“Only to a person who thinks the world is a broken thing that she can put back together again,” Rowena said. “Sometimes you can’t fix it. Sometimes you have to hunker down and hold on the best you can.”
“Or just go ahead and die…” Serafina said bitterly.
She wanted to get down to the bottom of what Rowena was hiding, but she began to hear a deep pounding sound all around.
She looked up to see a dark cloud passing over the top of the forest. The stars disappeared. Her legs flushed with a cold surge of sudden fear.
The sound was low in volume at first, but it got louder and louder as it came closer. The earth and trees began to shake, a heavy heartbeat pounding the air. Boom…boom…boom…
A swirling wind rose up, and the leaves on the trees began to vibrate. The sticks on the forest floor lifted up and rose slowly into the air, levitating around her. She tried to be brave, but her arms and legs began to tremble, and she couldn’t catch her breath. Rowena’s goats bleated as they scurried around the lair in terror.
Rowena ran inside and came back out clenching a potion-filled flask. Ducking down in panic, she looked up into the blackened sky and all around her, ready to fight, holding the flask up in her shaking hand like she was going to throw it at the attacker.
“He’s found us!” Rowena whispered over to Serafina. “You need to go!”
“But who is it? What’s happening?” Serafina asked as she took cover behind a large tree.
“Don’t be a fool, cat,” Rowena shouted at her. “Get out of here!”
Serafina ran through the forest to escape the storm. The trees twisted and thrashed as branches cracked overhead and came crashing down around her. A gust of wind buffeted her so hard that it knocked her off her feet and threw her tumbling across the ground. She scrambled back up and kept running, but then heard Rowena scream behind her.
Gasping for breath, Serafina turned and looked back.
Serafina could see Rowena cowering by her lair. A great blow of force came crashing through, breaking the limbs of the trees all around. The strength of it pushed Serafina back like a giant wave, lifting her off her feet and dragging her along. She grabbed the swampy earth to stop herself and held firm. Then she began fighting her way back toward Rowena, who was consumed in battle against the unseen attacker.
With the dark, swirling wind and flying branches, Serafina couldn’t see everything that was happening, but she saw the figure of Rowena running into her partially destroyed lair, grabbing a potion, and threatening to throw it. “Don’t hurt me!” she screamed, her voice shaking in both fear and anger. “I swear I’ll fight you!”
Serafina looked all around, searching the trees for a glimpse of the attacker, but she couldn’t see him.
Serafina felt her feet getting wet and sticky. She looked down. The mossy ground welled with a dark blood. Insects and worms oozed out of the ground around her.
“Stop it!” Rowena shouted. “Leave me alone!”
A blast of force sent a large, broken tree limb sailing through the air at Rowena. The branch slammed into the girl, knocking her to the ground with a brutal blow. The branches attacked her like tearing fingers, ripping terrible, jagged cuts across her back.
Serafina gasped when she saw not just the fresh bleeding wounds on Rowena’s bare back, but the scars of the past all across her back and sides. This wasn’t the first time she’d suffered this attacker’s wrath. For all her ability to cast spells and change shape, it appeared there were some scars that even a creature of her ilk could not heal.
But Rowena didn’t stay down for long. She quickly got back up onto her feet, wiped the blood from her swollen mouth, and looked out into the forest in fierce defiance. Before the next attack came, she scrambled to her cache of potions. She grabbed a flask and hurled it into the forest, filling the bog with a dense mountain mist.
As if in angry reply, a blazing ball of fire came hurtling out of the forest straight at Rowena.
She threw up her arms with an explosive flurry of ice and snow, extinguishing the fireball in a burst of steam.
Through all this, Serafina looked for the attacker, but she couldn’t see him.
“Tonight!” a voice blared. “Get the cloak tonight or I’ll kill the boy myself!”
“If you kill him, you’ll never find the cloak!” Rowena screamed angrily.
But as if to make the final point, another massive fireball came barreling out of the darkness straight at her, this one coming twice as fast as the one before. She leapt out of the way just in time, but the fireball struck the tree behind her and exploded, throwing burning sap in all directions.
Rowena screamed in pain as the searing liquid scalded her bare skin and lit everything around her on fire.
Serafina rushed forward to help her, dodging between the flames. She dropped to her knees beside Rowena as the girl twisted in pain from the burning sap. Knowing that she had to help her, Serafina closed her eyes and let a part of herself fade down into the porous ground, sinking down to where the water lay. Then she focused her mind and swept up her arms and with the force of sheer will began to pull the water up through the spongy moss of the bog, flooding everything around them. The rising water doused the lingering flames and flowed over Rowena’s body, sweeping the burning sap away, before receding back into the bog beneath them.
Stunned by what she’d done, Serafina collapsed to the ground in exhaustion next to Rowena.
She and Rowena lay in a heap of scorched, soaking-wet, shredded trunks and branches. The attacker was gone and the fire was out.
The two of them lay there for several seconds, just recovering.
Then Rowena opened her eyes. She slowly crawled out of the wreckage, gathered herself, and struggled to her feet. She seemed barely able to move. Her robes had been torn from her bleeding, dirt-stained body, and she had suffered many bruises and burns. But she was alive.
She gazed desolately around at the destruction, then she took a long breath and seemed to steel herself.
Going into the part of her lair that was still intact, she opened a vial and started rubbing a viscous gray mud onto her burned arms and legs, wincing and gritting her teeth against the pain.
Rowena didn’t say anything to Serafina, but the sorceress seemed to understand that Serafina had saved her life, or at least the agony of immeasurable more pain than she had already suffered.
In the next moment, Rowena grabbed her satchel and began to quickly gather some of her crystal flasks and other accoutrements of her dark arts.