Page 21 of What Blooms from Death

The restless, wandering souls of the dead.

They were a jarring sight, even though I’d expected to see them here.

Orin had warned that, given my innate magic, there was little chance of me being able to walk through this morbid landscape without causing some sort of disturbance. It was only a question ofhow muchandhowmanyI would disturb—and how dangerous that disruption might prove.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, determined not to get distracted. The amount of chaos my power and I could potentially wreak in this dead world was immeasurable. It was imperative that I chose one path to follow and followed it to the end.

But the souls continued to follow me down my chosen path, too.

Perhaps it was my magic inadvertently fueling them somehow, but they seemed more sentient than I would have expected. They slowed when I slowed. Turned when I turned. A few made movements on their own, too, sweeping wider and out of my line of sight—almost as if they were dividing and preparing to attack from all sides.

Phantom voiced my fears a moment later: (They’re trying to surround us, I think.)

I broke into a run.

Ahead, the terrain became messier, the mountains I’d been traveling alongside easing into my path, into foothills full of uneven ruts, path-blocking boulders, and jutting rock formations of all shapes and sizes. I set my eyes on two particularly large slabs of stone rising up in the distance, a narrow passage cutting between them. If we could get through that narrow gap, hopefully…

I didn’t think beyond this. I only ran faster. Just as I reached the opening to the gap, I caught a flash of swirling white energy diving toward me.

A terrible coldness wrapped around my ankles. Fingers slipped beneath my pant leg and clenched into my skin—not quite a solid touch, but enough to knock me off balance. I stumbled. Stayed on my feet. Kicked at the reaching fingers, gasping as my boot went through them. As an even deeper cold sank into my bones—

And thensomethingstruck the fiend that was attacking me, drawing a sound like howling wind from it as its hold on me slipped.

I was free.

I didn’t stop to try and make sense ofhow, or ofwhathad just happened—not until I was on the other end of the gap.

Phantom raced ahead of me, bolting out onto a sweeping expanse of dark, uneven, but mostly clear ground.

Breathing hard, I straightened and glanced over my shoulder. The sound of howling wind persisted. An odd energy funneled through the gap behind me. I risked a few steps back into that gap, just until I could see the opposite side again.

Nothing else was there—dead or otherwise—aside from the creature that had tried to attack me. It was shriveling up, turning to nothing more than wisps of smoke that occasionally curled into the vague shape of a human.

Disturbing—but harmless now, I thought.

An arrow lay on the ground beside it. One that seemed to have sucked the sentience out of the wandering soul and put it to rest, somehow. Whoever—orwhatever—had fired that magical arrow…had they been trying to help me escape?

“Thank you?” I called out, unsure of what else to say, and hoping good manners might coax my protector out of hiding.

I received no reply.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I climbed the rocks to my right until I came to a large, flat ledge that afforded a better view. I searched for several minutes, but…no sign of anything, spectral or otherwise.

Oh well.

I jumped down and continued on my way. And as I emerged on the other side, I quickly forgot about what I’d left behind, my attention grabbed instead by a grove of flowering white trees that had suddenly appeared in the distance.

“That grove wasn’t glowing so brightly before,” I whispered to Phantom as he raced back to my side. “Was it?”

He growled in response, the air around him darkening as he stalked forward. His body shifted as easily as it had in the world above, but arguably more impressively, now; rather than shadows tumbling chaotically about as they had in the past, watching him change here was like watching ink spill upon a page, only to arrange itself into the shape of a perfectly accurate drawing.

This time, the ink became the dragon shape he’d taken on the bridge—with the addition of wings. He flexed those leathery appendages but didn’t take flight; only pressed them back against his lean shape, streamlining his body, making it even faster.

I lost track of the blur he became as he hurtled into the trees.

Those trees reacted strangely as I stepped into their embrace, their white flowers blooming with sudden ferocity and expanding to their full diameter in the span of seconds—only to shrivel up in the next breath. Several of them burst as they withered and compressed to their most compact point, showering me with fragrant petals as they did.

Incrediblybright, fragrantpetals.

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