Chapter 8 #2
It sits in a natural hollow in the rock in a circular basin, maybe four feet across, filled with water so dark it looks like liquid obsidian. The edges are smooth with age, worn down by time or magic.
Except the water reflects stars.
It’s still broad daylight. The sky above us is hazy gold, choked with pollen and the remnants of whatever toxic weather this iteration produces. But the surface of the pool shows a clear night sky, pinprick constellations drifting slowly across its surface.
“That’s a seeing pool,” Peeble says, landing on the rim. “Old magic. Pre-iteration old. You press your hand to it, and it links to other pools along the Rootline.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m a beetle who used to be human and remembers being the first marked in existence. I’m certain about exactly three things in this universe, and ancient water features are one of them.”
I kneel beside the basin and press my palm to the surface.
The water is the kind of cold that bites at the skin and seeps into your bones. The bond in my chest flares, and the locket heats against my collarbone. Ripples spread from my hand in slow circles, the star-strewn surface blurring, shifting, then reforming into something new.
Into faces.
Bryx appears first, upside down and slightly distorted, his compound eyes wide. He’s in Jo’s garden. I can see the elm tree behind him, the trellis, and the edge of the porch. He’s leaning over something, and when the image stabilizes, I realize he’s leaning over an identical pool of dark water.
"Holy—Kaelren?" Bryx’s voice comes through like he’s speaking from the bottom of a well. Hollow, echoing, but unmistakable. "Leo! Leo, get over here!"
Leo’s face appears beside Bryx’s. He looks rough. Good. Glad to know I’m not the only one suffering around here. He doesn't seem surprised by the magical form of communication. Apparently, he's learned to just take everything in stride.
"Kaelen," Leo nods. "Where are you? Have you found her? Is Peeble—"
"I’m right here!" Peeble shoves their face toward the pool. "Miss me? Of course you did. I’m the highlight of everyone’s day."
I shove them out of the way. “I take it Elle isn’t there?” I ask, daring hope to fill my chest.
Both of them look at one another, then shake their heads like they, too, had been hoping for this.
I sigh. "We’re in Iteration Fourteen," I say. "The Bloom weaponized plant life here. Everything is carnivorous. Elle isn’t here, but there’s another version of me, and he’s…" I stop. I don’t have a word for what he is. "Compromised."
"How compromised?" Bryx asks.
"Root is consuming him. He’s letting it."
Silence from the other side. The water ripples, and their faces distort for a moment before settling.
"How long have we been gone?" I ask.
"Nine days on our end," Leo says. "The Elm Gate’s been unstable. Raskel’s been reinforcing the wards, but every time an iteration collapses, there’s a shockwave through the Rootline."
That’s not good. The Elm Gate is our way back. Our way home. If it fails while we’re still jumping iterations, Peeble and I are stranded wherever we land.
"Listen," Bryx says, leaning closer until his face fills most of the pool’s surface. "We’ve been tracking the Rootline disruptions from here. Every time an iteration destabilizes, there’s a pattern.
The collapses are getting closer together.
Whatever’s happening, whatever she did when she dispersed, it’s accelerating. "
"How much time do we have?"
Bryx looks at Leo. Leo looks at his hands.
"We don’t know," Leo says quietly. "But it’s not a lot."
The water ripples again. The connection is thinning.
"We’ll move to the next iteration as soon as we can," I say. "Keep the gate stable. Keep the garden alive."
"Kaelren—" Leo starts.
"I’ll find her."
I pull my hand from the water. Their faces stretch, blur, and dissolve back into reflected stars. The pool goes still.
Peeble is quiet for a long time. For Peeble, that’s about twelve seconds.
"So. Running out of time. Gate’s breaking. No pressure."
"No pressure," I repeat, and neither of us laughs.
With that, the image fades from the pool, and I feel no closer to answers than before.
We’re still on the high ground at dawn when it starts. Shouting, the crack of Root magic, the low groan of something massive taking a hit. I move to the edge of the outcropping and look down into the delta.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren has found what he’s been looking for.
A massive pod dominates the center of the flooded clearing, and stands is the right word, because it’s walking. A cathedral of vines and thorns, fifty feet tall, moving on root-legs that tear free from the mud with slow, wet pulls.
Its body is layered in living plant matter: bark plates shifting like armor, flowering tendrils lashing from its sides, a canopy of leaves spreading wide enough to swallow the sky. Wherever it steps, the ground responds—flowers erupting, vines racing outward, the delta reshaping itself around it.
Petal-mouths open and close across its surface. Dozens of them, each door-sized and lined with translucent teeth. They gape, release clouds of yellow pollen, then snap shut in a rhythm that sounds almost like breathing.
Almost like speech.
But it’s what’s inside that stops me.
Through gaps in the vine-armor, I can see them.
Silhouettes. Dozens of bodies suspended in amber sap, hanging like insects in resin.
Fae, mostly. Arms outstretched, mouths open, eyes closed.
Alive or dead, I can’t tell. The sap pulses around them, feeding on them or feeding them. It’s hard to say which is worse.
And one silhouette is shaped like her.
The breath leaves my body. My hand finds the locket and presses it to my chest hard enough to hurt. The shape is right, the height, the build, the way the hair drifts in the sap. For one sharp, impossible second, I think she’s here. I think I found her—
The locket is cold.
No heat. No pull. No answer.
That’s not Elle. It’s the Bloom wearing her shape. A lure, a puppet of sap and memory, crafted for exactly the kind of desperate fool who would charge a walking cathedral of teeth to save a ghost.
