Illusory

"How long do you think this is gonna take?" I asked breathlessly, having to raise my voice to be heard over the sounds of nature — sticks snapping beneath my feet, leaves rustling all around us, and birds calling overheard. I was already tired of this, of having to practically jog to keep up with Van, of having to watch out for tree roots and fallen limbs and nearly falling because of them, anyway — and we hadn't even been out here for ten minutes.

"Not too long, I'm sure," he called back to me. He was just as calm as ever, breathing evenly and not pushing himself at all, and I wondered how he did it. He worked out just as much as I did — which was approximately never — and spent even less time in the woods, so how was he doing this with so little trouble? "A few miles is nothing if you set the right pace."

"But this pace is killing me!" I whined. "Can't we just go back and wait for people with cars to come get us?" My foot caught on one of the tree roots I'd been keeping an eye out for, and my hand scraped against the bark of a tree as I caught myself. My palm began to bleed, but I kept moving, knowing that Van wouldn't show any sympathy for a tiny little scrape on my hand. Hell, I wouldn't have shown any sympathy for it, either.

"No," he said flatly. "We've already made it this far. We have no reason to stop now."

"But you don't even know how far we've made it!" A bright yellow leaf dropped from the tree above, fluttering slowly toward me on the breeze, and I knocked it aside before it could hit me in the face. "We could be going in the wrong direction for all you know! Or the pilot could've been wrong, and we're not even heading toward the right city!"

"I doubt the pilot would be wrong," he remarked dryly. "Pilots are men who get paid to know where everything is."

"Nuh uh. They get paid to fly planes," I argued, nearly tripping over another root. I huffed as I caught myself on another tree, smearing blood from my scraped palm across the bark.

"Well, yes, but they also tend to be very knowledgeable about the areas in which they fly those —" He stopped suddenly, holding a hand out toward me as he had on the plane to stop my approach. "What is...What is that?" he murmured to himself, squinting into the trees before him.

"I don't see anything," I whispered, but he didn't even seem to hear me. He crept forward as silently as he could, dead leaves still crunching softly beneath his feet, and he continued to hold his hand out to me, as if I would suddenly forget that he'd told me to stop and come barreling after him while belting out a show tune.

"Pulso!" rang out through the trees, a rugged, masculine voice that I'd never heard before, and it suddenly felt like a ball of quick-moving wind had slammed into my chest. I sailed backward several feet, coming down on a mass of sticks and sharp rocks that cut into my back through my jacket. My blanket and bag fell to either side of me. I gasped for air, trying to replace what had once again been knocked from my lungs, but I didn't dare move to do anything else.

"Subrigo!" came another cry of that unfamiliar voice, and the rocks and sticks that I'd just landed upon stabbed their way through my clothing and into my skin. I screamed and rolled onto my front, but the damage had already been done. Pain lanced through my back from a dozen different stab wounds, and though I reached back and clawed at the sticks and stones, there was nothing to be done about it.

"Ember!" I heard Van shout, leaves rustling and twigs snapping as he started toward me.

"Subrigo!" that voice yelled again, and the rocks and sticks jerked from my back and started another trip through the air. I let out a sobbing cry, tears blurring the wall of brown and yellow that spread out before my eyes, and let my arms fall uselessly to my side.

Van's movement through the undergrowth stopped. "Contego!" he thundered, and I heard the sound of dozens of rocks pinging off of a metallic wall of some sort. The noises of his travels resumed, and he was soon crouching before me. "Ember," he whispered, taking my tear-smeared face in his hands. They were cold, and it came as a shock that brought my eyes wide open. "Get up. We need to go." His fingers slid beneath my armpits, and he pulled me to my feet with a strength I hadn't know he had. "Come on, Ember. Come on," he murmured as he set me on my feet. "I need you to move."

"Rotundtur Flamma!" The words echoed through the trees, and the spell burned through them. Over my shoulder, I saw a giant ball of flame hurtling toward us, just like the one I'd seen through the hole in the plane during its attack. I fell into a fit of pitiful sobs, unable to help myself at this point.

