Vaughn leads our group through a dense patch of forest, Lyra walking beside me with Aldric taking up the rear. I look over to Lyra, “so, explain how I am meant to help you?” I ask through gritted teeth hoping the conversation would distract me from the growing stitch in my side. 

She sighs, "over the last millennia, a static has seeped across the realm. It smothers the purpose of everything it touches until there's nothing left but a hollow need to survive." She points to the trees in the distance and I notice they are greying in parts, the vibrant bronze and greens replaced by a dull and uniform grey. My breath hitches. 

"If the Static continues to spread, we will break, conform. But you…"

I stop walking. "Me. The hot mess mum running on caffeine and chaos. The huffing and puffing woman trudging through the forest in a ripped one-sleeved shirt miles too big for me? I’m the answer to the magic leeching apocalypse that’s been going on for a MILLENNIA? That's your pitch?"

Lyra glances desperately in front of us. 

Vaughn takes a step toward me. He moves with a cautious, fluid grace, his jaw tightening as he searches my face, but he stays silent, his hands steady by his sides. He looks to the ground.

I turn back to Lyra. 

"We don't need a warrior," she whispers. "We need the woman who looked at a bleeding stranger on her lawn and didn't run”. 

I run my fingers across the sparkling scar on my upper arm as I look to Aldric behind us. His hauntingly familiar eyes look at me as if waiting for me to realise something. The logical and pragmatic mum in me wants to call bullshit. But the scar is right there under my fingers, bright and impossible and very, very real. Blurgh.

"Right,” I quip, the ghost of a smile on my weary face as I turn to continue the trudge through the picturesque forest. 

I fall into step behind Vaughn and study the Agro Ranger to distract from my laboured huffing. Fuck I hate exercise. He is an intense dude. Grumpy exterior notwithstanding, he is an absolute bundle of tension. He constantly scans the trees for any sign of danger, ready to leap at it at a moment’s notice. Despite the sun shining high in a cloudless sky - armpit melting weather if ever I saw it - shadows seem to reach for him as he walks. Actually, hadn’t he wrapped me in shadows and hauled me from my front yard to this very realm? Why the fuck are we walking? 

“So Agro Ranger, where exactly are we headed?” I jog a little to catch up to him, “And must we walk? Surely you can use your super cool, not creepy at all, shadow moving superpowers to take us where we need to go like that” I click my fingers in his face as I utter the last word and smile at his very unimpressed face. 

“Maybe somewhere with a hot bath and clean clothes?”  He sniffs the air around me and looks pointedly at the ripped shirt. 

“Rude. But also, “ I sniff my shirt, “yes…” I glare at him. 

“The ‘super cool shadow moving superpower’ is called fracturing, and with the static around it is too dangerous, I need a clear path between where we are and where we are going or we may arrive, well,” he pauses, a smirk forming on his rugged face, “fractured”. 

“Or inside out,” adds Lyra, stopping beside us. 

I turn to face her, eyes wide, “walking it is then!” I declare, clutching my side with a groan as she loops her arm through mine. 

“We don’t have too far to go, there is a cottage just past that cluster of boulders through the trees there,” Lyra whispers as she points through the trees to a group of bare grey boulders in the distance. Surely Agro Ranger could have given me the heads up. Prick. 

I glare at Vaughn’s back as we continue on our way. Lyra squeezes my arm and slows her pace to give me some respite. My palms tingle as I take in more of the forest around me. I notice more splotches where the colour of the forest has seemingly leeched away and as we approach the boulders I realise they aren’t bare at all. They are covered in thick moss. Thick grey moss, as though someone had sucked the colour straight out of it. I halt. This isn’t just a lack of colour, it’s the physical manifestation of a Monday morning when the coffee machine is broken and the car won't start. A heavy, soul-sucking nothingness. Well not nothingness. Everything is there but it isn’t THERE - it all blends, nothing original, nothing warm just existence, survival. 

I exhale as I unhook my arm from Lyra’s and walk speechless toward the boulder and the grey foliage sprouting around its base. I reach out a hand to feel the texture of the moss. “The static,” Lyra confirms, “Order demands sameness, so without Chaos, individuality, colour, cannot exist”. 

“Order without Chaos is a head without a heart. Technically alive but not living." Vaughn adds, watching my face. My eyes widen. Poetic logic. And absolutely devastating. 

I suck in a breath as I sink my fingers into the spongy and soft covering atop the boulder, that tingle returns. A low-voltage zing, zipping up my arm. I recoil and reach toward my pant pockets, checking that my phone is not electrocuting me. Nope, no phone. Because I’m not home. I’m here, in a colour sucked forest helping people who kidnapped me to get back to my kids. I place my hands on the boulder in front of me, and sink my head between my elbows. I close my eyes and suck in a steadying breath, willing the angry tears away. The zinging returns and my eyes snap open. It isn’t painful, it doesn’t even feel wrong. It feels … right. Odd, but right. I sink my fingers deeper into the colour deprived moss. Under my touch, the ashy grey of the moss seems to swirl and dissolve, falling away like soot, leaving behind a vivid deep green. I stare at the thick and vibrant moss beneath my finger tips. Squelching it between them. Did I just do that? 

