Yann woke up earlier than he expected the next day. He thought he would sleep longer after staying up so late.

  He raked his hair out of his eyes and stiffened when he saw Eliska standing off at a distance from all the sleeping Watchmen.

  Yann got to his feet and went over to her. “Are you okay?” he murmured. “Did you have more nightmares?”

  She waved her hand at nothing. “It’s always like that. I’ve been having them for years. These are no different—except that the Darklings look different. These are the armored kind. I’ve never seen them before, so I don’t know if the visions are coming from somewhere else or…..” She shut her eyes and shook that thought out of her head. “I don’t know what it means.”

  “Omer says the Dark is building in strength. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  “I don’t know.” She looked away. “It sounds like he knows more about these Darklings than any of us.”

  “Just hold out a little longer. We’ll eventually wind up in a Layer where you’ll get your magic back. I mean…..everything keeps changing so fast. That has to change, too, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled up at him, but her features pinched. “Thanks. Thank you for everything you said the other night. I’m really grateful.”

  “I meant it. You’re part of us now. We won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Her lips trembled and her cheek spasmed. He really wanted to put his arms around her again, but just then, Marine stirred in her sleep.

  She didn’t wake up, but the movement drew Yann’s and Eliska’s attention back to the group.

  “Did she do or say something to upset you yesterday?” Yann murmured. “Why did her stories bother you so much? I thought you liked her.”

  Eliska’s voice rasped with buried emotion. “I do like her. I love her.” She choked on the words and ran her hand across her face. “She’s so…..so wonderful. I can’t stand the thought of losing her. I’ve never met anyone like her….but I know I will lose her. She’s the only friend I’ve ever had. She’s so beautiful—inside and out. She’s everything I wish I could be….”

  “You’re all those things, too,” he insisted. “Don’t you know how wonderful and beautiful you are?”

  Him saying that only seemed to upset her even more. “She’s special. She can at least make all of you feel better—if only for one night. She doesn’t need magic to do it. She can do it with her voice and her eyes and her stories. I wish I could give you something like that….”

  “You do,” Yann breathed. “You care about us. Do you think we all don’t see how much you care? None of us wants to lose you—and not because of your magic. You have something….something special….something special to all of us. You must know that by now.”

  She started to say, “I’m not like her…..”

  Right then, Rien woke up. He sat up, but he didn’t look around. He bent over the coals and added a few twigs to make them smoke back into flames.

  Yann and Eliska both returned to the circle without saying another word. They sat down in their old places across from each other.

  Eliska proved everything Yann just said by turning to Rien. “How do you feel this morning?”

  “I’m all right, I guess,” he mumbled without looking up. “I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “From what I saw, everything that happened to you happened to the rest of us,” Yann interjected. “Something hit Vidal. Just because you were the only one who could see those Darklings doesn’t mean they weren’t there.”

  Rien’s eyes shot up. “Do you think so?”

  “How else can you explain what happened to Vidal?” Yann waved at the area around them. “Anything is possible in this chaos. I don’t think any of us can doubt that anymore.”

  Their voices woke up everyone else. Yvan frowned when he saw Rien sitting there as quietly and calmly as anyone could hope.

  “How are you feeling this morning, man?” Yvan asked.

  Rien nodded. “I feel okay. I don’t know what happened.”

  “Maybe it just passed—or maybe this Island made it better,” Eliska suggested.

  Their comments brought Rien farther out of his shell. He actually started to smile and his shoulders relaxed a little more.

  The upturn only lasted a few minutes before the other men woke up. It became all too obvious all too soon that all was not right with the world.

  Barsali left camp right away. He vanished into the trees, and when he came back, he paced back and forth apart from the camp. He didn’t come back to rejoin everyone.

  Vidal got to his feet, too, and started obsessively checking his weapons in between darting furtive glances into the forest.

  Their behavior put Yvan and the others on edge. No one dared to go near those two.

  Neils pretended not to see them. The group had finished off the biturong last night and no one ventured out to find anything else.

  “We’ll continue on to the town today. We shouldn’t have any problem getting there this morning.” Yvan went over to Vidal. “How’s your head?”

  “Fine,” Vidal snapped and went back to what he was doing.

  Yvan scowled at him. “Is there something I should know?”

  “No,” Vidal snapped. He kept adjusting the leather strap around his axe handle.

