The wind created a low, whirring hum at the opening in the fallen tree. Eddie stood there, all four legs rigid, growling at the panorama of sand.

  ‘Sam, stop!’ Tink shouted to be heard.

  He resisted at first, wanting to tug free and wipe away the tears. Catching himself, he relented. He had to anyway, unless he wanted a long drop through a briar of stone roots. He rejected the oddly comforting image of Hans Gruber flailing in the air as he fell from Nakatomi Plaza. Yippee-ki-yay, mother f...

  He’d stormed off, marching for the light ahead of them. Not with a plan. It was somewhere to go, something to do. Away, not from Tink, but from wherever he found himself. His feet pounded the stone like it was of his problems, and like his problems it remained immune to change.

  His mum, Tara, had been perfectly well last year, before it all suddenly changed. She started getting tired. Dark rings grew under her eyes, as if all the relentless uphill slog of being a single mother in a London council flat on a sink estate had finally caught up with her. She lost weight. Not that she had much to lose, so her clothes hung off the bony spurs of her shoulders and hips.

  The doctors took their time, time she didn’t have. There were delays even for cancer tests, made worse by cancelled appointments because of striking nurses and doctors. It wasn’t cancer anyway. It wasn’t anything they could explain. She was just dying, aging at an accelerated rate, like Walter Donovan at the end of Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail when he chose his cup poorly. That scene always terrified Sam. He’d watch it through his fingers, even though the special effects were a bit crap compared to modern techniques. But the horror was infinitely worse when it was happening to your mum. In real life, her withering away had been so slow he’d ended up wishing the scene would end already and she would die. What kind of son thinks like that?

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Tink said, holding on to his arm so he couldn’t get away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he snapped and regretted it. Tink’s eyes were as wet as his. She was as trapped as he was. They were in this together and he was thinking about himself, consumed by his own grief and anger. He sniffed and wiped his eyes on his sleeve; then something else Tink said occurred to him. ‘You said your dad hasn’t been the same since your mum disappeared. Is that something to do with this?’

  ‘She would go to the woods a lot, a bit too much. They say I’m like her. A Fletcher, they mean. And that’s practically a wyrmal.’

  ‘What’s a wyrmal?’

  ‘Just because the Lorimer’s snared the wrym and defeated Hardrada and Nywn didn’t mean their followers disappeared. Everyone was trapped here together. Their decedents live in the town. Besides, it was peaceful and prosperous, so there was nothing to fight about, except when the Lorimers return, and the magic weakens and needs renewing. Things and people change then. Mostly, the sides keep to themselves. Like marries like. But we’re still only a town and people fall in love that shouldn’t. Like my mum and dad. I don’t think she was happy. They’d row. She was supposed to follow Ma Tunstalls act as the guides to the Lorimers. Supposed to, at least. But mum went to the woods and...’

  ‘And what?’

  It was Tink’s turn to snap a little. ‘She never came back.’

  Sam let this sit for a while, thinking it over. In front of them, the dunes rolled away forever. Eddie quietened down to the occasional warning woof. Finally, Sam said, ‘You mean she left?’ Maybe there was a glimmer of hope. A way out.

  Tink was downcast. ‘No, she didn’t leave. We can’t; I told you. She’s still in the woods. I’ve seen her.’

  ‘She lives in the woods?’

  Tink gave a half shrug. ‘Something lives in the woods that used to be my mother.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Maybe not, Sam thought, but he would believe her. Given everything else that had happened how could he not? ‘Try me,’ he said.

  ‘A pure white doe turned up in the forest right after my mum disappeared. We were all searching the woods. I was near the fairy circle. It’s this ring of small standing stones in a clearing. When I was there, listening to people shout my mum’s name, from between the trees this deer walks towards me. She was white as snow, almost dazzling when the sunlight hit her. I put out my hand and she came right up close. Let me stroke her head, and I knew it was her. Deer don’t do that. My dad came blundering through the undergrowth, snapping branches, calling her name, and she was gone, just like that. But dad saw her go. We never spoke about it, but I know he thought the same.’

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Sam’s head was melting with all the information. Could this place be anymore messed up? As soon as he’d thought it, he wanted to take it back. Never tempt fate. But the sentiment stood. He turned back to the dunes. The sky brooded as though it was summoning all its fury. Sam knew that feeling. He took a deep breath, tasting salt and iron, and turned to face Tink. He took both of her hands in his and when her eyes met his, he said. ‘Fuck it!’

  The corners of Tink lips curled, though only slightly.

  ‘Fuck all this.’ Sam let his rebellion grow. ‘Fuck Herne, fuck Sugnar or whatever it’s called. Fuck Hernshore. Fuck making deals that take our mums away. And fuck dying for it all.’

  Holding his hand as tightly as he held hers, Tink laughed. It made Sam feel like he could do anything. They were in this together, and from the mouth of the cave in the middle of the giant tree’s petrified roots, they set their defiant faces against the leviathan of fate.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Tink asked.

  ‘There’s got to be a way out. Other people have done it before, and we’re not going to find it here.’ He looked out over mile after mile of rolling dunes. If he leaned out a little too precariously, he could see the beached galleon, its tattered sails flapping. It was too far away. He continued to search. At first, he panned down and along and skipped over it. Backtracking, he found what he was looking for. There, nestled in a cleft between two dunes, corners of a thing darker than the sand.

