“I have an older brother who’s a bit like Hunter. We didn’t always get along.” A hot prickle went down Dylan’s neck. “When I think about it, it’s like being in that Warped Wood . . .”
Quinn opened her eyes. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me more. I’ve been to a place a lot like those woods. I know what kinds of things happen there.”
Some hard knot inside Dylan’s chest loosened.
Quinn’s hand rested on his arm and it might have been the only part of him that wasn’t trying to dissolve.
“Do you really think our two worlds were never meant to come together?” she asked, her voice so low he could barely hear her. “I can’t bring myself to believe that my world was never supposed to be this way. I can’t believe the Water Nymph wasn’t meant for me.”
Dylan looked up at the birds skittering through the canopy of leaves. “Our worlds have changed each other in terrible ways.”
“Not all terrible,” Quinn said.
He supposed she meant the sanctuaries and the avatars, mistakes though they were.
He cared only about her arm against his, the smell of maple flowers, the shifting sunlight that made her eyes flash copper. “No, not all terrible.”
She looked at him, surprised. She must have heard in his voice what he meant. She gave him a sad smile. “The funny thing is, I always just wanted to be left alone.”
“So did I.” A dark memory of his brother threatened to overwhelm him. He pushed it away. “People change you.”
Dylan’s body felt weighed down—with exhaustion, with a sad sort of weariness. He lay back against a tangle of roots and moss.
“I’m tired,” he said. “You should probably go now. You have a long walk ahead.”
“No. I’ll stay a little longer.” She moved her hand into his. Little lines of worry appeared around her eyes.
“Are you going to bring your band here?” he asked. “Find someone who can cross into the Other Place and use the scepter? You can still save yourselves that way.”
“I don’t care about that just now,” she said. “I care about what’s happening to you. Isn’t there some way I can help you?”
He shook his head. “What will you tell your band when you go back to them?” he asked.
“I’ll tell them I met someone from the Other Place.”
“Say it was a dark mage.” He felt dizzy. He thought he would float away if she didn’t keep hold of his hand. “The darkest. And he told you terrible things.”
“I’ll say it was Dylan, and that he finally came home to his own world.”
“To the world he ruined?” He closed his eyes. He hardly knew what he was saying. Exhaustion threatened to overtake him. “He started all of this, the real Dylan. Drew us all together and now we’ve screwed each other up. We might have been okay if we had walked away much sooner. We could have gone back to how we were before we got stuck together.”
He felt Quinn shift in the dirt next to him. “You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “People don’t change you. They can’t, because you’re never just one thing to begin with.”
“They do. They do terrible things and you go to pieces. You can’t be put together again.”
She brushed a hand over his forehead, light as a falling leaf. “That’s what people are. Just all different pieces.”
Quinn imagined the tall spikes of the Bristle Beast coming up through the dirt, felt herself speared. The smell of decay kept coming back to her coupled with the memory of running, running from the yellow Dream House.
The soft sound of Dylan’s breathing drew Quinn’s attention. His sleeping form had sunk into the leaf litter, sunk too far. Quinn couldn’t tell where his back ended and the ground began. All of his lines and shapes had gone blurry. He was like a Water Nymph: half in, half out of the world.
He was like something being consumed.
Quinn was like something being invaded. Her entire world filled up all the space inside of her. The ruffled lakes, the shadows of moss on trees. The white unspooling rivers, trailing like veils over mountain ridges. Truley gathering up the howling baby, Artak at the fire. The yawning crevices. The charred camp.
She tried to picture it all going to pieces.
Once Quinn had seen her band set fire to another band’s camp. She imagined it now as the forest fire she had once watched from the High Tower—red and orange and soft gray—eating and eating at the world.
Destruction wasn’t the work of mages.
Dylan awoke when he heard Quinn’s soft footfalls coming back to him. She jostled him as she lay down again. He felt the cool smoothness of the device in her hand. He tried to slide it out of her grip and found that he was no longer solid enough to do so. The scepter tumbled into the leaves. Quinn’s hand melded into his, pushing right through his loosely held cells.
He found he didn’t mind.
Quinn severed the connection between the worlds. She chose death for her own.
Her work was done. She trembled on the cool blanket of leaves, still holding Dylan’s hand.