Chapter 27: Portal Magic
Beneath the descending platform, entwined within tangled ferns, Tavik and Bran looked up as golden shafts split the canopy, scattering the green shadows overhead. The entire world seemed to pulse with a vibrant light. Every leaf and moss-laden stone shimmered in radiant amber and emerald, their surfaces touched as if by celestial hands. Even the air vibrated, unsettled by the sheer magnitude of the power released above them. Through the tether, Tavik experienced the full force of all that befell Nix, an overwhelming surge of sensation for which he was neither forewarned nor equipped to withstand.
A pillar of golden light descended without warning, hammering into the earth before them. The impact shuddered up through the ground, into their boots, and into their back teeth. Neither spoke. Bran gripped Tavik’s arm, and both looked upward toward the platform still descending through the thinning mist, barely able to make out the shapes of what Oren and Nix had become, when the storm magic hit the tether.
It arrived as lightning often does: in the span between one heartbeat and the next, there was only emptiness, and then, with abrupt force, everything surged forth. What had been stillness was, in an instant, transformed into a torrent of energy.
Tavik found himself seized by a force that welled up from his core and erupted outward, unchecked and fierce. In a single, breathless moment, blue-white lightning laced itself across his skin, crackling along his arms and chest before bursting into the air in wild, searing filaments. Charged energy raised the hairs on his head, while the sound, sharp and unrelenting, rang through the clearing, reminiscent of splintered glass. Bewildered, as though time itself had slipped into another rhythm, Tavik looked down at his hands, watching light flicker and snap between his fingers, erratic yet vivid. For that instant, he was utterly enveloped in Nix’s storm, the tempest grounded in him as if the sky itself had marked him as its chosen conduit.
Bran had scarcely a moment to react before a startled cry escaped him.
The arc that leapt from Tavik’s skin where Bran’s hand gripped him was instantaneous and absolute. The sound of it was still in the air as Bran was flung bodily away, fast and entirely without ceremony, crashing through the undergrowth at the treeline’s edge in a violent percussion of snapping stems and thrashing ferns, and then the yelp cut off, mid-breath, as though a door had been shut on it.
Tavik pivoted, searching the thicket. The undergrowth remained motionless; not a single leaf stirred where Bran had vanished. As the ferns settled with a faint whisper, silence reclaimed the clearing.
“Bran.” The name came out flat and urgent. He crossed the ground between himself and the treeline at a run, the lightning still leaping off him with every step, crackling in the air around his shoulders and snapping from his bootlaces, and pushed through into the undergrowth where Bran had gone, one arm up against the branches. Roots, moss, the deep green shadows of the Eldertree forest, ancient and indifferent. No movement. No sound.
“Bran.” Tavik pivoted restlessly, anxiety rising like a tide. “Where are you?” The question hung in the thick silence, his searching gaze darting from shadow to shadow, every breath taut with apprehension.
The forest yielded nothing to him, no answers, no sign, only the distant stirrings of unseen creatures and, behind him, the low, deliberate settling of the platform as it made contact with the woodland floor.
He pushed deeper, scanning roots and hollows, calling his brother’s name again, the lightning crackling its restless light across the bark of every tree he passed, illuminating nothing useful. The wrongness of it sat in his chest like a stone: the silence where there should have been a voice, the absence where there should have been a person.
Then, with swift precision, two pairs of footsteps landed behind him, their approach unmistakable. Tavik spun on his heel, alert and ready.
Scarcely had Tavik registered their arrival before Nix advanced, closing the distance in a seamless, purposeful stride. Without hesitation, he placed his palm firmly against Tavik’s shoulder, his movements swift and measured.
“Cease,” whispered Nix.
Every arc died at once. The crackling fell away from Tavik’s skin and hair, the light snuffed out as cleanly as a candle, and the sudden silence of it rang in the space where the lightning had been. Tavik looked down at his hands. Ordinary hands. He let out one long breath.
Oren reached forward and hugged Tavik quickly, and Tavik gripped him back for one urgent second before pulling away and turning immediately back toward the trees, one hand shooting out to clamp onto Nix’s shoulder in passing, a single fierce grip of greeting, and then he was already moving again, pushing into the undergrowth, calling Bran’s name.
