Page 66 of The Endless One

She crouched before it, tilting her head to the side. “What are you doing here?”

The spider seemed to pause. One leg lifted, gently stroking the air as though it might be able to feel her, before it continued the slow crawl forward.

She wasn’t sure what to do here. The spider shouldn’t be in this golden realm, that much she was certain of. But how had it gotten here? How was it walking toward her as though it knew where she was, even though she knew for certain that it didn’t?

Moving back, Jessamine tested to see if it would follow her. And it did. Strangely enough, the spider moved its direction the moment she shifted hers.

“How odd,” she muttered, standing and taking another few steps back. That didn’t seem to deter the little creature, as it was obviously still following her. As though no matter how far she tried to move away from it, it would always know where she was.

Jessamine felt the smallest spike of fear drive through her chest. Spiders had never been her favorite creature, although she had a healthy respect for them and knew to leave them alone when they were hanging from a windowsill. They had their use, but that didn’t mean she had to endure being around them.

Then came another sound. This one of wings beating at the air and the wind rustling through feathers.

A raven landed on the ground only fifteen feet from her. It ruffled dark feathers, a third eye in between the other two blinking at her.

“Oh. I’m hallucinating now,” she said.

Except then a thud on her right side revealed itself to be a snake that had seemingly fallen out of the sky. This one lifted its head and stared at her as well, tongue flickering as it tasted her scent on the air.

This wasn’t good. She had no idea who these creatures had been sent by, but she had a suspicion it could be the Huntress.

“No, Jessamine,” she told herself as she backed away from the creatures. “She can’t find you here. That’s the point of all this. She would have to find all the other parts of you, and she couldn’t have done all that. Not yet.”

But maybe, just maybe, she had. Fear turned her stomach sour, and her heart thundered in her chest. Something inside of her screamed that she needed to get somewhere safe.

Jessamine turned, and she ran.

This world was not so kind as to allow her to flee easily, though. Her feet pounded on the golden ground, and all she could hear were the howls of wolves. Black wolves, all of them made up of dark shadows with blood dripping from their jaws, hunting her across the never-ending nothingness of this realm. They called out their glee at having to chase their prey, and she did not know what to do.

So she kept running, her breath sawing in and out of her lungs as she pumped her arms and forced her legs to keep going even when they cramped. She would not fall to the Huntress. She would not die for real.

There was still time for someone to find her here. If only she could keep moving. Keep running. Keep hiding.

But her magic wasn’t even here. She couldn’t use it in this realm. In Elric’s shadowy realm, she could have conjured so many things to keep her safe. She would have had a barrier, a city, a wall that would have been impossible to get inside, but here?

Nothing could protect her from what hunted her down.

She might have continued running or gotten away, if there wasn’t the distraction of the swarm of bats that attacked her next. They tangled in her hair, their high-pitched shrieks filling her ears with sharp staccato sounds.

Terror made her scream a little, stuttering in her run until she was standing still, frantically running her hands through her hair and untangling the soft bodies that were biting at her fingers. She could feel the blood slicking between the digits as she ripped them out, one by one.

By then, the wolves had caught up.

The first one caught her in the chest, knocking her down onto the ground as it bit her arm. Pain lanced through her as another wolf grabbed her other arm. Pinned by twin beasts, she was stuck there, terrified but unable to move as she stared up at the raven that hovered in the air above her.

“Is this my death?” she croaked. “Will it be so easy for you to kill me, after all?”

A low quiet filled the air. The wolves’ growls died down. The sound of the wings became less of a buffeting ache. And then, all that filled the clearing with noise was the soft sound of a toad croaking.

A toad?

She couldn’t quite pay attention to the oddity of that, because the raven was sinking in the air. Talons grew closer and closer to her face until all she could see was the darkness of the feathers. They raked across her face, sinking closer until those feathers caressed her cheeks. The thundering sound of her heart stuttered, as it felt as though she had… absorbed it. The raven was sucked into her body; those talons become her own, stretching her fingers into claws that suddenly tore through the thin gold beneath her.

She listened to the rattle of her lungs as her body shifted and changed.

Writhing on the ground now, she struggled to get away from the creatures pinning her down. Already she could feel the slithering of the snake as it coiled around her bare leg, sinking into her skin as scales fluttered down her entire body. She could feel them growing underneath her skin, then popping out in a wave of texture that wasn’t normal. Wasn’t right.

Then the toad, it hopped onto her chest and crawled its way to her mouth. Tiny clawed hands dug at her face, scrabbling at her lips as it shoved itself beyond her teeth. She tried to shriek around it, but the beast seemed impossible to harm. She even tried to bite through it, but that got her nowhere as it crawled down her throat and made a nest in her stomach.