With the same terrible, unnatural quickness, the shadow-touched forest detritus cobbled itself together, knitting a body out of ruin. Old bones tugged free of the forest floor, some animal, some human, some too strange-shaped to be either, all corrupted with threads of shadow that seeped up from the roots of the sinking tree.
This was it, Red knew, in the quiet part of her mind that seemed to float above her fear. Here was the shadowed monster from the fairy tale, facing off against a man changed by a forest. It was real, all of it was real.
When the chaotic roiling of bones and darkness and growing things stopped, a woman stood in its place.
Her hair was long and dark, her eyes an acidic emerald. She smiled, and mushrooms sprouted between her teeth. “You think this time will be any different?” The voice sounded nothing like a human. It was deep and somehow creeping, oscillating in the air, the lowest string plucked on an untuned harp. “This story has played out over and over again. It’s such fun watching from below, but it always comes to the same conclusion. You aren’t strong enough, Wolf-pup. Just like your father.”
Eammon bent half double, his seeping hand pressed against his battered ribs, the other brandishing the still-bloody dagger toward the creature. His breath rattled in and out of his lungs, his teeth glinting in the unchanging twilight.
The forest-and-shadow woman moved the blade aside with an almost-gentle finger, careful not to touch his blood. Lichen grew from her nailbeds. “It gets harder and harder to hold on to yourself, doesn’t it? The magic crowds you out, so you open a vein instead. But you can’t bleed enough to hold it off forever. Can’t bleed enough to keep the Shadowlands closed, can’t bleed enough to keep everything trapped.” The thing turned its eyes toward Red, soil dripping like tears down moss-scabbed cheeks. “This ends in roots and bones. For all of you. It always ends in roots and bones.”
Suddenly the specter of the girl changed. In an instant, she was prostrate on the ground, the terrible pieces that made her hidden away. Instead she looked like a corpse, the regular corpse of a young woman.
Red recognized her, though it took a moment. She’d seen the portrait in one of the books in the library.
Merra.
A blink, and Merra’s stomach ripped, the sound visceral enough to make Red’s gorge rise. Tree roots spilled from the hole, flowing out of the bloody cavity in a mess of gore.
Merra’s corpse stayed still a moment. Then it let loose a sound that could’ve been a cackle or a scream, standing again, hands outstretched toward Eammon in a posture of near-surrender. Skin decayed into forest; moss ate at fingers formed of wrong bones.
It shook Eammon loose from whatever horror had held him frozen. Mouth twisted, he lurched forward, swiping at the creature not with the dagger but with his bleeding hand. The girl-shaped thing laughed again, a thin, reedy sound this time, and crumbled apart at his blow. Eammon turned and rushed toward the tree, running over raised roots like stones in a river, dagger slicing into his palm anew.
But the creature wasn’t gone, not yet— like as long as the breach remained open, it could regenerate itself. It melted out of Merra’s shape, churning its bones and leaves to make amalgamations of more faces, half forming and falling away. One feminine, heart-shaped, sweetness turned to terrible. Another narrow-chinned and full-lipped. A woman with Eammon’s amber eyes, a man with his angular jaw.
“Why even try?” The thing turned to watch Eammon, making sure he saw every facet of its changing face. “A forest in your bones, a graveyard beneath your feet. There are no heroes here.”
Eammon snarled, teeth bared as his palm wept the same too-dark, green-threaded blood Red had seen when he took her wound in the library. He slapped his hand against the tree trunk, pressed until blood seeped between his fingers, dripped down his knuckles. The tree was half sunken now, the branches nearly scraping the top of his head.
Slowly, the rot receded, fading down the tree and back into its roots, like Eammon’s blood was something it had to escape, then out of the roots and back into the ground. The sinking reversed as the rot disappeared, the tree righting itself by incremental degrees. Eammon bled and bled, his eyes closing, knees beginning to buckle.
The creature twitched, melting as the tree regrew, features running back into forest and shadow. “You know what happens to heroes, Wolf-pup?” The thing reared back, no longer trying at human shapes, just a lick of darkness studded in bones and twigs. “They die.”
Eammon’s eyes opened as the creature surged forward. He turned and slammed into it with his bleeding palm.