Chapter 28
Let me tell you about my morning.
I was in Grandma Jo's kitchen, attempting to make what Leo called a "grilled cheese" using Earth's primitive cooking technology and a flat metal device that heats up when you plug it into the wall.
Mora was supervising, which meant she was standing three feet away with a wet towel ready because the last time I used the hot metal device, I set the curtains on fire.
Kevin was on the porch. Raskel was in the garden doing something to the elm tree that involved a lot of muttering and occasional whacking with his stick.
Leo and Sarah were in the living room arguing about whether the news anchor on the television box was wearing a wig or not.
A normal morning.
Quiet. The kind of day where the biggest threat was burning bread.
Then the elm tree exploded with light.
Not fire. Not the gentle glow of the portal we'd used before.
This was a detonation of white radiance that blew the kitchen window inward, knocked me off the stool, sent the grilled cheese flying into Kevin's face through the open porch door, and turned every plant in a fifty-foot radius into a searchlight.
Mora hit the floor beside me. "What was that?"
"Either the Rootline just activated, or the tree is having a religious experience. Either way, I think we should investigate."
We ran outside. Leo and Sarah were already in the garden, Leo standing between Sarah and the elm tree with his arms spread wide like a man who thinks he can shield his wife from a tree that's pouring white light from every crack in its bark.
Raskel was standing six inches from the trunk, his tiny hands pressed flat against the wood, his eyes closed, his face scrunched in concentration.
"Raskel!" I shouted over the roaring hum of the Rootline. "What's happening?"
"Someone is pulling from the other end!" he shouted back. "With enough power to light up every Root connection on the planet! It's a summons, you cotton-headed nincompoop! Someone wants us there!"
"There? There where?"
The light answered for him. It surged from the tree, wrapped around us, and yanked.
I have been through portals before. But this was different.
The transit took approximately two seconds and felt like being squeezed through a tube of warm light.
I landed on stone, on my feet. Which was a first. Kevin crashed into me half a second later because Kevin has never stuck a landing in his life, and today was not the day he would start.
"Okay, what the hell just happened? Where are we? And why does it smell like a spa in here?"
The chamber was glowing. And then I saw her. Elle.
She was standing across the chamber crying, and she was the most beautiful thing I'd seen since Mora smiled at me for the first time.
"ELLE!" I launched across the chamber, all six feet of insectoid enthusiasm, and crashed into her with a hug that lifted her off the ground.
"You're alive! You're whole! You're wearing something gorgeous!
Did you do something different with your hair?
It looks amazing. Everything looks amazing.
I'm going to cry. I'm crying. Kevin, are you seeing this? "
Kevin buzzed confirmation. He was also crying, in the particular way that bees cry, which involves producing a small amount of luminescent fluid from their antennae glands and looking profoundly moved.
But he was crying for a completely different reason.
Peeble was there and had him in their arms, peppering them in what I could only assume was beetle kisses.
Elle hugged me back, laughing and sobbing at the same time. "Bryx. Oh my gods, Bryx."
"Don't 'oh my gods' me, you vanished into the cosmic ether and left us making grilled cheese in Arkansas for months!
Do you know what that's been like? Leo doesn't have cable.
I had to watch something called 'local news.
' It's horrifying, Elle. The world is terrible and the weather forecasts are lies. "
"I missed you so much."
"Of course you did. I'm delightful." I set her down and held her at arm's length, compound eyes cataloging every detail. She looked good. Really good. "You look happy," I said, and the observation surprised me.
"I am happy." She wiped her eyes. "I found him, Bryx. I found everyone. There's so much to tell you."
Mora reached Elle next, and the hug between them was longer.
Leo grabbed Elle the moment Mora released her, lifting her off the ground in a hug, spinning her around before setting her back on the ground. "Don't you ever do that again," he said into her hair. "I'm serious, Elle. Never again."
"I'll try."
"Not try. Promise."
"I promise."
Sarah hugged her next, gentle and steady, and said something too quiet for me to hear that made Elle's eyes fill again.
Raskel did not hug anyone. He stood at the edge of the group, tapped his stick on the root floor, and said, "Good. You're alive. Now tell me about this city before I die of curiosity, which at my age could happen literally at any moment."
The briefing happens fast because apparently we are short on time.
The young woman who pulled us through the Rootline is named Thalia. She governs the city. She is also, apparently, Elle and Kaelren's daughter from another timeline, which is the kind of information that should come with a warning label and a stiff drink.
I handle this news the way I handle all news that breaks my brain: with grace, charm, and a joke that nobody appreciates.
"So you're telling me that the brooding prince and the sass queen made a baby, and that baby grew up to be a military commander who runs a living city and can pull people across dimensions with her bare hands?
That's the most on-brand thing I've ever heard.
Kevin, are you getting this? Our leadership reproduced, and the result is terrifying. "
Kevin buzzes agreement. He's already explored half the chamber and has taken a particular liking to the bioluminescent moss, which he's been licking.
"Kevin, stop licking the walls."
Thalia gives me the same flat look her father gives me. The resemblance is uncanny and deeply unsettling. "The Cathedral manifests within hours. I need everyone in position."
Leo and Sarah are assigned to the civilian shelters in the inner ring.
Leo doesn't love it. I can see the protest forming on his face, the fighter instinct that says he should be outside, helping, doing something.
Sarah puts her hand on his arm and says, "There are children in those shelters, Leo.
" That settles it. Leo has never said no to protecting children.
