Chapter 8
The next iteration smells off before we even finish falling through the gate.
Sweet. Cloying. The kind that makes my throat close and my eyes water. I hit the ground on my feet this time, an improvement over the last crossing, and immediately pull my collar over my nose.
Peeble lands on my shoulder, antennae twitching in every direction. "Oh. Oh, that’s revolting."
"Agreed."
"It smells like someone dumped perfume into a compost heap."
I check the locket. The pulse is there, but faint. She’s not here. Some part of me already knows that. But I’ve been wrong before, and I can’t afford to leave without being certain.
We’re standing at the edge of a river delta, the Cradle of Silt, if the geography matches what I remember from Wynmire’s southeastern territories. Wide, flat, crisscrossed by slow-moving channels of brown water. Mud banks rise like the spines of buried creatures. Everything is bright green.
There’s something different about the green here.
The grass along the waterline grows higher than it should, moving in a steady rhythm even though the air is still.
Vines hang thick from the trees, layered and dense, and the trunks twist into shapes that don’t look accidental, arching overhead, narrowing into tight passages, bending inward as if shaped over time by pressure rather than chance.
From a distance, it’s striking in its beauty. The hills are covered in wildflowers, and the canopy above is full and unbroken, rich enough to look almost painted. It would be easy to call it paradise at first glance.
Up close, the flowers have teeth.
Not figurative teeth. Real ones, small, translucent, needle-sharp, lining the inner edges of petals that open and close in slow, steady pulses.
I watch one clamp down on a dragonfly mid-flight.
There’s a soft, wet crunch. The wings twitch once between the petals before disappearing.
The flower stills afterward, its surface smooth again, as if nothing had happened.
"It appears that in this iteration the Bloom over-corrected," I say, crouching to examine a cluster of moss that’s slowly creeping toward my boot. I pull my foot back. The moss changes direction to follow. "The rot isn’t spreading here. The Bloom weaponized the plant life instead."
"Ahh, yes," Peeble says. “Iteration Fourteen, the carnivorous garden. Keep your wits about you, Kaelren. I’m too gorgeous to be some plant’s afternoon snack."
We move carefully through the delta, sticking to the mud banks where the vegetation is thinnest. It doesn’t take long to find the first body.
A fae male lies half-submerged in a shallow channel.
Vines have grown through him, slipping in at the joints and pushing out through his chest. His eyes are open.
His mouth is caught mid-scream. Where the vines pierce his skin, small white flowers have bloomed, their petals shifting faintly in the still air.
Peeble lands on a nearby rock and tilts their head, studying the body with the calm detachment of someone long accustomed to death. “Well,” they say after a moment, “that’s a look. Bold choice. Very ‘nature reclaims its own.’ I’ll give it a six out of ten for presentation.”
"Peeble."
"What? He’s clearly past the point of caring about my review."
I kneel beside the body, careful not to touch the vines. The fae’s armor is Crown standard, or what passes for it in this iteration. Dented, vine-scarred, the insignia barely visible under layers of plant growth. He’s been here a while. Weeks, maybe. The delta has been eating its dead slowly.
We find more as we push deeper. A patrol group of six lay in a defensive circle that didn’t save them.
Roots erupted beneath their feet and pulled them down.
They’re partially absorbed into the mud now, their armor rusting, their bodies becoming part of the landscape.
Mushrooms sprout from their shoulders. Ferns uncurl from their open mouths.
Peeble perches on the helmet of one of the dead guards. They straighten their antennae, square their little shoulders, and assume a stiff, military posture.
"Attention! Private Peeble reporting for duty!" They salute with one leg. "Ready to serve in the Corpse Corps, sir! The morale is low, mostly because everyone is dead, but we’re making the best of it!"
"Get off him."
"He doesn’t mind. Do you mind?" Peeble taps the helmet. "See? No objections. Very agreeable, the dead. Best conversationalists I’ve met in iterations."
I grab Peeble off the corpse and set them on my shoulder. "We’re in a killing field. Could you act like it?"
"I am acting like it. This is how I process trauma. You brood. I mock the deceased. We all cope differently."
There’s a sound to my left, a wet snap, and I spin with corruption already building in my palm.
A plant the size of a small wagon sits twenty feet away, its thick stalk rooted in the mud, its bulbous head split open to reveal rows of green, fibrous spines.
