Page 63 of The Teras Trials

Intense, radiant light. Through my eyelids, I see a flash of white, and when I open them I’m still somehow struck by a dazzling afterimage. The harpy drops, panicked. I see it blinking, head convulsing as it twists, trying to shake itself out of its blindness.

Fred rushes in. She drives against the bird, slamming the pole across its head. It squawks weakly as something bodily snaps. Blood oozes from part of the skull where it’s matted and red. Still, the thing tries to fly away. Once it flies, we’ll have lost it—so I jump onto it. My arms wrap around it. I feel muscle rolling beneath feathers, oil-slick with blood and gore and grease. The teras twitches and spasms, screaming at me, a torrent of Latin and gibberish and pained cries I don’t quite catch. Its chin is wet, half caved in. The talons scrabble up to my arms and my belly. The harpy tries to gut me. Instant, white-hot pain scorches through me. I howl and writhe with it, hands losing purchase, sliding down to grip the ankles and wrench its claws away from me. My stomach is slick with wet and heat, and my head is buzzing—I don’t know if I am gutted, I don’t know if I will look down and be my brother, propped up against a tree, intestines in my hands. Fred puts the pole around the harpy’s neck and chokes it. Then Leo comes, cocks the gun, and shoots the harpy in the head.

It goes slack sluggishly, as if it is desperate to hold on. I watch as life filters out through the tiny hole in its skull, a slow crawl of blood and gore seeping free. I watch its eyes. Our heads are so close together, I can’t help but see when the life leaks out of them, until it is empty and dead, and nothing more than a foul-smelling corpse. Then, almost immediately, the air is lighter, the tension gone. But it’s a deceit of my body. Spots crowd my vision until everything I see is a star scape. Cold douses my limbs and seconds later I am freezing, shivering. Shock, some part of my brain informs me soberly. You’re going into shock. And on the back of those words, I feel pain for the first time; sharp, stinging fire. With shaking hands, I pull my vest away from my body. It’s torn to shreds and bloody. My shirt beneath it is the same. My belly, too. A gouge divides my navel. Other desperate scratches line me.

“God,” I whisper, and then I am on the ground.

Here it gets foggy. I have only impressions; of the greenhouse in a blur, foliage and flowers an ill-defined bloom of colour. Someone yells my name, then several someones, then hands are on me—everyone is so warm, I could go to sleep in their arms—but then I am shaking.

My mind starts to come undone. I fancy it is my soul, unpicking itself from the flesh, hoping to fly through the greenhouse and out, up into the dreary English sky. I think of Corinthians, and Paul, and the second coming of Jesus, and the transformation of this mortal flesh into a glorified body. When I might taunt death.

Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

But then the sharp, hissing pain flares along my stomach and I think: the sting is right fucking here. Death is a moment and a state, a finality. It is the state of dying—the long drawn-out act of it—that is definitively worse.

“You’re not dying,” someone—Leo?—tells me. God, am I speaking aloud? Am I rambling?

“I’m in shock.” I know I say that one out loud, because Leo agrees with me, and a different kind of burn blazes in my belly at his agreement. He swims into view, face soft and indistinct in my fuzzy gaze. But I can still tell he is beautiful. I reach up and manage to graze the side of his cheek with my finger, before he moves it away. Swats me away like a fly. I think.

I hear only snippets.

“Do. . . the harpy?”

“I’ll carry it. The dean might release another, for the other groups. And him?”

“Shock, I think. Only, I don’t. . .”

Sound flits around me, too quick to catch.

“Close your eyes,” Leo whispers. Someone starts humming. I don’t know if it’s me. It feels familiar, as old as my body, so I start humming too. A song comes to mind, a little lullaby my mother wrote. Dactylic hexameter, like the epics.

Somnum cape, parvule, sub tegmine alarum Dei

Protector est, et semper te custodit in pace

Et tenebras immanes, quas daemones parant

Lumine suo, Deus exsuperat et vincit omne malum

Sleep, little one, under the wings of God,

He is the Protector, and always keeps you in peace

And the immense darkness, which demons prepare

With His light, God surpasses and conquers all evil.

19

LESSON NINETEEN

I dream that my insides are turning black and thick like tar, as if rot has taken hold of me and eats at everything good in my body from the inside out. I dream that when I die and they cut me open, no blood will spill. Only putrefied organs will leak from my skin. And my heart will be swollen and black, and that’s the thing that kills me in the end. Not the decaying of the rest of my body, but the size of my heart—so large it can never be held by anyone.

I wake covered in sweat, half tangled in a white bedsheet. White light half-blinds me—it’s morning; sunlight glaring through grey clouds in that gaslight way. I try to sit up—and searing pain floods along my stomach, forcing me to collapse onto the pillows. My gut burns. I have been stripped of my bloody vest and shirt and wrapped in bandages. A bit of brownish blood has stained them. Experimenting, I press on my stomach—and regret it. God.

I writhe like that for what seems like an hour, hating that I’m awake, cursing myself for not shooting that fucking harpy right away.

“A Healer came to see you.”

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