Chapter 32
The third-ring barricade collapses at roughly the same time that Kevin decides to sting a Root construct in the face.
I want to be clear about the order of events here, because Kevin will later claim he did this on purpose, and I need the record to reflect that he absolutely did not.
One second, the barricade is holding. Defenders braced, ward lines glowing, Captain Rhyven’s voice cutting through the noise with orders that sound rehearsed a hundred times.
The next second, a Root construct the size of a horse slams through the reinforced section, and Kevin, who was perched safely on my shoulder doing nothing, launches himself directly at its head.
His stinger punches through something that looks like bark, but sounds like bone. The construct shudders, staggers sideways, then takes out six feet of remaining barricade with it.
“Kevin!”
He buzzes once. Proud. Completely unaware that he has just created a gap in the defensive line large enough for three more constructs to pour through.
My best friend, everyone. Strategic genius.
Future military consultant. I’m going to have words with him later, assuming we survive, which at the moment feels optimistic.
I grab him out of the air, tuck him against my chest, and unleash a sonic pulse that catches the first construct mid-charge. It flies backward into the second one. The third one gets through.
Sarnyx handles it.
She appears from my left, cutting the thing’s front legs out from under it before I can blink. It crashes face-first into the root-path. She puts a blade through its root-node before it stops sliding. She’s terrifying. I love her. I would never tell her that because she’d hit me, but I love her.
“Plug the gap,” she says.
“Plugging.”
I send two more sonic pulses into the breach while a team of the Verdance defenders drags reinforcement panels into position.
The panels are living wood, and they fuse with the barricade’s edges when pressed into place, sealing shut with a sound like knuckles cracking. The gap closes. The line holds.
For now. Which is the unofficial motto of this entire battle. For now. Someone should embroider it on a banner.
Nobody has told us what’s happening inside the Cathedral, which is fine. I love not knowing things. It’s my favorite.
I watched them go.
Sarnyx carved the path, cutting through constructs and the Verdance defenders alike. The constructs fell. The defenders moved, because the alternative was being in her way, and nobody with functioning survival instincts wants to be in Sarnyx’s way.
Vashael’s toxins barely neutralized the pollen bursts spilling from the Cathedral’s petal-mouths. Sarnyx severed a tendril midair, the cut so clean both halves dropped separately.
Then Elle, Thalia, and Kaelren ran through a four-second gap between the Cathedral’s root-legs.
I stood on the wall and watched. I did not scream, which I think shows tremendous personal growth.
Nimor was already in there, scouting through shadow, doing that thing where he phases through solid matter and comes back looking like someone drained half the color out of him. Peeble went with them too, because Peeble has never once in their existence stayed where it was safe.
That was maybe thirty minutes ago. Maybe forty. Time stopped making sense around hour three of this siege. I’ve been operating on pure adrenaline and spite ever since.
Since then, nothing. No word. No signal. No convenient burst of light from inside the Cathedral to suggest everything is fine and we can all go home.
Just the battle getting worse. The Cathedral pressing harder, as if it’s trying to crush the city flat while something unfolds in its belly that it very much doesn’t like.
So I do what I do best. I look around. I take stock. I make inappropriate observations during a crisis.
Sarnyx comes back from the corridor approach covered in construct residue and takes command of the eastern section within minutes.
She has four Verdance soldiers under her direct command now, and they move when she tells them to move.
She earned that in about six hours of fighting alongside them.
Rhyven saw it happen and adjusted his formation to put her at the weakest point of the perimeter.
Smart man. Scary woman. Excellent combination.
She catches me looking and gives me a nod. It means still alive, keep fighting. Sarnyx doesn’t waste nods. She doesn’t waste anything. I once watched her reuse a bandage three times in one battle, and then kill someone with the pin that held it together.
Vashael stands behind the shield line, and I have to say, watching her work is one of the more attractive things I’ve seen during an apocalypse.
She mixes toxin compounds in vials grown from the Verdance’s own wood, her hands moving with the rapid precision of a chemist who could poison you and make it sound like a compliment.
Her mist slowed the constructs during the early waves, turning their vine-fiber bodies stiff and brittle. But the Cathedral is learning her compounds now, adapting its constructs’ biology in real time, which is both horrifying and, if I’m honest, a little impressive.
She’s switched to concentrated vials, throwing them in clean arcs that shatter against the Cathedral’s root-legs. Where the liquid strikes, vine armor blisters and blackens.
It won’t last. Nothing lasts. But it buys minutes, and minutes are the currency we’re trading in.
Eltrien stands at the base of the Heartwood, and he hasn’t moved from that position since the battle started. Which means he’s either channeling critical intelligence to Rhyven’s commanders through the Rootline, or he’s fallen asleep standing up.
Given that his marks are blazing bright enough for me to see him from three rings out, I’m going with the first option.
He’s tracking the Cathedral’s movements through the root system, feeding positioning data to Rhyven’s defense grid. Every time a squad redirects to intercept a breach before it happens, that’s Eltrien.
He’s the reason we’re not fighting blind, and he looks like he’s about to fall over.
Nimor is inside the Cathedral with the others.
He went in first, scouting through shadow, finding passages the Cathedral hadn’t sealed yet.
I don’t know if he’s still solid in there.
Every time I saw him phase back during the earlier waves, he looked a little less whole.
The Cathedral’s interior does something to him.
