Page 17 of The Tribes of Magic (Paragons #3)

“I’ll be fine, Red. Just fine,” he assured me. “This won’t be the first time I’ve outsmarted the General. Thanks for the heads-up, though. You’ve been a big help. I only wish…”

“Savannah Winters!”

Orion’s voice drowned out Conner’s. And then Conner himself disappeared too. The moon went next, followed by the field. The crickets fell silent. The fog flooded in, swallowing me.

Ice-cold hands gripped my shoulders, wrenching me back. I fell sideways, tumbling and turning and thumping like an old pair of sneakers caught in a dryer. My breaths came heavy—then not at all.

I couldn’t breathe!

Something slapped me hard on the back. No, someone . It was Orion. He held my limp body with one arm. The other was thumping my back repeatedly. Black splotches danced in front of my eyes.

“Savannah!”

“She’s not breathing!”

“I…That…Eris…Find…Killjoy…”

Their voices were bleeding away. The world was bleeding away. The black splotches melted into total darkness.

Air filled my lungs. I heaved in a deep breath, and it burned. Every breath burned. But at least I was breathing again.

My vision slowly cleared. The watercolor maelstrom subsided. The violent blotches and blurs calmed and faded away.

Eris’s face came into focus. “Savannah? Are you all right?”

“By some definition.” I tried to sit up, but that so wasn’t happening right now. It felt like the world had tipped upside down. I closed my eyes and counted down from ten, waiting for everything to stop spinning. “What happened?”

“You fell into an inter-dimensional eddy,” Orion told me. “It was pulling you under.”

“Orion had to pull you out.”

“But before that…I actually traveled to another dimension? It wasn’t all a hallucination?”

“You got in all right,” Orion said. “It was the getting-out part that gave you trouble.”

“Yeah. Isn’t that always the case?” I chuckled softly.

“People can’t spend too long in another dimension, not even Dreamweavers. Or Polymages. It’s not like traveling between realms, Savannah. Traversing dimensions is considerably more complex. You need to build up your endurance, bit by bit. Is this your first time moving between dimensions?”

“No, actually. I was in Shadow Fall with Kato.”

“Right. I remember now, hearing about that. Of course, Shadow Fall is closer to our own dimension. The effects are not as strong as where you just were.”

“Which is?” I opened my eyes to discover that the world had finally stopped spinning.

Orion’s lips drew together. “You’ve been through a lot, Savannah. And you’re safe now. That’s all that matters.”

“Right. So if you think I’m going to settle for that answer, you don’t know me at all, Orion. I’m a cat, insatiably curious and totally unable to take no for an answer.”

“And with nine lives to spare?”

“ At least nine lives, Eris. The number of times I’ve been in mortal peril since coming to the Fortress two weeks ago…let’s just say it was a lot more than nine.”

“I don’t know, Savannah.” Orion looked at Eris, who shrugged.

“You’d best just tell her, Orion. She won’t stop until she finds out. She sticks her nose in everyone else’s business. Imagine how doggedly persistent she’ll be about knowing all her own business.”

“Exactly.” I nodded sharply. “Doggedly persistent. I like it. Mind if I borrow the phrase, Eris?”

“Be my guest. Heaven knows you’ve certainly earned the title, Savannah.”

Eris was just a hair’s breadth away from a smirk, but she was holding it back. I wasn’t sure if that was for my benefit or Orion’s.

I turned to him. “Tell me. Where was I?”

“Oblivion.”

What a great name.

“You weren’t quite all the way to Oblivion,” Orion said. “But you got very close.”

“There’s no way out of Oblivion.” I’d heard that somewhere. I just couldn’t recall where at the moment.

Orion helped me to my feet. “Try not to think about that right now, ok? It’s all over, you’re here, and you’re safe. Focus on that.”

I was trying, but it was hard to focus on all that when I’d been standing on Oblivion’s doorstep. “How long was I away?”

“A few minutes,” Eris told me.

“So the game is already over?”

“Yes.”

“And I lost?”

“Not as badly as they did.” Eris pointed.

And I looked. The other seven Apprentices lay sleeping under a blooming jacaranda tree.

Ordinary jacarandas only bloomed for a few weeks each year, but this was no ordinary jacaranda.

Eris had once told me this particular jacaranda tree bloomed every day of the year, delighting Knights and Apprentices alike with its bright purple flowers and sweet scent. Now that was magic.

“What happened to the other Apprentices?”

“They didn’t find Orion fast enough,” Eris told me. “See? You didn’t do so terribly, Savannah. At least you are still conscious. And you did express Dreamweaver magic, which was the whole point of the exercise.”

“But none of them did? None of them are Dreamweavers?”

