the door he’d opened. There was no Four Paths anymore, just grayscale, the iridescence still oozing ever closer. Around them, trees crowded into his peripheral vision, their branches undulating grotesquely, and the sky was an undying, staticky white.
They stared at each other, no longer singing. Violet’s face was grim. They hadn’t just called the Gray?—they’d gone inside it. He’d expected this to happen after what Violet had described, but that didn’t make it any less unnerving. Humans weren’t supposed to be here; that was impossible to forget.
“It’s here,” Violet whispered, the words ringing out through the circle a moment after her lips moved. Isaac shuddered. He’d never entered the Gray for longer than a few seconds, and already every bit of him wanted to leave. He didn’t belong here.
He was opening his mouth to ask Violet how she knew the Beast was close when a voice spun around the edges of his mind, cruel and cold. It hissed, tinny and hollow, and Isaac gritted his teeth against the sound. The fog around him began to thicken, until it had become a humanoid form that Isaac recognized all too well.
“You need to leave,” Maya Sullivan whispered. She wore a hospital gown that could not quite hide the ritual scars snaking across her shoulders. Tubing wound around her arms and legs, puncturing her flesh. “Now.”
Isaac had steeled himself for the possibility that the Beast would show him some sort of vision designed to throw him off. But it was still hard to look at his mother like this: awake but trapped by the medical devices that kept her alive, her face animated with fear. It sent a chill through his entire body, a bone-deep fear that took him back to his fourteenth birthday. He could hear the faint sounds of his brothers screaming. A memory, he told himself?—it was just a memory.
Beside him, Violet looked confused. “Who is that? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a trick,” Isaac whispered. “You know it’s a trick.”
He forced himself to look away. There was nothing the monster could show him that was worse than the images that played in his own mind every night as he tried to sleep. The knife. Blood dripping onto the leaves. The smell of charred flesh, the distant sound of screaming.
“Run,” his mother hissed, her hand outstretched, fright contorting her features, and then a gust of wind rushed through the Gray, blowing her away into smoke.
The smell washed over them again, decay so strong it nearly made Isaac gag. He had just enough time to remember what others had told him about the Gray?—that there was no smell in there at all?—before he felt something twining around his legs.
He glanced down and gaped. The iridescent liquid from the founders’ symbol had become roots, and they’d snaked forward, viscous and oily, to wrap around his thighs. Isaac summoned his power and gripped the roots, shuddering at the way they felt against his palms?—warm and soft as human flesh, almost like he was touching someone else’s hand. He concentrated as best he could and burned the roots away. But they grew back faster than he could destroy them, encasing the tips of his boots in bark. He shook them off and stumbled backward.
“Isaac!” Violet’s voice was shrill and panicked. He glanced up and saw her struggling to kick more roots away. Tears snaked down her cheeks, the same iridescent gray as the liquid that pooled around them. “Get us out of here!”
He’d never seen anything like this before. Never even heard of it. But he didn’t need to see more to know that if they stayed here for much longer, they would die.
He summoned all his strength, wincing, and sent the biggest shock wave he could manage through the roots, disintegrating most of them into ash. Then he reached upward and tried to rip the air open again, gasping?—but as it opened wide, instead of relief, he felt something else.
Dread.
The world around him faded. Fog engulfed him like a second skin, and suddenly, he was gone.
Isaac floated, ephemeral, in a sea of static. His body was frozen; when he glanced down, he saw that he had turned as smoky and transparent as the vision of his mother. Roots twined around his arms and legs, crawling toward his nostrils, his ears, the corners of his eyes. They burrowed through his hair like centipedes, hooking around the edges of his mouth and pulling it open as they tried to snake down his throat.
Everywhere they touched hurt like