved in her also moving among and below the Sea.
Free, Yllstra had said.
And yes, she was free.
“Let’s go, citizen. It’s time to move,” Yllstra said, though without the same gruffness as before.
Kindred moved.
“What are they?” Kindred asked as they walked, lights approaching from all sides now, even dimpling the darkness above and below.
“Ghosts,” Yllstra said. “The ones we carry with us, the memories that hold sway over our hearts. Not as they truly were or are in life but as you remember them, as you imagine them. Don’t ask me how a bunch of trees know what’s in your heart, because I don’t know. No one even really knows how these trees are here in the first place. This level used to just be the Healing Glade. And then the trees started appearing, pushing further and further in. And then lights began moving in the darkness.”
As they walked, other lantern bearers came to Kindred, to invite and plead and entice her. They appeared as her crew: Stone-Gwen, her body rippling with flames, her lantern a pit of blackness even darker than the shadows of the forest, her smile plain and quiet, her song only the sounds of her easy breathing. Captain Caraway, smiling that same backlit grin, her hair sparking and crackling over with energy, lighting building and roaming in the clouds of her wild mane, her eye unveiled and pale, bulbous, hungry.
“My own suspicion,” Yllstra continued, ignoring the lantern bearers, “is that it’s the Sea itself, like the siren stories of old, trying to conjure beautiful and terrifying bits from inside your own head to pull you down to the deeps.”
Kindred nearly laughed at that—she knew those “siren stories of old,” had heard them as a child. But this was not a place for laughter, and so she kept quiet.