The duty was a simple one. A gap in the Woven Deeps, a chasm ten meters wide where an older root-system had failed, needed to be bridged. It was the work of a warden, as fundamental as breathing. Lauri Vatanen stood before the gap, the cool, damp air of the lower passages clinging to his fur. He needed to do this. He needed to prove that Ilmar’s visit, the elder’s quiet judgment, had been misplaced. He needed to prove it to the grove, and to the hollow space inside his own chest.
His hands were unsteady. He held them out, broad paws with dark fur, and watched the fine, persistent tremor in his right hand. It was a low thrum of failure, a vibration that started in his memory and ended in his fingertips. He tried to still it by clenching his fist, but the shaking only burrowed deeper, a frantic bird beating against his bones. The task required focus, a calm he did not possess. His initial concentration felt frayed, a worn rope threatening to snap, barely holding at sixty percent of what it should be. He took a breath, the air tasting of wet moss and the clean, ozone-like scent of the Photosynthetic Myxoids that pulsed with soft green light in the walls around him. He had to initiate the chant.
He began the low, resonant drone of Biotic Husbandry. The sound started deep in his chest, a vibration that matched the grove’s own ambient hum, and spilled from his lips. It was a language older than words, a communion of intent and biology. He shaped the sound, weaving his will into the notes, calling to the latent root systems that lay dormant on either side of the chasm. For a moment, there was only the sound and the intent, a pure channel of creation.
Across the gap, the thick, dormant roots stirred. They vibrated in sympathy with his chant, the deep, resonant frequency of his voice waking them from their slumber. The response was nominal, a healthy seventy percent resonance that told him the grove was listening, willing to answer. Tiny, pale tendrils, no thicker than his finger, began to emerge from the larger roots, questing blindly into the empty air. They were nascent life, ready to be guided, to be woven into a structure of immense strength and living grace. He just needed to hold the song. He needed to guide the growth.
His focus slipped.
It was the sound that did it. The low groan of the waking roots, the faint creak of living wood under strain. It was too close to another sound, from another time. A high mountain pass. The shriek of stressed wood, not waking, but breaking. The memory was not a thought; it was an invasion, a complete sensory override. The scent of pine and cold stone filled his nostrils. The shouts of his kin echoed in his ears, sharp with alarm, then cut short. He saw the world tilt, saw the massive graft-bridge they had spent a week growing tear away from the cliff face. He saw bodies, dark shapes against the snow, falling.
The memory intrusion was total. His focus, once a taut line, shattered. It plummeted to a useless fifteen percent, his mind no longer in the warm, green dark of the grove but back in the blinding white of the pass, watching his failure unfold. The price of his concentration was paid in full, and he was left bankrupt.
His chant faltered. The resonant, life-giving hum became a discordant, wavering note, thin and full of his own sudden panic. The biotic energy he was channeling, once a steady river, became an erratic, destructive torrent. The nascent root-bridge, halfway across the chasm, shuddered violently. The delicate, questing tendrils whipped back and forth as if in a gale. The smooth, controlled flow of life had become a chaotic flood.
A section of the bridge died. The symbiotic bonds that held the living wood together, nurtured by his song, were severed by its sudden discordance. A three-meter stretch near the far anchor point went grey and brittle in an instant, the vibrant green of new growth collapsing into the colour of ash. The wood withered, its moisture violently expelled, leaving a dead, skeletal lattice hanging in the air. Thirty percent of the structure was gone, a scar of dead tissue on a living wall.
The grove felt it. The ambient hum of the entire sector, the life-song of the interconnected Myxoid network, dimmed in response to the localized trauma. It was a wave of biotic distress, a shared pain propagating at a hundred meters per second through the living architecture. The drop was only five percent, but to Lauri’s senses, it was like the sun going out. The warm, green light of the passages flickered and faded, and the silence that rushed in was not peaceful, but dead. His failure was not his own; he had wounded his home.
He broke off the chant entirely, a strangled gasp tearing from his throat. He clutched his head, his claws digging into the thick fur at his temples as if he could physically tear the memory out. But it was too late. It played out in full now, the images no longer muted by the nectar’s haze. The sight of the last of his kin, his closest friend, looking at him with surprise and not accusation just before the rocks took him. The crushing silence after the avalanche. The guilt, a physical weight that had bent his spine for years, rose to a suffocating one hundred percent. He was a liability. He was poison.
He slid down the wall, his back scraping against the living moss, and curled into a ball on the floor. The tremor in his hand was a violent, uncontrollable spasm now. He reached for his belt, his fingers fumbling for the familiar shape of the Nectar Flask. It was empty. He had drained it defying Ilmar, and had not yet returned to the Grove Heart to refill it. There was no escape. No comfort. Just the cold, hard certainty of his own inadequacy.
Then came the new sound.
It was not a sound, but a pulse. A spike of pure information, sharp and distinct, that lanced through the dull, aching distress of the grove. It was an alarm, a signal with the highest possible priority, overriding everything else. It came from the east. From the perimeter. It was a specific, directional warning, a focused point of terror in the diffuse sea of his own misery.
A new, external threat had appeared, demanding his attention. It was a crisis that did not care about his guilt or his shaking hands. It was a real monster at the door, and he was the only warden left to face it.