"Restinguo!" Van yelled, one arm around my waist as he thrust the other out toward the flame, but the spell only extinguished half of the fire. The rest continued toward us, showing no signs of stopping. "Restinguo!" he said again, and another small bit of the flame subsided, the ball slowing its approach slightly, but nothing more. His eyes widened.

"Contego!" I yelled in a shaky scream-sob. It was the word I'd heard Van utter earlier, the one he'd used to save himself from the levitating rocks, and I pictured some kind of big wall as I spoke it, hoping desperately to create what I saw in my mind.

Nothing happened for a moment, the fireball only feet from us now; then, suddenly, a shimmering wall of bright, sunny yellow sprang to life before us from the ground up. It seemed to be only half there, transparent and trembling oddly as it was, but when the ball collided with it, the flame spread along it and promptly died away. The wall shattered noiselessly into pieces, and the pieces disappeared abruptly before they hit the ground.

"I...I just..." I stammered, my teary eyes darting from where the shield had once stood to Van's shocked face and back again. "I just cast a...a spell..."

"We need to go," he said, then yelled again, "We need to go!" He took me by the upper arm, clutching it so tightly that I already felt a bruise beginning, and began to walk quickly away from the break in the singed trees where the fireball had emerged from, dragging me right along with him.

"But my bag," I said, noticing that he still had his slung securely over one shoulder.

"There's no time," he snapped, quickening his pace until I was nearly stumbling with every step. "We need to get out of here."

"Anima." The single Latin word slithered through the trees, an acidic whisper where there normally would have been a powerful shout.

"No," Van hissed under his breath, and a great rumbling began behind us, the ground shaking as if we'd been caught in an earthquake. "No!" His pace quickened further, and my already unsteady legs grew even unsteadier. The earth's trembling grew louder, more violent, a cacophony of rending earth and rolling rocks, and I was finally knocked to the ground atop more pointy rocks and sticks. I cried out once, then again when Van roughly hauled me to my feet by the arm. "Keep moving!" he yelled, yet his voice was still nearly lost beneath the rumbling of the earth.

We crashed through the underbrush, sharp branches slapping me in the face and tearing at my hands and neck. I stumbled and cried out, but Van kept me going. "We can't stop," I heard him chanting. "We can't stop, Ember. We can't stop."

A massive branch suddenly sent a tree to our right sprawling to the forest floor, in spite of how deeply the roots had been planted. It fell away from us, but the branch was headed our way. It was like an arm, waving about, stretching toward our running forms, the twigs at its tip acting like a set of fingers grabbing for us. Those twig-fingers caught the back of my coat, jerking me backward and out of Van's grip. It flung me without a second thought, and I sailed past a thick-trunked maple with a single hollow on its front that stared out at me like an eye. I hit the ground, rolling and rolling and rolling until my injured back finally hit another tree and I stopped.

"Ember!" Van called after me, and I heard him clawing his way back through the undergrowth toward me. "Dilamino!" he shouted, his footsteps never ceasing. A terrible rending sound rebounded through the trees, the impossible sound of wood ripping in two. Wood couldn't be torn, I thought; it could only be cut or broken. But yards away from me, I saw a tree being split in two to leave only jagged edges and a rainfall of splinters, and I knew that this was Van's power.

One half of the torn tree fell to the ground, lifeless, but the other used its branches to drag itself toward me. Van was suddenly beside me, pulling me violently to my feet with another painful grip on my arm. "This guy can animate trees, Ember," he growled in my ear, facing the approaching tree. "You need to get out of here."

I was startled by this change of words, of this we to you nonsense, and my facial expression showed it. "What?"

"Run, Ember," he snarled, his breath warming my cheek. "Run back the way we came. Grab your bag on the way."

