“Eventually. He also broke three knuckles and brought down a section of ceiling.” She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “He’s infuriating. Completely impossible. Refuses to listen, refuses to plan, refuses to admit when he’s wrong.” A pause. “But he’d burn the whole realm down for me, and I know that without question. So.”
“So,” I repeat, because I understand the math. The equation of loving someone whose flaws are inseparable from the reasons you need them.
She glances at me. Holds the look a beat longer than necessary. “You seem to think before you act.”
“I have a beetle who reminds me constantly that thinking is superior to punching.”
“Absolutely true,” Peeble confirms from the branch above, where they’ve appointed themselves overseer. “Though I’ve had limited success applying that philosophy personally.”
Elle laughs again. The sound does something to the ache behind my sternum that I refuse to examine.
The fourth anchor sigil flares to life. Then the fifth. The gate trembles, slowly awakening after being dormant for too long.
Light bleeds through the bark. Warm, golden, pulsing in time with the sigils. The Rootline pathway inside the elm is reopening; the connection between this garden and Wynmire is reestablishing itself. I can feel it in the locket, a strengthening of the signal, the paths untangling.
And then I feel something else.
Something coming through.
Not from Wynmire. Frombelow.
“Oh no,” Peeble says. “Oh no, no, no.”
The ground shakes again. Harder this time. A second tremor follows, then a third, each one stronger, each one closer to the surface. The pile of dead root and soil that was the first golem, the pieces aremoving. Reassembling. And not just the first one. New root matter is pushing up through the garden, something primal.
“The gate’s reactivation woke something up,” Elle says, drawing her sword. She doesn’t look surprised. She looks resigned, which is worse. “The golem was a guardian. We killed the guardian. So the thing it was guardingagainstis no longer being suppressed.”
“What thing?”
The answer comes as a root mass the size of a shed bursting up twenty feet from the elm. It doesn’t rise into a figure like the golem. It spreads—outward, fast—a wall of root and thorn overrunning the garden in seconds. Fence posts vanish. The patio fractures and disappears beneath spined growth. Even the shattered ceramic frog is swallowed.
At its center, something pulses. A core. Dark, knotted, dense with magic that doesn’t feel like Root or Bloom. It feels older than both. From before the split. Before the iterations.
“Boundary parasite,” Peeble says, their voice suddenly thin. “It feeds on the energy between realms. The golem was keeping it contained. We just rang the dinner bell.”
The mass surges toward the elm, toward the gate. If it reaches the Rootline, if it breaches the space between realms, it won’t stop here.
It will spread.
“We need to kill the core,” Elle says, already moving. She cuts through the leading edge of the vine growth, her blade trailing Bloom fire that burns the roots to ash. But they regrow behind her almost as fast as she clears them. “If we destroy the central mass, the rest dies.”
“The core is twenty feet deep in a living wall of root matter,” I point out.
“Yes, I have eyes, thank you.” She cuts down another wall of growth. “Do you have a better plan?”
I do, actually. It’s a terrible one.
“Peeble,” I say. “Get to the gate. The moment it fully opens, you go through. Don’t wait for us.”
“Excuse me? I don’t take orders from—”
“Peeble.”
Something in my voice stops them. They look at me, and whatever they see makes their wings fold tight against their shell.
“Fine,” they say. “But if you die, I’m composing a very unflattering eulogy.”
I turn to Elle. “Your magic. Can you channel it through someone else’s weapon?”