A fool like the one currently charging across the flooded clearing with Root magic burning in both hands.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren slams into the Bloom-core like a battering ram.
His fighters fan out at its base, hacking at root-legs and dodging whipping tendrils.
He ignores the legs entirely and climbs, driving bare hands into the vine-armor as if it yields for him.
The Root-veins beneath his skin pulse in time with the cathedral’s rhythm, syncing, aligning, almost merging.
He’s trying to carve her out of it.
"He sees the shape," I say. My voice sounds distant to my own ears. "He thinks it’s her."
"It’s not," Peeble says firmly. "You know it’s not."
"I know."
But knowing doesn’t stop the feeling. Watching him climb that thing, watching him tear through vine and thorn with bare hands, I understand him completely.
I understand the math he’s done in his head.
The calculation that says any chance, even a wrong one, is better than standing still.
I’ve done that math. I’ve almost acted on it.
The only difference between us is that I have Peeble on my shoulder telling me I’m an idiot, and he doesn’t.
"We should go," Peeble says. "Now. Before this gets worse."
It gets worse.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren reaches the heart of the Bloom-core and lets go. Full Root magic, unrestrained, tearing out of him in waves that make the air shudder. The cathedral screams, a single, layered sound from every petal-mouth at once, high and almost human.
But the Root doesn’t answer the way it should.
In our iteration, Root magic is power; dangerous, but wielded. Here, where the Bloom has devoured everything else, the Root is starved. It’s had nothing left to feed on.
And when Fourteen opens himself fully, pouring everything he has into the strike—
The Root reacts like a predator catching the scent of blood.
Vines burst from within the cathedral, Root, not Bloom.
Dark and pulsing, the same shade as the veins beneath his skin.
They don’t strike. They reach. Curling around his arms, his legs, his torso, sliding through the gaps in his stripped-down armor and sinking into the Root-veins already threaded through him.
He doesn’t scream.
He laughs.
It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard—not because it’s manic, though it is, but because I understand it. That laugh means he’s finished weighing outcomes. Finished holding himself back. He’s chosen his answer, and his answer is surrender.
“If she’s inside you,” he says, his voice carrying across the clearing with impossible clarity, “then I will be too.”
He opens his arms, and the vines take him. They lift him into the cathedral’s body, plant matter folding closed around him, sealing him in sap beside the silhouette that isn’t her and never was.
I can’t breathe.
My fingers lock against the rock, knuckles draining white as corruption spreads up my arms, black veins threading higher without my consent.
Because I see it now. I see exactly what he’s become.
Obsession without anchor. Love without direction.
The version of me that stopped caring about returning, that burned everything down for the chance to reach her, even if reaching her meant becoming something that could never hold her.
That’s what I am without her.
Not a hero.
Not a prince.
Not even a monster.
Just gone.
Peeble and I stand there, stunned, for a breath too long before the collapse begins.
The sky tears open. The pale gold above us pulls apart, and behind it is nothing, not dark, not light. Just blankness, like the world has been erased from behind the surface.
Grass surges to waist height in seconds. Vines thicken and spread, swallowing rock, bodies, and water. Trees harden, sprouting thorns as long as blades. The rivers slow, choke on plant matter, and lock into solid green ridges.
The ground heaves. Plains rise into jagged hills. The delta reshapes itself into something hostile. The clouds darken to bruised plum and sink lower, pressing down on the world.
Then the edges begin to bend. The landscape warps toward its center, folding in on itself.
Like it’s feeding.
"We are leaving," Peeble says. "Now."
I don’t move. All I can do is take in the chaos happening all around me.
The ground lurches. A vine as thick as a tree trunk bursts from the earth six feet to my left, and I’m dragged back to the present.
"Kaelren!" Peeble is screaming. Actually screaming, which they never do. "The pool! The pool is destabilizing! If we don’t go right now, we don’t go at all!"
I turn and run.
The seeing pool is churning. The dark water has turned to liquid light—silver and gold swirling together, throwing off sparks that burn where they land on the stone rim.
The star reflections are gone, replaced by a whirlpool that leads somewhere.
Anywhere. Whatever’s on the other side has to be better than here.
A vine lashes at my back. I dodge, feel it graze my armor, but keep running.
The pool’s surface is rising, bulging upward like something is trying to push through from the other side. The liquid light stretches into a dome, and through it I can see Jo’s garden—not reflected, but there, as if someone punched a hole between here and home and the edges are already fraying.
"Jump!" I yell, raw and desperate. "Peeble, jump now!"
Peeble doesn’t hesitate. They fold their wings and dive headfirst into the light.
A vine snaps at them as they go. It catches the edge of Peeble’s left wing, just the tip, a quarter inch of iridescent membrane, and tears it clean off. Peeble shrieks, more offended than hurt, and disappears through the surface in a spray of silver.
I’m three steps from the pool when the ground beneath me cracks.
The rock shelf we’ve been standing on splits down the middle, and I’m falling.
Not far, just a few feet, but enough to put the pool above me now.
I grab the stone rim with both hands and haul myself up, arms burning, corruption flaring in response to the strain.
Vines are coming. A wall of them, rushing across the delta floor like a green tide, consuming everything in their path.
The fighters from Fourteen’s group are already gone, swallowed or fled; I can’t tell.
The cathedral is still standing, but it’s growing, absorbing the collapse into itself, becoming the only structure left in a world that’s folding up around it.
I pull myself over the rim and throw my body into the light.