A knot twisted in my stomach, disconcerted by her presence here, even if I didn’t know why.
In a few long strides, I caught up to her. She walked beside my thread in steady, even paces. She wore her red blindfold, the ribbon unusually long, fluttering behind her—a lone shock of color in a world of misty grey, except for— My attention fell to her bare feet, and the crimson, bloody footprints they left behind her.
The sense of looming dread rose.
What could this mean? That the Sightmother was in danger?
But before I could push the vision deeper, her head snapped toward me.
She didn’t speak. But her hands reached out, cupped together as if to pass something to me. I opened mine— —And gasped in pain.
Scalding liquid burned my skin. I tried to jerk my hands away, but the Sightmother grabbed them and forced my palms up—forced them open to receive the fresh, bubbling-hot blood.
And then, she was gone.
With a strangled cry, I lowered my hands to let the blood fall away, flecks of it splashing onto my feet. Weaver, it hurt, like even the remnants ate through my skin second by second.
A path through the mist opened before me. There were no intersections in the threads now. Only one path forward. Inevitability.
There was nothing more frightening than inevitability.
Stop, something inside me screamed. You don’t want to see.
But I had a task. I continued. The thread cut into the bottom of my feet. Drip, drip, drip, as the blood from my feet and the blood from my hands fell to the glass abyss below.
The mist faded.
The smell of salt filled my nostrils. The breeze was warm and pleasant. Somewhere distant, the wind rustled the leaves of vegetation. The ocean sang its rhythmic song against the shore.
Pleasant.
Foreboding.
I kept walking. Faster now.
The beach surrounded me. It was beautiful—the kind of place I would dream of as a child, when I thought the ocean was a mythical thing far away. It was nighttime, the sand bathed in silver. Dwellings dotted the shore, some wood with thatched roofs, some well-constructed tents. The tents were familiar. They were the same style as those I slept in every day, alongside Atrius’s army.
All were empty. No footprints in the sand, save for my own.
Hello? I called out.
No one answered.
Show me the settlement, I pushed the vision, even though every nerve in my body screamed, Get out of here, turn back, go away. This is wrong.
Now each step was a compulsion. My hands were in agony, the skin bubbling, the dripdripdrip of the blood faster than ever.
I broke into a run without meaning to, past more empty houses and empty tents, tall trees closing in around me.
And then I tripped.
Something hard jutting up from the ground sent me to my knees.
I pushed myself up and craned my neck to look behind me.
There, sticking up from the dirt, was a—was that a rock? It was black and textured, partially buried.
It’s a rock, I told myself.
You know it is not a rock, another voice whispered.
I crawled to it, head spinning.
You know this looks familiar, the voice jeered.
No.
I started digging. My hands were so bloody they slipped against the sand. My fingernails snapped. I kept going, clawing at handful after handful of dirt, praying to my god—praying to his god—that I was wrong.
I was so frantic that my fingernails, or what was left of them, had torn Atrius’s face by the time I revealed it, marring those too-hard, beautiful features with deep rivulets of red-black vampire blood.
No.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. This was no longer a Threadwalk. No longer a dream. Everything about this was real.
I grabbed Atrius’s exposed horn to pull him from the sand.
But his eyes remained wide open and sightless. Blood smeared his skin, red from my hands and black from the wounds I’d accidentally gouged.
“Atrius,” I choked out.
I dug more, pulled more, trying to get him out—
And then he came free.
Not all of him.
His head.
His throat had been severed, the cut messy and dripping. His hair was matted with blood. I let out a choked sound of horror, but I couldn’t let him go. Couldn’t look away.
Look, the voice whispered.
And I lifted my head. Forced myself to take in something other than Atrius’s head.
And then I realized it—that the town was not empty.
No, I had missed the many, many rocks, one every few feet, in the sand of the beach, in the gritty dirt of the trees, in the vegetation.
Rocks that were not rocks at all. Rocks that were actually pieces of shoulders, or heads, or hands, or legs.