The Uninvited Guest [Unknown | Antarctica]

[Thalia]

Thalia stared and barely blinked. Was everything really just gone? She’d drawn similar images in her sketchbooks often enough that the question was an earnest one, filling her with a weird mix of awe and pure fear. She wanted to race out, to discover for sure if the world beyond was really as empty and abandoned as it appeared, but the bite of the cold held her rigid. The arms strewn about herself did little to preserve what was left of her body heat.

She backed away from the cave mouth. Her brows slashed over her eyes, but her gaze was a thousand miles away. Or years. The worst of her fears always pushed her insular, away from the boundaries of reality. Even her sister never reached her there. A myriad of emotion flashed unknowingly over her face. Wherever she was then, she looked desperately sorry.

When her legs folded Thalia knew it was with a kind of finality. Even if she could find her way back to her feet, there was nowhere to go. Her limbs huddled tight. She pressed her sooty hands against her face and took a shuddering breath, but it was the only panic she allowed herself. The power trickled in as a gentle stream, and if its sweetness didn’t warm, it did at least distract. Her breathing steadied. Concentration was not yet a strain, but gods she was tired.

She patted the space beside her in invitation, watching Tristan for signs his shoulder pained him. He was unlikely to complain about it, just as she was not going to admit she understood how dire their situation truly was.

There was nothing to burn in here. The threads she intertwined coalesced into light and warmth, rippling gently in nonsensical patterns as mesmerising as flame before them. A giant, glowy knot. It provoked the shadow of an enthralled smile to her mouth, despite that for the moment she was still shivering in a deep, uncontrollable tremble. Her arms wrapped around her knees, her chin resting atop, like a flower leaning for the sun. She realised already that she did not know a way to make it happen on its own. That they’d only have heat for as long as she was awake. For as long as she had the energy to continue the right patterns.

There was a good chance they would die here. After the fanciful dangers they escaped, it was a cruel irony; that the elements would be the one enemy they couldn’t fight or outwit. She’d told Tristan not so long ago that she was glad for the way their lives had intersected, but now she discovered herself a deadly harbinger. Thalia wasn’t afraid of dying, or not any more than anyone else might naturally be at the prospect of that unknown journey. But she was afraid of loss. She was afraid of the waiting hellscape he’d described – a place she could not follow.

“Did you really come here for the guardian?” Most of her did not expect an answer, and she would accept his silence. He might not even know himself, as inexplicably beholden to his whim as she was. But back at the cabin he’d offered to be the bridge between her and the dreams she could not remember. She understood enough from her drawings for a thousand questions more to pile behind her eyes. Thalia wasn’t a practical person, and she did not need answers that made sense (life rarely had them, honestly), but she did desire connection – a sense of her place in the vastness. That she had one, somewhere.

“I don’t know how to do the dreaming,” she said after a while. “But maybe we’re just on another part of the island. Sierra might be able to come to us here, if you know how to find her there.”