Her soft palm gently rubs my cheek, and then she drops her touch away and looks past me to her son. She nods at him, and he nods back to her like they’re communicating in their own silent language. Then he murmurs, “I know.”
I glance between them, and this time, my eyes do start to well up, because I think I just got approval from Slade’s mother. I didn’t even realize just how much I needed that until this moment.
When we leave, I walk out first so that Slade and Elore can say their goodbyes in private. After he comes out a few moments later, I reach down and grip his hand, and he grips mine right back.
Then, hand in hand, we walk to the rip in the world.
CHAPTER 43
AUREN
The rip seems to draw me forward just like before.
Light and dark congeals at the center, and a mimicry of stars glitter within its clouded depths. We stand before it, and even despite the cold of the cave, there is the faintest stream of warmth hinting from an unfelt breeze.
I walk closer to it, only stopping when Slade’s hand comes down to my arm. “It has a very strong draw,” I say.
“It’s Annwyn. The two of us will always feel that call to home. But no one has come through since we arrived here—which I think must mean that this is the only side that has an entry point anymore or that the magic is too unstable. It’s dangerous. Which is why I had to dissuade some of the people not to try to go back through it.”
“You said it nearly killed one person who tried to go back.”
He nods. “The rip was even more unstable then, but it could also have to do with them being Orean. I dissuaded anyone else from trying.”
“Why would they even want to go back?” I ask curiously. “I thought they hated it there?”
“They did, to a point. But they’d been in Annwyn for hundreds of years. It had become familiar to them. Adjusting to Orea was not easy, especially since knowing they could never leave this remote, difficult place. Knowing that all their loved ones would’ve long since passed. For some of them, loved ones were left behind with my father.”
With the guilt I hear in his voice, sadness gnaws at me like the brittle teeth on an infected creature, chewing a hole right in my chest.
“Why are we here?”
Instead of answering directly, he instead says, “We’d been here in Orea for several weeks when the rip started to fail.”
My eyes snap to him.
“The noise…it was like a thunderstorm churning up an angry sea, and the wind was right there with it. It woke everybody up. I could tell right away that the magic was collapsing.”
I immediately think of all the villagers, of the implications of what would happen if the rip did fail.
“What did you do?”
“Shoved so much magic at it that I passed out,” he says with a dry chuckle.
“Great Divine.”
He runs a hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah. At first, nothing was happening. I was just rotting everything out. Thousands of beetles dropped from the ceiling, their husks raining down on us. The blue fluorescence blinked out—I think we were even in danger of the whole damn mountain caving in on us. And still, nothing was helping. But then I figured out it wasn’t rot power it needed. It was that raw, indefinite power that my father and I had somehow made together when we clashed. I was able to channel that same force and feed it into the rip. It nearly drained me to death, but it worked, and it stabilized the rip. It’s something I’ve had to do ever since.”
My mind whirs. “You’re saying you’ve had to feed raw power into this rip all this time so that it doesn’t close?”
Slade nods, and I just stand there completely dumbfounded. “I didn’t even know fae could do that.”
“Neither did I,” he says with a humorless laugh. “And I can’t use that power for anything else. I have enough rot power to take out all of Orea, and I need to expel it. It would be nice if that’s what the rip needed, but it’s not. My rot magic has no effect whatsoever. Too bad, because expelling rot can be invigorating, while expelling raw power is always exhausting.”
“So…you have to come out here to Deadwell to expel your rot power, but then you also have to feed raw magic into the rip?”
He tilts his head. “Yes.”
“How often do you have to do this?”
“Depending on how much power I can feed into it, the longest I can leave it is about eight weeks.”
I stare at him with awe. Not only is this male unparalleled with his rot power and his overall extent of control, but he has to drain himself every two months to sustain a rip between worlds. “Wow. You are…really, really powerful.”