“You can heal me when Rourke is safe,” she said when I reached for a seed crystal.
“She’s right. Conserve your strength.” Marcus scanned the broken terrain. “Are we close, Celeste?”
“About halfway there.”
I slumped against the side of the sled, eyeing the steep ascent ahead of us.
“This is good news, Mika,” Marcus said, taking in my tired expression. “The energy in storms doesn’t hurt the gargoyles, not like it would us. Plus, the gargoyles do a great job of making the storms predictable. That means we can switch strategies, which is damn lucky. Defense isn’t working; we’re going on the offense.”
We put Marcus’s new plan into action with the next storm—this one a whirlwind of water, wood, and air. It barreled down on us in the middle of a scorched gully where burned stumps and fallen logs had slowed our progress to an aggravating creep. Celeste ducked out of the rope and took to the air before the storm reached us, and Marcus used the anchor rod to pin the sled in place. Then we sprinted toward the storm again, angling up the hill out of its path.
“Same as last time: Cut the storm apart, but this time focus on air,” Marcus ordered.
I nodded. He was playing to my strengths: In the destructive cycle of the elements, earth destroyed air. He could use fire against water and wood with more efficiency than I could.
“Should we link?” I asked.
“No. We’ll be more efficient apart.”
Holding a stitch in my side, I watched the seething magic tumble across the ground. Chunks of ash puffed into the air whenever the storm touched down, lifted by the storm’s wind and the plants bursting from the soil. Sporadic showers fell from the midst of the energy, and the rich aroma of freshly churned soil and rain drifted through the air. It was almost a shame to break apart this storm; it left a string of plants in its wake, rejuvenating the otherwise barren hillside.
Well before the storm was close enough for me to reach, Marcus tore into its outer edges, burning through the wood element. I tapped a foot impatiently, useless until Celeste landed close enough to offer me a boost. I grabbed at the magic she offered and flung earthen blades into the vortices of air.
Despite our assault, the storm bounded toward the dormant gargoyles, picking up speed until it pounced, frothing around their frozen shapes. Plants erupted from the soil, growing taller than the sides of the sled in seconds, but they couldn’t obscure the wild magic from us. Methodically, we slashed it to pieces until it weakened enough to unravel on its own. I jogged back to the sled even as I tested the gargoyles. They all felt the same as before: stronger than they’d been in Terra Haven but still comatose.
“Not too shabby,” Marcus said with his first real smile of the day.
The storm had shifted a few gargoyles on the sled, and we set them back in place. Then Marcus cut through the vines and small trees choking the sled, and we pushed onward.
We weren’t so lucky with all the storms. Most were more violent, tearing up earth, striking with lightning, belching flames and ice alike. But our strategy was sound. Fatigue proved to be a greater obstacle. The higher we climbed, the more frequently we were forced to stop to deal with the storms. Oliver returned to my side to give me a boost, but even with his help, every encounter drained my energy, and my sprints toward the oncoming storms became jogs. In between storms, my feet dragged along the path. I ate the snacks Marcus handed me. I drank the water he gave me. I focused on not tripping. Only the dormant gargoyles and their improved health kept me going.
The dead gargoyle beside the trail caught me completely off guard. She was small and looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a wolverine, though twice the size of either animal. Her butterfly wings were spread as if to catch the sun, but her body had faded to gray and her right side had eroded into the dirt. I fell to my knees beside her and tried to help her anyway, but my gargoyle-tuned magic didn’t penetrate the dead rock.
With trembling fingers, I brushed a layer of dirt from her face. She had been so close to her baetyl, and she had died. Alone. Her life fading until nothing but the husk of her body remained.
I’d begun to hope that if we unraveled enough wild magic, the pieces of the baetyl inside it would fill the dormant gargoyles on the sled with life and they’d wake, but staring into the lifeless gray eyes of the dead gargoyle, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing short of fixing the baetyl would be enough.
Oliver whined and twined around me, tugging me from the corpse.
“Come on. There’s nothing we can do for that one,” Marcus said.
“Shouldn’t we do something? I don’t know—bury it?”
“It is customary to scatter the body,” Celeste said. I glanced toward the old gargoyle. She hadn’t stopped. The trail was steeper here and momentum was precious. She plodded past, head bowed.
“Is it okay if I do that?”
“It’s part of your duties as a healer and guardian,” she said.
My heart squeezed. I gathered earth and wood and wrapped the deceased gargoyle. The body crumbled under the weave, the once life-filled quartz disintegrating into pieces no larger than sand. With a boost from Oliver, I lifted the remains on a current of air and scattered them across the hill. Oliver hummed a sorrowful note, and Celeste added high-pitched harmony.
Swiping tears from my lashes, I pushed to my feet.
The hedgehog-wolverine was only the first of many dead gargoyles we found along the ridge. I stopped counting them after a dozen, and it sickened me how quickly I perfected the magic to decompose their bodies and scatter them. I began to look forward to the storms. Those at least I could do something about.
Heart weary and exhausted, I didn’t understand why we stopped under a clear sky with no storm on the horizon until Celeste spoke.