The Wishing Tree - Book Two [Completed]

The Quillore - Part 5

"Another cave?" I ask, stuffing the wings inside his satchel with the arrows as he directed.

"I know where a lot of them are. So, it's just easy to head for one when the winds start."

He's crouching in the corner using a flint to try to start a small fire. He looks up, and I can just see the outline of his face in the darkness.

"You want to try one of your wishes?" he asks.

"What if I only get so many?"

"I doubt it works that way," he says, confident.

I close my eyes and think about heat and fire. I remember what it was like to sit by a fireplace on the Third Realm or to be warming my toes by a fire pit on the Second Realm. My cheeks start to warm and my forehead feels hot like I have already been close to the fire too long. The small pile of sticks that Mason gathered start to smoke and then they burst into flame.

He sits back on his heels and watches the fire for a moment, lost in thought. He doesn't meet my eyes when he asks, "You have that sequence?"

I pull the sheet out from the front of my dress and move closer to the flames. I look down and scrawled across the top is the number one. Beside it are the words wings of the black foil. I look up and meet Mason's eyes.

"How did you know that we'd need the wings?" I ask.

Mason's smile is muted. "It's almost always the opening move from the tree. It just determines how badly you want to get out. Some people don't even chase the fly; it just ends there."

I think about how quickly Mason acted, how I stood there, paralyzed. "You've never tried to get out?" I ask.

His smile vanishes. "Not this way, no."

"How do you know the moves?" I ask, oscillating between curiosity and suspicion. 

He shrugs, and I get the sense that he's feigning nonchalance. "The moves become progressively more personal, testing your strength and resolve." He meets my gaze. "The tasks will call into question everything you think you know about yourself."

"Has anyone ever made it out this way before?"

Mason looks at me out of the corner of his eye. "One that I know about." He looks back at the flames and puts his hands closer, rubbing them together. "You know her."

"Maizie." The chill from the rocks beneath me makes me shiver, and I shuffle a little closer to the fire. I think about what she was like when I first met her, full of insecurities, twitches, probably riddled with nightmares. "She was a mess on the Second Realm when she emerged. She was a shell of a person for quite a while."

"Not surprising."

I sit in silence, thinking about how much Maizie changed once she remembered her Third Realm self and once she remembered what happened to her on the First.

"Do you think that's going to happen to me? I make it back to Ryan, but I'm not really me anymore?" I ask. I don't know what's more terrifying, not making it back or not being me.

Mason doesn't say anything for a while, and I think he isn't going to answer. Finally, he says, "I don't know, Hannah. I don't have that answer, but I do have a lot of questions. About you, about all of this."

"Maizie also said something similar the other night," I admit.

"So, you did have a bad dream."

"Maizie's not a bad dream." My tone is defensive. "She just reminds me of what I don't have and why I don't have it." I look into the flames, watching the flickering red and orange. "That's not her fault." I let my words sit between us for a moment before speaking again. "You're trying to avoid the conversation. What do you think is going on?"