The storm in his own blood was a violence that drowned out the quiet death of the grove. Lauri Vatanen lay on the floor, curled against the living root that formed the wall, and shook. It was not the familiar, persistent tremor he had learned to live with, the low thrum of guilt he could mute with nectar. This was a seizure, a frantic, full-body spasm that rattled his teeth in his skull and blurred the world into a smear of sickly, dim light. His withdrawal severity was an eight out of ten, a clinical assessment that felt like a laughable understatement for the feeling of being torn apart from the inside.
He was a warden. The thought was a shard of glass in his mind. A warden’s duty was to maintain, to heal, to protect. He was doing none of those things. He was a passenger in his own collapsing body, watching as the heart of his home bled black poison onto the floor. The hissing of the spreading Corrosive Myxoids was the only steady sound in the chamber, a counterpoint to the frantic, useless beat of his own heart. He had to do something. The instinct was buried under layers of failure and self-pity, but it was there. A desperate, hopeless act was better than no act at all.
With a groan that was half pain and half effort, he pushed himself away from the wall. His limbs were foreign objects, clumsy and disobedient. He crawled, dragging himself across the floor, away from the weeping lesion on the Grove Heart. On the far side of the chamber, near the ceiling, a small patch of Photosynthetic Myxoid still clung to life. It was a patch of faint, clean green, a stark and beautiful defiance against the encroaching darkness. It was a source of life. A tool.
He had to climb. The wall was a lattice of interwoven roots, usually an easy ascent. Now, it was a mountain. His claws scrabbled for purchase, his muscles screaming with the effort. The shaking made every movement a gamble. Twice he slipped, his body slamming back against the wall, the impact jarring a fresh wave of tremors through him. He pressed on, driven by the single, insane idea. He reached the patch, his breath coming in ragged sobs. The healthy Myxoid felt cool and pliant under his paws, its faint glow a soothing balm. He carefully, painstakingly, peeled a section of the living gel away from the root, its viability a fragile ninety percent. It pulsed weakly in his trembling hand, a tiny, captured star.
He carried it back to the Grove Heart, his movements slow and deliberate, as if carrying a cup filled to the brim with water. He stood before the weeping lesion, the oozing blackness a gaping wound in the body of his world. This was the work of a warden. This was Biotic Husbandry. A simple graft, a patch of healthy life meant to overwhelm a sickness, to sing a stronger song of symbiosis and coax the corrupted tissue back into balance. It was a technique he had mastered as an apprentice.
He began the chant. The sound that came from his throat was a ragged, wavering rasp, nothing like the deep, resonant hum the work required. His biotic control was a ruin, barely fifteen percent of what it should be. His hands, holding the precious green patch over the black lesion, shook so violently that the graft was a blur. He tried to channel the energy, to focus his will into a healing current, but the power that flowed from him was as erratic and broken as his own nerves. It was static, not a song.
The graft misfired.
There was a flash of ugly, violet light. The energy he pushed into the graft, meant to heal, was twisted and inverted by the corruption. Instead of the green overwhelming the black, the black corruption surged into the healthy patch, consuming it in an instant. The faint green light did not just extinguish; it was devoured. The healthy Photosynthetic Myxoid, his last desperate tool, turned black and sizzled, its life inverted into a new, more virulent font of decay. The feedback was immediate and catastrophic, a doubling of the blight’s intensity.
The black weeping from the Grove Heart intensified, the fluid now pouring from the spot where he had attempted his cure. A fresh wave of Corrosive Myxoids erupted from the failed graft site, spreading across the chamber floor with an audible hiss. The rate of corruption increased by a horrifying fifty percent, the stain of active decay expanding by two square meters in the space of a few heartbeats. He had not just failed to heal his grove; he had actively fed the disease. He had become the blight’s instrument.
A scream tore from his throat, a sound of pure, animal rage and self-loathing. It was the howl of a man who had lost everything and knew, with soul-crushing certainty, that it was his own fault. His hope, a thing he hadn’t even realized he was still clinging to, was now at zero. His gaze, wild and unfocused, fell upon a small, sealed gourd tucked into a niche in the wall. His emergency reserve. The last flask of clean, untainted nectar he had saved for a day of ultimate desperation.
This was that day. But he did not reach for it to drink.
With another roar, he lunged for the flask, his fingers closing around the smooth, familiar shape. He did not hesitate. He pivoted, his body a coiled spring of despair, and hurled it with all his strength against the far wall of the chamber. The gourd shattered, a sharp crack that echoed in the dying space. The last of the clear, shimmering nectar, his final escape, his secret comfort, splattered against the stone. Before it could even run down the wall, the advancing black sludge on the floor surged up to meet it, consuming the life-giving fluid with a greedy, final hiss.
The resource was destroyed. The symbolic act was complete. He was now utterly, completely without his crutch. There was no going back.
The strength born of rage vanished as quickly as it had come. His stamina depleted, his willpower a dying ember, he collapsed to the floor. He lay there, his cheek pressed against the cold, damp stone, and breathed. The air was thick with the smell of acid and rot. The hissing of the spreading blight was the sound of the world ending. He watched it advance, a slow, black tide, and felt a profound and terrifying sense of peace. He would not move. He would let it come. He would let it take him. It was a fitting end for a failed warden.
The dust motes in the sickly light seemed to hang motionless. The cold from the stone floor seeped into his bones.
A footstep scraped on stone at the grove's entrance.
