I Only Summon Villainesses

It was indeed a terrible situation but the ground was splitting apart beneath us, so terrible would have to do.

“Go!” I kicked my heels and Cindy surged forward.

Her hooves left the stone and caught air. Not running exactly, more like each stride found invisible ground for a fraction of a second before the next one landed. We climbed at an angle, following the curve of the canyon wall as it crumbled around us. Stone fell past us, close enough that I could feel the wind of it against my face.

The shadow creatures were everywhere. They flowed past us on the walls, a river of liquid darkness, their forms rippling as they climbed. Some passed close enough that I could see those eyes, that strange wet gleam of shadow staring out from formless bodies. None of them reached for us. None of them changed course.

They were simply leaving. Flowing out of the depth like water escaping a broken vessel.

’What are these things?’

There was no one to ask who would know.

Cindy hit the rim of the canyon and her hooves struck solid stone with a crack that sent sparks flying. I looked back down into the pit and watched the floor cave inward, collapsing into nothing, swallowed by a darkness that had nothing to do with the shadow creatures. Just emptiness. Just the gate coming undone.

Maggie was ahead of me, already running along the top of the canyon with two figures slung across her shoulders. Nisha on one side, Milo on the other. She moved like their combined weight was an inconvenience rather than a burden.

The ground beneath us was splitting. Long cracks raced along the surface of the canyon, splitting the rock apart like someone was pulling it open from below. The sky above, if you could call it a sky in this gate, had taken on a sickly tone, as if the light itself knew this place was dying.

“Which way?!” I shouted at Maggie.

She did not turn around. She simply angled left and kept running, and I pressed Cindy to follow, the destrier’s burning hooves eating distance across the crumbling stone.

Then we hit the storm.

The shadow creatures that had been flowing up and out of the depth had not simply dispersed.

They had gathered.

Ahead of us, the canyon path was choked with them, a wall of writhing darkness so thick and dense that it blotted out everything beyond it. It looked like a black sandstorm, swirling and shifting, except the particles were alive.

Cindy reared and I nearly lost my grip. Behind me, the bodies slid and I threw one arm back to hold them in place, feeling Cressida’s weight shift dangerously.

“Maggie, stop!”

She stopped, turned and looked at the storm of darkness with an expression I could not read.

Her flames flickered along her arms, casting pale light across the roiling black. For a long moment, I expected her to burn through it. To sheer the darkness apart the way she had down in the pit.

But the darkness was not attacking. It was not blocking the path. It was… moving along it.

Flowing in our direction.

…Toward the exit.

’They’re going out. The same way we need to go.’

I stared at the storm of living shadow and felt something that I could not quite place settle in my gut. Not fear exactly. Something stranger. Like standing in the presence of something vast and old that had simply decided you were not worth noticing.

’They’re leading the way.’

“Maggie. Follow them.”

She looked at me. That pale gaze, always measuring, always calculating. For a moment I thought she would refuse. Pyre Saint did not follow. She led, or she burned.

But the canyon behind us was gone. The collapse was eating the ground faster than we could retreat. There was only forward, and forward meant through the storm.

She turned and ran into the darkness.

I kicked Cindy’s sides and we plunged in after her.

The world vanished and everything was drenched in a drowning darkness that made it seem like the world had suddenly gone off-mode. Cindy’s molten core pulsed against my legs, a distant heartbeat of warmth in a sea of nothing.

I could not see Maggie, could not see the canyon walls. Could not see even my own hands gripping the mane of the horse.

But Cindy kept running. Her hooves struck ground that I could not see, and with each stride I felt the direction, felt the pull of whatever current these creatures were riding. They flowed around us, not through us, parting just enough to let the horse pass before closing ranks behind us.

’Kassie, I can’t see anything.’

’I know. I can feel it through you.’ She paused. ’Trust Cindy.’

’I’m trusting a horse that looks permanently angry with me through a storm of shadow creatures in a collapsing spirit gate. I should consider writing a book on Trust.’

’You are being dramatic.’

’I THINK THE SITUATION WARRANTS A LITTLE DRAMA, KASSIE.’

The darkness thinned.

But not all at once, gradually, like surfacing from deep water. First I could see my hands. Then Cindy’s mane. Then the outline of the canyon walls, but wrong, different and wider. The air tasted different too.

Then light poured into my vision… real light, not Maggie’s flames or the sickly glow of the dying gate, but actual open sky pouring through a gap in the stone ahead.

Maggie was already through it.

Cindy burst through the gap and the world opened up around us. Wide sky and open air, the canyon behind us was groaning, stones tumbling inward, the entire structure folding like a house of cards collapsing in slow motion.

The shadow creatures poured out alongside us, spreading across the open ground like spilled ink before thinning, dispersing, sinking into the earth and the cracks of the rock and the natural shadows of the world outside the gate. Within seconds, they were gone. As if they had never existed.

I pulled Cindy to a halt. The destrier snorted and stamped, her hooves leaving scorch marks on the grass.

Maggie stood ahead, Nisha and Milo still draped over her shoulders. She was watching the gate collapse behind us with an expression that might have been curiosity.

I slumped forward on Cindy’s neck, pressing my face into the white-smoke mane. The heat was almost comforting now.

’We made it.’

’Yes,’ Kassie said through the Link. Her voice carried something that I could almost, almost call relief. ’You did.’

I lay there for a moment, breathing. Feeling my ribs complain and my lungs burn and every part of my body protest the last hour of existence.

Then I lifted my head and looked at the three unconscious girls draped behind me, at Nisha and Milo slung over Maggie’s shoulders, at the collapsing mouth of the gate behind us still spitting stone and dust.

’That storm of darkness… it led us out.’

It had not attacked or consumed us like I thought it would. Instead, it had escaped and also helped us escape too.

’Why?’

The gate groaned one final time, and then it folded inward on itself with a sound like the earth swallowing its own tongue. Stone crushed against stone, dust erupted outward in a final breath, and then…

Silence fell on the atmosphere… and the gate was gone.

And I had far more questions than answers.