Ema stood in the middle of the night square. Everything felt so real, so ordinarily calm. The baroque fountain behind her hummed quietly, and the smell of grilled meat and beer from a nearby outdoor seating area drifted into the cool air. Everyone was there. Beata, Ondřej, Matyáš, Libor, and Tomáš. They were laughing, clinking glasses, and the noise of their voices carried softly through the empty street. Ema laughed with them. For the first time in a very long time, she felt that deep, relaxing sensation that she belonged somewhere. That she didn't have to run anymore.
"To you, Ema!" Tomáš raised his glass high and winked at her. "For not giving up." The others joined him with a hearty "Cheers!". Ema smiled. Her heart pounded with pure, unadulterated joy.
At that moment, the air trembled. It wasn't the wind. It was a heavy, ominous pressure, as if all of Olomouc had suddenly sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The noise of their conversation was cut off by absolute deafness. Darkness erupted from the gaps between the ancient cobblestones. These weren't shadows; it was physical matter. Black, thorny vines shattered the pavement with a loud, dry snap, like breaking bones. Like twisted weeds, they writhed blindly in the air for a second, and then shot forward with lightning-fast, serpentine speed.
Ema wanted to scream, but her lungs tightened. She saw the first vine wrap around Beata's ankles. The black thorns sliced deep into her flesh with a wet, smacking sound. Beata, in her favorite t-shirt featuring a unicorn vomiting a rainbow, jerked her leg and dropped to her knees with a shriek. "Ema, help me!" she begged, pure terror in her eyes.
"Ema!" Libor croaked. A second vine was already gripping his throat, its thorns tearing chunks of skin. With paralyzing dread, Ema watched as more vines sank their teeth into the bodies of the others. They pierced Matyáš's chest clean through; the weeds crushed Ondřej's hand into a bloody pulp. She wanted to run to them, but her feet had fused to the pavement. She could only stare at the monstrous execution.
And then came the worst part. The thorns gripping her friends didn't just stop at tearing. They began to function like living, twisted surgical instruments. The end of one black vine pushed through the soft tissue of Beata's cheek and disappeared inside her mouth. A second later, the tip—now hooked like a fishing lure—appeared at the corner of her lips and pierced the skin from the inside out. With a wet, sucking sound, it hooked into the skin from the outside and began to tear and pull her cheek into a razor-sharp, unnatural wideness. Another barb pushed through her eyelid from the inside of the eye socket and violently pulled it back. Beata's pleading gaze vanished. Her face twisted into a grotesque, artificial smile. The skin on her cheeks split with a loud crack, exposing blood-soaked muscles, and yet something radiating from it terrifyingly resembled pleasure. The darkness had become her symbiote, rewriting her nervous system.
Libor, Matyáš, and Ondřej were suffering the same fate. Their lips were stretched ear to ear, their skin torn into bloody shreds. A raw, inhuman laughter erupted from their throats. It looked as if the madness had consumed them from the inside, and they were celebrating it.
Only Tomáš didn't freeze. When a cluster of thorns shot toward him, he reacted with the speed of a predator. He leaped back instantly, raising his right arm while still in mid-air. With a deep, resonating hum, a one-handed sword materialized in his palm. He landed on the cobblestones and carved a precise circle with it, severing the flying vines like stalks of straw.
But there were too many of them. The square began to fill up. Shadows began pouring out from the side streets and the dark entrances of the buildings. People. Dozens of people, controlled by the exact same twisted madness. Their faces were ripped open into those same bloody, ear-to-ear smiles, held together by black hooks. They surged forward, their laughter sounding like grinding metal.
Tomáš stopped hacking at the thorns. He saw that his friends were lost and that a wave of lunatics was crashing toward him. The sword in his hand dissolved. He positioned himself in the center of the square. His calm was now absolute and chilling. He brought his hands together in front of his chest and closed his eyes. At that moment, he began to levitate above the cobblestones. Light started emitting from his body in regular, blinding blue pulses, crashing out into the space in heavy waves. With every pulse, the air vibrated, as if breathing with him.
From that bluish rippling beneath him, a massive form began to take shape. The light condensed until a large lioness landed on the pavement with a heavy, concrete thud. She was pure, searing energy. The lioness from the crest of the House of Přemyslid.
