Elowen
Istand at the edge of what remains of the ritual ground and look at the wildspont's center, and I understand what has to happen next.
The problem is that stopping a ritual mid-collapse doesn't seal what the ritual opened. The energy Malrec poured into it doesn't disappear because he did. If it fully breaks open in the next quarter hour, the pressure wave alone will level the forest. What follows will reach Duskmire before dawn.
I know this because I understand what the plants have been telling me for months.
The stabilizing compounds work by absorbing the excess charge from corrupted tissue and redistributing it back into the earth safely.
Every test I ran in the workroom, every sample, every interrupted anchor — they all pointed to this.
It works, but it requires proximity. Physical contact with the core, not the perimeter.
The only way to stop this is to go inside it.
I am still weighing the words when Draekir appears at my left, coat torn at the shoulder, a gash at his side that he hasn't acknowledged and I haven't yet found the right moment to address.
He sees the same collapse I'm looking at, and the calculation behind them is fast and accurate.
"The anchors aren't enough," he states.
"No."
"Someone needs to go to the center."
I don't answer immediately, and the pause is answer enough. He turns to look at me, and his expression does something I have never witnessed before. It's fear with no armor over it. Raw and present.
"No," he tells me.
"You know I'm right."
"I know you're the only person here who thinks walking into the heart of a rupturing wildspont is a viable—"
"It is viable." I face him fully. "I know what the herbs do.
I know the ward trace residue and how the ritual damage propagated through the fault line.
There is no one else here who has spent the last three months learning the interior logic of this thing from the inside out, including you.
You know I'm the only one who can guide it. "
"Then tell me what to do and I'll go."
"It doesn't work that way. This is not me deciding I'm expendable. This is me being the correct tool for the problem."
"You are not a tool." The words arrive tight and stripped of everything but what they are. "You're the person I am not willing to watch walk into that."
"Then don't watch. Come with me."
The silence between us stretches taut. Somewhere behind us, one of Vuldren's soldiers shouts something that gets lost in the sound.
"Draekir." I step toward him. "I am not asking you to let me go. I am telling you that I am going, and that I would rather not go alone, but I will if that's what you need from me." I press my free hand flat against his chest, over the place I know his heartbeat is.
"Then I am beside you," he replies. "Every step."
We go in together. The core is worse. The light here has no color left in it — just white, absolute and sourceless.
Memory flickers at the edges of my perception; not my memories, something the wildspont is doing, fragments of sensation and image that don't belong to the present moment.
I feel the forest attack. I feel the archive, the storm door, his hands on my face in that kitchen corridor.
The magic is pulling at whatever it can find to feed itself, and what it finds is everything we've moved through to get here.
I focus on the compounds. The plants are real, the paste is real, the ward trace beneath my feet is real and I know how to read it.
The first application hits the core like a stone dropped in still water — a ripple moving outward in both directions, the corruption flinching away from the stabilizing element and then pressing back harder.
The pulse that follows shoves me backward and Draekir's hand closes around my arm before I lose my footing.
"Keep going," his voice sounds far away, but he's standing behind and above me, one hand at my shoulder. I work through the damaged lines. My hands are shaking. They're working, but the core is old and saturated and it resists the interruption with everything it has left.
A surge hits the inner wall and Draekir takes it. Then another. He doesn't make a sound. His hand stays at my shoulder, solid, and I feel through it what the effort is costing him.
"Don't let go," I instruct him.
"I haven't yet."
The core shifts. The pulsing slows, loses its outward urgency, begins turning inward instead.
The terrible white pressure against my skull eases by degrees.
I press the last of the paste into the deepest crack I can reach, both hands buried in the earth, and feel the line answer with something that is almost relief.
The wildspont breathes in. Then out. Then settles. The light drops. The pulsing stops. The pressure wave that was building toward Duskmire has nowhere left to go. Then the final surge comes.
It erupts from the place where the ritual core stood, a release of everything the wildspont had been fed and couldn't process. It comes up through the earth and air at once, without direction, without control, a last violent exhalation.
Draekir steps between me and it. I hear it before I understand it. The sound travels through the ground and into my hands where they still press against the earth. He doesn't shout. He doesn't do anything except take the full force of it across his back and fall.
I turn. He's on the ground, face-down, one arm beneath him and the other extended. Not moving. The gash at his side has torn wider from the impact, and the burns across his back where the surge hit are visible even through the ruined coat.
I am beside him in an instant, "Draekir." I put both palms to the worst of the burns, applying pressure because this is what I know, this is the only thing I have left to give him. "Stay here. Don't go somewhere I can't follow."
His breathing is shallow, the intervals between each exhale too long. I pull what remains of the herbs. I get his head tilted, one hand braced under his shoulder, and I keep my other palm flat and firm against his side.
"I love you," I tell him, because there is nothing left in me that feels the need to withhold it. "I told you before and I meant it then, but I mean it more now."
The ruins around us have gone quiet. His pulse holds. Thin and uneven. But present.
I press my head to his temple and keep my hands working, because stopping means accepting the alternative and that is the one thing I am not capable of tonight.
The forest is still. He is still. I am not. I stay there, in the dark and the settling quiet, and I don't let go.