He did not know how long he had been running, only that stopping felt like dying, and dying felt very close. Each breath came ragged and wet, tearing itself free of his chest as though it, too, wanted to escape. The ground beneath his feet shuddered. He stumbled, caught himself on nothing in particular, and kept moving.

The growl that followed him was not loud. It did not need to be. It was the kind of sound that lived in the chest cavity, that pressed against the ribs from the inside out. It was the sound of something vast deciding, with great patience, that it was done waiting.

“I’m scared,” the boy shouted, though there was no one close enough to help him and he knew it. His hands curled into fists at his sides, trembling. He shouted it anyway, because some part of him needed the words to exist outside his own head.

“Don’t worry, we’re okay!” A girl’s voice, somewhere to his left. Then her hand, reaching through the dark toward him. “Come on, over here!”

He turned toward her. He almost made it.

The roar that split the air next was not a growl. It was something older and louder than that, the kind of sound that does not travel through the air so much as replace it entirely.

The girl yelped, a short sharp sound she immediately seemed embarrassed to have made.

“Oh no.” The boy’s eyes went wide. “They made it over here.”

Then, cutting through the chaos like a blade through smoke, a voice came from above.

“Get away from there!”

Something small and furious dropped between them and the dark. The boy caught a glimpse of bat-like wings, a glowing pom pom bobbing with the motion of landing, a tiny dagger already drawn and already bloody. The clash of that small blade against whatever lay hidden in the shadow was, somehow, the bravest sound he had ever heard.

A second figure landed beside the first: tall, sinuous, his scales catching no light because there was no light to catch. He moved the way water moves when it has somewhere to be. His sword was thin and elegant, and he held it the way people hold things they have held for a very long time.

“I won’t let you lay a hand on them,” he said, and her voice was low, steady, and carried in it something that did not sound entirely like a promise. It sounded more like a warning to himself.

The shadow struck. It had no shape that the boy’s eyes could agree on, shifting and refolding as it moved, and what it did next it did quickly. The winged creature took the blow full in the chest and went tumbling, landing hard somewhere to the right.

“Ugh.” A pause. The sound of something struggling back to its feet. “Why, I oughta...!”

The scaled creature exhaled through his teeth, a low sound coiled at the back of the throat. He lifted his blade and held his ground.

“Gwaar.”

The girl, the one who had reached for him, stepped forward before the boy could stop her. She placed herself between the fighters and the children, and her voice, when it came, was something the boy had not heard from her before. Not the voice she used when she was frightened. Not the one she used when she was pretending not to be.

“No more,” she said. “I won’t let you harm these children any more than you already have.”

She turned, and when she looked at her allies her eyes were urgent and very clear.

“If we can just get to that place...” Her gaze moved to the distortion hanging in the air behind them, a wound in the world that pulsed with light the color of something almost forgotten. “If we can just reach it...”

The fog came before any of them could move.

It did not roll in the way fog is supposed to. It arrived, sudden and total, swallowing sound and shape and distance in the space of a breath. The boy spun in place.

“Sister?” His voice came out smaller than he intended. “Ah, Sister?!”

“I’m okay.” Her voice, still close. Still steady. “Go. Head for that light.”

He heard her before he saw it: the small, involuntary sound she made when something hit her. Not a scream. Worse than a scream.

“Run, Zayn.” Her voice was tight now, wound around something she was not saying. “Get out of here.”

“No way.” Zayn shook his head, though she could not see him. “No way, no way, no way. I’m not leaving you. If I’m not with you, I…”

“What are you doing?!” Real fear in her voice now, the kind that isn’t for yourself. “Go, Zayn. Hurry!”

The ground shook again, deeper this time, a tremor that came up through the soles of his feet and settled behind his teeth.

From somewhere inside the fog, the snake girl’s voice came, fraying at the edges.

“It is not good. I cannot hold them any longer.”

“Look out!”

He heard her footsteps. He did not have time to understand what was happening before her hands were on his shoulders, and then he was moving, not running but falling forward, aimed at the light.

“What the…?!” The distortion took hold of him immediately, a pull that was not wind but felt like all the wind that had ever existed concentrated into a single direction. “It’s sucking me in!”

The winged creature’s voice came through the fog, cracked and furious, gritted out through what sounded like considerable pain.

“Unngh... If anything happened to you, I’d...!”

Through the light, through the pull, through everything, the boy found his sister’s face. The fog had thinned just enough. She was looking at him the way people look when they are trying to memorize something.

“You have to get back safe,” she said. The words came out carefully, as though she had chosen each one. “On your own. Somehow. At least you...”

She did not finish.

The second distortion opened beneath her feet without warning, and the hands that came out of it were made of dark matter, not flesh, not shadow, but something that had decided to be shaped like hands for the sole purpose of this moment. They curled around her legs and they did not let go.

Her face changed. Every controlled thing in it came undone at once.

“Aaaaaaaah!”

“Layla!”

The word tore itself out of him, raw at the edges, ragged in the middle. He reached back, arm outstretched, fingers spread, as though distance were a problem that could be solved by wanting hard enough.

It could not.

The portal closed around him the way water closes around a stone. Complete. Final. Without drama.

In the moment before the world went white, he made her a promise. He did not know if she heard it.

“Wait for me,” Zayn said, to the place where she had been. “I’ll rescue you, Layla. No matter what.”

Then there was only light.

And then there was nothing.

And then, somewhere else entirely, someone else’s story was about to begin.

✿✿✿✿✿