Demetri's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Demetri knelt by a rotting oak and pressed his pale hand to the bark, praying the decay was not his own. He had guarded this forest for six hundred years. Half his face shone white as bone, the other hung dark and shriveled, and both halves warred inside him every hour. His task was simple and endless: hold the balance between life and death, so neither swallowed the trees. But this sickness spread faster than any he had seen. Gray rot crawled up the trunks. Leaves curled black and fell. And Demetri could not tell if his shriveled half had begun to leak its poison into the ground he swore to protect. He followed the rot to its edge, where the healthy wood met the dying. There he tested himself. He laid his white palm on a sick branch and willed life into it. The branch stayed gray. He laid his dark palm beside it. The rot spread under his fingers at once, hungry and eager. His stomach turned. The proof sat in his own hand. He walked to the inn at the forest's edge, a leaning house of timber and moss. He needed a mind clearer than his. Inside, the blue-haired innkeeper stood on a raised walkway that put his small frame at eye level with his guests. Grinwold set down a mug and studied Demetri's face without flinching, as men usually did. "You look like a man arguing with himself," Grinwold said. "Sit. Tell me the trouble." At the hearth sat a dwarf in plate armor, his red beard braided with stone beads. A great hammer leaned against his knee, its runes glowing faint. Tiroc Stouthammer rose the moment he saw Demetri's dark half. "That side of you carries the rot," the paladin said. His hand found the hammer. "I rode here chasing the sickness. It ends where you stand." "I did not spread it," Demetri said. "But I cannot swear my darkness had no part." Grinwold raised both hands between them. "Prove it, then. Both of you. Go together." They returned to the dying wood. Tiroc raised his glowing hammer over the sick soil. Demetri stopped him. "Light alone will burn what can still be saved." He knelt and pushed both hands into the earth, white and dark at once. The rot fought his dark half and fed on it. So he stopped resisting. He let his darkness pour down, drawing the sickness into himself, while his white half held him from breaking. Under the soil his fingers closed on a knot of black roots, not his own. Something buried had rotted here. He tore it loose and dragged it into the light. Tiroc's hammer fell and burned it to ash. The nearest trees held. The rot stopped spreading. Demetri stood, shaking. His dark half had not caused the sickness. But it had answered the buried thing too easily. Something had planted that root, and it knew his weakness.