“He was right here,” Tavik said, his voice tight. “He had hold of my arm when the lightning hit, and it flung him straight through there, I heard him go into the branches and then nothing, no sound, nothing…”
He registered Oren and Nix falling in behind him and felt the knot in his chest ease fractionally at that, even as his eyes kept moving, scanning roots and hollows and the deep shadows between trunks. He glanced back once, and the sight of Oren landed on him like a physical thing: Oren was now nearly seven feet tall, his crown of light blazing quiet at his temples, and Nix beside him broader and taller and carrying that deep indigo blue across his shoulders like a second skin. Tavik took it in for the space of one startled breath and turned back to the forest.
“How long?” Oren’s voice came from just behind him, stripped of everything except the question.
“Minutes,” Tavik said. “Less than that. I don’t know. He was just gone.”
They worked through the ferns methodically, Nix, a silent presence off to their left, moving through the trees with that unhurried economy of his that covered a great deal of ground whilst appearing to hurry not at all.
“We saw you vanish,” Oren said. His voice was controlled, but Tavik knew his brother’s registers, and this one had something working beneath it. “From above. Through a device the Æthelweave had, a kind of mirror grown from the tree, that let us see the forest floor. You were there, both of you, and then you simply weren’t.” He paused. “Where did you go?”
Tavik pushed a low branch aside and held it. “There are beings beneath the roots of the Eldertrees. Small winged creatures, luminous. They have a city down there, grown from the roots themselves, whole streets of it, and a gathering hall, and a market.” He glanced across at Nix. “They called themselves Talanooks. Their elder is called Teo. He found Bran first, then brought me through.”
Oren said nothing for a moment, absorbing this.
“We were with them for what felt like hours,” Tavik continued. “Music, memories stored in root and light, things I’ve no good words for. Teo said time ran differently down there. When we came back up, barely a moment had passed.” He pushed through into a small clearing and turned in a slow circle. Still nothing. “Bran, where are you?”
His voice faded into the vast silence of the forest, enveloped by ancient trees whose hush permitted no reply. Not a single echo returned, no reassurance offered in the stillness.
Nix, who had come to stand at the clearing’s edge, had his attention fixed somewhere above the canopy, that particular distant focus that meant he was working through something inwardly. He spoke without looking at them.
“In the Canopy City,” he said. “When I was trying to understand what had happened to you both, I felt something in the tether.” He glanced at Tavik. “You were trying to push something through it.”
Tavik stared at him. “You felt that?”
“Barely. Like something pressing against a current.” Nix’s ears moved. “It was confused. Fragments. I couldn’t make out what you were trying to say, but I knew you were alarmed.”
Tavik was quiet for a moment. He had grown accustomed to knowing the tether ran one way only, knowing that Nix could not feel what came from his direction, that the connection was entirely Nix’s to Tavik and never the reverse. The idea that something had come back, however muddled, however faint, settled into him with a significance he didn’t quite have the words for yet.
Oren had been watching them both. Something in his expression had shifted, a careful, considering quality, as though he were measuring a distance he hadn’t previously known to account for.
“Teo put that book on Bran’s shelf, I’m certain of it,” Tavik said, pulling his attention back to the trees. “Rootbinder’s account of the Temporal Mist Migrations. It was on a shelf the Talanooks had made for Bran, all the titles chosen for him specifically, arranged as though they’d known exactly what he’d want. They made me a shelf of books too, one’s suited to me” His jaw tightened. “Teo never seemed surprised by anything we told him. He knew what was in that book before Bran read it. I feel like we were set up somehow, to be where we were so you both could face the Temporal Mist at the right time.”
A hush settled momentarily across the clearing, the silence lingering just long enough to be felt.
“The Druidess,” Nix started.
Oren turned to him. “Ætherina?”
“Something about her unsettled me.” Nix’s voice was measured and quite without inflexion, the tone he used when he was being precise rather than emphatic. “I couldn’t place the source of it. She was never anything but gracious. But it was as if she knew something she wasn’t saying.” His pupils shifted briefly. “The Æthelweave. The way they gathered to watch us leave. It felt strange, like they knew something.”
Oren said nothing. He looked between his cousin and his brother, his expression that of a man who had been entirely comfortable with the situation an hour ago and was now revising that assessment.
“We need to find Bran,” Tavik said and started through the clearing toward the next stand of trees.
Nix followed, his gaze sweeping the forest floor with steady attention. After a moment, he slowed, and something in the quality of his stillness changed, that particular inward quality of someone whose senses were telling them something their mind had not yet caught up with. He said nothing. Tavik glanced at him sidelong, read the expression, and looked back at the trees.
They pressed on through the undergrowth, their search persistent, while the forest exhaled a quiet indifference, its ancient tranquillity unbroken by the disappearance of a single fifteen-year-old boy.