I watch them follow a Verdance guide into the inner corridors, Leo turning back once to find Elle. She gives him a nod that means I'll see you on the other side. He nods back.
Thalia assigns me to the outer perimeter with the ward line defense teams, and the walk from the Heartwood to the second ring gives me my first real glimpse of the Verdance.
I have seen a lot of places in my life. The Thornwood Throne, with its living blossom dwellings and vine walkways.
Vyn Hollow, with its canopy bridges and tree-settlements.
The rebel base, cobbled together from desperation and audacity.
Even Grandma Jo's garden, which for all its Earth-realm modesty had a magic that made my antennae hum.
The Verdance is none of these things.
The Verdance is a living organism. Every bridge is a nerve.
The root-paths beneath my feet pulse with golden light in patterns that feel less like infrastructure and more like circulation.
The air tastes green and charged and ancient, and the Heartwood at the center throws a presence that I can feel in my chitin, in the place behind my compound eyes where my sonic abilities live.
This city is the biggest, most complex living thing I have ever stood inside.
And it's about to get hit by something that wants to erase it.
The preparation is visible everywhere. Armed citizens in living-wood armor move to positions along the second ring's perimeter wall, their movements practiced and calm.
Shield generators hum at full charge along the ward lines, the amber glow of their output visible from a hundred yards.
Overhead, crews are reinforcing the canopy connections between towers, thickening the vine bridges so they'll survive shockwaves.
On the walls themselves, weapon emplacements have grown into position: ballistae, concentrated Bloom launchers, and several things I don't recognize but which glow with the particular intensity of devices designed to ruin someone's day.
Kevin buzzes beside me, taking it all in with the wide-eyed wonder of a bee who grew up in a garden and is now standing inside a city that could eat that garden for breakfast.
"I know, buddy," I say. "It's incredible."
Mora is beside me, one hand resting on the living-wood railing of the second-ring walkway, the other gripping the medical pack she's been issued by the shelter teams. She didn't go with Leo and Sarah.
She asked to stay with the defense perimeter, and when Thalia looked at her, really looked at her, something passed between them I couldn't read, but she seemed to understand.
"She looks like both of them," Mora says quietly, watching Thalia cross the second-ring plaza below us, issuing rapid orders to Rhyven's defense captains.
"It's in the way she moves. She has Kaelren's precision and Elle's warmth, and it's strange because those two things shouldn't work together in one person, but they do. "
"That's the thing about Elle and Kaelren," I say. "Nothing about them should work. And it all does."
The sky is nearly fully violet now. The indigo veins have spread until there's no blue left, just dark bands of color pulsing against a purple backdrop.
The sun is gone. The light that reaches us is filtered and strange, casting everything in a lavender haze that makes the golden root-paths glow brighter.
Then, at the horizon, something changes.
A line of violet light appears at the edge of the sky, low and sharp, like a crack in a window.
It widens. The air changes, going cold and metallic, the copper-coin taste intensifying until I can feel it in my antennae.
The golden veins in the root-paths flare bright in response, and from the Heartwood at the city's center, a deep, resonant pulse rolls outward through every structure.
The Bloomfall Moon rises.
It comes over the horizon not like a moon but like an eye opening. Violet, enormous, its surface swirling with patterns that look disturbingly organic. The light it casts turns the world the color of a bruise, and where that light touches the Verdance's outer ring, the living wood shudders.
Then, beneath the moon, the boundary fractures.
I see it happen. The air between the outer ring and the treeline tears open in a long, jagged line, and through the tear, something moves with the slow, deliberate inevitability of a thing that knows it has all the time in the world.
The Cathedral.
It emerges from the fracture like a building pulling itself out of the earth.
Vine and thorn and bone-white root, layered thick, rising higher and higher as more of it pushes through.
The structure is massive. Sixty feet tall, maybe more, and still growing as it exits the tear.
Its surface is covered in overlapping plates of living armor that shift and breathe, and along its sides, petal-mouths open and close in slow, wet rhythms, each one door-sized, each one lined with translucent teeth.
It moves on root-legs that tear free from the ground with slow, sucking pulls, each step leaving a crater of dead earth where living soil used to be. Wherever it walks, the world behind it is gray and flat and finished.
I feel something I don't often feel.
Fear.
Real fear. The kind that sits in your gut and tells your legs to run and your brain to shut down and your sense of humor to please, for the love of all things holy, take the night off.
Mora's hand finds mine on the railing. She grips hard.
Kevin presses close to my side, his fuzzy body vibrating at a frequency that means he's terrified and trying very hard to be brave.
The Cathedral takes its first step toward the Verdance. The ground shakes. The ward lines flare. The shield generators scream to life, and the outer ring's first layer of defense blazes into existence, a wall of concentrated Bloom magic that burns amber against the purple dusk overhead.
Behind me, somewhere in the city, a horn sounds. Low, deep, resonant. The Verdance's war call. The signal that the siege has begun.
Rhyven's voice carries across the perimeter. "All positions. Hold the line. First wave incoming."
I look at Mora. She looks at me. Her brown eyes are steady and certain, the way they've been since the day I met her in the ruins of a battle and decided she was the bravest person I'd ever seen.
"Stay close to me," I say.
"Always," she says.
I turn to face the Cathedral. I crack my neck. I flex my mandibles. Kevin rises to full height beside me, wings thrumming, stinger extended, his small, furry body a declaration of war against something fifty times his size.
"Alright, you oversized salad," I say. "Let's see what you've got."
The Cathedral takes another step. The outer shield flares.
The Battle of the Verdance begins.