Though I could see, by the determined cast of her jaw that I was coming to recognize, that she was going to do her damnedest to get there anyway.
Then the pumpkin patch began to stir.
Both the uncarved gourds and the bespelled fantasia of jack-o’-lanterns suddenly lifted off the ground, trailing vines. As if spun up by some fastidious tornado, they began to whirl slowly toward the center of the patch. Talia watched, slack-jawed with awe, as they rotated around one another like a solar system in miniature, before some invisible force sucked them in toward the center like a black hole.
Snapping them together into a shambling pumpkin monstrosity raining disturbed soil—a construct woven together with vines, topped by the same colossal sugar skull I’d noticed when I was last here with Lin.
The pumpkin gargantuan took two stumping steps forward, bending until it was face-to-face with Talia, sprite flames flickering in each of its ghastly hollow eyes. Then it issued a roar so bone-rattlingly loud it made me flinch even from my safe distance away.
In contrast, Talia endured the howling—so forceful it actually blew back her hair, and I could only imagine how pumpkin-monster breath might smell—with such a languid lack of affect that it was like gourd-based beasts got up in her face every other Tuesday. Then she held out a splayed hand and, like a squid shooting off ink, squirted a sticky mess of ectoplasm like a decaying spiderweb directly into its face.
The roar cut cleanly off, the beast swinging its blinded head from side to side. Talia wheeled around and took off toward the apple orchard—where Gareth was facing down what looked like a heinously ugly apple tree Ent.
The orchard had knit its own amalgam, a giant woven from warped trunk, bristling branch, and strategically placed clusters of fruit and leaves. Gnashing its serrated jaws, it lashed out at Gareth as he approached, snapping branches out at him like cracking whips. Gareth deflected a few blows with his vambraces—it made me grind my teeth to see those dumbshit things come in legitimately useful—and those he couldn’t fend off, he attacked with transmutation spells. Branches that should have struck him senseless turned to harmless wisps of steam, confetti, or what looked like bright ribbons of shredded silk.
Though I logically knew he wasn’t doing any of this for the sole purpose of annoying me, there was something inherently obnoxious about his display. Trust a Blackmoore to make a melee with Evil Johnny Appleseed look like a two-bit magic show, as if it took next to no power at all to manipulate molecules this way.
Meanwhile, Rowan was engaging in his own careful dance with a sunflower giantess.
The sunflowers Linden and I had picnicked beneath had braided themselves into a towering floral scarecrow, with, intriguingly, a feminine shape. Unlike the other two constructs, she was somehow almost pretty, with a spill of petaled yellow hair that flared around her like a corona, the green fronds and leaves that wove her body nipping in at the waist. Her eyes were huge, black, and compounded as a fly’s, made of the spiraling seeds that formed sunflower centers. Each time Rowan feinted in either direction, she twitched to block him, moving with an eerie shutter-clicking speed that felt like too many frames per second to fully process.
As I looked back to gauge Talia’s progress, Rowan had just begun conjuring crabgrass and giant foxtails from the ground to fling out like a weedy net, trying to trap her in place while he raced for the glowing token she guarded behind her back.
Back at the patch, Talia hadn’t had much success. Though she’d managed to mute its howling and blind the topmost head, the pumpkin fiend clearly had plenty of other eyes at its disposal. As she raced toward the apple orchard, it shot off vines like lassos, curling them around Talia’s ankles and yanking her feet out from under her. She fell hard, the kind of bone-crunching tumble only properly described as eating shit. My breath caught at how viciously her chin struck the ground, blood trickling from her lip where she’d bitten herself.
But then she lifted up on her forearms, giving her head a shake to clear it, sheer murder blazing up in her eyes. Teeth bared, she reached down to wrench off the vines; I couldn’t quite tell what spell she’d used, but from the way they fell off her like corn silk, she must have somehow turned her grip razor sharp.
Then she staggered up to her feet and stalked toward the pumpkin fiend like one of the Furies, actually growling under her breath.
It was, Gauntlet matters aside, almost intolerably hot to watch.
The fiend charged her like a frenzied bull, swinging its arms. But then the air around the pumpkin patch began to shimmer, going silvery and somehow thin. I could see the strain of intense focus carve Talia’s features even finer, her garnet blazing to crimson life as she lifted her hands and cupped them toward the sky. There was an abrupt shift to the air that felt strangely sepulchral; a cold breath blown over your shoulder in an empty crypt, a chilly finger drawn slowly down your spine.