She charged immediately. Tomáš descended onto her back, and together they plunged into the mob. It was a massacre. The lion's claws were like giant razors. A single swipe tore the bodies of the smiling monsters and the black thorns to shreds. Blood and darkness sprayed into the air. Tomáš, his eyes still closed, orchestrated the destruction—blue blades of energy rotated around the lioness, crushing everything that came near them. It was an absolutely overpowered, terrifying display of raw might.
Ema felt a black hole forming in her chest. This was her fault. She had drawn this here. The remaining thorns behind her suddenly released the dead friends and turned uncompromisingly toward her. She saw the air around them ripple with frost, and felt a dull pressure at her jaw. She felt the corners of her mouth beginning to lift against her will.
The blue lioness registered it. With a massive roar, she spun around and charged straight for her, crushing the pavement beneath her paws. Ema saw salvation approaching, but the black spikes were already at her face. A split second before the first hook bit into her cheek to tear her skin, the entire world shattered into blinding whiteness, and Ema felt a searing heat.
She opened her eyes with a start and gasped sharply for air.
Her heart was racing, cold sweat pouring down her temples, but she wasn't lying on the cobblestones. She was in her bed at the dorm. And the heat that had pulled her from the nightmare came from Beata. The girl was sleeping, squeezed onto her side of the bed, her arm wrapped possessively and protectively around her, exactly like the first night.
Ema let out a sigh of relief and gently tried to wiggle out of the embrace. "Beata?" she rasped. "Was I screaming in my sleep again, or did you finally switch to girls overnight?"
Beata immediately cracked one eye open. She squinted at Ema for a second, then pulled back with a quiet, bubbling laugh. "In your dreams, Volná. You were thrashing around and whining again like you were getting gutted. I had to step in, or I wouldn't have gotten any sleep at all," she yawned and stretched. Then she sat up, ran a hand through her messy pink-tipped hair, and smiled. "So, how did you enjoy your evening yesterday?"
Ema sat up and leaned against the headboard. "It was great. Really, thank you guys so much for taking me with you," she said sincerely. Then she touched her forehead in confusion. She was expecting a splitting headache and a churning stomach, but she felt completely clear-headed. "But it's super weird that I don't have a hangover at all. After everything Libor poured down my throat yesterday..."
Beata chuckled and jumped out of bed. "Architects don't get hangovers, sweetie. We're up pretty early, so how about we head into town for breakfast? We'll have a girls' morning." She stopped at her closet and started pulling things out. She tossed a hot pink, sequined t-shirt and a short denim skirt at Ema. "Here. Looks like we're the same size."
Ema caught the clothes mid-air, held the hot pink sequined monstrosity up to eye level, and looked at it as if she had just been handed a live toad. "Um... do you have anything else in there?" she asked cautiously. "Something a bit more... dark? I'm used to wearing hoodies and baggy stuff. You know, like a proper skateboarder."
Beata looked at her, tilted her head to the side, and put on an expression of absolute, almost childlike incomprehension. "Skate-what? Is that some kind of forbidden magic? Or is it used for cleaning carpets?"
Ema chuckled, realizing Beata was messing with her. "Just... underground? An edgy style?" she added, accompanying it with a theatrical pose—she stuck out her tongue, threw up a rebel hand sign, and for a second tried to pull off the look of a hardcore skater who had just dropped in on the steepest ramp in town.
Beata burst into a ringing laugh and shook her head. "Tough luck, Volná. This is my closet, not a funeral home's storage unit. You'll only find pastel colors, sequins, and pure joy for life in here. So you have a choice: either you wear this, or you go into town for breakfast in that giant flannel of yours, which, by the way, could probably be used as a weapon of mass destruction after these last few days."
Ema sighed, but ultimately pulled the pink t-shirt off the hanger with resignation. "You're coming with me for some serious shopping this afternoon, because this is an absolute assassination of my identity," she muttered while squeezing into the tight denim skirt. "I have some money in my backpack that... well, that I have. I'd love to buy you something too, as a thank you for taking care of me."
Beata's smile beamed. "Shopping? You couldn't have said anything better. It's a date."