As we tugged clothes over our wet bodies, Isalio relayed more information to me in a breathless stream.

"The Morgabeast is starting to block me again now, but I saw inside its mind for a second, and it was just outside the Forest of Lost Beasts, and some of the beasts were"—he sucked in a breath—"already listening, already leaving the Forest, going to attack a nearby village."

"Which village?"

He paused in the middle of tying his pants, gazing at one of the cave walls as though seeing far beyond it. "I don't know. It was thinking about a big village with many Guardians, maybe ones who already turned against Borgal. And there's a fortress."

I blew an exhale. "That has to be Torglasa, Fraschkit's home village. How many beasts are escaping?"

"A few dozen, I'd say."

"How soon will they reach Torglasa?"

"Not sure; I don't know where the village is."

"Did the beasts leave the forest already?"

"Yes, I—I think so."

"So they'll be there in less than an hour. But the Morgabeast isn't joining them?"

"No. I can't see inside its mind anymore, but I think it's still in the forest, still recruiting more beasts."

"If we get above ground, can you stop it?"

"This far away, I think it has better control than I do." He dragged a hand through his hair. "If I try to do something from here, I would just be showing it how much I know."

"So what should we do?" we both asked in unison.

His eyes widened at being asked. I wanted him to answer that question himself because he knew more than I did and had more experience leading—but he had only ever led as the High Prince, and I knew he was still struggling to define his role outside of that, much less lead the people he had once fought against.

Lacking time to persuade him of his own ability to decide, I weighed my other options. If we went to Torglasa right now, Isalio and I could fight back the beasts there...but that might give the Morgabeast time to seize control of the whole forest. However, if the beasts took Torglasa by surprise, they might slaughter everyone there.

"I'll find Fraschkit," I said. "She can choose a team to fight back the beasts in Torglasa while you and I go to the forest to stop the Morgbabeast."

He drew a deep breath. "Even if we can survive the rest of the forest, how will we find the Center Stone?"

"The Morgabest is already sharing its mind with you. You'll be able to feel where it came from—or at least feel where it doesn't want us to go."

I hardly believed myself, and even if my words were true, I certainly didn't like the risks posed. But I didn't have any better ideas.

He gave a slow nod. "I don't like it, but I'll try."

"If you think I'm wrong, you can tell me."

"I have no idea if you're right or wrong. I just know this really wasn't how I wanted this bath to end."

Despite the fear gripping me, I breathed a laugh. "Yeah, me neither. Once we defeat the Morgabeast, I'll make it up to you."

His eyes flickered with interest, but his response sounded ironic—and a little sad. "Yeah. You'd better."

***

Somehow, we succeeded in persuading everyone of Isalio's vision. An hour later, we had gathered weapons and divided duties. Before leaving, the other Guardians and I struck our battle stance, ducking our heads, splaying our fingers toward the ground, and tapping our feet. Here at the Mantle, we were deep enough underground that the pulse easily guided our movements, always a small movement followed by a stronger one. Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump.

Moments after that, Fraschkit and a dozen other fighters headed to Torglasa, and Isalio and I set course for the Forest of Lost Beasts. 

As the cave of the Mantle faded into the endless desert sand behind us, my chest constricted tighter and tighter. Fuck, what was I thinking? In my effort to sound confident in front of Isalio, I had completely forgotten my own inadequacies.

When Isalio had asked me if I believed that the First Guardian would help us in battle, perhaps my answer should have been, 'It doesn't matter.' The First Guardian couldn't help anyone as hopeless as me. In Sitaklasa, the possibility of facing the Morgabeast had left me frozen in horror for several minutes. This time, it wasn't a possibility—it was an inevitability.

And if I froze this time, we would both die.

The warper itself amplified my terror. With each bump and turn, nausea pooled in my gut. When we reached full speed, the sand disappeared into a tan blur beneath us, and I couldn't help thinking that we could disappear just as easily. We were each only a grain of sand beneath the Morgabeast.

Swallowing down an acidic ball of saliva, I forced a casual tone. "By the way, does the Morgabeast have any weaknesses I should know about?"

He raised an eyebrow. Clearly, my casual tone hid nothing—he knew both how desperate I felt and how bizarrely belated this question was. I was asking for an antidote seconds before dying from the poison. I waited for him to point out the obvious: that if he knew about a weakness, he would have told me by now, and that I was the one who had devised this plan. But when he responded, he just sounded apologetic.

"I really wish I knew the answer to that, Rem."

"What about hitting it in the eye?" I knew it couldn't be that simple, but First Guardian, I really wanted to smash in the Morgabeast's eye and see it wither like the Scouts had.

