Chapter 10
Alina
The Rooted Marches, Nightfall
It’s still Sowing Day, and the land feels awake.
Farmers are out in force, turning soil, laying out seed-sacks, checking irrigation channels that look more like glowing root-veins than pipes.
Every time they see Dagan, they brighten.
Every time they see me—they do a double-take.
Then they brighten more.
That’s weird.
But also… kind of wonderful.
We crest a rise overlooking a wide terrace carved into the hillside. The soil down below is dark and rich, furrowed into neat lines.
A tall woman with coppery gray skin and braided hair with streaks of lime green running through it straight down her back looks up from where she’s directing a crew.
Her face splits into a grin.
“My Lord!” she calls, wiping her hands on a rough linen apron as she strides up the path toward us.
Two boys trail after her, each clutching a small cloth pouch.
“Clarisse,” Dagan says, and his whole energy shifts. Less grim, more grounded. “Your fields look strong.”
“They will be stronger with your blessing,” she answers, then flicks her gaze to me, sharp and curious. “And with your viyella’s eyes on them, if rumors be true.”
Heat creeps up my neck. “Um. Hi. I’m Alina. I mostly bring sarcasm and a basic understanding of soil mechanics.”
The older of the two boys snorts.
“She speaks like Varen’s cousin from the quarry.”
“Hush,” Clarisse murmurs, though she’s smiling. To Dagan, she dips her head. “My Lord, if it pleases you, the boys have brought the first seed.”
The smaller boy steps forward, cheeks flushed, and holds out his pouch like an offering.
Dagan’s expression softens in a way I’ve never seen.
“You honor the Marches,” he says gravely, taking the small pouch in his large hand. “What is planted with intent grows strongest.”
“What did you bring?” I ask gently, crouching a little to meet the boy’s eye.
“Heart grain,” he says, eyes wide. “For porridge and bread. For trading. For my little sister so she won’t be hungry when she comes.”
Clarisse’s eyes flick skyward for a second. I recognize that look.
Hope and fear wrapped up together.
“Your sister?” I ask.
“In my belly,” Clarisse says dryly. “We argue over names daily.”
“Oh,” I say, smiling. “Well. She’s already got an excellent big brother.”
The boy beams.
Dagan opens the pouch and lets a few of the seeds spill into his palm. They’re a deep reddish-gold, faintly luminescent.
He closes his fist around them.
The air changes.
I feel it before I see it—this low, thrumming vibration that starts under my boots and runs up through my legs. Like standing on a bridge when a truck goes by, only the truck is the world.
His green-gold eyes shadow over, going distant and deep. Stone hums. Roots stir beneath the terrace.
The furrows in the field seem to darken as if rich nutrients are bubbling up from below.
“May the season be gentle,” Dagan intones, voice not just loud—resonant—like the land is speaking with him. “May your hands be strong, your backs unbroken, your table never empty. May what you sow return to you tenfold.”
A soft wind sweeps across the terrace, lifting soil, ruffling the boys’ hair, stirring Clarisse’s braid.
My arms break out in goosebumps.
The seeds in his palm glow for a moment, then settle back into quiet.
He pours them back into the pouch and presses it into the boy’s hands, covering them with his own.
“Plant them,” he says. “You and your brother, together. The field will listen.”
“Yes, my Lord,” the boy whispers, eyes huge.
“Thank you,” Clarisse says, and then, surprising me, she looks at me. “And thank you, Lady Alina. For walking the lines with him.”
“Oh, I’m just tagging along,” I say, flustered. “He’s the one doing all the heavy lifting.”
“Still.” Her gaze goes soft, assessing. “It eases an old farmer’s heart, knowing our Lord no longer walks alone.”
Something squeezes behind my breastbone.
We move on.
It’s like that the whole morning.
Fields and terraces and carved-out plots. People call out blessings and jokes.
“Lord Dagan, keep the blight away this year, eh?”
“And the hail!” another farmer shouts. “Last season took half my yield!”
“You planted too late,” someone else calls. “Blame your dice games, not the sky!”
Dagan grumbles, but he stops each time he’s hailed.
A woman with dirt under her nails presses a handful of tiny, bright blue seeds into his hand for her herb garden.
An older man with a limp offers him a single, perfect bulb he’s been breeding for seasons, asking for strength against rot.
Each time, Dagan does his thing.
Palm to seeds. Eyes gone distant. The ground hums, then settles.
I stand there, useless and awestruck, while genuine relief washes over these people as if someone just paid off their mortgage and handed them a year’s worth of groceries.