It’s been watching us. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.
The head rotates, tracking our movement like a turret.
Then it fires.
A seed the size of my fist launches from its center with enough force to crack bone.
I throw myself sideways, and the seed punches into the mud bank behind me, embedding three inches deep.
On impact, it splits open and immediately starts growing, a tangle of thorny vines erupting outward in a two-foot radius.
"It’s a pea-shooter!" Peeble shrieks, launching off my shoulder. "A literal pea-shooter! The garden is shooting peas at us!"
Another one fires from the left. I dodge, roll, and come up running.
A third plant. This one, lower to the ground, shaped like a fat tuber with a sputtering fuse of bioluminescent moss on top, detonates as I pass it.
The explosion isn’t fire. It’s pollen. A thick yellow cloud that coats everything within a ten-foot radius.
Where it touches the dead guards, their bodies jerk and twitch as new roots force their way through dead muscle.
"Potato bomb!" Peeble announces with entirely too much excitement. "That was a potato bomb! This iteration has weaponized root vegetables!"
I grab Peeble out of the air and run.
We tear through the delta for half a mile, dodging plants that spit thorns, vines that lash like whips, and flowers that emit a high-pitched scream when disturbed, which apparently attracts every predatory plant in a hundred-yard radius.
By the time we reach a rocky outcropping where the vegetation thins, I’m bleeding from three different thorn grazes and Peeble has pollen caked across half their shell.
"This," I say between breaths, "is the worst iteration yet."
I lean against the rock and check the locket again. The pulse is still faint, still not quite right. Not Elle. I close it and tuck it back under my armor.
That’s when I see him.
Across a ravine choked with creeping vines, maybe two hundred yards out, there’s a group of fighters moving through the undergrowth.
Eight, maybe ten, armed with machetes and axes that glow faintly with Root magic.
They’re cutting a path through the carnivorous growth, hacking at vines and stomping on the twitching remains of predatory flowers.
And at the front of the group is me.
Not me. Iteration Fourteen’s Kaelren. But the resemblance is close enough to make my stomach drop.
He’s thinner—gaunt in a way that doesn’t look intentional. His armor reduced to leather and bone, no metal anywhere, like he learned that lesson the hard way. His hair is longer, pulled back with a strip of cloth. He moves with the restless, brittle energy of someone who hasn’t slept in weeks.
But the worst part is his skin.
Root-veins are visible everywhere, not just the corruption marks I carry, but dark green lines threading beneath his skin, pulsing to a rhythm that isn’t his own.
They climb his neck, trace his jaw, disappear into his hairline.
His hands look more vine than flesh, fingers slightly too long, slightly wrong.
He’s merging with it. The Root is consuming him from the inside. And he’s letting it.
"Oh no," Peeble says quietly. "That one went feral."
I can’t stop staring. He’s me. He’s what I become without her. Without the anchor. With nothing to hold the line between the male and the magic.
“He thinks she’s inside the Bloom somehow,” I say.
I don’t know how I know. The bond between us hums. Two versions of the same thread, almost in sync. I feel his obsession like heat from a fire. It’s all that’s left of him.
"Well, he’s wrong," Peeble says. "She’s not here. The locket would be screaming if she were."
"I know."
"So we should leave."
"I know."
But I don’t move. I watch him lead his ragged group through the delta, cutting, burning, pushing toward something I can feel pulling at me. Something massive. Something that’s been growing for a very long time.
"We can’t interact with him," I say, more to myself than Peeble. "If I interfere, it destabilizes the iteration faster, creating a Rootline paradox."
"Yes, I’m aware of the rules. I was the one who told you the rules."
"Then we observe. And we stay out of sight."
We follow at a distance, keeping to the rocky high ground where the plants thin out. Iteration Fourteen Kaelren never looks back. His fighters trail him with the hollow-eyed loyalty of people who’ve lost everything except the one leading them.
I recognize one of them. Thinner. Scarred. Missing an ear, but it’s this iteration’s Sarnyx. She watches his back with the same quiet ferocity mine does.
Some things don’t change across timelines.
We retreat to higher ground as the sun drops. The delta becomes more dangerous at dusk. The plants are more active in low light, and I’ve already counted several species that hunt by vibration alone.
Peeble finds the pool first.