Her eyes widen slightly. Then she grins. “You want to combine.”
“Yes. The parasite predates the split. If we hit it with both at once, it won’t know how to defend against the combined force.”
“That’s either brilliant or suicidal.”
“I’ve been told those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
She studies me for half a second, then nods. She holds out her free hand. I take it. Her skin is warm and calloused, and her grip is stronger than I expect, and when our magic connects, I feel the jolt all the way to the soles of my feet.
Not the same as my Elle. Not the same resonance, not the same depth. But there’s a compatibility that transcends iterations. The magic in us recognizes each other. Theywantto work together. The corruption in my veins doesn’t recoil from her light. It reaches for it.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Oh, that’s—”
“Focus,” I say, because if I don’t, I won’t.
We move together. She cuts a path, clearing the vines ahead. I follow, corruption anchoring behind us so that the growth can’t close at our backs. We work inward, foot by foot, the combined magic holding a corridor open through the living thicket.
The roots fight back. They lash at us from every angle, thorns the size of fingers tearing at armor, vines wrapping around ankles and wrists. Elle takes a thorn across the cheek and doesn’t flinch. I catch a vine around my forearm and burn it away with a pulse of corruption that makes the surrounding roots recoil.
Peeble’s voice carries from somewhere near the elm. “The gate’s at seventy percent! Move faster!”
We reach the core.
Up close, it’s worse than I thought. The knotted mass pulses with a slow, patient intelligence. Not sentient, but aware. It knows we’re here. It knows what we intend. And it’s gathering itself, root matter contracting around the core in layers of dense protection.
“Together,” Elle says.
She drives her sword into the outer layer while I slam both palms against the surface. Root and Bloom collide inside the parasite’s body, my corruption boring inward through the root matter while her magic follows the path I make, burning everything the corruption loosens. Two forces that should oppose each other, working in tandem instead.
The parasite reacts. Not with sound, but with force. A vibration slams through me, shaking my vision and threatening to tear me apart from the inside. Elle cries out, strained, driven by pain and refusal in equal measure.
I hold on. Push deeper.
The core is just beneath the surface. I can feel it fighting back, drawing power from the space between realms to protect itself.
Elle’s free hand finds mine. She squeezes. Hard.
We push together.
The core cracks.
The reaction is immediate. The root mass convulses, every vine and tendril snapping taut and then going slack. The growth stops spreading. The thorns retract. And the core itself splits open, releasing a burst of energy that hits us both like a wall of wind and throws us backward.
I land hard on my back in what’s left of the herb garden. Elle lands beside me, rolling twice before catching herself on one knee. The parasite’s remains collapse inward, the root mass crumbling to dry, dead fiber that scatters in the breeze.
And behind us, the elm treeexplodeswith light.
It isn’t the gate opening. It’s something larger.
The energy the parasite had been feeding on, boundary energy, Rootline energy, rushes back to its source. It floods the elm, surges through the trunk, and forces the gate wide. Not just to this iteration’s Wynmire. The Rootline itself flares into view, a web of sunlight radiating from the tree in every direction, linking to more iterations than I can track.
At the center, a portal forms.
Fully open. Stable. Blazing.
Through it, I see a world that isn’t this one and isn’t mine, and the locket at my chest begins to sing.
“Kaelren!” Peeble’s voice, frantic. “The gate’s fully open and it’s pulling! I don’t think it’s going to hold for long!”
