Chapter 12
We hit dirt.
Not stone, not starlight, not the spongy decay of carnivorous soil. Actual dirt. Dry, cracked, sun-baked Arkansas dirt that smells like clay and summer heat and something so painfully familiar that my chest locks up before my brain catches the reason.
Grandma Jo’s garden.
I’m on my hands and knees in what used to be a flower bed.
Dried stems crack under my palms. The elm tree stands ahead of me, massive, ancient, its canopy throwing shade in the late-afternoon light.
The porch is there, the wind chimes, the ceramic frog on the stone ledge. Everything exactly as I last saw it.
For three full seconds, I let myself believe it.
Then Peeble screams.
I’m on my feet before I register moving. Peeble is on the ground three feet to my left, on their back, legs twitching.
Their left wing.
The vine in Iteration Fourteen caught the tip before we went through the pool. I’d seen it; the quarter-inch of membrane ripped clean. I’d heard the shriek. But in the portal's chaos, I’d assumed it was surface damage.
It’s not cosmetic.
The tear has spread. What was a quarter-inch gash is now a jagged line running from the wing tip halfway to the joint, the membrane split and curling back on itself.
Fluid seeps from the wound. Not blood, exactly, but something luminescent and pale gold that drips onto the dry soil and makes the dead grass underneath it shiver.
“Kaelren!” Peeble’s voice is higher than I’ve ever heard it. “Kaelren, my wing—it’s—oh gods, I can see the inside of my wing. I can see the inside of it. That’s not supposed to be visible! Those are private wing-internals!”
I kneel beside them. “Stop moving.”
“Stop moving? My wing is falling off, and you want me to stop moving? That’s like telling someone whose arm is hanging by a thread to just relax and enjoy the scenery!”
“Peeble. Stop moving.”
They stop. Not because I asked nicely, but because the pain hits.
I see it happen. The adrenaline dropping, the reality arriving, the moment their body catches up with what their brain already knows.
Peeble goes still, all six legs locking, their compound eyes fixed on me with a focus that cuts through every layer of snark and bravado.
“Fix it,” they whisper. “Please.”
I’ve never heard Peeble say please without sarcasm attached.
I press two fingers against the base of the damaged wing, careful to avoid the torn membrane.
My corruption responds, and it hurts. Using Root magic for healing when your body is more corruption than man is like running a river backward.
Every cell in me wants to break, and asking it to build instead takes a level of control that makes my jaw ache from clenching.
The magic flows from my fingers into the membrane. Slow. Careful. I watch the torn edges tremble, then reach for each other, fibrous tissue stretching across the gap. It’s not perfect. The repaired section is slightly darker than the rest, a visible seam in the iridescence, but it holds.
Peeble tests it. One cautious flutter. Then another. The wing catches air.
“Oh,” they say, and their voice wobbles in a way that they will absolutely deny later. “Oh, that’s much better. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I won’t. I have a reputation.” They clear their throat and resettle their wings with exaggerated dignity. “Now. Where the hell are we? Because if you landed us in Jo’s garden, I swear I will compose a symphony of gratitude so embarrassing you’ll wish you’d left me wingless.”
I look around. The garden. The porch. The elm. Everything checks out. The locket around my neck pulses, steady, warm, the way it does when it’s close to the anchor point. For one desperate moment, I think we’re home.
Then I notice the sundial.
Jo’s sundial sits in its usual spot between the herb beds and the trellis.
But the markings on the face are wrong. Not the numbers, the symbols etched around the rim.
In our timeline, those symbols are a mix of Root script and Old English that Jo carved herself, a blend of both her worlds. I’ve studied them. I know every line.
These symbols are purely fae. No English. No compromise between worlds. Whoever carved this sundial never learned to blend in.
I look around and notice different furniture, a missing vegetable garden, and various Wynmire plants in its place.
“Peeble.”
“Already noticed.” Their voice has gone flat. “The herbs are wrong, too. Those are military-grade nightbloom and siege thistles. Jo grew tomatoes and basil.”
“Another iteration,” I say.
“Of course it is.” Peeble settles on my shoulder, their repaired wing tucked carefully against their shell. “Why would the universe do something reasonable like send us home? That would involve basic decency, and the Rootline has never once showed basic decency.”
Before I can respond, something growls.
