Then shapes began to coalesce, the tattered and translucent gray of ghost ship sails, all around the pumpkin fiend. A keening whine emanated from them, building into an eldritch wail.
I realized that Talia was deliberately thinning the veil all around her—turning the patch into more of an in-between place like the Witch Woods, sliding it closer to her own domain.
As more and more phantoms appeared, circling the pumpkin fiend in a sinister swarm, it became clear that Talia couldn’t just talk to ghosts, but also command them. They swooped and darted around the pumpkin fiend like rabid bats, until it had no attention to spare for anything beyond their blitz attacks. And insubstantial as they looked, the shades were clearly far from harmless; I could see gouges appearing in the fiend’s bright orange skin, scrapes and ragged pits where the shades were taking whole chunks out of it.
Talia was whipping up their rage, turning them into poltergeists.
When the fiend began to howl in pain, Talia took advantage of its distraction. She spun herself into a woolly black cloud of ectoplasm, rose into the air, and began hurtling toward the apple orchard like a meteor. I’d had no idea she could move that fast; with a spurt of hope, rising awe, and an （uncool） hint of proprietary pride, I realized that she must be even stronger than I’d thought.
Which was good, because a glance at the apple orchard confirmed that time was rapidly running out for her and Rowan.
Gareth had made impressive headway against Evil Johnny Appleseed （the pun center of my brain kept insisting that the thing should really be called an Apple Corps） by aiming transmutation spells at its various grafted limbs. He’d even managed to turn one of its arms into a slab of solid stone that it couldn’t really lift; it was listing heavily to the right, dragging the dead weight around as it struggled to fend him off. They were almost all the way to the other end of the orchard, where the Gauntlet token twinkled from just behind the monster’s trunk, only a few feet away from Gareth’s reach.
To his left, Rowan was still struggling with the sunflower giantess. Though he’d made it more than halfway across the field, she was tearing through his snares almost as quickly as he conjured them—while strafing him with a stream of sunflower seeds, forcing him to constantly expend energy shielding himself.
“Rowan!” Talia shrieked at him as she streaked by overhead. “You don’t have time to fuck around! Go, go, GO!”
With a grim nod, he fell to one knee, a hand flung out to keep his bindweed shield erected while he clenched the other into a fist, drawing it down toward his chest.
The twilit sky darkened deeper just above the field, clotting into a maelstrom of whirring wings. A patchwork flock of birds, pigeons and swallows and ospreys and ravens, gathered overhead like a shrilling cyclone—then descended on the giantess in a pecking, cawing mass. But even as Talia plummeted toward the apple orchard, it was already too late.
With a massive burst of power that leached his face dead white, sweat slicking back his hair, Gareth called down a lightning storm.
The entire apple orchard filled with flickers of jagged light, like a million flashbulbs going off at once. I hissed in pain, shading my eyes as the glare threatened to scorch my enhanced Arbiter’s vision into a burning haze. But I could still see well enough to spot the bolt of lightning that struck Evil Johnny Appleseed right down its center, cleaving it into two charred logs that toppled over to either side.
Just as Talia landed behind him with one knee to the floor, Gareth leapt over the split wood to snag the Gauntlet token out of the air. The light melted into his hands, enveloping his entire silhouette with a golden glow—and the words of acknowledgment fought their way out of my mouth.
“Second victory goes to House Blackmoore!”
21
This Will Always Be the Place
So that was a cluster,” Talia said into her arms.
The four of us were at the Shamrock Cauldron for an impromptu pity party the Monday after the challenge. Talia was downing drinks with grim efficiency, at a rate impressive even for her. Yet even facedown on the bar with her head pillowed on her forearms, she didn’t seem to be getting much drunker, as if her misery was somehow absorbing all that alcohol like a hollow limb. Compared to her, Rowan, Linden, and I were taking it relatively easy—though once he gathered that our collective funk was Gareth related, Morty had made sure to keep all our glasses full.
“You really tried, though,” Linden attempted, taking a stab at comforting. “Seriously, you both damn near crushed it. That’s gotta be worth something.”