He flinched, and my heart fractured. I’d given him reason to fear me.
“It’s okay. I’m me,” I said, my voice raspy and foreign. “Are you okay? Where’s Celeste?”
“It’s you!” Tension lifted from his shoulders and his wings settled against his back. “Hang on.” Face set in firm lines of determination, he slunk across the intervening crystal floor, whimper-growling with each step. He leaned forward as if pressing against a great wind, and I wondered what sort of pressure the baetyl pushed back against him.
Shadows danced around my vision. The heat had increased to oven temperatures while Marcus and I had climbed toward the exit, and my swollen skin ached. I grabbed Marcus’s armpits again and hauled him a few more inches. Then Oliver was beside me, twisting to grip Marcus’s shirt with his back paw. Together we tugged, and the large man moved a foot. I would have cheered if I had the breath.
In a few more pulls, we cleared the crystals and the ground smoothed. Oliver stopped making pained sounds. I sagged against the tunnel wall, gulping humid air.
Light from the baetyl bathed us in the cool glow of golden citrine, mint prasiolite, sunset-orange carnelian, cerulean dumortierite, and shimmering combinations of so many other crystals. I swept my gaze over the glorious shapes, memorizing the deadly beauty of the baetyl. I’d never see another again, and I’d already forgotten so much; I didn’t want to forget this.
Then I turned my back on the baetyl’s divine splendor, grabbed Marcus’s shirt, and helped Oliver drag him up the dirt path.
*
I made Oliver stop once I could breathe without feeling like I was drowning. The baetyl pressed into me, calling to me, but its voice had changed.
I lowered myself to the ground next to Marcus, who remained alarmingly unconscious. Oliver whined, but the baetyl sang inside my head, drowning him out. Too tired to remember all the reasons I’d had for avoiding it, too tired to resist it, I opened myself to the power, but the baetyl didn’t try to link with me; it tried to talk to me.
Once I felt its magic, I felt its need. The baetyl was healed—mostly. The last gap existed at the mouth of the tunnel, where the wild magic storms had torn apart the pattern beneath the crystals. Following the baetyl’s guidance, I layered elements across the opening, and when the last element settled into place, a wash of magic gusted through the tunnel, toppling me and sending Oliver rolling.
The baetyl receded from my mind, and I let it go without regret this time. I’d done it. I’d healed the baetyl. No one but a gargoyle born in those crystal-lined walls would be allowed in or out now.
I collapsed to my side in the warm tunnel, shifting so Marcus’s head rested on my stomach. I needed to get him out. The humidity had decreased and the air was warm rather than stifling, but we had a ways to go. At the very least, I needed to clean his wounds and send Oliver for a healer. I needed to check Oliver, too. I needed to finish my mission and get the dormant gargoyles into the baetyl. I needed to bandage myself back together.
I cobbled together my energy—
And passed out.
*
Something bit my arm, and I jerked awake.
“Easy there,” Marcus said.
I grabbed the elements before I recognized his voice, confused at the infinitesimal amount I could hold. The space was wrong, too dark and cool, and the glowballs didn’t illuminate much. Where were the crystals? The baetyl—
Memory returned in a rush. I tried to sit up, but a warm hand on my shoulder held me down.
“Relax, Mika, we’re all okay.”
“The gargoyles?”
“Celeste says they’re weak but fine.”
“Celeste’s okay?”
“She’s fine. Oliver, too. Now hold still.” He slathered a compound of kachina greenthread across my forearm, covering a dozen cuts. I hissed at the sting, then relaxed as the plant’s numbing agents took the pain away. Oliver peered at me over the top of my head, smiling, and my heart eased. Marcus shooed him back, and the young gargoyle took flight across a star-speckled sky, landing a few feet away on a flat boulder. His entire body glowed as if lit from a fire within, reminding me of the crystals inside the baetyl, but it was only a trick of the firelight on his carnelian body.
I’d lifted my free arm to pet Oliver before he’d flown away, and I examined it now. Ragged fibers at my shoulder were all that remained of the shirt’s sleeve, and lamb’s ear bandages crisscrossed my bicep and forearm. The rest of my shirt was bunched around my chest, and the numbness of my stomach told me Marcus had already tended the cuts there. I turned my arm toward the light and stared at the back of my hand. The crystals the baetyl and I had grown into my flesh were gone. In their place was a series of six-sided scars trailing up to my wrist, the flat scar tissue lavender and sparkly like it’d caught amethyst dust inside it as it healed. I flexed my fingers, relieved when they all moved stiffly.
“Your back is similar,” Marcus said. He didn’t look up from my other arm, using slender strands of air to tie the lamb’s ear leaves into place.
“My back?” I echoed. My wings.
“There was so much blood on your back, I started there, but the wounds had been sealed. It took me a while to figure out the red was part of the scars.”
“What does it look like?” I wished I had a mirror or could move to feel my shoulder blades. I was lying on my back without pain, but I still wanted confirmation that I was whole.
“Like you’ve been run through with a sword on both shoulder blades, and the scar tissue is the color of Oliver.”