His was the only voice she had ever heard. The same voice that had hushed her to sleep when the storms were so fierce they rattled the stones in their walls. The same voice that had laughed with her. Cried with her. Reassured her that everything would be okay even when it seemed like nothing ever could be again.
Kestrel whipped around, her braid smacking the center of her chest.
“Thom!” she forced her dry throat to yell. “Thom! Where are you?”
“I’m here!” he shouted back to her, coughing through each word. “I need your help.”
“I’m coming! Just—just stay there!” Following the sound of him, Kestrel broke into a sprint. The sand was harder here, the earth a dry and withered thing that made it easier to bound across, unlike the soft sands surrounding her tower that wanted to swallow each stride. “Just keep talking to me. Where are you?”
“Are you sure about this, Little Fury?” asked the voice inside her head.
It sounded so much like Thom that for a moment it jostled her. Made her doubt herself, yet again. Kestrel was used to Thom’s imaginary voice creeping in unannounced. Oftentimes she would be mid-conversation with the real Thom when the imaginary one would try joining in. And she knew him so well that the voices almost always echoed one another.
But that was what made this feel so alarming.
It was rare that the two ever differed...
“Yes, I’m sure,” Kestrel grumbled, sounding nothing of thesort. “This is the whole reason I’m out here, to find you. Isn’t it?”
He didn’t respond immediately, and so Kestrel kept running. Nothing could stop her from reuniting with the only other person in this realm she had ever loved.
Then something dark began to bloom on the horizon.
Kestrel heard the faintest whisper in her mind:Think about it. Better to be safe than stupid.
She might’ve slowed down if Thom’s real voice hadn’t egged her onward at that exact moment.
“You’re getting closer,” he yelled, voice cracking with relief. “That’s it. You’re almost here!”
Desperation and delirium had her racing as fast as her feet would allow.
The dark smudge on the horizon grew into something massive. A crater that left the earth hollowed and black. Kestrel didn’t know much about the lands beyond her tower, but she knewthatdreadful place. It had been marked prominently on one of the maps Thom had left lying around after one of his travels:
The Maw of Death.
A foreboding and forsaken place.
The meager contents in Kestrel’s stomach churned.
A small voice inside her told her not to take another step. But by the time she was even remotely suspicious, it was already too late. It was like someone else was controlling her legs now. They dragged each foot out from under her. One step after another, the space between her and that gaping chasm growing smaller and smaller by the second.
She ambled until she stood at the Maw’s yawning edge.
“Thom?” she called out, peering into the abyss below. “Are you down there?”
No more of Thom’s replies came.
Hot, dense air wafted up from the chasm. It reminded her of what the carcasses rotting in the sun smelled like when Thom wasn’t able to discard of them quickly enough. Kestrel gagged on the acrid stench that rose from the Maw. She shielded her nose with her knifed hand—only to realize her weapon was gone. In her haste to reach Thom, she had left her knife buried in the sands and was now defenseless—not that a knife could stop this stench. It rose and fell around her like a dying breath, but Kestrel was certain it belonged to something living, something even more horrifying than a cinder.
Somethingwas down there.
Something dark and malevolent, Kestrel could feel it.
A quiet voice in the corner of her mind told her to back away. Told her to run. To neverevercome to this place again.
Kestrel knew she should heed its warnings. Every inch of her wanted to. After all, there was a reason Thom—a man who battled monsters every day—was wary of it.
She tried backing up a step but could not budge.
