Page 197 of Mud

“Find them and end their suffering, for the brightest colors in the world await the worthy victor,” he said. “We wish you the best of luck, players. Iris is with you.”

The light disappeared just as fast as it had appeared, and Taland and I didn’t move or blink or even breathe for a good moment after.

Then he looked back at me and I saw just how scared he was.

For the first time since we met in this game, Taland was actually scared.

“We’re screwed,” I whispered because something told me that this was going to be fuckingpainful—possibly the most painful challenge of all.

Then I felt it.

The pull was there, right there below my breasts, in my gut, deep inside me, into my bones. It took my breath away and I choked, thinking someone had maybe stabbed me from behind. Thinking maybe someone had put magic on me or something because the feeling made no sense.

But Taland choked on thin air, too, and when our eyes met, we both knew.

It was exactly as the hologram guy said—our bonded animals were calling us, and I could have sworn I heard the vulcera’s cries in my head.

Taland could hear those of his bonded eagle, too, I was sure.

“Sweetness,” he whispered because we knew we needed to follow that pull.

“Run. I’ll meet you when we find them,” I promisedhim.

The next moment, we were both running.

Taland was faster than me, though he tried to slow down as much as he could because we were running in the same direction. I couldn’t tell youwhichdirection that was because it all looked the exact same to my eyes, but we were running, and the rubber soles of my boots held wonderfully. I didn’t slip, and neither did Taland, and the movement warmed me up in no time.

The vulcera’s face, her moss green, wide eyes were in the center of my mind, and I couldn’t tell you how I knew which direction to go, but I did. My feet knew the way, and luckily, so far, Taland was right next to me.

A while later, what could have been ten minutes or thirty or even an hour, the view began to change.

A massive structure was in the distance, something that looked like a frozen mountain. More players around us, running as well, and one had stopped near one of those large ice shards that rose from the ground. He’d stopped and was on his knees in front of something that was…bleeding.

My foot almost slipped. There was blood on the ice-covered ground in front of his knees, and on a creature with dark fur. I couldn’t see what it was, but it was an animal, all right. A familiar.

And the man kneeling in front of it was shaking. Sobbing—out loud.

The thought that I was going to find the vulcera bleeding all over the ice made me move twice as fast. Made me want to set this entire place on fire and burn it to a crisp. I was close, so close I could feel it, and the more we ran, the bigger those ice shards became. Some were even shaped likeC’s, and more animals were near them, like that ice was there to shield them.

The animals were all motionless, like they were already dead.

No, no, no, no…

Taland turned to look at me when we were close to the mountain—which wasn’t a mountain at all. My goddess, it was an ice statue of an actual roc with large wings half spread, an enormous beak, and talons on its feet that were bigger than my entire body as it rested on an ice cube the size of a three- or four-story building.

No wonder I’d mistaken it for a mountain—it was gigantic. It would make Madame Weaver look like a normal sized spider in comparison, and it was surrounded by a different kind of ice—bluer.

That’s because there was a lake underneath it.

Fuck, they’d created an exact replica of the Valley of the Roc from stories and history books.

“I’ll find you!”

The voice pulled me out of my trance, and I looked to the side to see that Taland was running farther and farther away from me. Still in the same general direction, but we were already at least fifty feet apart because the pull in my gut was leading me west, while he moved more to the north by the mile.

“I’ll find you!” I called back to Taland because right now it didn’t matter that we would be separated. What mattered was that we found our familiars before our guts exploded right out of us—because they would.

Then I saw her.

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