Page 80 of The Stone Survival
“Flora, what did your mother look like?” Willowman asks. Flora goes still and silent. “Where did you play as a child?”
“Stop it…”
“Flora…” Willowman is close enough now to touch her. “What is your first memory?”
“Blake,” she says softly. “Blake looking down at me in the rain. It’s wet and cold, but his smile is warm, and he loves me. He loves me more than anything.” A soft sob breaks from her lips. “I’m safe with Blake. He’ll protect me. Always.”
“You know what you are, don’t you?”
She shakes her head.
“You’ve suspected for some time, haven’t you?”
“No. No, no, no.”
“Say it,” Willowman says.
“No! It’s not true! Not true!” The last part is a scream, and then she’s gone.
Vanished into thin air.
“What the fuck just happened?” Curi says.
“Flora is a remnant,” Willowman says. “A being created from an amalgamation of memories. Something that hasn’t been done for over a century, and then only by the most powerful magic users in any coven. The practice was forbidden when a remnant took the life of its creator.”
“Wait…are you saying that YarrowcreatedFlora?”
“Like a tulpa?” Derek says. “She’s like me.”
“Not like you,” Willowman says. “You’re Cameron’s shield manifested into a human form. And a tulpa is a creature woven from a human’s fear and imagination. A remnant is built from thememoryof a person, living or dead.”
Yarrow gave Derek the bracelet. He created Flora and… “Yarrow brought Taz back to me when he went missing. He must have placed the bug on him.”
“It’s Yarrow…” Palia says softly. “Yarrow is working for the faction.”
Yarrow is our traitor.
CHAPTER 39
CAMERON
The orb transported us directly into a dank, dark cell illuminated by an anemic lantern fixed to the stone wall outside our prison. The bars had some kind of magical charge on them that not only hurt but also incapacitated. It reminded me of the charge on the bars in the cells at Ivor’s base.
Serath and I had barely finished looking for any fractures in the structure of our cell that we could exploit when a shadow in the cell opposite us moved.
“Hello?” Serath called out. “Who’s there?”
The shadow shrank away from the light. “No. You’re not real.”
Wait, that voice…I knew that voice. “Yarrow? Yarrow, is that you?”
Pale fingers curled around the bars, provoking no nasty effects, and a face peered out of the gloom. Gaunt and hollow-cheeked, with eyes too large, in a head that seemed too big for his body, it was still, unmistakably, Yarrow.
“What did they do to you?” Serath asked. “Blake…”
“Can you help me? Can you get me out?” His voice cracked. “I just…I want to go home.”
Something was wrong. The way he was looking at us, as if we were strangers. “Yarrow, you know who we are, right?”
