One second Toby was screaming with rage, holding on, veins popping in his neck as he held onto the juddering machine gun. The next, the brass shells tingled to a stop, and he was saying the impossible. ‘Tink? It’s my Tink!’

  Like a locomotive racing by a toy car, Sugnar accelerated past them, but a change was upon her Michael hadn’t noticed because his eyes were set on the way ahead.

  Toby was staring up at a gash running horizontally along Sugnar’s body. Brilliant white light flared from the wound. When Michael looked again, livid cords of muscle covered the exposed ribs. Moist and glistening, new scales formed. All in an instant. As quickly as it grew it died back, revealing the mouldering ribs and the festering cavity within. What Michael saw brought a lump to his throat. Without the use of the witch’s stone, he wouldn’t be able to see it, but he knew the moonthread was there, reeling tautly out of his chest and connecting him to Sam, who stood next to Tink, apparently equally as surprised to see them. The shock made Michael relax his foot on the gas.

  ‘Faster,’ Toby cried. ‘We’ve got to keep up.’

  Michael checked himself and stamped on the accelerator. He recognised the beanstalk shape of this father after all these years, the man of magic tricks and stories. And his mother, helping him with another man Michael couldn’t place. The feeling of seeing her a year after he’d buried her was a warm current swirling in the fathoms of his heart. How were they all here? And not only them, but Tara, the woman he’d once loved. The mother of the son he hadn’t known until a handful of days ago. She was here too. Were they all trapped inside the great wyrm? This was something about the legend he’d never known, perhaps no one had.

  The shore was coming closer. A spark of an idea glittered like a lit fuse. He didn’t know what would happen if Sugnar made it to the sea. She might be set free and what that would mean for their little pocket of existence or the world beyond, he couldn’t be sure, but she, Sugnar, couldn’t take all the people he loved with her.

  ‘Jump!’ Michael waved, taking one hand from the wheel. They were fifteen or twenty feet above the dunes. That wasn’t so high if they were jumping onto soft. Ankles might get sprayed, or legs broken but it was better than the alternative.

  Toby certainly agreed. ‘Jump, jump,’ he shouted, waving frantically.

  Tink, Sam, and the rest disappeared in a blaze of white and Sugnar’s naked ribs healed over, sealing them inside.

  ###

  ‘You think we can make it?’ Tink said, facing the wall of growing tissue knitting over bones. She’d sought Sam’s hand and he’d gladly taken it.

  ‘The sand should break our fall,’ he said, trying his best to sound confident. ‘We’ll all jump together.’

  ‘No, Samwise,’ Tara said from behind them. ‘We can’t leave. Only you two can go. We’re dead and we couldn’t leave even if we wanted to. There is nothing more I want to do, my beautiful boy.’

  ‘No, that can’t be right.’ All the old desperation, the denial and anger and whatever all those stages of grief he told himself he was done with before he arrived in Hernshore, came back.

  ‘It is,’ Cynthia said gently.

  ‘I’m afraid so, my boy,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘We are bound to Sugnar.’

  ‘There has got to be a way,’ Sam pleaded. ‘Her heart. We’ll kill her. Use the axe.’

  Tenebrous light broke though the desiccating flesh of the snake. The dunes rolled by between the bars of her ribcage, like an end of the pier movie flicking through its cards, this one with a World War II jeep struggling to keep in the frame.

  ‘We’ll always be connected, Samwise. I’m part of you, and you are all I ever could have dreamed of. My beautiful boy who’s becoming a beautiful man.’ By the graze of her thumb, she wiped a tear from his cheek and pushed both Sam and Tink hard in the chest.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  ###

  Hand in hand, Sam and Tink cursed as they fell backward. They hit the top of a dune hard, and they tumbled downhill in a hail of sand. Coming to a rest, Sam sat up and tried to cry out, but he couldn’t catch his breath. The jeep rumbled up behind them.

  ‘Tink!’ Toby leapt down from the side of the jeep and scooped his daughter up in a bearhug, kissing her hair.

  ‘Dad, you’re crushing me.’

  Toby lessened his embrace and set her down but wouldn’t let go. ‘Sorry, love. I thought I’d lost you, and you’re alive and…’ Overcome with emotion, the big man could say no more.

  A pair of feet clad in expensive Italian handmade shoes came into view. Tears streamed down Sam’s face. Michael dropped to his knees and awkwardly, unsure if it was the right thing to do, put an arm around Sam’s shoulders. Sugnar sped away, sliding through the dunes towards the shore, taking the boy’s mother away along with Michael’s parents. In that moment, Michael realised he and Sam had something profoundly in common, a particular type of loss and pain of sons that have lost their parents.

  ‘They couldn’t come?’ he asked.

  Sam could only manage to shake his head. Michael put a second arm around his son, folding him into a full embrace. Their first. It was awkward. What if Michael had done the wrong thing? What if it it was too much, and Sam rejected him? After a heartbeat of hesitation, Sam sobbed and buried his face into Michael’s chest, wrapping his own arms around his father.

