“Everybody move.” Maleshi stalked forward, sneering at the blackness swirling around them. Their vision blurred with every step, the darkness sometimes blocking the other magicals from view, only to reveal them again the next second. But the outline of dampened light around the portal doorway remained bright enough to see at any given moment.
“Somebody’s shrunk this place,” Lumil muttered. “I don’t like being in a box.”
Venga hissed at her. “This is nothing like being in a box.”
“Well, sure. I meant metaphorically.” The goblin rolled her eyes at him and shook her head. “Asshole.”
“Picking up the pace would probably be our best bet,” Persh’al muttered. “You know, with shifters at three o’clock and everything.”
“Really?” Cheyenne squinted through the blackness, looking for in-between monsters. “You sure? ‘Cause I don’t—”
A pair of burning red eyes materialized in the black smog two inches from the halfling’s face.
“Holy flying shit!” She leaped back and blasted the thing with two orbs. The ground shook beneath them as the shifting monster bellowed. Cheyenne slapped her hands over her ears and blinked against the tears welling in her eyes.
“Yep, loud as fuck!” Ember grabbed her friend’s arm and tugged her to the doorway. “Can’t stop now, Cheyenne.”
The halfling stumbled across the spongy, slurping ground, throwing energy spheres and purple sparks at anything with red eyes that moved.
Lumil bashed at the giant pincer sweeping toward her and splintered the hard carapace into thousands of tiny pieces. The in-between monster shrieked and withdrew. “You’d think these things would grow a few brain cells and learn to recognize us by now.”
“No brains, asshat!” Byrd unleashed green fire at a swarm of black, glistening wings flapping overhead. “And yeah, I might be talking about you too!”
Persh’al reached the doorway first, his sparking blue whip writhing from his clenched fist, and turned back to wave the others forward. “Come on! Let’s go!”
A thick tentacle lashed at him from the top of the doorway. He cracked his whip into the shimmering black flesh and split the thing clean in half. The severed end thumped on the ground, and he kicked it away with a grimace. “Fucking disgusting.”
Ember and Cheyenne hurried toward him and the shimmering doorway. The halfling turned to blast more energy spheres at the point of a razor-sharp beak dropping toward Venga. Her attack splintered the beak, but the creature simply rearranged itself and spilled a nest of writhing tentacles from within the dangling husk that had been its mouth.
Venga roared and shoved two scaly fists into the wriggling mass. His other two fists rose high above his head, palms open, and jagged claws extended. Green light flashed across his all-black eyes as he shouted a spell, and the tangled tentacles hovering over him burst to smithereens in his grasp.
“Everybody through. Come on!” Persh’al waved them forward again, lashing every striking black appendage until the space in front of the doorway glowed a constant blue.
Byrd and Lumil darted through the doorway first. Then Maleshi raced past, skidding across the ground as she slashed at a striking tentacle and split it into five ribbons with her claws. Venga stalked toward them, throwing up plumes of black smoke with every heavy step and tossing incoming black monsters aside with all four arms.
Corian darted through the doorway, dragging Venga the rest of the way with him. Ember tugged Cheyenne’s arm to get her to move. “Persh’al, come on!”
“Go!” He stepped in front of the doorway and cracked his blue whip at a spider-like creature with a dozen red eyes at the center of not eight legs but nineteen. His whip lashed leg after skittering leg before any of the sharp, barbed ends had the chance to stab their intended targets, namely Cheyenne and Ember.
The fae finally managed to pull Cheyenne through the doorway, and they stumbled across the portal exit two seconds before Persh’al. The blue troll shouted as a severed spider’s leg morphed into a barbed claw, and he dove through the doorway to skid unceremoniously on his stomach across loose, charred dirt. The in-between monster shrieked and retreated through the doorway, and then it was over.
“I really hate those things.” Persh’al shoved himself off the ground and slapped the coarse dirt off his clothes. “Now what?”
Corian pointed to their right. “Now we get the hell away from here and that.”
Everyone followed his gaze to see the blight’s black tendrils snaking across the land, sucking the life from the few rare scraps of plant life remaining this far in the Outers. Venga scratched his hairless head with one hand and stroked his scaly chin with another. “That’s it, then?”
“That’s it.” Ember glared at the necromancer. “Feel free to let inspiration strike. We could really use suggestions from the magical who created that.”
“Come on.” Maleshi nodded at the portal she’d just conjured, then looked over her shoulder at the quickly approaching blight. “I hope I don’t have to tell anyone how important it is to be quick about it!”
The magicals slipped through the shimmering oval of dark light. Less than ten seconds after the general’s portal disappeared with a soft pop, the snaking tendrils of the blight’s corruption spilled across the soil. It cracked the earth beneath it, filled the empty spaces with black, oozing sludge, and kept going.
Chapter Eighty-Five
“Anyone else think it’s weird that the crossing took less than five minutes?” Ember straightened her sweater and gazed at the shimmering magical dome surrounding the capital city of Hangivol in front of them.
“My guess is the in-between acts rather like the Outers these days,” Corian muttered. “With ever-changing boundaries.”
“You’re not complaining, are you?” Lumil grinned at the fae.
“Not even a little. I was under the impression that the portal doorways were farther apart, that’s all.”
“They usually are.” Maleshi lifted her chin and stared across the dark silhouettes of Hangivol’s rising towers in front of them. “And this city usually isn’t on fire.”
Cheyenne squinted at
