I look at Mora. She looks at me. Her brown eyes are steady and certain, the way they've been since the day I met her in the ruins of a battle and decided she was the bravest person I'd ever seen.
"Stay close to me," I say.
"Always," she says.
I turn to face the Cathedral. I crack my neck. I flex my mandibles. Kevin rises to full height beside me, wings thrumming, stinger extended, his small, furry body a declaration of war against something fifty times his size.
"Alright, you oversized salad," I say. "Let's see what you've got."
The Cathedral takes another step. The outer shield flares.
The Battle of the Verdance begins.
The outer shield holds for twenty-nine minutes.
Apparently, that's seven minutes longer than the last cycle. Seven minutes bought with overcharged generators based on Kaelren and Rhyven's gamble. For twenty-nine minutes, the amber wall of concentrated Bloom magic stands between the Verdance and the Cathedral, and the Cathedral hits it with everything it has.
I watch from the second-ring perimeter as the assault begins. The Cathedral sends Root constructs first. Dozens of them, grown from its own body and detached, each one eight to ten feettall, made of twisted vine and thorn and something that looks disturbingly like bone. They charge the outer shield in waves, slamming into the amber barrier and burning on contact. The shield holds. The constructs burn. More come.
Then the petal-mouths open.
The Cathedral's surface ripples, and two dozen door-sized mouths gape wide and release a cloud of yellow pollen so thick it turns the air between the Cathedral and the outer shield opaque. The pollen hits the amber barrier and hisses, eating at the concentrated Bloom magic the way acid eats metal, dissolving the shield's surface in slow, spreading patches.
"Corrosive pollen," Rhyven says beside me, his voice tight. "Same tactic every cycle. The constructs test the shield, the pollen weakens it, and then the Cathedral moves through the gaps."
"How long does the pollen take to eat through?"
"Last cycle, about eighteen minutes. With the overcharge, we're buying extra time, but not much."
Peeble lands on my shoulder with all the subtlety of a falling coin.
“Just so we’re clear,” they mutter, adjusting one jeweled leg, “if this turns into another ‘we might die but it’s poetic’ situation, I would like it formally noted that I object.”
I roll my eyes and watch the pollen cloud thicken. Through it, I can see the Cathedral's silhouette, massive and patient, waiting for the shield to fail. It doesn't rush. It doesn't need to. It has done this fifty-three times and it knows exactly how long the defenses take to crumble.
Vashael's toxin mist deploys next. She's positioned behind the shield line, her hands working with the rapid precision of a chemist under fire, mixing compounds in vials grown from the Verdance's own wood. The mist she produces is pale green and hangs in the air just behind the shield wall. When the firstconstructs break through the weakening patches, they hit her mist and slow.
Their vine-fiber mass stiffens. The regeneration that normally knits them back together in seconds stutters, the damaged tissue turning gray and brittle instead of regrowing. It buys the defenders time. Not much, but enough to matter.
At minute twenty-two, the first major gap opens. A section of the outer shield, the width of a house, dissolves, and Root constructs flood through. Five of them. Eight. Twelve. They move fast, their twisted bodies scrambling over each other, thorn-claws scrabbling at the ground.
Sarnyx is on them before they take four steps. Her thorns extend to full length, each one as long as her forearm, and she moves through the constructs with the brutal efficiency of someone who's been fighting things bigger than her for her entire life. Two down in seconds. The third takes a thorn through the chest and keeps coming, its vine body knitting around the wound, and Sarnyx rips it apart with her bare hands.
"They regenerate," she says, not winded, barely looking at the remains. "The vine fiber reconstructs. You need to destroy the root-node inside each one or they'll keep reforming."
"How do you know that?" Rhyven asks.
"Because this isn't my first hostile garden."
More gaps open. More constructs push through. The second-ring defenders engage, their living-wood weapons slicing through vine and thorn, and Sarnyx moves along the line, showing them where to strike. She's worth ten soldiers. Rhyven sees it too. Within five minutes, he's adjusted his formation to put her at the weakest point of the perimeter, and the line holds.
At minute twenty-nine, the outer shield collapses entirely. The generators blow, their living-wood frames splitting apart in bursts of amber light, and the wall of magic that's been standing between the Verdance and the Cathedral falls.
The Cathedral moves forward.
We enter the tunnels at a run.
Kaelren leads. I'm behind him. Thalia follows me, and Nimor scouts ahead, phasing in and out of the tunnel walls, his shadowed form flickering through the root system and reporting back in clipped fragments. Peeble is clinging to my shoulder for dear life.