  Yvan scrutinized him at close range. The bruise on the side of Vidal’s head looked exactly the same.

  He refused to meet the Watch Commander’s gaze. That on its own meant something must be wrong.

  Yvan left him there and went to check on Barsali. Barsali paced far enough away from camp that no one could hear their conversation.

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  Barsali didn’t ignore the Watch Commander nor did Barsali give Yvan one-word answers. Yann and the others heard them talking at length, but Barsali still paced back and forth in front of Yvan. Barsali never stood still even for a second.

  “I wonder if they had nightmares, too,” Marine murmured.

  “Did any of the rest of you have them?” Eliska asked.

  “I always have them,” Omer husked. “I’ve been having them all my life—but now I see the armored Darklings instead of the regular kind.”

  “It’s the same for me,” she told him. “What about the rest of you?”

  “I’ve been having nightmares ever since we came to this Layer…if it is a Layer.” Marine cast a desperate glance around the area. “I never had nightmares before—definitely not about the Dark or Darklings. I always felt comfortable there.”

  “Should we be worried that you’re comfortable with Darklings?” Neils asked.

  She burst into a grin, but just then, Yvan returned and squatted down with the others. “Barsali’s all right. He had nightmares last night, but he’s certain he’ll be okay. He wants to travel, so we’ll move out.”

  Everyone stood up. The air of tension followed the group out of the forest and back to the open countryside where they landed before.

  The others set off, but Eliska stopped there just outside the tree line.

  “What’s wrong?” Yann asked.

  “The town,” she murmured. “It’s the same distance away that it was yesterday. We don’t get any closer.”

  “You’re right!” Marine exclaimed. “I didn’t notice before!”

  “What does that mean?” Yann asked.

  “This happened to us when Eliska and I were by ourselves. We tried to get to a city, but it always stayed the same distance away.”

  “And then we found out we were in an illusion Layer,” Eliska finished.

  The others gathered around to listen. “Are you saying this is all an illusion?”

  “We may be in the land of nightmares,” Anríq suggested. “We could be trapped in someone’s nightmare—or in a bad memory.”

  Rien spun around to stare at him. “You can do that?!”

  “Any landscape is possible in the Coil,” Anríq replied. “We don’t have the magic to find out where we are, but it would explain why all of you keep having nightmares.”

  The men scanned the landscape. Yann didn’t see anything to threaten the party here, but maybe whatever threatened them was inside their own minds. That would be disastrous.

  Yvan recovered first. “We’ll have to test it. We’ll walk toward the town and see if the same thing….”

  He broke off and the whole group froze when the Voyant appeared before them again.

  He didn’t attack this time, either—not outright.

  The instant he appeared, the landscape went haywire all around the party. The trees twisted out of position, stretched their limbs in all directions, changed into different shapes, and then erupted into Darklings.

  These Darklings remained rooted in one place. They couldn’t move. They thrashed and bellowed while they lashed their limbs everywhere, but the tree Darklings didn’t attack the party, either.

  The ground swelled and undulated all over the place. The road in the distance whipped from side to side. It no longer led in any particular direction.

  The disruption caught the nearest town in the upheaval. Buildings blasted out of position and came alive only to collapse just as fast.

  Bizarre creatures ejected from the soil only to get pulled back down by some unseen force beneath the surface.

  A tempest broke out around the Voyant himself. Wind lashed in a whirling hurricane. The storm snatched up sticks, rocks, and debris from the ground.

  All that crap revolved around him in a spiraling tornado, but none of it touched him. He stood at the center of his halo scowling as fiercely as ever. Not a hair on his head rustled in the wind.

  Niyazi rushed forward raising his battle axe to attack the Voyant. Neils, Rien, and Omer stepped out of line to back up Niyazi.

  Anríq dodged in front of them and held out his arm to stop them. “Don’t touch him!”

  “Are you out of your tree?!” Rien countered. “He’s the one doing all of this! He destroyed Middleborough!”

  “Attacking him outright always backfires on us,” Anríq replied. “Remember what happened to Wesh? Don’t attack him. Back off, Niyazi.”

  Niyazi obeyed him, but at that moment, a broken roar made everyone spin around fast. The Watchmen all raised their weapons to defend themselves.