He offered a wry smile. "You can try."

Zooming out on the dashboard, I found the crest of dark green in the far corner. After setting the course, I checked my wristwatch for any update from Fraschkit, even though I knew it was too soon. Then my fingers wandered aimlessly over the dashboard, as if merely touching buttons could prepare me for facing a beast no one had ever survived; as if continuous movement now would prevent me from freezing in a few minutes.

Fuzzy dark green creeped into the corner of the map, and a bright-orange rectangle popped up to deliver a beeping warning: APPROACHING UNKNOWN TERRITORY.

A jolt of nerves shot through me. I had never seen that message before—though then again, I had only driven a warper a half-dozen times, including the very first time my father had attempted to teach me.

I should have warned Isalio before we left that I hadn't driven many warpers, and that he probably shouldn't entrust his life to me. But it was too late for that warning now. He already trusted me, and I needed to suck it up and deliver results.

"Remgar? Are you ok?"

I bristled. "Of course I'm ok. All Guardians can drive warpers. Do you think I can't?"

To my surprise, the corner of his lips quirked, and his eyes softened. "We are about to face the Forest of Lost Beasts and the Morgabeast, and if we survive that, we'll be up against the Demons at the palace who could lead me around like a dog on a leash even when I was at my strongest. Your driving skills are the least of my worries."

I wanted to once again fixate on my own incompetence, but my indignance at his self-assessment won over. "You say 'at my strongest,' but they took you at your weakest."

"I was strongest at the moment I summoned the Morgabeast."

"You really think that was your best self—your fullest potential?"

"Best self, I don't know, but maybe it's my real self. If it wasn't, why was that the beast I summoned?"

The dashboard beeped again, louder this time. The blotch of dark green was rapidly devouring the map, and the orange warning rectangle started flashing. But even as I noted the change, most of my mind remained focused on answering Isalio.

"First of all, the Morgabeast wasn't summoned—it was unleashed. And anyway, if that was your real self, why did they have to torture you? What were they breaking?"

When Isalio was silent, I shot him a sideglance. He gnawed on his lower lip, staring ahead blankly.

"Hey," I said gently. "You've been under the Morgabeast's influence for a long time—and before that, Danif was controlling you. But that won't last much longer. Soon, you'll be free."

"Do you really believe that?"

That made me pause. A minute ago, fear of failure had nearly incapacitated me. But shifting my focus to Isalio forced me to look past my own insecurities. While I could drown in my own self-doubt, I wasn't willing to let Isalio drown in his.

"Yeah, I do believe it. I believe in you."

A new message flashed across the dashboard: PREPARING FOR LANDING.

The warper had auto-selected a landing location outside of the forest, since the forest itself was off-limits. As I had done when I blasted into the dungeon, I flicked the switch to override the warper's decision. We would crash into several trees soon, but any extra progress made inside the warper could improve our chances of reaching the Center Stone.

Ten seconds later, the dark green took over the entire dashboard, and I questioned my judgment. Traveling at warper speed, I had no control over where and how we would land. What if we hit the biggest tree in the forest, head-on, and instead of ricocheting, the warper collapsed in on itself? Or what if we landed in the middle of a gathering of beasts, surrounded on all sides, attacked before we could even draw a breath? Or what if...

It was that third 'what if' that scared me most, that locked my joints and stole my breath.

What if I froze?

What if I was perfectly capable of saving us both, and I failed to do so?

That fear of failure wrapped around my chest, constricting my breathing, and my breaths came faster, louder. If only Hefgar were here—he would be able to do this. But Hefgar was gone because of me, and I wasn't—I couldn't—

"Remgar?"

"I'm sorry, I don't—I don't think I can do this. I came here to keep you safe, but I'm just going to make everything worse. I'm just going to..."

I imagined the scene from my nightmare once more: my mother and brother screaming at me to follow them, realizing I couldn't, turning around... and dying. Dying because they stayed, dying because of me. But in this reimagination, I didn't see Isalio as the monster. He would also turn around to save me. And he would also die.

I glanced his way—and immediately regretted it. His amber eyes were wide and luminescent, studying me, waiting for whatever I was about to tell him. There was so much admiration there, and far too much trust. Shame constricted my throat, hot and bitter.

Turning my gaze back toward the dashboard, I choked out, "You don't know how weak I am."

"Weak? I saw you take down several beasts the last time we were in this forest. I saw you demolish so many Scouts and Demons at Sitaklasa that the rest fucking fled."

