Yann slammed down hard on dry grass. He wasn’t in the volcanic landscape anymore.

  The next minute, Eliska, Marine, Anríq, and the other Watchmen slammed down on the ground near him.

  He got onto his hands and knees to see if they were all right. As soon as he got into that position, his heart stopped when he saw the land caving in only a dozen yards away.

  The soil crumbled and dropped off into a bottomless void of Darkness and vapor in some Layer somewhere.

  The collapsing landscape inched closer right behind Eliska. She lay on the ground groaning and peeling herself out of the grass. The land fell away behind her where she couldn’t see it coming closer to her feet.

  “ELISKA!!” Yann yelled and dove for her, but not fast enough.

  The instability dropped out from underneath her and she started to plummet. She screamed out, clawed at the grass, and tried to pull herself back up, but she fell too fast.

  Before Yann could get there, Anríq dove for her. He happened to land just a few feet closer.

  He seized her by the wrist and hauled her onto solid ground. They both scrambled to get out of the way in time.

  The collapse didn’t stop coming. Nothing could stop it.

  It fell out from under Marine next. She went through the same process of screaming and trying to scuttle onto stable ground as the world dissolved underneath her.

  Yann threw himself toward the edge to grab her, but everything solid evaporated the instant he got there.

  He hurtled at her and caught her before they both plunged off into nothing. She screamed in his ear. “HOLD ON TO ME!!” he yelled back.

  He didn’t dare to look to see where they were or where they were going. They could be floating in the Layers forever if she didn’t get her magic back.

  He clamped his arms around her slender frame. She clung to him with all her might—and then they broke through some stretchy, rubbery barrier and hit the side of a hill.

  They both crashed onto grass again—cool, green grass this time.

  The rest of the Watch all tumbled down the same hill and sprawled on level ground at the bottom.

  Yvan sat up rubbing his head. “I really gotta find a way to stop doing that.”

  Marine pushed herself off of Yann. He had to concentrate to make himself loosen his hold on her.

  She pushed off his chest with one hand and propped herself on one elbow while she looked around. Then she looked straight down into his face from above.

  Her hair hung around her cheeks and those deep, dark eyes caught him in an unimaginable tide.

  She burst into the biggest, brightest, most angelic smile he’d ever seen. Her cheeks flushed and her skin glowed.

  “Thank you, Yann!” she gasped.

  He didn’t know what to say. He just wanted to lie here on his back and look up at her forever, but another groan distracted both of them.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  She sat up and so he did. The rest of the Watchmen picked themselves up. Anríq and Eliska sat next to each other fifteen feet away from Yann and Marine. Vidal leaned against the hillside holding his head.

  “Are you okay?” Yvan asked him.

  “No!” Vidal snarled. “My head is killing me.”

  “I’m not surprised after the way you got hit,” Omer told him. “It’s a miracle you’re conscious at all.”

  “What happened?” Vidal demanded. “I never saw it coming.”

  “We don’t know what happened,” Neils told him. “None of us saw what hit you.”

  Vidal looked up. “You must have.”

  “There was nothing there,” Neils replied. “You were running in to help Niyazi and the Watch Commander take care of Rien. The next minute, something hit you in the head and you fell over.”

  Vidal touched the bruise on the side of his face. “Damn! It hurts like hell.”

  “I’m telling you that was them!” Rien blurted out. His voice spiked to a shriek. “I’m telling you that was the Darklings I saw before! They were right there! They came after me! I’m telling the truth!”

  Everyone turned around to stare at him.

  He sat on the grass with the others, but he definitely recognized everyone now. He knew exactly where he was.

  Yvan turned to Anríq. “Do you have your magic back? Can you heal him?”

  “I don’t have my magic back,” Anríq murmured.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing else you can do for him?” Yvan persisted. “Anything at all?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” Anríq replied. “He’s whole. He’s just scared.”

  “How do you know he isn’t seeing things?” Yvan asked. “He could be out of his mind. Without your magic….”

  “He isn’t seeing things,” Marine interrupted in a tiny voice. “I’ve seen them, too.”

  Yvan spun around to stare at her, too. “You have?”

  Rien dove for her, grabbed her arm, and pawed at her hand. “Oh, thank you!” he practically sobbed. “I thought I was going crazy. You’ve seen them? You know what they are? Tell me you’ve seen them.”

  “You aren’t going crazy,” she murmured. “I saw them in nightmares and then we all saw them in that sheet of magic that just took us.”

  “I saw them, too,” Eliska murmured. “I had a nightmare about them that same night when Rien did.”

  “Are you sure they were the same kind?” Yann asked.

  She nodded down at the grass. “They had the same armor and the same mechanical joints. I’ve never seen that kind of Darkling anywhere else.”

  “Neither have I,” Marine replied. “I’ve never even heard of them.”

  “I thought they were only a nightmare,” Eliska went on. “And then Vidal got hit…..”

  “This could be a completely new kind of Darkling,” Marine suggested. “The instability could be morphing them into new, more dangerous Darklings that are more destructive. It could all be part of the same process.”

  “They aren’t new.” Omer’s voice sent a chill through the group. “I’ve seen them before.”

  Everyone turned around the other way to face him.

  He squinted away in another direction and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. He barely spoke above a whisper, but his voice sent a prickle up Yann’s scalp.

  “You were too polite to ask me how I got to Middleborough,” Omer murmured. “You were too happy to take any fighting man into the Watch. You wouldn’t have been so quick to accept me if you knew where I came from.”

  No one made a sound. Yann didn’t dare to breathe. Omer never talked about his past. He joined the Watch as a teenager when Yann was just a boy.

  Omer grew up in the Watch and eventually took his oath when he got old enough. He never said a word about his family or his former life in all that time.

  “I was born the only imp in a family of magic-users. I had to learn to fight to make up for not having magic. My family and their party fought the Darklings.”

  Omer shut his eyes, turned his head farther away, and his voice broke.

  “I grew up from an early age watching the people I loved being torn apart and devoured. I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to lose my mind. My family brought me to Middleborough and turned me over to the Watch so I could heal, but I will never forget those things I’ve seen.” He heaved a shaky sigh, opened his eyes, and narrowed his eyes at the horizon. “Now it’s all starting over again.”

  Yann wouldn’t have broken that silence for any money, but Yvan did it instead.

  He scrambled to his feet. “We can’t stay here. Everybody get up. We have to keep moving.”

  Yann stood up automatically. His body responded instinctively to his father’s order.

  As soon as everyone stood up, they all saw that they were in another woodland. A few larger towns surrounded the area not too many miles away from where the Watch landed.

  Yvan started walking, but the towns turned out to be farther away than anyone realized.

  Everyone kept glancing around in agitation. Both Yann and Anríq stayed near the two girls. No one acted like this was anything out of the ordinary. The girls didn’t, either.

  The sun started to go down long before the group got near a town. Yann couldn’t fathom what the Watch would do once they got there.

  End of Chapter 11.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

  I post new chapters of The Corrupted Coil series on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday PST.

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