  In his head, Sam heard his mother’s advice. Look, really look. Then make your lens capture what no one else can perceive. He did have a lens to zoom on his phone pocket. Brushing past the witch’s stone he’d picked up in the playground, he unlocked it. Camera app on, which would have a better zoon than video, Sam pointed the phone at what he was trying to see. Tink moved to look over his shoulder. At their feet, Eddie growled.

  Tink leaned closer, trying to get a better look. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell.’

  ‘Will it go any bigger?’ Her arm came around him, reaching for the phone, but stopped short, as if the thing were magic.

  ‘That’s its max,’ Sam said, annoyed at their luck.

  A curious thing popped into this head, sort of an odd mash of two images: an old school director’s monocular style viewfinder, used to frame a scene, and the stone in his hand at the playground. In the image, the swing was a director’s chair and Hernshore was his set. He’d been showing Tink the video’s he’d shot, trying to impress her, and the stone had been lying innocuously on the ground. He would have ignored it, had it not been for the windchimes on the porch of Michael’s beach house and the odd name Michael had told Sam they had. At the time, it was a curiosity, nothing more. Now, with the strange clarity of hindsight, it was a viewfinder, waiting to be used.

  He fished the stone from his pocket. It was both smooth and substantial in his palm, and warm from his body.

  ‘A witch’s stone?’ Tink seemed to not remember he’d picked it up.

  No more than three inches across the entire stone, the irregular hole at its centre was about one inch. Inexplicably he knew he should look through it. Held between thumb and forefinger, Sam lifted it to his right eye, and squinted shut his left.

  ‘No... fucking... way!’

  ‘What?’ Tink said.

  Sam had to double take, opening his left eye, and checking without the stone, then once again with it. He panned around, left and right, down to peer through the jagged stone roots, and back up to the dunes and the sullen clouds above.

  ‘What? Tink repeated.

  ‘See for yourself.’ Sam gave her the stone.

  With trepidation she put it to her eye. ‘Herne’s balls!’

  ‘And you said I’m weird?’ Sam said.

  Tink looked at him uncomprehendingly,

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘can I have it again?’

  He made another pan across the dunes. ‘I guess that’s more of your moonthread.’

  Through the witch’s stone, fine threads were visible. They were particularly abundant along the horizon, a literal spider’s web of silver criss-crossing sky, tangling with the stars, so that the dunes below appeared to be suspended from the heavens, trapped there like a fly cocooned in silk. In places the silk had frayed and, having lost its lustre, hung in tatters, or lay as tangled skeins upon the dunes, only visible through the stone. There was more. The moonthreads ran beneath the sand, though these were as faint as a fracture on an X-ray. There was a buried city of blocky stone buildings, miniates and obelisks, and through the crest of one dune, the thing that had initially caught Sam’s eye: military vehicles, including several trucks, a tank, another vehicle with both wheels and caterpillar tracks, and at least two jeeps. Other objects strewn between the encircled vehicles.

  Something about this seemed wrong. Wrong in the way of déjà vu and knowing the phone was going to ring right before it does, which in the normal world could be called simple coincidences. Here in the bubble of Hernshore and the netherworld desert of the dunes, where a gigantic serpent god was trapped, ideas like luck and fate and magic weren’t flights of imagination. The idea that a grandfather he’d never met had made a cult war movie called Across The Dunes, that it was his mother’s favourite movie, that she had a child by the director’s son, and when she died, that son ended up in his grandfather’s study ejecting a VHS tape of that same movie, all fit perfectly, synchronously, together. They too could all be connected by the invisible gossamer of moonthread, like everything else in this place. And if that, then why not this other thing Sam could see in the dunes?

  ‘Look,’ Sam pointed, handing the stone back to Tink. ‘They are military. Maybe we can get one going, and they might have weapons.’

  Tink squinted and wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s a long way off and how are we going to get down and...’

  Sam cut in, a ball of excitement percolating through him from a drug called hope. ‘We can’t stay here forever, right? I think I can climb down the roots. Then it’s a straight run. It can’t be any further than the run we made to here. And now we’ve got the stone. You can keep watch from up here, wave at me if you see Sugnar coming.’

  ‘What about Eddie?’

  Sam thought it over. ‘I could make a sling from my hoodie and take him with me. He’ll be another early warning system. If there’s nothing there we can use, I’ll hurry right back, okay?’ It felt good that she was worried about him, better than good. He considered that he might be trying to impress her. That was true, but it wasn’t the only reason. ‘Look, this is it, the end game, the final act. We can’t lie down and wait to die, right?

  Tink chewed her lower lip, unsure.

  ‘Right?’ Sam tried again, more insistently, hoping to pass on some of this newfound bravado.

  ‘Right,’ Tink agreed, not lifting her eyes to his.

  ‘Fuck it, right? Fuck, Herne. Fuck, Sugnar, right?’

  ‘Right.’ Tink nodded, forcing into the word some of the swagger she had in spades when they first met.

  Okay, then, Sam thought. He pulled off his hoodie and sized up Eddie. I guess this is it, he thought. As the wind hummed through the roots of the giant petrified tree, and the dirty clouds rumbled above the dunes, both Tink and Eddie looked at him doubtfully.