frenetically. Riza gasped, noticing the way the rest of the crew scattered, thanks to the very winds that Taeral had thrown at them to help slow them down.
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh God!” I croaked and covered my mouth, watching with an even mix of terror and hope as Taeral succeeded in teleporting himself midair—he caught Varga and vanished again, reappearing next to Riza, Herakles, and Eva. I wound up screaming with delight when Raphael shot through the sky and snatched Acantha and Nethissis just twenty feet from the ground. Riza, in turn, teleported up in the air and gripped Fallon by the back of his neck. A moment later, they were back on the ground, and Fallon was panting, pale as a sheet of paper and likely scared out of his mind. Not that I could blame him.
As soon as he landed them both safely, our crew was reunited, breathing a collective sigh of relief. Lumi gradually released the trees from their cushioning position, the trunks groaning as they resumed their upright reach for the heavens, their crowns shuffling and wiggling and stretching to cover the starry sky.
“Oh, man, it is so good to see you all!” Taeral exclaimed.
Varga’s entire crew was understandably astonished. We didn’t care, though. We rushed and hugged each of them, breathing in familiar scents. Acantha and Nethissis weren’t spared, either. Lumi held them tight in her arms, kissing their cheeks and thanking them for accomplishing such a difficult spell.
“What in the world are you guys doing here?!” Varga asked. “How did you get here?”
“We’ve been on Mortis all along,” I said, laughing. “And we had no freaking clue!”
“How… How is that even possible?” Eva replied, her yellow eyes big and round and filled with wonder and amazement.
“The pink waters. They’ll take you where you ask to go. We only just fully understood this ourselves. Until now, we thought they were so-called ‘portals to the gods,’ as in portals to somewhere, but we didn’t know for sure that we had any control over the destination,” I said, then measured each of Varga’s crew from head to toe. “We’ll tell you all about it, but first, are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”
Lumi checked Acantha and Nethissis carefully. She cursed under her breath. “These two are worn out. They overexerted themselves.”
Nethissis wiped her bleeding nose and smiled. “We’ll be okay. It was just extremely difficult to first get off Calliope, then steer the spell down onto Mortis.”
“What happened? How did the light bubble break down like that?” Lumi asked.
“We’re not sure. It began faltering shortly after we breached the atmosphere,” Acantha explained. Dark rings had settled around her eyes, unnatural for a healthy Bajang. Lumi was right. They’d exhausted themselves up there. “It lost its direction, and we couldn’t control it anymore. We depleted the serium batteries, but still, we couldn’t do much.”
“We gave them all the energy they could get out of us, too,” Varga added. “It still broke.”
“What matters most is that you’re here,” Lumi said, cupping his face. She kissed his forehead and smiled. “Don’t you ever scare us like that again.”
I wanted to bask in this momentary relief for as long as I could, but I knew that the interplanetary spell failing like that was no coincidence, and that, as Lumi had mentioned earlier, there was the risk of more Reapers coming after us. She’d made it quite clear that the Word wasn’t to be fully relied upon, and I worried…
I worried that our troubles were still in their incipient phase. That the worst was yet to come.
Lumi
Despite my smile, dark questions piled up inside me.
After the brief outburst of the Word earlier, which had been powerful enough to scare off those three Reapers, I could no longer feel it. My connection to the Word was still there, but… it sounded like radio silence. Like whoever had been on the other side of the line had stepped out for a moment, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why or what had possessed the Word to react like that, in the first place.
And while I was thrilled for our team to be reunited and even enriched by the presence of Acantha, Nethissis, and Fallon, I worried. The interplanetary spell wasn’t supposed to react like this. The light bubble was meant to be impervious to atmospheric pressure and friction. As my apprentices told us about what happened the moment they took off from Luceria’s platform, a startling truth began to form in