Sap
Math had been awake for hours, with no solution in sight—unless exiling himself to a cave counted. Then came a strange noise from the back of the storeroom.
He directed the light to hover in that area. Several stone blocks in the middle of the wall were crumbling, pushed aside to tumble to the ground. A small figure forced his way through the hole, grunting and grinding his teeth.
Catimus Abhigan.
“What are you doing?” Math demanded. He momentarily forgot his own imprisonment, overwhelmed by indignation. Someone had torn a hole in one of Isofal’s walls. Somehow, this man had managed it.
Abhigan lifted his head, giggling.
Math felt a chill.
The man’s bright green eyes were mad. Black juice stained his mouth and dribbled down his chin. Then he grinned, making it more obvious that the juice wasn’t black so much as dark green.
Catimus Abhigan lifted a hand to his mouth. A finger was gone—the stump jagged, chewed. Math reeled. Abhigan hadn’t lost it. He’d eaten it.
“You came,” Catimus said, voice singsong. “That was smart.” He pointed, oblivious to the missing finger. “The Queens want to talk to you.”
“The feeling isn’t mutual.” Math circled a brighter light spell and studied the man again by summoned gaslight. “What have they done to you?” Math wasn’t sure the man in front of him even qualified as human anymore.
He realized, dull and thick, that Catimus was a grimmock. Not the undead definition, perhaps, but certainly a living being corrupted and cursed by magic.
“Me?” The man giggled again. “I’m awake. It’s so nice. The Green wakes,” he giggled. “The Queens are coming. Their day is roots and rot and rain.”
“So you said before.” Math carefully edged his way around the man and slammed his fist against the door. “You better get in here! That guy we brought back from the logging camp is being really weird!”
Math already knew he’d be ignored.
Meanwhile, Catimus scuttled over to a wall and began running his hands up and down the surface, muttering to himself.
“What are you doing?”
Catimus ignored him.
“You need to stop.” Math contemplated just how much trouble he’d get into if he used magic on the man. It seemed the lesser of two evils.
Kill the full-grown. Bring the saplings back to us.
Math’s mouth opened in shock. That hadn’t been a sound, not even words, but pure intention—heavy, relentless—delivered straight into his thoughts.
Math swallowed painfully, an ugly, heavy feeling dragging at his stomach. They hadn’t won against the trees at all, had they?
The Queens had just been taking their measure.
The worst part, though … the worst part was how something inside of him wanted to obey.
Gravefuckers, it was the damn spores, wasn’t it? They’d done more than cause hallucinations.
The small man grinned at Math as he wiped black-green blood away from his mouth. “You might want to duck.”
Still grinning, Abhigan bit down and tore open the veins in his wrist.
Dark green sprayed onto the wall and ran down in rivulets, flowing into the mortar grooves between the stone blocks.
The blood didn’t flow the right way. It didn’t drip like blood at all, but moved like something alive, something with purpose.
It split, and split again, growing lighter in color as it did until the emerald streams were clearly identifiable as sprouting plants.
The crawling vines dug their roots into the mortar with extraordinary speed, doing the work of centuries in a matter of seconds.
The vines didn’t burst—they slithered. They twined through the mortar like arteries leading to a heart.
Abhigan was expanding, bloating up in a manner not unlike the corpse at the logging camp.
Math dove behind the fabric bales just as Catimus Abhigan exploded.
The explosion wasn’t what took down the curtain wall. Rather, it was the blood that wasn’t blood, seeping into the stone foundations, transforming into a writhing mass of violently expanding foliage.
The stone groaned. Then it split—deep, like a snapped tree limb. Dust roared outward. Math staggered as the fortress wall tore apart behind him.
A bellowing noise rang out, all too recognizable as Captain Rabu.
Math circled wind-based Storm spells to push falling masonry away from him.
Shouts and screams rang out. He couldn’t tell if those screams were from the knights stationed outside the storerooms or from some other group.
The noise was deafening; Math slammed into a plant-weakened wall just as the ceiling collapsed behind him, filling the air with choking dust. The wall gave way; all the walls gave way.
Math fell among shattered stone and rubble in the inside bailey of the cenobium.
Behind him, a giant section of curtain wall vanished.
The cenobium interior was wide open to anyone who might feel like strolling inside. Math didn’t need a light spell to know that a whole lot of somethings did indeed feel like doing so.
He heard the trees moving.
Bring the saplings back …
The saplings …
Math scrambled to his feet. They hadn’t meant plants, seedlings, or sprouts. They’d meant the children.
Whatever else, he wasn’t letting that happen.