The scrape of stone on stone was an intrusion, a sound that did not belong in the quiet symphony of decay. Lauri Vatanen did not move. He lay on the floor of the Grove Heart chamber, his will to live a barely flickering ember. He had willed himself toward nothingness, and he was almost there. The advancing tide of black, hissing Corrosive Myxoids was a promise. It would be a quiet end. He would let it come. He would let it take him.
Another sound. A gasp. A living sound, ragged with effort and terror.
He did not want to look. To look was to acknowledge. To acknowledge was to feel. He had chosen to feel nothing. But the sound came again, closer this time, a choked sob that cut through the haze of his withdrawal. He turned his head, his muscles protesting.
A young Silvanus apprentice stood at the entrance, her form a silhouette against the dim light of the passage. She was soot-streaked and wild-eyed, her simple tunic torn. She stumbled into the chamber, her gaze fixed on the weeping horror of the Grove Heart. Her arrival broke the chamber’s funereal silence, a frantic pulse of life in a room devoted to death.
She saw him then, a heap on the floor, and a fresh wave of despair washed over her face. She was the only survivor, and this was the help she had found.
She gasped, her voice thin and reedy, talking to him or perhaps just to the dying air. — It came from the east. The Tears… they fell like rain.
Lauri watched her, his mind a slow, muddy current. The east. The alarm pulse had come from the east. The information registered, but it was distant, happening to someone else in another world. He remained still, a statue of apathy.
The girl took another shuddering breath, her small frame trembling, her eyes wide with the vast, empty horror of someone who had watched their world dissolve. — My whole village… it’s just sludge now, — she whispered, the words catching in her throat.
Sludge. The word landed. He looked from the girl’s terrified face to the glistening black sludge that was steadily consuming the floor of his own home. The same hissing, eating, unmaking poison. The abstract threat, the whispers from other groves, the distant alarms—it was all made horrifyingly real in that one word, from that one survivor. The cost of failure was not a dimmed light or a withered root. It was total annihilation.
He felt a flicker, deep inside. A cold spark in the ash of his soul. It was the warden’s duty, a thing he thought he had burned out of himself. He pushed himself up on one elbow, the movement sending a fresh wave of violent tremors through his arm. He looked at the apprentice, truly looked at her. Elina Rovio. He remembered her name from a season’s roll call. An apprentice healer.
The girl’s face became a mirror, and in it he saw the vacant peace he had been craving. It was the face of a corpse. He saw his own choice—to lie here, to let the blight take him—reflected in the fate of her village. His apathy was not a personal failing. It was a weapon, aimed at everything he was sworn to protect. The price of his inaction was not his own life, but the lives of others. The connection was a blade twisting in his gut.
His empathy, long dormant, stirred. The guilt he felt was no longer for a past failure on a mountain pass. It was for a present failure, here, now, on this stone floor.
— It’s moving west, flowing from the Regalis border, — Elina said, her voice a little stronger now that she had his attention, pointing a trembling finger back the way she had come, toward the east.
A direction. A vector. A source.
The blight was not just a sickness. It was an invasion.
The knowledge settled into him, a block of ice in his chest. The Regalis. The iron-fisted regime of the plains, with their crystalline walls and their hatred of the forest’s chaos. It made a terrible kind of sense. This was not a random decay. This was a war.
He pushed himself to his feet. The effort was monumental. Every muscle screamed. The world tilted, the sickly light of the chamber spinning around him. The shaking in his limbs was a frantic, rattling storm, but for the first time in days, it was not the only thing he could feel. Beneath it, a new foundation was setting. It was not hope. It was colder than that. It was resolve, forged from the certainty that his despair was a luxury he could no longer afford. He was trading that comfortable, quiet end for this agonizing, uncertain motion.
The debate was over. He had found a new purpose, however faint, in the terror of a child’s eyes.
The air in the chamber was foul, thick with the chemical tang of the Tears of Ash. The hissing of the Corrosive Myxoids was a constant, hungry sound.
He had to move.
