~Fwhip~

My fingernails dug into the sides of Gem's jaw, the difference between my skin tone and how pale her face was incredibly striking. Her skin was slick and uneven with sweat, eyes wide as she spoke words I never thought would come out of her mouth again. 

Erin told me. 

I blinked, still meeting her eyes which I swear seemed to go hazel for a moment, irises polluted by something dark. Red. But then it was gone, emerald-green once again encircling her pupil's reduced to specks from fear.

"Who said what now?" Sausage asked, knelt on the ground to the left of me. 

Gem didn't reply, panting. Her chest heaved, strands of hair plastered to her forehead and the sides of her face. Her gaze left mine, flicking frantically around, elbows, behind her supporting her weight, tensing as her head whipped around. It was like she thought someone was watching her.  She flinched horribly when Violet nosed her shoulder with a worried whine. 

"Gem—" I started, pulling her chin straight again to get her to focus on me. "What the hell happened?" I asked, trying to keep my cool, although my tone was far from calm. 

She swallowed. "Erin— she was there—"

"So you were dreaming...?" Sausage interjected. I glared at him, silently reprimanding him for cutting my sister off right when I had finally gotten her to talk. 

"Shzzzz!" I exclaimed quickly, pressing my index finger to his lips to shut him up. 

Gem ignored my attempts at silencing Sausage, shaking her head violently at his question. "Not a dream." She replied breathlessly. 

"Gem..." I began slowly, pulling my arms away from her jaw and shoulder and instead bracing them in front of her. "You were just asleep...and you just saw a dead person...I'm pretty sure that's called a dream—"

"Oh shut up—" She snapped. Well. There she was. No more broken Gem. Or even more broken Gem, who knows. "It was too real to be a dream."

"That's what everyone says." I deadpanned. "I once had a dream about getting chased by a mint chocolate chip ice cream on a sugar cone. Sugar. Not even a waffle cone. And I thought that was very real and terrifying when I had it."

Sausage nodded along enthusiastically from beside me. "Exactly! I had a dream about—"

"No not exactly!" Gem started (and I was quite glad she had stopped him, I don't think I wanted to know what Sausage's dreams were about), panic returning in her voice as she sat all the way up, dragging her fingers through her hair and shoving it all back, a few fingers tracing her hairline almost hesitantly. "She was there. She spoke to me. She threatened me."

"Buuuuuut she's dead—" Sausage started.

"I KNOW THAT!" There was a trace of a shriek lacing her voice. "THAT'S MY POINT!"

"I think you're a bit tired after yesterday, Gem." I said, pursing my lips at the glare she gave me, nose scrunching upwards and swallowing up several patches of her freckles.

I half expected her to get up and slap me, but instead she stumbled to her feet, swaying before straightening her back stubbornly. 

Then she walked in the complete opposite direction. 

"Gem— No— I'm sorry—" I started, scrambling up after her.

"Where are you goingggg?" Sausage asked after she had remained silent, continuing forward. 

Towards the graves.

"Gem, she's not going to just walk out of the dirt just 'cause you saw her in a dream—" I tried to reason. Key word being tried.

I jogged after her, Sausage close behind, stopping beside her. However, Violet whimpered, pawing at the ground. I glanced over my shoulder to see the dragonet stop, twenty feet from the gravesite, refusing to go any further. Huh.

The ground felt more solid the closer we got to the graves, frozen solid. I could see the little flecks of frost scattered amongst the dirt...

I followed Gem's eyes, towards the grave furthest to the right, with the name Phoenix Major etched into the stone. I could practically see the gears turning in my sister's head as she stared at the muddled ground. The soil seemed darker here, tainted, shifting from the bland, bleak beige to a deep, dark, rotting brown. 

Gem knelt down, supporting herself on her knee as slowly she lowered a hand, letting it hover just over the patch of ground, where Erin lay underneath. But as soon as she let her fingertips brush the dirt...

A drawn-out, inhuman screech exploded from far, far below, a wicked wave of glowing red strands pulling themselves from the dirt and shooting out in all directions, like thorns, latching onto Gem's arms, legs and torso, as if it were trying to pull her even further down. Down to what (or who) lay beneath.

I screamed, something searing my ankle and curling around my calf. My stomach dropped as I was yanked off my feet, and oh look the sky's upside-down—

I didn't even register the fact that I was flat on my back until I could feel my head throbbing from where it made contact with the ground, the grey of the sky swirling in my direct line of sight.

"Ow—" Sausage's grumble was muffled. I blinked several times, trying to stop the world from spinning. 

I scrunched my nose, blowing the fallen hair out of my face that had come loose from one of my sister's stolen hair ties. I managed to prop myself up onto my elbow. The heated pressure on my ankle was gone, but I could feel the strip of burns running along my skin, my pants blackened at the ends from where they had come in contact.

I lifted my head, squinting through strands of red that now lay dormant, barely visible as they twisted amongst the dirt, before making eye contact with Gem, who was pushing herself up from her stomach. She met my gaze with an "I told you so" look on her face. Oh, I knew that face all too well. 

Then it all hit me.

Oh my god Erin just attacked us from hell.

"This is bad— or good? Is it good bad? Does this mean she's alive down there—?" Sausage stammered, half crawling and half shifting himself closer to where both me and Gem had fallen overtop the grave, as he came to the same realization.

"I have no clue...but some sort of her is still here— and very angry." Gem replied breathlessly. "But I doubt she's actually "alive" as in heart is beating and she's breathing—"

"Erin was always angry." I tried to point out.

"And are we sure she ever even had a heart?" Sausage added.

