They pulled what was left of it onto the bank, but it was indisputable that the pickup was ruined without its rear half. While Richter sobbed over its corpse, now forever bereft of decorative flames, another girl clutched something else dear to her, sobbing incoherently.
With her hair still glued to her head by drying mud, Maelys was unsympathetic. "Why the blazes were you clinging to that trunk you dimwit? We nearly…we nearly…"
A particularly loud sob turned into a hacking cough. A small clod of dirt fell from Sauvanne's mouth as she hugged the luggage she had saved. "It…it has my supplies…my spare glasses…my wolfsbane ingredients…those are so expensive."
Effie's shadow overshadowed Sauvanne's shuddering form in the pale starlight. "Maelys. This was all your fault, you know.
"The stars of this place say we are doomed. We have no exit, and now, no transport. We've lost everything except for your companion's useless herbs. ("That's not true," muttered Richter. "My pumpkin juice dispenser is fine.")
Maelys clenched her hand on her wand. "Oh. Really, O prophet? You signed up for this! You knew we were going to travel into places like…places like this! This is all part of the territory. Are you suddenly chicken, you toothopaste-headed bitch?"
Effie did not budge. "I have been inside 'places like this' before. You think that monster was something? That was a house pet compared to the horrors I've experienced. I've seen worlds where time flows in circles and writhing flesh fills every bit of space. Sometimes you don't even see the monsters before they've eaten every shred of your existence except for your ability to scream. If we had stopped to think, actually formulated a plan, I would have explained how to probe the rift in the first place to stop us from getting stranded here!"
Maelys's lips quivered, shaking with anger, but no sound came out. Then she laughed. And laughed.
"I knew it! Always, you have been against us, ever since the very beginning. I was right to be suspicious of you. You have too much power, too much knowledge to be someone our age. You lead us in circles as if we were blind children. Now you demoralize us so you can manipulate us, pick up the scraps. You're a Polyjuiced werewolf, you traitor, are you n…"
"MAELYS!"
Sauvanne was pointing at the sky, where the clouds whose patterns they had been following were rapidly dispersing. And hanging like a fleshless skull in the middle of the emptying sky was a full moon.
There was howling, howling in the distance that slowly grew louder.
Richter was the next to speak. "Run. RUN!"
There were not three werewolves. There were probably more than fifty, running in a massive unceasing line of pupil-less eyes and foam-flecked fur, prowling aimlessly through the starlit moor. The pounding drumbeat of their claws against the torn ground was only matched by their bloodcurdling howls, hungry and unceasing, echoing off the ominous hills as they raced headlong towards the horizon where the moon dipped low, lurking like a beckoning diabolist.
"I guess there probably isn't much food here for them, except…each other?" mused Richter.
Sauvanne elbowed him through the muck.
It had taken no mathematician to judge from the increasing volume that the sources of the howls would have outrun the drained, tired teenagers. Richter had led them back into the swamp where they had waited, treading the liquid mire, praying that neither lupine predators nor leviathan worm-mannequins would discover them and that they had enough energy to keep from sinking.
When the howls were gone, the group slowly trudged their way back to solid land. Near the bank, Maelys came to a stop, covering her face with her hands and refusing to be dragged by Sauvanne and Richter.
"Michael…Michael!" she repeated blankly.
It was her nightmare. In this hellscape he was either dead or one of the pack. Or maybe, just maybe they had fallen down the wrong rift, to be chased by completely unrelated werewolves who would soon tear them limb from limb.
Maelys felt her shoulders held tight by broad hands – she was being shaken by Richter. She stared up into his eyes, the moonlight shining through his pale gold locks.
"No. We've come this far. We're still alive, and we still have hope! We promised each other never to surrender, never to give up! You must keep fighting. You have to!"
Sauavanne hugged Maelys tight as Richter continued.
"Michael was brave and clever. He would find a way out of this. We need to have faith in him. You need to have faith in him! There is a mystery here we don't fully understand. We will solve it and bring Michael home. All of us will go home!"
There was a sound of slow, sarcastic clapping. Richter stood silent, but Sauvanne turned to Effie with hurt in her eyes as the older witch came closer.
Effie smacked Maelys's cheek lightly, but the girl did not react. "She's broken. You can't get through to her now. Just petrify her and levitate her along with us."
Turning away, Effie conjured a lump of solidified mud, and sat down on it. "Trust me, we're in too deep. Our best move is to withdraw. Regroup. Resupply and come back with reinforcements. These werewolves can't have grown here, so my hunch is that they were taken here. If someone put them here on purpose, then they must have a way out. And remember…"
Mud erupted into air like a geyser. There was a rush of something long, moving at immense speed, and a grinding of wooden slats that threatened to burst Maelys's ear drums. Towering over them was the worm-mannequin, mud falling away from its awful grin. Maelys stared into its multifaceted, punctured eyes, and found that she was frozen - Richter and Sauvanne were carrying her with them as they half-swam, half-stumbled away. Effie was on her feet, waving her arms, shouting something, but Maelys could not make out her words – everything felt dim and faraway.
The worm-mannequin dove again. Its maw was met with a bright electric burst fired unwaveringly from Effie's hands – and kept coming. There was no time for Effie to react before it was upon her.
And then there was nothing but its horrible fractal hide, spinning and spiraling greedily as it began to sink back into the mire.
The immediacy of burning anger dispelled the cloud of Maelys's despair. Nobody deserved this, Maelys thought. "Inflamarae maxima!"
Flames wreathed the worm-mannequin, with a curious effect on its outwardly wooden skin. Chipped white scale-like paint flaked off in the magical heat, and underneath, the surface turned black and glossy. The monster submerged itself, extinguishing the ineffectual flames.
"Reducto!" yelled Richter, blasting the mud in front of him into a towering geyser. Maelys raised her wand to do the same, her eyes scanning the churning mud.
Then a horrifying pale face erupted from underneath her feet. As she stared into the empty pits of its eye sockets, black ink burst out of its frozen void-like rictus of a mouth, covering her eye and the left side of her face. It burned, it shocked, it chilled her to her bones. It felt like something intangible inside her was being sucked into a starless emptiness while she tried to scream but had forgotten how to.
And then there was nothing for Maelys as she fainted away and the world went black.