Not from behind us. Not from the trees. From under the garden.
The ground shakes. Just a tremor at first, enough to rattle the wind chimes and send a crack racing through the dry soil between my feet. Then the tremor becomes a pulse, and the pulse becomes a rhythm, and the rhythm sounds like breathing.
Something massive. Something hungry. Something that’s been here long enough that the earth has grown around it.
“That’s not ideal,” Peeble observes.
The ceramic frog on the patio ledge tips and shatters. The wind chimes crash together. At the far edge of the garden, where the fence meets the neighbor’s yard, the soil splits.
What rises isn’t plant or animal—at least, not fully either.
It drags itself out in pieces. First, a broad, eyeless head plated in hardened soil and root.
Then a segmented neck, each joint grinding as it straightens.
Shoulders follow. Arms. A torso that keeps unfolding from the rupture, as if something too large was forced into a space too small to contain it.
By the time it finishes pulling free, it stands nearly twelve feet tall. Two arms hang at its sides, ending in dense knots of root fiber shaped like crude hands. Its head turns toward us, sightless, but aware.
The ground trembles in time with its breath.
“Root golem,” Peeble says, circling once in the air like they’re inspecting a questionable antique. “Ancient. Pre-iteration, if I’m reading that plating right. This isn’t new growth. This is old-root, compacted and hardened. Somebody planted this thing on purpose.”
“Planted it to guard what?”
Peeble tilts their head toward the torn earth beneath our feet. “Given that we just dropped in uninvited? I’m going with this exact spot.”
The golem takes a step forward. The ground cracks under its weight. It raises one arm, root fibers fanning out into something that looks disturbingly like a blade.
I draw on my magic, corruption surging through my veins, black marks spreading up my arms, and prepare for a fight that I am not at all certain I can win.
That’s when an arrow punches through the golem’s left shoulder joint.
The impact is enormous. The arrow is no standard shaft; it’s thick as my thumb, tipped in something that glows white-hot, and when it hits, the root plating around the golem’s shoulder detonates.
Chunks of hardened soil and fiber spray in every direction.
The creature staggers sideways, one arm hanging useless, a sound like grinding boulders coming from its eyeless head.
I spin toward the source.
She’s standing on the roof of Jo’s house.
Red hair. Marks blazing gold at her collarbone.
A longbow in her left hand that’s taller than she is, already nocking another arrow with the casual precision of someone who’s done this ten thousand times.
She’s wearing armor consisting of combat gear, leather and bone plates fitted close to her body, scored and stained from use.
A short sword hangs at her hip. Her boots are planted wide on the shingles, balanced like she was born fighting on uneven ground.
Elle.
But not my Elle. The face is the same. The hair is the same. The stubborn set of her jaw that says she’s already decided how this fight ends and the golem just hasn’t been informed yet.
She looses the second arrow. It takes the golem in what passes for its knee, and the leg buckles. The creature drops to one side, catching itself on its remaining good arm, root fibers gouging trenches in Jo’s garden.
“Get clear!” she shouts down at me. Her voice is Elle’s voice, the same pitch, the same cadence, but harder. Worn smooth by years of fighting instead of years of adjusting to a world she never asked to be part of.
I get clear.
She drops from the roof, landing in a roll that brings her up already running. The longbow goes over her shoulder and the short sword comes out, and she moves toward the downed golem with a directness that reminds me of Sarnyx. No hesitation. No second-guessing.
The golem swings with its remaining arm.
She drops into a slide, passing beneath the blow, and comes up on the other side with her sword already buried in the gap between two root plates at its torso.
Magic pulses down the blade, bright and fierce, the opposite of everything I carry.
The root fibers around the wound turn brittle and crack.
The golem screams. A deep, subsonic vibration that I feel in my bones more than hear. It thrashes, trying to shake her loose, but she holds on with one hand and drives the sword deeper with the other.
“Any time you’d like to help,” she calls over her shoulder.
Not panicked. Just irritated, like I’m the one slowing this down.
Fair enough.
I channel corruption through both hands and slam them into the ground.
The magic races through the dry soil, black veins splitting the earth in a line that runs straight to the golem’s base.
When it reaches the creature, it climbs—threading through the root plating, finding cracks and seams, working into the structure of the thing from the bottom up.
Root magic built this golem. Root corruption can unmake it.