Chapter 12 #2
The creature shudders. Its movements slow.
The grinding sound from its head pitches higher, almost frantic, as the corruption eats through the bindings that hold it together.
Elle, this Elle, sees the opening. She rips her sword free, pivots, and brings the blade down on the golem’s neck joint in a two-handed strike that carries the full weight of her body behind it.
The head separates. Not cleanly, root fibers stretch and snap like wet rope, but it separates.
The body stands for another two seconds, swaying, arms grasping at nothing.
Then it falls. The impact shakes the entire garden, knocks a section of fence flat, and sends up a cloud of dust and debris that takes a full minute to settle.
Silence.
Elle sheathes her sword, pushes her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist, and turns to look at me.
“You’re not Kaelren,” she says. Not a question.
“Not in the way you think.”
“Thank the goddess.” She exhales and plants her hands on her hips.
“That man is an absolute headache. I’ve been stuck on this side of the gate for three days waiting for him to break through, and all he does is pace, brood, and send messages through the Rootline telling me to hold position and wait for backup.
I’ve been engaging without backup since I was fourteen. He acts like I’m made of glass.”
Peeble, who has been uncharacteristically quiet during the fight, chooses this moment to interject. “Well. Our Kaelren does that too. But he’s less annoying about it. Marginally.”
I give them a look.
“What? I said marginally.”
Peeble spends a few moments explaining our situation, and surprisingly this Elle takes it in stride.
Iteration Thirteen Elle crouches in front of Peeble, her expression softening for the first time since she dropped off the roof.
“Peeble. Oh, you beautiful bug. You look just like mine.” She holds out a finger, and Peeble, who normally requires a minimum of three compliments and a formal introduction before allowing physical contact, climbs onto it without hesitation.
“I am universally adored,” Peeble says. “It transcends timelines.”
Elle laughs. It’s a wonderful sound, open and warm and completely at odds with the woman who just decapitated a twelve-foot root golem with a short sword. She sets Peeble back on my shoulder and straightens, looking me over with an assessment that is thorough and not entirely professional.
“So,” she says. “You’re from another iteration. You fell through the pool portal. And you’re here looking for your Elle.”
“That’s the gist of it—”
She’s sharper than I expected. This one grew up in Wynmire. This one had time to learn what she was, to train, to fight. She didn’t stumble through a portal, confused and afraid. She was forged.
“We need to get back to Wynmire,” I say. “The pool portal should have taken us through to the present timeline, but—”
“Instead, it dumped you here. Because the Rootline is destabilizing and the crossing points are scrambled.” She nods like this confirms something she’d already suspected.
“It’s been happening for weeks. The boundaries between iterations are thinning.
Things that should stay in one timeline keep bleeding into others.
” She gestures at the pile of root and soil that used to be the golem.
“Like our friend here. That thing crawled through a portal two days ago. It’s the third one this month. ”
“Where’s your Kaelren?” I ask.
“Stuck on the Wynmire side of the gate.” She jerks her chin toward the elm tree.
“Something locked it from this side when the golem came through. He’s been trying to break through for three days.
He’s strong, but subtle isn’t exactly his skill set.
” A pause. “Actually, nothing is in his skill set except glaring and giving orders. I don’t know what I see in him. ”
Peeble makes a sound that might be a laugh.
I ignore them. “If the gate’s locked from this side, we can unlock it.”
“Already tried. The golem’s presence was scrambling the Rootline around the elm.
I couldn’t get close enough to work the sigils without it attacking.
And fighting it solo while also trying to channel gate magic was…
” She rolls her eyes. “Let’s just say the first attempt didn’t go well.
There were splinters involved. I don’t want to talk about it. ”
“But the golem’s dead now,” I say.
“The golem’s dead now.” She grins, and it’s the kind of grin that makes tactical assessment difficult. “Which means we can try again. But we need to move fast.”
“Why fast?”
She holds up her hand. The skin on her fingers is slightly looser than it should be. Dryer. The nails have a faint brittleness to them that wasn’t there five minutes ago.
“In this iteration,” she says, “the human realm and Wynmire don’t play nice with each other.
Fae who stay too long on this side age. Fast. I’ve been here three days and I can already feel it pulling.
My joints are stiff in the mornings. My reflexes are slower than they should be.
Another week, and I’ll have aged a decade. ”
I look at my own hands. Same hands. Same corruption. But now that she’s said it, I notice the ache at the base of my thumbs. A dull tightness in my shoulders that wasn’t there when we came through the portal.
“Delightful,” Peeble says. “Adding ‘rapid aging’ to the list of things this trip has inflicted on us, right between ‘wing mutilation’ and ‘emotional devastation.’ What a vacation.”
Elle leads us to the elm.
Up close, the differences between this tree and ours are subtle but definitive.
The anchor sigils at the base are intact but dormant, their light gone cold.
And the gate itself, the gap between the physical trunk and the Rootline pathway that should connect this garden to Wynmire, is sealed shut.
Like someone drove a bolt through it from this side.
“I can feel him on the other side,” Elle says, pressing her palm flat against the bark. Her marks flare, bright light racing up her forearm, pulsing through the sigils in the wood. “He’s been hammering at it for hours. Idiot’s going to burn himself out.”
The affection in her voice doesn’t match the words. I know that particular contradiction well.
“The golem’s root system was entangled with the gate’s foundation,” I say, examining the base of the trunk where thick, dead roots from the destroyed creature still wind through the anchor points.
“It wasn’t just guarding this spot. It was feeding off the gate’s energy.
Siphoning the Rootline to sustain itself. ”
“Which is why it locked when the thing showed up,” Elle finishes. “The gate shut down to protect itself from being drained completely.”
“So we clear the dead roots from the anchor points,” I say, “and the gate should reactivate on its own.”
“Should,” she gives me a sideways look.
We work together. My corruption is better suited to the task.
The dead root fibers respond to Root magic, even the corrupted kind, and I can coax them loose from the sigils without damaging the underlying stonework.
Elle handles the anchor points themselves, her magic rekindling each sigil as I clear the debris from around it.
It’s efficient. She anticipates where I’m going next. Moves to the next sigil before I’ve finished the previous one. We work in a rhythm that feels practiced, which is unsettling because we’ve known each other for approximately fifteen minutes.
“You’re good at this,” she says, not looking up from the sigil she’s reigniting. “You must have better control than mine. He just throws corruption at problems and hopes for the best. No finesse. No patience. He once tried to force open a sealed passage by punching it until the stone gave in.”
“Did it work?”
“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. From below.
“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 are moving.
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 guarding against is no longer being suppressed.”
“What thing?”