The alarm pulse from the east was a spike of glass in his mind, a focused point of terror that overrode the dull, aching shame of his failure at the bridge. Lauri Vatanen stumbled through the woven-root passages, his unsteady gait driven by a singular, desperate need. He had to get to the Grove Heart. He needed the nectar. His hands shook with a low thrum of memory and exhaustion, but the thought of facing an external threat in this state was a deeper fear. The nectar would calm his nerves, steady his hands, and give him the focus to be a warden again, if only for an hour.
He burst into the central chamber and stopped, a gasp catching in his throat. The air was wrong. The familiar, soft green glow of the Photosynthetic Myxoids was gone, replaced by a sickly, flickering dimness that cast long, dancing shadows. The chamber’s luminosity was barely twenty lux, a candle against the sun it once was. The air, usually thick with the clean scent of pollen and damp earth, was acrid and sharp.
The Grove Heart was weeping.
From the fibrous, bark-like petals of the massive symbiotic flower, a thick, black fluid oozed, tracing slow, glistening paths down its surface. It was not sap. It was not nectar. It was the colour of char and old blood, a viscous horror that pulsed with a faint, ugly light of its own. This was the Tears of Ash, the virulent blight he had only heard of in panicked whispers from the eastern clans. Here. In the heart of his home.
A thick droplet of the black fluid fell from a petal’s edge and landed on the living floor below. A sharp hiss, like water on hot iron, cut through the silence. The patch of healthy, green Myxoids where the drop landed curdled instantly. The soft light extinguished as the gelatinous life-forms writhed, their structure collapsing inward. In seconds, they were transformed from a source of light and life into a patch of glistening, black sludge that began to spread, a stain of active decay. A Corrosive Myxoid, born from the death of its healthy kin. The blight was not just a sickness; it was an inversion, turning life against itself.
The sight was a violation, a deep, fundamental wrongness that should have sent him reeling. But the alarm from the east still echoed in his nerves, and the violent tremor in his hands was a more immediate tyrant. The addict’s reflex, a pathway carved deeper than reason, took control. His desperation level was absolute, a screaming need that drowned out the horror. He saw the fluid, but his body only registered a source. He acted on pure, debased instinct.
He fumbled at his belt for his Nectar Flask, the cracked gourd a familiar weight in his trembling grasp. He ignored the spreading sludge, the hissing decay, the death of his home. He held the flask under a steady stream of the black fluid, his mind locked on the single, desperate goal of getting a dose. The price of this act was a profound denial, a choice to see only what he needed, not what was truly there.
The flask filled with the foul liquid. It was not the clear, shimmering fluid of life he craved, but a curdled, opaque poison. It smelled of rot and acid, a noxious vapour that should have been a final warning. He raised it to his lips.
He spat, violently, a choking retch tearing from his throat. The fluid was fire and filth, a taste of pure corruption that burned his mouth and tongue. The shock was absolute, a physical blow that shattered his addict’s haze. The liquid he had just tried to drink was not a cure; it was the disease itself. The last, desperate hope for a chemical escape was not just gone, it had become an active poison.
He stared at the weeping Grove Heart, then down at his empty, trembling hands. The realization crashed over him with the weight of a mountain. The blight was not a distant threat from the Regalis border. It was not an external enemy to be faced. It was here. It was an internal invasion, a corruption of the most sacred, central part of his world. The source of his escape was the source of the poison. His solace was his damnation.
His hope, a flickering, pathetic thing he hadn't even known he was holding, extinguished completely. The world narrowed to the hissing of the spreading sludge and the frantic, useless beat of his own heart.
Then the shaking began in earnest. It was not the familiar, low-grade tremor he had lived with for years. This was a violent, uncontrollable spasm, a storm that seized his entire body. The first true pangs of unaided withdrawal. His hands vibrated at a frantic frequency, a blur of motion he could not still. His teeth chattered. A cold sweat broke out across his fur.
The hissing of the sludge was the only sound. The air was cold on his sweat-soaked fur.
His home was poison and his body was a cage.