I looked up at him, at the raw rage in his face, and all I could do was give one single nod beneath the hard gaze of this man, this man that I just couldn't deny. "Okay, Van," I whispered, resting a hand gently against his on my arm. "I'll meet you back at the plane." My hand slid away from his skin, and I ran away from him as fast as I could on my wobbly legs.

A few of the tree's branches stretched out at me as I sprinted past — or, rather, jogged past, though the energy just the jog was taking felt like I was running a marathon at full speed — but when the twiggy fingers at their tips grew close to me, the tree began to lose its balance; it had to revoke its branches to keep from crashing to the leaf-covered ground with no hope of rising again.

I paused by my back pack, stopping only to catch my breath and look back at Van. The tree was crawling and stretching its way toward him now, and he stood boldly facing it. Determination set his jaw and narrowed his eyes, and I knew he couldn't lose. Whoever this magician was, this mysterious man or woman who could animate trees with half a thought and fling fireballs around on a whim, he or she had nothing on Van. With that notion in my mind and a vague hope in my heart, I slung my bag over my shoulder and started at a brisk walk through the forest, heading back the way we'd come.

-?-

Reaching the site of the plane wreck proved to be no small undertaking. I didn't think I'd taken any serious damage — I'd only been thrown a couple of times and gotten a few shallow cuts from some sharp rocks and pointy twigs, after all — but I felt like someone who'd just been shot in the shoulder: perfectly capable of walking but losing so much blood that it gradually became a serious challenge. This day had so shocked and shaken me, so rattled my nerves, that it was taking a physical toll on me. It didn't help that I hadn't eaten in a while, either. By the time I reached the camp site, I was about ready to collapse from exhaustion.

It was much later in the morning now, around ten o'clock if I had to take a guess from the position of the sun, and I arrived too late to join the other survivors of the crash on their journey to town. In a car. Safe.

"I told you we shouldn't have gone," I mumbled to myself, crumpling into a little pile of gray and white and blue denim only a few feet from the fallen plane. "I told you that something bad would happen. I even told you that there was probably something waiting for us in there. Granted, I didn't exactly have a powerful magician with the intent of killing us in mind at the time, but still." I fell from my sitting position onto my back on the ground, sighing when my back hit the cool patch of dirt.

"I could go to sleep right now," I said, and felt like I was speaking to the airplane. "If I had a pillow and a blanket, I probably would." But alas, I'd left my blanket behind in the woods, and I'd never had the luxury of a pillow to go with it to begin with. "Maybe I'll try, anyway," I muttered, allowing my eyes to slip shut. "Yeah," I whispered after lying still for a few seconds, surrounded only by the silence of the empty field and the occasional sound of an animal in the woods, "I think I can do this."

I'd just begun to drift off when a voice said, "Do you really think it's a good idea to sleep out here?" It was feminine, dark, threateningly unfamiliar, and I jerked upright as my eyes snapped open. Before me, only a foot or two away, stood a woman of about 5'6, her arms crossed over her tiny chest. Her ocean-blue eyes bore into my own, holding a scowl I wasn't quite sure I deserved, and her foot tapped impatiently in the dirt, sending little clouds of dust floating into the air. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled tightly back in a high ponytail, the tension only adding even more harshness to her unpleasant face. It would have been a pretty face, too, if it lost the perpetual unhappiness that seemed glued there like a mask.

"No, of course not," I responded defensively, my eyes scanning her body in search of weapons or any other threatening items. "But I really don't think I have a choice at the moment." She appeared to be unarmed, but that didn't mean that she wasn't dangerous. It seemed that magicians were running rampant around here, if Van's little altercation in the forest was any indication.

"You should leave," the woman told me, taking a single threatening step closer.

I cocked an eyebrow at her. "Or what?"

"Don't try to act tough, girly," she said, her eyes narrowing. "It doesn't look good on you."

"You're an example of why it doesn't look good on anyone," I countered as I got to my feet. My legs ached, my back ached, my lungs ached, my everything ached, but I did my best not to let it show. "You know, if you just smiled a little bit, you would probably be really, really pretty." The second the words left my lips, I wanted to smack myself in the face. What started as an insult had just turned in to a compliment. I was such a dumbass.