  A second revelation occurred to Michael then. Parenthood was a kind of slow sacrifice. For the first time, he understood it. There was no greater demonstration that the world did not revolve around you than having kids. Often that was in day-to-day sacrifices parents made for their children, that to them didn’t feel like sacrifices at all. Like his own mother had done. Like, he was sure, Tara had done for Sam—all by herself. She’d put aside her dream of being a cinematographer and director.

  Sometimes, though, parenthood required a profound and immediate sacrifice. Tara pushing Sam away from danger and towards the hope of a future. His own father had done that in the dunes. To his surprise, Michael knew, now, he would make both kinds of a sacrifice for Sam. It wasn’t rational. He didn’t know this young man, not really, not yet. Still, there it was. He didn’t matter anymore; Sam was his only priority.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tink said, instinctively backing away.

  The twisting funnel of sand was growing wider and wider, hungrily sucking up the desert. Massive curtains of dust flowed toward the vortex, a colossal dervish whirling. Directly above it, the eye of the storm had ripped through the skin of the day. Pinpricks of starlight smeared into a swirl through the blackness of space, while jagged bolts of lightning sparked like a reactor building to an explosive meltdown.

  ‘Get in the jeep,’ Michael said.

  Toby was already pushing Tink in that direction. ‘Couldn’t agree more.’

  The jeep whirred once before the ignition caught. Michael eased them off and as soon as they had some traction, floored it. The engine backfired and the exhaust expelled a plume of black fumes.

  ‘Herne bless you, Nat Wanban,’ Michael said.

  ‘Got that right,’ Toby said from the back with Tink.

  ‘Uncle Nat?’ she asked, eyeing the dunes as if she’d missed him.

  Toby hung his head, shacking it sadly. ‘I’ll explain later.’

  Instead of blowing, the storm sucked, turning the desert air into a stinging swarm. Although, it was hard to see loping up and down the dunes in the jeep, Sugnar was far ahead, and seemed as though she was almost at the shore.

  Tink leaned forward. ‘What happens if Sugnar reaches the sea?’

  ‘She can’t.’ Michael said, shifting down the gears to climb the next incline. ‘She’s trapped by moonthread. That’s what keeps her here.’

  Tink frowned. ‘Erm… what if she wasn’t anymore?’

  Michael twisted in his seat to read her face and saw Sam looking chagrined. ‘What did you do?’ There was no accusation in his tone. There was no need for that and not time either.

  Sam wiped his eyes. ‘I might have cut her free, with Alaric’s axe.’

  Michael’s mouth hung open.

  Toby simply said, ‘Bollocks.’

  They crested the next dune to see a stretch of shallower undulations in the land. Sugnar was halfway across, moving fast, almost to the sea, when the sand exploded in front of her. The earth jolted from beneath the jeep, and they took flight.

  Sugnar reared, climbing into the plume of sand to meet her eternal foe.

  Herne.

  He burst forth, arms spread, spear in hand, at least a hundred feet tall or more. He shook his mane of hair, antlers slashing. Loosing a battle cry, the two gods collided. The earth trembled and the sky convulsed. Bolts of lightning javelined into the dunes and did not burn out. They spasmed and crackled, filling the air with ozone, and causing the hairs on their arms and heads to stand on end. They raced down the final incline, onto flatter ground, spitting sand from their tyres. The vortex was gaining, sucking up the hill they just left behind. The firmer sand and gentler dunes gave them more speed. Still, Toby slapped Michael on the back.

  ‘Step on it, Mikey.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I mean it!’ Toby pulled his daughter close and held her tight.

  Michael turned to Sam. ‘We’re going to make it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. It wasn’t much, the same monosyllabic conversations they had since they met, but his face was different. He believed Michael, or at least trusted him. That wasn’t just something. It was everything.

  The wind was so strong, wanting to drag them back in to the tornado. Meanwhile, two gods wrestled, an entanglement of limbs and a coiled body. Sugnar bit Hernes’s arm, sinking her fangs deep into his muscle. Rich red ichor sprayed. Wild eyed, Herne drove his spear into the serpent’s body. She stretched with the carnage of a tumbling skyscraper, a steel structure tearing and pulverising its concrete. They fell in a writhing heap amid a cloud of dust.

  Michael swerved a pillar of lightning that spasmed towards them, turning sand to molten glass. Two wheels left the ground. They all leaned against the rise and the jeep slammed back on all fours.

  ‘Mikey, drive like my Ma!’ Toby shouted over the rushing wind. The desert behind them was collapsing into the funnel cloud, which had grown miles wide, a mirror to the eye in the clouds above. An ulcer in the daytime, peeling away to eternal night.

  Michael’s foot was already to the floor. On their left, the warring gods grappled. Herne’s hands were around the snake’s neck. Her tail was wrapped around his throat. He’d lost an eye somewhere in the fray. His face a bloody mask, he fought on oblivious to all but the lust of the kill.

  Tufts of gigantic marram grass were ahead, fringing the final dune. It seemed all was a scream of falling sand, of rushing wind, of gushing blood. Tink and Toby saw the chasm of disintegrating world snatching at the heels of the jeep, into which the two gods tilted and fell, remaining locked in their death clutch.

  The marram grass, bending to the wind and tearing from their shallow roots, swallowed the jeep. They hit the peak of the final dune and took flight, as the sky disintegrated to blackness and the world fell away.