Page 55 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“Deeper,” Garvis ordered before I could even process what I’d just admitted to myself.
I wanted so badly for him to deny chaining me up.
“Deeper.”
I loathe myself for hurting him.
“Deeper.”
“I can’t,” I gasped out loud. “I…”
I almost opened my eyes, but something was reeling me backward, in, in, in, and Garvis clutched my hands tighter and said, “Deeper.”
My entire mind fell backward, flailing through what felt like infinite sky, until suddenly I was…
I was on solid ground again. Solid… powdery ground?
I opened my eyes, raking my fingers through the ground. Snow.
When I looked up, it was to find myself in an entirely new world, with a wall of ice looming overhead.
CHAPTER
18
Athud to my left told me Garvis had fallen in here with me.
“Where are we?” I asked him immediately, scrambling to a stand and brushing snow off my legs as I gazed around the entire space.
My breath fogged out in front of me. Wherever it was, it felt like an Element Wielder had cast a spell over the whole damn place. The wall ahead of us glimmered with impenetrable blue, coated in ice that barely revealed what lay underneath: an arched gateway made of gnarled wood.
And the sky… a hazy pink blob smeared the far side of it, while the patch directly ahead of us winked with a crescent light so much like the shape of my knife—as if both sun and moon had tried to rise or sink and found themselves caught up in all the mist.
Behind us lay nothing but a frozen wasteland that melted into a horizon as black as the Cosmos itself.
“This,” Garvis said as he lifted himself to my side, “is your mind.”
“Mymind?”
I stared at the wall in front of us again, gaping. How many times had I felt as if ice coated my veins, filling my very heart? And here, all along, my mind…
“Has it always been like this?” I breathed.
“No.” Garvis didn’t turn to look at me, but a tinge to his voice made me glance sideways at him. “I’ve only ever been in your mind once before, back when it was still frosting over, but Coen…” He coughed into a fist. “Coen’s told me it was once a lively place.”
I ignored the jolt that last part sent through me—the idea that Steeler had once known my mind intimately enough to describe it in detail to a friend. “You’ve been in my mind once before now?”
“Yes.”
Finally, Garvis turned to look at me, and I startled at the sight of a single tear frozen in the crook of his eye, hanging there like a crystalized diamond.
“Before we begin, I need you to know something.” Garvis took a long breath. “It was I who buried your relationship with Coen last year. I buried every memory he was involved in beyond the moment you first laid eyes on him… as well as any memory that could’ve landed you in trouble with the Good Council. Coen’s done all the meddling since then, but I… I hid the heart of it all. I took it from you.”
I blinked at him. At the guilt etched all over his face.
“But then…” The snow beneath our feet seemed to wake with a grumbling quake. “Then you can retrieve them again.”
Garvis was already shaking his head.