I shook my head, eyes still fixed on the dashboard map—the black dot inching closer to the dark green and the flashing orange warning. "But when it mattered most, I did nothing."

He breathed a chhh. "You're talking about when you were twelve."

"That was when I learned how weak and cowardly I am."

"I've never seen an adult as strong or brave as you were at twelve."

"I didn't even know how to fight."

"And you still showed up." A hand settled over mine, and a soft murmur soothed over my panicked thoughts. "You got this, Rem."

It wasn't true—was it? Though I didn't fully believe him, the voice of doubt quieted, the tension around my chest relaxed, and my lungs expanded to pull in a fortifying breath. Warmth buzzed through me, partly from his touch and words but also partly from an inflow of lifeforce.

I opened my mouth to chide him for giving me lifeforce right now, for wasting precious energy when we didn't know what we were about to face, but there was no time to speak. The black dot on the map merged with the green, and the horizon darkened, thick woods blotting out the light of the sun.

A second later, we plunged into darkness.

As usual, my Guardian night vision activated, lighting a dim path through the heavy coverage of trees. Unlike usual, something else also activated inside me—another newfound power. The warper seemed to slow even though the speed gauge remained unchanged, and the path before me suddenly sharpened into hyper-focus.

On pure impulse, I switched off the auto-drive and seized the manual control.

Though the forest was thick, the trees appeared to me in small groups, and my gaze lit on the opening between them. Somehow, in less than a second, I gauged the space—adjusted—reacted. I veered left and right, dodging obstacles. Trees, stones, and ground orbited through the window in my peripheral. When the forest thickened, I jerked the steering knob sideways so the warper sliced vertically through the trees.

Then the trees closed in ahead of us, leaving no escape.

I shoved the warper into a nosedive. The machine rumbled along the foliage for a moment before burying its nose in the sludge. Sliding forward, the front of the warper crumpled into a tree, and Isalio and I jerked against our seatbelts.

I braced myself for beasts to wage war on the cracked windshield. Instead, silence. I scanned the cracked windshield. We had landed in a small valley, but the treetops twisted together overhead, a spiderweb of branches strangling out so much of the sunlight that it was dark as night.

Signaling for Isalio to remain still, I shoved open the dented door on the driver's side, grabbed my mace, and stepped out. My boots sank into damp soil, a jarring schlupp disturbing the eerie stillness that pressed in around us. Dank; dark. The ground felt wrong, pulsing with a foreign energy. Maybe the power of the First Guardian didn't extend to this forest.

I turned a slow circle and squinted, searching the moist valley for footprints, holes, or claw marks, and eyeing the surrounding circle of trees for movement. Nothing. The skin on the back of my neck prickled.

Were we too late?

Were the beasts of the forest already destroying the rest of the world?

Isalio nudged his door open and picked his way toward me. His eyes shone through the darkness, luminescent and flickering with trepidation. The darkness obscured parts of my vision, and Isalio surely could see far less. Instinctively, I raised an arm to block him from harm's way—though I didn't even know which way harm might come from. Some heroes we were, tiptoeing like spooked children out past bedtime.

Lacking anything else to do, I grabbed his hand. Even though we were both already supercharged, I pushed lifeforce toward him—and felt him push his own toward me.

Then creatures filled the space between the trees.

The beasts gleamed white, cutting a crisp outline against the dark foliage behind them like gleaming stalagmites. I readied my mace, prepared to lash out at whichever beasts reached us first. The ground shifted beneath my feet...

And sucked us under.

For a second, I thought we had landed in sinking sand. Then I realized the white creatures surrounding us were not creatures at all: they were teeth.

We were standing in the wide-open jaws of a gigantic beast.

Buried waist-deep in soil, I grappled for leverage. My foot found a firm but moving surface—the beast's tongue? Wrapping an arm around Isalio's waist, I leaped off of the writhing appendage just as the teeth slashed together. Landing on the flat side of a tooth outside the beast's jaw, I jumped again—all the way into a tree branch at least twenty feet off the ground.

I landed clumsily, mostly because I hadn't fully expected to make the landing at all. Stumbling forward into the trunk of the tree, I barely managed to pivot in time to keep from crushing Isalio. Instead, my back smacked the trunk, and I slapped one hand against the tree trunk to steady myself while the other steadied the Demon in front of me, who jerked against my grasp, apparently as surprised as I was.

The jaw sank back into the ground, and dirt rolled over the surface, obscuring the entire beast once more. But before I could even catch my breath, wisps of darkness surrounded us. I released Isalio and reached for my mace.

The beasts converged.