He keeps going anyway, because Nimor has never met a suicidal decision he didn’t embrace with both arms. Both translucent, flickering arms.
I find Raskel on the inner ring, and I have to stop for a second.
The gnome. The tiny, grumpy, stick-wielding gnome who banned me from Dr Pepper, whacked my shins for vibrating, and once called me “a hazard to the structural integrity of this house.”
That same gnome now stands on top of a supply crate, directing the entire logistics operation for the defense of a magical city under siege.
The Verdance citizens carrying ammunition, medical kits, and water stream past him in organized lines. Raskel routes them with sharp gestures of his stick, redirecting runners before they can collide or double back.
It looks chaotic. It is not chaotic.
Every runner gets where they need to be. The flow never tangles, never stalls. It’s the most efficient supply operation I have ever witnessed, and it’s being run by someone who comes up to my knee.
“You, with the water. Third section, eastern side. You, medical kit to the Heartwood base, the tall one with the glowing marks needs fluids before he passes out. You, ammunition to the breach point, and if you trip again, I will personally nail your boots to your feet.”
He sees me staring.
“What are you looking at, insect? Get back to the wall.”
“Raskel, you’re incredible.”
“I am aware. Get back to the wall.”
“Seriously, where did you learn to do this?”
“I am four hundred years old and I have survived eleven wars, six famines, and your personality. Supply coordination is not the most challenging thing on that list.” He whacks his stick against the crate. “Wall. Now.”
I notice, as I turn away, that he’s sending water and medical supplies to Eltrien without being asked.
Leo and Sarah are inside the civilian shelters beneath the Heartwood.
Thalia assigned them there before the battle started. Leo didn’t love it. I saw the protest forming on his face, the fighter’s instinct that wanted him on the wall, swinging at things, being useful in the way big men with good hearts often define usefulness.
Sarah rested a hand on his arm. “There are children in those shelters, Leo.”
That settled it. Leo can't say no to protecting children. It’s one of the many reasons I like him.
I can’t see them from here. The shelter entrances sealed when the first wave hit.
But a Verdance runner told me during a resupply that Leo is standing at the main entrance with a blade borrowed from a guard, while Sarah organizes the families inside, keeping the children calm and distributing food and water.
The runner said Sarah has the kids playing a game that involves counting the Heartwood’s pulse, turning the deep vibrations of the battle above into something rhythmic. Something safe.
They have no magic. No marks. No training. They crossed dimensions for Elle, and they did it without hesitation. I think about that sometimes. What it means to show up for someone when you have nothing to bring except yourself.
Mora is still on the walkway beside me.
A medical pack is strapped across one shoulder, and she hasn’t stopped moving since the first wave. Wrapping bandages. Applying pressure. Dragging wounded defenders to cover.
She looks up and catches my eye. There’s blood on her hands, someone else’s blood streaked across her cheek. Her braid has come half undone.
She is, without question, the most beautiful person I have ever seen in any realm, any dimension, any iteration of reality that has ever existed.
“Still here,” she says.
“Still here.”
Two words. That’s all we get. Then another construct hits the wall and I’m turning, sonic pulse, dodge, Kevin screaming past my ear to sting something.
I catch myself staring at the Cathedral during a lull.
Peeble is in there with Elle, Kaelren, Thalia, and Nimor. Doing whatever it is you do inside a walking cathedral made of dead realities, vine armor, and the consciousness of a man who turned himself into a building because he was sad.
Which, by the way, is the most Kaelren thing I’ve ever heard. The man can’t just be depressed like a normal person. He has to become architecture.
I think about what Peeble would say if they were on my shoulder right now.
Something about constructs having no manners.
Something about refusing to die without dignity.
Something sharp and theatrical that would make me laugh at exactly the wrong moment and remind me that we’ve survived worse than this.
Have we survived worse than this? I’m actually not sure. This might be the worst one.
Kevin buzzes from my shoulder. Missing his beetle.
“They’ll be fine, buddy,” I say.
Kevin doesn’t believe me. Neither do I. But we’re saying it, because that’s what you do when the people you love are somewhere you can’t follow and the only thing left is to hold a wall and wait.
Mora finds my hand between waves. Squeezes once. Lets go.
That’s enough. That’s everything.
The ground shakes violently.
The Cathedral goes rigid.
Every vine. Every tendril. Every petal-mouth, frozen mid-gape. The root-legs lock in place.
The constructs freeze a second later. Across the entire battlefield, every single one of them stops. Mid-charge, mid-climb, mid-swing. They stand like statues, locked in whatever position they held when the signal cut.
Silence.
After hours of grinding, screaming, cracking wood and breaking bones, the silence is so sudden it hurts.
Sarnyx is beside me.
“Something happened,” she says.
We stare at the Cathedral. The sickly green pulse in its walls is gone, replaced by a flat, steady glow. Unmoving. Locked.
Then, from somewhere deep inside the structure, a light.
A bright, white light bleeds through the vine armor in thin lines, pushing through cracks in the bark plating, spreading outward.
Mora grabs my arm.
Kevin buzzes once, high and clear, and I swear it sounds like hope.
I don’t know what’s happening inside that thing. I don’t know if they’re winning or dying or both, which, with this group, is usually the same thing. But something has changed.
Sarnyx looks at me. I look at her.
“Hold the wall,” she says.
We hold the wall.