“But it’s so very fun,” he complained. Lydian sighed. “It’s simple. Like my current form, you’re a liminal creature. When your body was infused with the stag’s essence, it acted like it was a foreign entity and built a wall to create a way to separate you and the stag. The more time you spend practicing, the more you connect your spirit to other things or go into other places as a liminal being, you make the wall thinner, more transparent. That’s why you can see the marks now and the outlines of some of the creatures here.”

“Until what, the wall goes away until I become wholly the stag?” That drop of fear had my heart turn colder than the ice I was trekking through. One day there would be me, a body, but not me, Janneke, inside it.

“Usually a thin film remains to keep your personality and human spirit in check. But don’t see it as the stag taking over you. See it as the stag becoming one with you. You won’t be Janneke the stag and Janneke the human, you’ll be a mix of the two. Janneke of the in-between.”

I eyed him suspiciously, unsure if I should completely trust the words that came out of his mouth, but knowing I had no better option.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I turned to see Soren glaring holes into Lydian’s—and maybe my—neck. I raised an eyebrow at him, confused, trying to send across the message that this wasn’t the conversation I truly wanted to be having right now and that I’d rather keep to the end of the line with him. But he still frowned and a fang appeared slightly over his lip like a snaggletooth, his features merging to his other form from his agitation. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, knowing what was churning inside of him. He’d just have to get over it. He knew I was his and no one else’s. He knew I loved him. He knew I didn’t enjoy being three paces behind the person who caused me nightmares for the last hundred years.

Before I could say anything to him about it, though, Lydian called for a halt. We stopped, bumbling into one another and crowding up so we could hear better what our next step was.

Lydian pointed to a long strip of clear ice. The mist had abandoned the place, the wind blew around it as if it didn’t exist. It shone in an almost rainbow color of lights in its icy sheen, like what had lured me outside into danger. Even now, the magic pulled on me like it had a hook around my belly button, almost forcing me forward. I gritted my teeth and stayed in place.