Page 57 of What Blooms from Death

I wanted to ask Thalia a thousand questions about that glow and all the areas around it. About the landscapes we were passing through. About her power—mypower—and the magic that shaped this realm and its ghosts and its walls and everything else…

The longer we walked, though, the more my attention kept being stolen by the groups of restless dead spirits that were pressing closer and closer.

They were following us; no less than a dozen drifted along on either side. They appeared as swirling blurs of grey fog in my peripheral vision, but they took on more definite shapes whenever curiosity got the better of me and I turned to stare at them in earnest. Each time I looked, they seemed more defined, like figures being carved out by a hidden hand, released from within slabs of grey.

They felt less dangerous now that I had a group of living beings surrounding me, but they were no less unnerving.

“You seem rattled,” Thalia commented, slowing to walk at my side.

“Every time I look, there seem to be more,” I said. “And they seem to grow clearer to me.”

“Clearer?”

“Their faces, especially.”

“…Interesting.”

“Is it?”

“They don’t often reveal their faces to people,” she said, frowning.

My heart skipped a beat as I made eye contact with one of the smaller ghosts. A child. Her body was pale, nearly translucent, and there was no color to the simple shift she wore, nor to theloose braid that swung to the middle of her back. Her eyes, though, were a bright and curious green.

I felt an immense sadness when I looked into them; a longing for something I couldn’t even name.

I moved closer to Thalia, fixing my gaze straight ahead.

“They’re merely shades,” she informed me, her eyes darting to the clusters on either side of us, lips moving silently. Counting them, I thought. “They won’t hurt us.”

“They seem less…well,deadthan I was expecting. More sentient than the ghosts one reads about in stories.” I hesitated, then added, “Shortly after I first arrived in this realm, one of them chased me and got a hand on me.”

Thalia gave me a long, searching look; I got the impression I’d said something wrong. Something foolish. Something one of our magical alignment should have known better than to say—though I couldn’t imagine what it had been; I was only telling the truth about what I’d experienced.

“They don’t see themselves as dead,” Thalia explained, her tone difficult to read. “But they don’t remember true life, either. They know only wandering. These are the lucky ones, I think; there are others who are more aware of the life they once lived, but still unable to truly grasp what it meant to bealive.They carry on in a state of neither true death nor true life, with only the vaguest impressions of memories to give them meaning—we refer to them aswraiths. We’ll encounter them on the path ahead; to get to where we’re ultimately headed requires passing through a city full of these creatures.”

“So that glow aheadisfrom a city?”

“Yes.” She visibly tensed. “Erebos. The City of Forgetting. The ones who dwell there are…well, complicated. And potentially more dangerous to us than the ghosts around us now.“

The green-eyed shade girl suddenly let out a high-pitched giggle and raced in front of me, her hand outstretched as if to tag mine and initiate a game of chase. When I didn’t reach back, her giggling turned to a sound more like a howling wind, and she disappeared in a swirl of grey mist and cold air.

The sorrow that had gripped me when I’d stared into her eyes was back. I stood half-frozen on the path for a moment, trying to catch my breath as the grief washed over and threatened to drown me.

“They’re drawn to your magic,” Thalia said. “We’ll continue to gather them toward us throughout our travels, I suspect.” With a grim smile, she muttered, “At least their glow gives us some extra light.”

I considered her explanation as I tried to settle my nerves. “Your magic draws them too, right?”

“Not as much.”

“But you’re just as powerful as me, if notmore, based on what you did to Elias back at that wall we passed through.”

She shook her head. “The shadows I controlled there were not from any magic I created. The energy already existed, put into place by much stronger magic-users than me a long time ago. I merely directed some of it by way of my staff. And I directed it poorly, in all honesty; the magic of our world grows less predictable—less manageable—by the day, it seems. I didn’t intend for that man to die.” She glanced over her shoulder at Aleksander and the others, lowering her voice as she said, “Not that it makes any difference to those left behind.”

I frowned as I, too, looked over our tense, wary group. She was right; no one in our company would be forgiving her—or truly trusting her—anytime soon. If not for my curiosity about magic and my desperate need for a more knowledgeable guide, I would have been nowhere near her myself.

We walked on in silence for a few minutes. She occasionally fidgeted with her staff, adjusting some of the gems along it, just as she’d done yesterday on the hilltop. She seemed troubled by our conversation—maybe by thoughts of Elias’s death?

I didn’t want to linger on that death, either, or try to make sense of the complicated feelings I had about it, so I redirected the conversation with one of the countless thoughts I had tumbling around in my head.

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