"So I've heard," she said coldly, taking another step toward me. "So, girly, are you gonna leave, or am I gonna have to act like my friend in the forest?"

"So you are a magician," I blurted, cocking my head to one side. "But if you're with that guy, then why aren't you just attacking me and getting it over with? He seemed pretty eager to get rid of both me and Van."

The woman shrugged, and she shifted her weight onto her other leg, beginning to tap the other foot instead. Being so impatient all the time had to be tiring. "Personally, I don't like his methods. I don't think you should kill someone who's not even in your way yet, just because they might be later on, and I certainly don't think you should take down an entire plane full of people just kill one guy and his weakling assistant."

So she was...the good guy? If Little Miss Angry Pants was the good one, I didn't want to know what the guy in the forest looked like.

"Do you know what's happening in there?" I asked, frowning. I had faith in Van and all, but if this guy was really as brutal and heartless as this woman made him out to be...

"Look, honey, I'm not your friend. I don't care about your well-being or the well-being of your boyfriend. If you give me a reason to, I'll kill you right now, and I won't think twice about it." Her foot began to tap even harder, drumming a faster, heavier rhythm against the dirty ground, and I wasn't sure if she was really getting angry or if she was just getting nervous. I sometimes tapped my toes when I was nervous. I sometimes did a lot of things when I was nervous.

I looked toward the trees and began to wring my hands. "You don't have to be my friend to tell me what's going on."

The woman sighed, following my gaze absentmindedly. Her foot slowed its tapping but didn't stop. "I don't know any of the specifics, but I know that they're both still alive. Your guy was heading back this way when I last checked in on the fight a few minutes ago."

"And your guy?" I asked, glancing at her face, which had grown bored. Even boredom made her look prettier than that scowl.

"I think he was injured or something," she said with another shrug, as if she didn't care that her partner or friend or whatever he was to her had been hurt. "He was still fighting, though. He's a hell of a fighter."

"I'm sure he is," I said with a quick nod, and her scowl returned full force.

"Don't patronize me, girly," she snapped, and her foot began its heavy drumming once more. "It's not going to help you."

"If I was trying to patronize you, girly," I sneered, glaring nastily back at her, "I would say something to compliment you, not some guy you don't even seem to care about."

"You'd better watch your tone with me, honey." I thought her foot was going to cause an earthquake, it was tapping so hard now. "I could kill you in a heartbeat, and I wouldn't think twice about it."

I was about to come up with some super badass response when the earth really did begin to shake. My eyes darted foolishly to the woman's foot, but I realized almost immediately that it wasn't her doing. I spun toward the forest and came face to face with the half-tree from earlier, still dragging itself along by the branches and roots. A scream was bubbling up in my throat, but it died down when Van suddenly walked out from behind the tree, a hand trailing along its rough trunk as he passed.

"Ember," he said, smiling weakly as he leaned heavily against the tree. "It's good to see that you're okay." Blood stained almost every inch of his suit jacket and dress shirt, pouring from some wounds I couldn't see; a deep gash across his cheek had even more blood staining his fair skin; his eyes were half-closed, a telltale sign of the fatigue caused by casting too much magic all at once, a sign I'd seen only once before.

I rushed forward with a horrified cry of "Van!" He fell against me when I reached him, and I staggered back under the weight, though I kept a tight hold of his waist and did my best to support him. "What happened? Is he dead? Are you all right?"

"No, just injured enough that he decided to flee," the man mumbled in my ear. His breath left him in a sigh, his body went fully limp, and I knew he'd passed out.

"Hey, you, Girly," I started, though I turned to find that that mysterious woman had disappeared. "Or not," I mumbled. Carefully, I lowered Van to the ground, eyeing the tree as I did so. "Are you...still alive?" I asked it, as if it could answer. But it appeared to be just a tree now, resting on the branches and roots with which it had been crawling only a moment ago.

I was completely alone, and I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.