Mountain [18+] ✔️ Complete

Fourteen • Stitch

The uprooted trees on the edges of the chasm seemed so fresh to me, so... helpless. I reached out to touch one of the branches, my heart clenching a bit at the sight. I couldn't help the upset, the anger. I was connected to the earth now, and these living things torn asunder churned my guts.

The teeth of the jagged abyss were solid rock, torn apart in just the right way to look like they would chew us up should we fall inside.

"What did this?" Archer breathed.

I swallowed, hard. "That demon must have done it," I said. But how? What else was it capable of? How could this be possible? If it could tear the mountain like this, what could it do to us? To Marius?

"It must be trying to intimidate us," Lyla spoke up, and knelt down to peer into the deep gorge. "Trip us up. It must be scared, knowing we're coming after it."

I took a deep breath. It was scared? I was suddenly reminded of my mother scolding me as a small child not to be afraid of bugs. They're more scared of you than you are of them, she'd told me. I'd eventually gotten over it, conceding that I had the upper hand because I was so much bigger. That I had a more formed brain and could make the deduction that I was more powerful than a spider or an earwig.

In this case, I was the bug. I was tiny and inexperienced, and terrified of the giant demon. How fully formed was its brain? Was it going to realize at some point that it would be stupid to be afraid of us, because it was so much bigger, so much more powerful?

But... was it more powerful? If a coven like ours, our own soul ancestors, had created it by accident... if we were the architects of its inception, could we not be of its destruction?

My mind whirled.

"Well, it won't be difficult to get across, anyway," Damien cut into my thoughts and I raised an eyebrow at him.

"Totally easy to get across an endlessly deep cliff that's like forty feet across," I said, sarcasm dripping like molasses.

He shrugged. "We're magic," he replied. "Arch could fill it with water so we could swim across. You could make a bridge with trees or something. Or Lyla could just blow us over." He waggled his eyebrows at the last suggestion.

She looked like she was stifling a laugh, and shook her head. "I think Saph might be the safest option for this one," she said, and turned to me.

I regarded the tree that I'd focused on, wondering if I really was the safest option. We hadn't yet figured out what we were really conjuring, just that we could manipulate our separate elements. If I could move the earth, could I make a bridge across somehow? With tree roots or...

"Oh," I blinked. "Do you think I could close this?" I turned excitedly to my friends. "Do you think I could fix it?"

Archer pursed his lips. "I didn't think of that... but maybe you can. That's a big hole, though..."

I got down on my hands and knees, shuffling to the edge, digging my hands into the dirt. I let myself fall into the state we'd been practicing, that meditative openness that allowed me to feel the magic in the earth.

I tried to imagine cords of life, flowing from the roots of the trees, criss-crossing back and forth across the chasm as if to stitch it back together. My muscles clenched, body tightening as I clutched at the ground.

Lyla cried out behind me, and I felt hands on my back. Somebody tried to wrench me backwards, but I was rooted to the spot. I held on to the magic threads, and though I couldn't see them I knew something was happening—something was working with me.

"Sapphire!" Damien screamed in my ear, but I ignored him.

Archer grunted in my other ear. "She's not letting go," he said, and his voice sounded far away and inside my head all at once. "We have to help her."

"How?!" Lyla's voice.

A third set of arms wrapped around my midsection, and an electric surge rippled through me. Suddenly the world burst with vivid colour, and I could see the threads. They were there, the brightest green I'd ever seen, back and forth across the gorge, taut and shimmering but holding.

"PULL!" I shrieked, and my coven curled around me, tightened their grips, bodies melding with mine. I was so warm, so connected, so safe, so there... it was as if life itself up until now had been a distant dream, nothing real until this moment, this powerful moment where the four of us were one, one with each other and with the earth, drawn together, knitted, stitched, roiling in the magic that bound all things together-

We collapsed in a heap, a writhing dogpile of heaving chests and jelly legs.

"What the hell..." Archer groaned, flopping off of me. I blinked as we disentangled ourselves, and sat up, body exhausted as if I'd just run a marathon.

The trees stood upright, branches proudly reaching for the sky, the soft dirt beneath near pulsing with health.

The chasm was gone. We'd done it.