“No.”

“It’s far too early in the day to know that, Eris. We haven’t even scratched the surface of their magic. How about you wake them all up, so we can try again?”

“All right, Orion, but this time, you might want to keep them conscious long enough to actually test their magic.”

As Eris walked off toward the tree, the wind sighed, releasing a breath of blossoms. The flowers twirled in the air like spinning ballerinas in pretty purple tutus.

“Maybe you should sit this next one out, Savannah,” Orion said.

“Why?”

“You’re still recovering.”

“I’m fine.”

“And let’s be honest, you don’t actually need to test your magic. You already know what you are.”

“True, but if I don’t participate, I can’t earn points. And if I don’t earn points, my name will sink even lower on the Scoreboard, which means no perks for my hometown and exactly the excuse the General needs to cut me from the Program.”

“The General can’t cut you from the Program. You already cleared that bar.”

I lifted my brows, slow and skeptical. “And what’s to stop the General from arbitrarily introducing new bars for me to stumble over? He doesn’t like me, and he wants to be rid of me.”

“You do have a point, but the General is going to hold on to you, Savannah, now that he knows you’re a Polymage.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. Personally, I’d prefer to be safe and not give him any reason to get rid of me.”

Orion shrugged. “Suit yourself, Savannah, but if you pass out from exhaustion, a concussion, or any other kind of trauma, you might give the General exactly what he wants.”

“Then I’ll just have to make sure I don’t pass out, won’t I?” I said brightly.

“How are you always so…perky? And persistent.”

I grinned at him. “Lots of practice, plus a natural inclination for not minding my own business.”

“The cat thing.”

“Curiosity, yes. And on that note, I wanted to ask you something about Dreamweaver magic, specifically about inter-realm travel.”

“It’s far smoother than inter-dimensional travel. I highly recommend it.”

“Yeah, I got that,” I laughed. “So Dreamweavers can move between dimensions.”

“Some of us.”

“And that’s how they can do things like turn themselves invisible and pass through objects and do astral projection.”

“You said you had a question? It sounds like you already have all the answers.”

“My question is: how is it that Dreamweavers can travel between dimensions on their own, but they can’t travel between realms without the Spirit Trees?”

“From the tone of your question, I’m guessing you’ve heard the urban legends, stories of Dreamweavers traveling freely between realms.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s all they are, Savannah. Legends and stories. I’ve never met anyone who can actually travel between worlds, between realms. None of the Knights can do it. Neither can any other Dreamweavers in the Many Realms.”

“But you can’t know that. The Many Realms are vast. And, really, is there any difference between traveling between dimensions and traveling between realms?”

“There’s a big difference. The dimensions are stacked on top of one another. So you aren’t really traveling far. Or at all, in fact. You’re staying in one place, just going deeper.”

“If you can go deep enough, you can go far enough. It’s just a different kind of distance,” I pointed out. “Kato sent the Cursed Ones all the way to Shadow Fall.”

“That is a rare power indeed, Savannah, and it requires a lot of magic. Kato can do it because he’s a Polymage—and, well, because he’s Kato. He’s been training hard since the day he was Chosen, and it shows in the spells he can do and the magic he’s mastered.”

“So it’s just a matter of training hard?”

“It’s not that simple. Even Kato doesn’t have enough magic to make a portal between realms. It requires far too much power.”

“But if someone were to accumulate that much power?—”

“They couldn’t.”

“But if they were, Orion. Then they could do the spell?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure such a spell is even possible. And I certainly don’t know how anyone could have that much magic. We’re talking about going between whole worlds, Savannah. Can you imagine just how much power that would require?”

“I think I can.”

I thought back to the battle at the Spirit Tree—and the amount of power I’d needed to teleport from one end of the Park to the other. Maybe Orion was right. Maybe it was impossible. And yet…

“What about the Spirit Trees?” I asked Orion. “They move people between realms all the time.”

“Yes, and no one understands much about how the Spirit Trees’ magic works. All we know is it has something to do with the spirits’ magic.”

“So if we figured out how the Spirit Trees work, maybe we could figure out how to teleport between worlds?” I asked.

“Maybe. And that’s a big maybe. The greatest minds in the Many Realms have spent millennia studying the Spirit Trees’ magic, and they haven’t figured it out. What makes you think you can do it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. That perky persistence you mentioned earlier? Or, as Eris called it, dogged persistence. If there’s a way, I’ll figure it out.”

Despite my lofty claims, I actually wasn’t so sure about that. All I knew was Conner was trapped out there, cut off from Gaia because of the General’s witch hunt. If there was a way to get to him, to bring him home, I had to find it. Because if I didn’t, he might be trapped out there forever.