  Everyone froze a second time when Barsali lunged away from the group heading back toward the trees, but he didn’t go into them.

  He swung his battle axe and hacked the air. “Get away from me, you demons! Get away! Don’t touch me!”

  Rien’s sword arm drooped to his side. “No!” he whimpered. “No, Barsali!”

  Barsali didn’t see or hear a thing. He kept hacking his axe at nothing, gasping in terror, and whirling somewhere else to defend himself against something that wasn’t there.

  The other Watchmen lowered their weapons one after another. Everyone stared at Barsali in defeat as the madness took him.

  No one suggested tackling him to take his axe away from him. No one said a word.

  He blundered close enough to the forest for one of the tree Darklings to hit him with its branch. It clipped the side of his shoulder.

  He wheeled backward and chopped the limb with his axe. He severed it and the tree Darkling bellowed in pain and rage.

  That roar sent a thunderclap through the surrounding countryside. The whole Island erupted in chaos at that moment. It didn’t shatter or dissolve or fall apart. It just went completely insane in every possible way.

  The short-clipped grass by the side of the road blasted out of the ground growing impossibly fast.

  It tangled together in a solid wall of vegetation. Ever-lengthening stems twined around each other and knotted into ropes that thickened into pillars.

  Pebbles lying peacefully by the roadside swelled and kept growing into boulders and eventually towering cliffs.

  The buildings in the nearby town exploded in size, grew to gargantuan proportions, and morphed into monstrous shapes before they came alive, too.

  The Voyant evaporated out of sight, and at some unseen signal, all those pillars of grass, massive cliffs, and towering grotesque buildings burst to life and turned into Darklings.

  “Run!” Yvan yelled.

  “Where?!” Neils hollered back.

  Everyone in the party hesitated for a second while they considered where to go. They couldn’t go back into the forest—not with all those whipping demonic trees thrashing their branches everywhere.

  The group couldn’t go out into the open—not with every single thing in the landscape turning into a Darkling.

  The group got trapped there between the forest and everything else. The Darklings didn’t come for the Watch this time—at least Yann didn’t see them come for the Watch.

  Darklings materialized out of all the stuff around the Watch—all the stuff that was already there before.

  The Darklings didn’t seem to attack each other, either. They just blundered around roaring and going crazy for no apparent reason.

  They stumbled closer to the Watch by sheer accident. One of the Darklings would step on someone pretty soon.

  Yvan hustled everyone sideways to follow the tree line. It was the only direction any of them could go.

  “This way!” he ordered. “Keep moving!”

  Yann turned away, but Eliska turned back. “Barsali!” she cried. “Barsali’s in trouble!”

  She took a few steps in Barsali’s direction. Yann followed her and saw Barsali standing right at the edge of the trees.

  A bunch of the tree Darklings’ branches had caught him by his arms. More snaked around his chest and one wrapped around his thigh.

  He struggled in panic, yelled, and screamed as he jerked from side to side trying to free himself. His axe lay on the ground next to him.

  Eliska rushed the axe, used all her strength to heave it off the ground, and hacked away the branch around his right arm.

  He broke free, but that only drew the tree Darklings’ attention to Eliska.

  They sent more lashing branches to capture her. She could barely lift Barsali’s massive axe.

  She tried to fight the branches off, and when that failed, she swung again and severed the branch on his left arm.

  Freeing him seemed to bring him out of his insanity—at least a little bit. His vision cleared and his eyes locked on Eliska.

  She charged him and held out his axe to give it back to him. He could free himself the rest of the way once he got his hands on it.

  He held out his hand to take it from her, but at that moment, a catastrophic wave of destruction hit the landscape coming from beyond the town.

  Yann didn’t see it until a bunch of Darklings roared out there. He glanced in their direction just in time to see them plummet off the edge of the earth into nothing.

  The town toppled out of sight and the wave chewed its way across the landscape swallowing every Darkling in its path.

  Yann dove for Eliska to pull her away in time. He didn’t have a clue where he would take her and he didn’t plan to leave Barsali in danger, either, even though two more branches still held him in place.

  Yann’s brain didn’t get as far as deciding how he would do that or even registering that he had to do it.

  “ELISKA!!” he yelled and tried to grab her.

  He turned his back on the wave for a split second and it yanked him away into a bottomless void.

  End of Chapter 13.

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