I felt a slight tremble from beneath where my palm and elbow pressed against the dirt. Heat. 

Gem glared at us. "Go ahead and make her more pissed off then why don't you?"

"So, what do we do? Dig her up?" Sausage asked, glancing from the ground back up to Gem, eyes flickering towards the headstone.

Gem's own eyes widened in panic. "No— very bad idea—" She said quickly. "We don't have time, anyways. We have a week, don't we? We need to get to the library. Both if we want Scott and Pearl back, and if we want to avoid the possibility of Erin rising anyways to get revenge." 

"A dead person raising themself from the dead? That'd be a spectacle." Sausage commented skeptically.

"Well, Erin does like doing the impossible." Gem shrugged, getting to her feet and brushing off the grime caked up on her knees. "Especially when people don't want her to—"

"Great. Now we have a looming time limit and an angry psychopathic supposed-to-be-dead teenager to deal with." I grumbled, pushing myself up all the way to sit.

"Wouldn't she be like, twenty now?" Sausage asked, raising an eyebrow.

I wrinkled my nose. "Don't make me think about that."

"So," Gem said sharply, ending me and Sausage's short conversation. "are we going to do anything about this?" She questioned sarcastically. "Because if we don't want to be doomed, I suggest we get our asses moving to the library." 

Sausage gasped dramatically. "Did you just hear that, Fwhip?"

I pressed a hand over my chest. "I heard it, Sausage." I replied, greatly exaggerating my expression of shock.

Gem rolled her eyes, scraping the toe of her shoe against the ground to kick dirt at both of us.

"The Great Gemini Tay just swore." Sausage declared. "We must remember this, people! This may not happen again in our lifetimes!" 

"I will—" Gem started, glaring at Sausage. But we didn't give her the time to finish.

"This'll go down in the history books folks!" I continued, gesturing upwards. "Just like her ginormous hat—" I shrieked as Gem yanked the amulet off from around her neck, swinging at my head with her newly formed staff. "NO I'M SORRY—"

"Well, you should have thought about that beforehand." Gem said, narrowing her eyes as I attempted to scramble away. "I wonder if you'd look good as a hamster—"

"NO—" 

"I don't know Fwhip, I think you'd make a very handsome hamster." Sausage grinned.

"SHUT UP—"

"Oh, you're not safe from this either, Evans." Gem growled, starting forwards towards him too.

Oh god she broke out the first names. 

Sausage's eyes widened in fear. "No! Mercy—" He pleaded, trying to scramble away but only tangling his ankle in his cloak and falling right back onto his shoulders.

I could tell Gem was forcing down a smile by the way the corners of her lips threatened to twitch upwards, instead thinning out to try and suppress the smirk. She approached the flailing Sausage slowly, holding out her staff... before twisting it around and rapping him sharply on the top of a head with the wooden end. 

"OW—"

"You're lucky I don't have the materials to actually turn you into a hamster. And that if I did it would greatly sidetrack us from what we're supposed to be doing." Gem said, flipping her staff once again in her hand. I watched as it condensed back into an amulet, it awed me every time, before she slipped it back over her neck. "Let's pack up camp now, yeah?"

"Y'know, your mood always gets better whenever you're right." Sausage mumbled, pushing himself to his feet and pressing a palm to the top of his head.

"I have no idea what you're talking about Sausage."

Violet let out an overjoyed bark-like rawr as soon as Gem crossed back over the imaginary line the dragon had drawn for herself, practically skipping over and stuffing her snout beneath Gem's ear, onto her shoulder. "Vi— Vi no you're going to knock me over—" The first laugh that I had heard from my sister since she had woken up from that nightmare-vision thingy escaped her lips as she staggered from Violet's weight, grabbing onto her dragon's neck to stop from falling.

Gem was distracted. I grabbed Sausage's arm, pulling him over to the side. "Does this seem like...a bad idea to you?" I asked in a hushed voice, just low enough for Gem to miss.

"What do you mean?" Sausage asked, brow creasing in confusion.

"I just— something seems off." I continued, speaking low. Out of the corner of my eye I watched as Gem sat down with Violet at her side, beginning to pack up our things. She called us over to help her, but I ignored it. "This seems too easy."

"What does?"

"The fact that this "spell" is simple. At least, too simple for one to bring back the dead. It doesn't even require sacrifice! Gem's having dreams, that was Scott's thing. But even his dreams were wrong a couple of times. What if this is wrong too? What if the book you found is a fake? What if when we get to the library, there's more to it? What if we can't pull it off?" I murmured, meeting Sausage's eyes.

Sausage paused, jaw tensing the slightest. Something shifted behind his eyes. Something hidden. I watched the tiny creases in his expression deepen, lips twitching into a frown. But in a span of a few seconds all of that was gone, covered by optimism. "That's a lot of whats, Fwhip. You forget that Gem is the most powerful wizard up to date. And we have Erin on our side, it seems—" He replied, gesturing back towards the graves in a wave that dismissed all of my worries. 

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you and Gem really forcing me to be the sensible one here?" I asked. 

"What is that supposed to mean?" Sausage questioned, wrinkling his nose at my statement. "We're being perfectly sensible!"

"If you say so..." I muttered, pushing myself back up to stand straight. 

"Guys? Hurry up and help me pack—" Gem called again from our makeshift camp a few dozen feet away. "It would only take a couple of minutes if you actually did something!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're coming!" I called back, starting forward. My gaze lingered on Sausage, looking them up and down slowly.

I knew he wasn't telling the whole truth. I knew there was something else.

But I just didn't know what.

***

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