She's right. She's exactly right, and she delivered it the way I would have, clinical and precise and with no room for sentiment. I taught her that. Or a version of me did.
"Alright," I sigh. "So we have an anchor. If Thalia can hold the Cathedral in place, even for minutes, the core becomes reachable. The question is what happens when we reach it."
"The core is a version of you," Torvel says carefully. "Which means destroying it is not simply a matter of force. You would be confronting something with your own intelligence, your own instincts, your own capacity for adaptation."
"But locked in place," Elle says. "If Thalia holds the anchor, it can't adapt. It can't shift. It has to face whatever comes at it in that moment, with whatever it has."
"Then we need an approach it can't predict. Something that doesn't look like strategy." I look at Elle. "Something that looks like the opposite of everything I've ever done."
She holds my gaze. I can see her thinking; the gears turning behind her green eyes. She doesn't have an answer yet. Neither do I. But the shape of one is forming between us, in the space where her instinct meets my analysis.
"We'll figure it out," she says.
"We have three days," Rhyven reminds us.
"Then we'd better think fast," Peeble says from the windowsill, where they've been sitting in uncharacteristic silence for the entire meeting. "And by 'we,' I mean you. I'll be providing moral support and devastating commentary from a safe distance. As is my role."
The council meeting breaks. Thalia assigns tasks. Torvel buries himself in the archives, looking for any fragment of dataabout the Cathedral's behavior during a partial anchor. Irielle goes back to the root-paths for another reading. Rhyven adjusts the evacuation timeline.
Elle and I stay in the chamber after the others leave. Thalia pauses at the door and looks back at us. At her parents, sitting at her war table, in her city.
"Thank you," she says. "For staying in your seats."
I know what she means. She means thank you for not being cycle forty-one.
"We're not going anywhere," Elle says.
Thalia nods once. The mask holds, but the green eyes behind it are bright. Then she's gone, and the Heartwood door seals behind her, and Elle and I are alone with a half-formed plan and three days to turn it into something that might save everything.
"She has your stubbornness," I say.
"That she does." Elle leans against my shoulder. "We're going to figure this out, Kaelren. For her. For all of them."
I put my arm around her and pull her close. The Heartwood hums around us, steady and ancient, and alive.
"For her," I say.
And for the first time in fifty-three cycles, the plan doesn't start with strategy. It starts with something a trained military mind would never think to use.
It starts with family.
Thalia takes us to a tavern.
I don't know why this surprises me. The woman runs a city, commands a defense force, and carries the weight of fifty-three apocalypses on her shoulders. Of course she drinks. I would be worried if she didn't.
The Root and Vine sits on the edge of the second ring, grown into the base of a wide tower where three major pathways converge. The entrance is a set of double doors carved from dark wood, and the sounds coming through them are unmistakable:music, voices, laughter, and the distinct clatter of glasses being filled and emptied that is apparently universal across realms.
"This is the most popular gathering hall in the Verdance," Thalia says, pushing through the doors. "The city built it during the third cycle. It has survived every siege since."
"The tavern survived," I repeat.
"People protect what matters to them."
Fair enough.
The interior is warm, crowded, and louder than anything I have heard since we arrived. Long tables run the length of the main room, built from the same living wood as everything else, their surfaces worn smooth by decades of elbows and spilled drinks. The walls glow with amber moss, and from the ceiling, clusters of bioluminescent flowers hang in heavy bunches, casting the room in a light somewhere between candlelit and golden hour.
Musicians are playing in the far corner. Three fae play stringed instruments and a drummer keeping time on a set of hollow root-pods that sound remarkably like a bodhran. The music is fast, bright, and heavily Irish in a way that makes no sense for a city in an alternate dimension, but makes me feel immediately at home.
