Neve obeyed.
He spun again, one hand held toward the rat-creature, the other pointed at the wall. A net of thorns fell over the rats, their myriad voices shrieking in harmony with the crash of stone as another thorny blast of power broke through the piled rocks. Neve crouched, covered her head as stones rained down around them, as light speared through the dark. The knotted rats’ shrieking intensified, like the light hurt their eyes.
Neve ran forward, squinting; Solmir followed. There wasn’t far to go—the cave opened out onto a gray cliff over a rocky beach. Beyond it, a stretch of flat, black water, as far as she could see.
Behind them, the rat-thing screamed, high and shivering and awful, ducking its many heads back into the shadows as the light seared across it. The thorns of Solmir’s magic slowly sank into the lesser beast’s mud-mottled flesh, making it twitch and shrink. Plumes of rogue power rolled off the bristling legs, the matted fur.
Grimacing, Solmir raised his hand again.
The magic seeped into him as the rat-creature died, growing smaller and smaller as the thorns he’d thrown over it tightened. The gibbering of the shadows it let loose was quiet, quickly silenced when Solmir took them in. Still, he sank to his knees as the magic kept coming, the hand that wasn’t gathering power from the air braced on the ground, his chest heaving. He closed his eyes; Neve couldn’t see what color they were.
Besides, the slow click of chiton, the twitching of what she’d thought were stones set into the sides of the cliff, was somewhat more distracting.
The last of the magic drained into Solmir as the cliff side—not stone, but a massive wing—fluttered, sending a gust of foul-smelling breeze to stir Neve’s hair. Her hand fell to Solmir’s shoulder, squeezed.
She echoed his demand from earlier. “You might want to move.”
A rush of wind, the smell of it enough to make her gag, and the children of the Roach launched themselves from the cliff face next to the cave.
The rat-thing had, strangely, been easier for Neve’s mind to deal with. Fused together, too many legs and eyes and mouths, clearly a monster. But the children of the Roach looked, simply, like giant roaches, and something about that was far more terrifying.
“That’s enough to turn your stomach,” Solmir said, still in that too-deep, too-rough voice. Neve didn’t realize that she’d cowered on the ground and he’d stood until he braced his legs on either side of her body, hands lifted in the air. This close, she could feel the tremor in him, the vibration of something bearing so much weight it was near to collapse.
Neve didn’t watch, but she felt the impact in the atmosphere as Solmir’s thorns shackled the children of the Roach, a sick, low thrumming as their wings beat against the brambles. No thuds of massive bodies hitting the ground—they dissolved in midair, broken down to nothing but shadow.
Through it, Solmir’s breath came harsh, and she felt the legs pressed against her side tremble, harder and harder, so close to buckling.
When she reached out and closed her hand around his ankle—not to take magic, just to offer a reassurance, an anchoring—it felt like practicality. She still needed him, after all.
But the jolt that went through him, the look in his eyes when she raised her head, felt more like shock.
The last of the Roach’s children winnowed away into nothing in the air above them with a chittering screech that made her skin crawl. Then, finally, silence.
And she still had her hand around Solmir’s ankle.
Neve stood, flexing her fingers out and in as she awkwardly scrambled from beneath him. A slight rumble shuddered through the ground. The Shadowlands, slowly breaking apart, counting the time they had left.
He offered her his hand, wordlessly, veins still tracked in darkness and mud still clinging to his palm. She took it, let him pull her up. They stood there a moment, breathing hard, eyes locked.
She was the first to turn away, to look out from the cliff and over all that black water. The air wasn’t foul, not like it had been in the cave or when the Roach’s children flew overhead, but neither did it smell like salt. It was just empty. Nothingness. “I assume this is the Endless Sea?”
“You assume correctly.” Solmir propped a boot on a rock, vainly attempting to brush dried mud from his legs. “The Kingdom of the Leviathan.”
Neve glanced down at her mud-soaked nightgown, her dirt-streaked arms. “Would the Leviathan mind if I used its kingdom to wash off some of this mud before we go to the Heart Tree?”
“Probably,” Solmir said. He grasped the edge of his thorn-torn shirt and tugged it over his head, grimacing. “But the Leviathan is a selfish old bastard, so bathe away.”