Meanwhile, Rowan was engaging in his own careful dance with a sunflower giantess.

The sunflowers Linden and I had picnicked beneath had braided themselves into a towering floral scarecrow, with, intriguingly, a feminine shape. Unlike the other two constructs, she was somehow almost pretty, with a spill of petaled yellow hair that flared around her like a corona, the green fronds and leaves that wove her body nipping in at the waist. Her eyes were huge, black, and compounded as a fly’s, made of the spiraling seeds that formed sunflower centers. Each time Rowan feinted in either direction, she twitched to block him, moving with an eerie shutter-clicking speed that felt like too many frames per second to fully process.

As I looked back to gauge Talia’s progress, Rowan had just begun conjuring crabgrass and giant foxtails from the ground to fling out like a weedy net, trying to trap her in place while he raced for the glowing token she guarded behind her back.

Back at the patch, Talia hadn’t had much success. Though she’d managed to mute its howling and blind the topmost head, the pumpkin fiend clearly had plenty of other eyes at its disposal. As she raced toward the apple orchard, it shot off vines like lassos, curling them around Talia’s ankles and yanking her feet out from under her. She fell hard, the kind of bone-crunching tumble only properly described as eating shit. My breath caught at how viciously her chin struck the ground, blood trickling from her lip where she’d bitten herself.

But then she lifted up on her forearms, giving her head a shake to clear it, sheer murder blazing up in her eyes. Teeth bared, she reached down to wrench off the vines; I couldn’t quite tell what spell she’d used, but from the way they fell off her like corn silk, she must have somehow turned her grip razor sharp.

Then she staggered up to her feet and stalked toward the pumpkin fiend like one of the Furies, actually growling under her breath.

It was, Gauntlet matters aside, almost intolerably hot to watch.

The fiend charged her like a frenzied bull, swinging its arms. But then the air around the pumpkin patch began to shimmer, going silvery and somehow thin. I could see the strain of intense focus carve Talia’s features even finer, her garnet blazing to crimson life as she lifted her hands and cupped them toward the sky. There was an abrupt shift to the air that felt strangely sepulchral; a cold breath blown over your shoulder in an empty crypt, a chilly finger drawn slowly down your spine.

Then shapes began to coalesce, the tattered and translucent gray of ghost ship sails, all around the pumpkin fiend. A keening whine emanated from them, building into an eldritch wail.

I realized that Talia was deliberately thinning the veil all around her—turning the patch into more of an in-between place like the Witch Woods, sliding it closer to her own domain.