Chapter Six: An Unexpected Departure | Part 2
Rhea hugged her arms across her chest and looked very much like she was digging her fingernails into her own skin. At long last, she took a deep, rattling breath that hitched in her throat. “He taught us how to get into his mind in an emergency, remember?” she said thickly. “We should at least try.”
Benn gave a stiff nod. Thirtyx stood awkwardly as they settled, cross-legged, on the floor. He typically felt useless when they went into full sorcery mode, but this brand of uselessness caused a near-physical ache. If they had been the ones attacked, Thirtyx wasn’t sure he’d remember how to breathe, much less cast an intricate, otherworldly spell.
And yet, both twins were currently tracing golden sigils on the rug with their fingertips.
“I’ll guard the door,” Thirtyx muttered at last. Maneuvering the desk chair under the handle drew his attention away from the unsettling effect of Pfah magic, and while it wouldn’t stop any would-be intruder worth their salt, it would give him enough warning to devise a way to hide them.
By the time he was pleased with his barricade, Benn and Rhea had formed a sort of cross on the floor—four tangential circles in two perpendicular figure-eights, each with a myriad of complex etchings inside. They reached across the sigil to take each other’s hands, but not before Benn brushed a finger across his nose.
Thirtyx felt a strange, baffled sense of honor at being allowed—invited—to witness what they would see inside Grimmary’s mind. Guilt twisted his gut. Someone like him shouldn’t be allowed in there. Not since— since—
He needed to get his thoughts under control before they sensed his discomfort and tried to stretch the boundaries of the chat line to find out why.
But the twins had bigger concerns. They bowed their heads and closed their eyes, and for a moment, the room was dark. Then, the sigil on the floor flared to life, and crescents of gold illuminated the junctions where his friends’ eyes closed.
The whirlwind of colors and sounds and emotions that assaulted Thirtyx’s brain was so powerfully disorienting that it made him nauseous. He braced his back against the door frame and slid to the floor before the vertigo planted him there without his consent. He slammed his eyes shut to focus all his awareness on this weird metaphysical journey, but almost immediately thereafter, the chaos gave way to darkness.
The fear radiating from his friends’ minds indicated that they hadn’t expected to find darkness.
Their mental shouting of Grimmary’s name was pure anguish, but it was short lived, interrupted by the strange sensation of a hand taking Thirtyx’s left—but not really. It was like the touch equivalent of watching a film, a skin-to-skin contact filtered from Grimmary’s mind through Benn’s mind and into his own.
A gruff voice echoed through the same layers of mental insulation. “He’s okay, michae. He’s just resting for now.”
Rhea and Benn’s unfiltered emotions changed to relief, comfort, and hope. They both pictured a wizened devil—purplish skin and dark eyes framed by a gray beard that blended neatly into his mop of hair, nearly obscuring his stubby horns. The portrait was accompanied by the name Tyren. The twins often spoke fondly of one of Grimmary’s closest advisers, but Thirtyx had never met him, mentally or otherwise.
“I figured you’d be checking in,” Tyren continued. “I offered to stand guard so I could speak freely when you did. Anyway, he’s going to be alright. Larafie confined the bloodfire before it spread too far. Now, she and Aranna are putting together some kind of poultice to draw it out. Last I checked, they’re pretty sure they can save his leg. But it’ll be painful, so when he passed out, they let him stay that way.”
Fear. Outrage. Anguish. Thirtyx’s breath hitched as he braced himself against his friends’ emotions. He became abruptly aware of his own legs—like something was searching and examining them. A searing pain made him recoil before he realized it wasn’t his pain.
A distant moan. A vague restlessness. The disorienting miasma of colors and sounds swirled again, but briefly and without the same vigor as before. The phantom pressure on Thirtyx’s hand increased. “Now, now. He’s going to have enough agony when he wakes up,” Tyren said softly. “I know you want to explore the injury for yourselves, but please… leave him this blessed moment of oblivion. I assure you, everyone here is doing everything they can to keep him safe and comfortable.”
Calley Jones 