Once, halfway down a ridge, a farmer with a wide hat looks between us and grins.
“Looks right, this,” he says. “Earth Lord and his viyella, walking the lines together.”
I choke a little. “You don’t even know me.”
“We know what the land says,” he replies simply.
“What does it say?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He tips his head, listening to some frequency I can’t quite catch.
“That she belongs,” he answers at last. “If the Marches didn’t like you, milady, you wouldn’t be standing this close to the Lord without tripping over your own feet.”
Dagan snorts. “The Marches have always been opinionated.”
“Wonder where they learned it from,” I mutter.
He shoots me a look that is pure exasperated affection.
We keep walking.
To me, it feels like tracing survey lines—only instead of dragging seismographs and swearing at faulty batteries, I have a twelve-foot, winged seismic sensor in demon form and some kind of magical inner GPS that hums under my skin whenever something is wrong.
We move along ridges where the rock feels thin.
Like a scab over an unhealed wound. At those spots, my chest tightens before Dagan even reaches for the stone.
“There,” I say, pointing. “That section’s under more stress. You can see it in the fracture angles.”
He plants his palm against the rock. I follow his lead and lay my hand beside his.
The world narrows.
For a heartbeat, I feel the fracture too—like a hairline crack in a tooth waiting for the right pressure to split it.
He murmurs words in his language, low and rough.
His power pours out, seeping into the rock, bracing it, weaving through whatever warding structure he’s crafted there over the years.
The fissure quiets.
But there’s an echo of pain.
“Only for a while,” I say quietly.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Only for a while. The SoulTakers press from below. Idris twists what should be simple seepage into something jagged and mean. We buy time. We do not yet win.”
We cross narrow bridges that span glowing ravines, the walls lined with roots pulsing faintly like capillaries.
Sometimes the light intensifies when we walk past, as if the land is blinking awake to look at us.
At one point, a group of younger farmers—teenagers, really—rush up with handfuls of mixed seeds cupped in their palms.
“Lord Dagan! Bless ours too!” one pants, sweating and grinning. “We’re planting the far terrace this season—first time on our own.”
The boldest of the girls looks at me.
“Milady,” she says shyly. “Will you touch them as well? They say you walked the fault in Stonebend and the earth sat quiet like a tamed dog.”
“I–” I blink. “Uh. Sure. I make no promises, but… yeah. Give ’em here.”
They giggle and huddle close as Dagan and I both place our hands over theirs.
He mutters something under his breath that sounds an awful lot like, “Tamed dog, indeed,” but his power rises and the ground thrums again, and for just a second, I swear I feel the seeds.
Tiny, dormant possibilities.
Waiting.
I let my thumb brush one, thinking please grow, please hold, please don’t fail them, and a warmth flares in my palm that’s not entirely his.
“All right,” I say, voice a little rough. “Go plant before your Lord changes his mind and demands a blood sacrifice.”
They squeal and scatter, and Dagan side-eyes me. “Blood sacrifice?”
“Relax, it’s a joke,” I say. “Mostly.”
He huffs out something that might be a laugh.
By the time we circle back toward the main road, my legs ache, my boots are dusty, and my brain is buzzing with everything I’ve seen and felt.
The Marches aren’t just land.
They’re a living system.
A whole body depending on this one very stubborn, very tired man to keep its bones from shattering.
And everywhere we go, people look at him like a mix of king, storm, and older brother.
Everywhere we go, people look at me like a question that might finally have an answer.
What am I doing here?
Walking beside the Lord of Earth.
Counting cracks.
Blessing seeds.
Trying very hard not to fall irrevocably in love with the way his magic unfurls every time someone presses a little pouch of hope into his hands and asks him, with more faith than any church I’ve ever seen, to help it grow.
Yeah.
Too late.
But the more we walk and repair, the more I see something is not right beneath the surface.
The hurt in Nightfall runs deep. Like its fissures.
“It’s like playing whack-a-mole,” I mutter under my breath after the fifth site. “Only if the mole wins, everyone falls into a hell pit.”
“You use strange metaphors,” he says. “But the sentiment is not wrong.”
We crest another rise, and I freeze.
Below us, the hillside drops into a broad, bowl-shaped hollow. A cluster of low stone buildings sits at its center—a waystation for the people here, from the looks of it. A few carts are parked out front. People move between them, small as ants at this distance.
Cracks spider-web the slope above the settlement.
Fresh ones.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up.
“Dagan.” My voice comes out thin. “Those fractures—were they there before?”
He steps up beside me, his hand automatically going to the small of my back like he can’t not touch me.
His eyes narrow. “No.”