My heart races and my breath hitches as I struggle to process what just happened. Do I have magical powers? I pull my palms up to my eye level and stare at them, turning them slowly in the sunlight. I look again at the moss and wiggle my fingers to see if they make the same kind of light that Lyra had on my arm. I don’t remember seeing it on the moss, but maybe it was too thick and masked it? I reach down and stroke a fern at the base of the boulder, willing the grey to fall from it. A zing flies down the length of my fingertips as the grey swirls and dissolves in front of my very eyes. 

I snap upright , “Oh my stars! I have magical powers!” I squeal, raising my arms above me in triumph and excitement and turning toward the others. “Wait,” I lower my arms in a panic and my widening eyes snap to Vaughn,  “how do I have magical powers? Why do I have magical powers? Wha-“ 

It is Aldric who steps forward. He steers me gently, his large hand a warm weight on my shoulder as he sits me down on the boulder—on the green, vibrant moss I’d just colourised with my bare hands. He takes my hand in his, his thumb tracing a slow, grounding line across my knuckles. My pulse, which had been thrumming like a hummingbird on caffeine, begins to settle. His skin feels like a hot stone from a spa treatment—unnatural, steady, and exactly what I need. “You just did something that shouldn't be possible for someone who didn't know they had magic ten minutes ago and you likely have more power than you realise right now” he tells me gently. “There is much you don’t yet know and much we need to tell you. I promise we will tell you everything. But let us get you safe and cleaned up first.”

He sounds like a narrator for a history documentary, the ones Blake and I like to watch together. My heart squeezes at the memory. I focus on Aldric’s hand wrapped around mine,  his hand is real and here and able to help me get back to my lazy doco nights. It was the only thing stopping me from screaming. I take a deep breath, “Everything? That sounds ominous,” I chuckle nervously as I stand from the boulder, “lead the way, Sunshine”. Aldric studies me for a moment before standing and nodding to Vaughn. As we move around the boulder I notice the vibrant green has already begun to fade. This static really is a possessive bitch and she is why we cannot have nice things. 

Vaughn resumes his position at the front of the pack, his back stiff and purposeful. Lyra loops her arm in mine again—a little too tight, maybe, but I don’t pull away. Aldric falls in behind us, like a physical shield, a warm weight at my back that keeps my nerves from completely fraying.

I hadn’t realized how hard I was bracing myself until now. My jaw is locked so tight it throbs, and my shoulders are practically glued to my ears. I’m holding myself together through sheer stubbornness, walking like I expect the ground to open up and swallow me whole at any second. Gah, I need a Aldric’s hot stone hands all over my body. Nope. No. 

“We’re about to cross the wards,” Vaughn calls over his shoulder, snapping me from my mental spiral. “It stops the static from reaching the cottage. You might feel a little… odd.” He looks at me over his shoulder, checking I hear him. 

Odd would be a massive improvement. Between the fox-crow, the sudden blast of Technicolour woo woo, the "you have powers" bombshell and my traitorous hand thoughts, I am officially cooked. All I want is a hot shower and clothes that are not Aldric’s one sleeve ripped up tunic. At least my work boots are made for the woods - a small consolation to my aching bones. 

We barely make it three steps before the air shifts. 

It isn’t that freezing shadow-hug Vaughn used earlier. This is a wave of pure, heart-swelling relief. It feels like the sudden, sharp joy of finally remembering the lyrics to a song you’d forgotten you loved. The buzzing under my skin just… stops. The air turns sparkly and smooth, tasting like eucalyptus and something impossibly familiar. It smells like the deep exhale of walking through your own front door after a long day at work. 

The change is so total that my body gives up before I can tell it to. I let out a long, shaky breath I didn't know I was holding. My shoulders drop, the tension draining out of them so fast my arms feel heavy, and my jaw finally unclenches. Something in the woods had been holding me tight, while the ward just … lets me go. It’s like the air itself recognises me.

I sway a little, my knees feeling like jelly now that they aren’t locked tight.

I don’t fall, though. Lyra still has her arm looped in mine and Aldric is right there. He doesn't grab me or make a scene of it, but he’s stepped up just close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off him. A steady, calm presence, waiting for me to find my feet.

I look at him, trying to think of how to explain the sudden, beautiful quiet in my head. But he isn’t looking at me the way the others were. He doesn’t have Vaughn’s heavy, century-old expectations in his eyes, and he isn't wearing Lyra’s expression of careful, fragile grief. He’s just watching me like I’m allowed to be here. Like I’m not a problem to solve or a ghost to mourn.

He looks at me like he knew that release was coming and stayed close on purpose, not to catch me like I’m broken, but just to be there when the world finally stopped screaming.

“Better?” he asks. His voice is low, easy.

“Better,” I whisper. And for the first time since this nightmare started, I don't feel like I'm lying.