Demetri's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The rot was dead, but the wound remained. Demetri stood where the ash still marked the soil. For six hundred years his wards had ringed this forest. No stranger crossed them unseen. Yet someone had walked in, dug deep, and buried the black root against his very weakness. He could not remember a single breach in all those centuries. Until he found the gap, the enemy could return and plant again. Tiroc kicked at the burned earth beside him. The dwarf's hammer still glowed at his hip. "Wards failed. Find where." "They did not fail," Demetri said. "Something slipped through a seam I cannot see. I need older eyes than mine." He led the paladin under the great trees, where hanging leaves shut out the sky and moss swallowed their steps. Here the oldest wards were rooted. Demetri knelt among the tangled roots and pressed both palms to the ground, white and dark together. He called a name the forest had not heard spoken in an age. The air thickened. A shape rose from the moss, half-there, wrapped in ivy. A dryad, older than his wards, older than his watch. Her eyes were pale water. Vines drifted through her like smoke. "You wake me for a hole in your fence," she said. Her voice came from every tree at once. "Someone crossed unseen," Demetri said. "Show me how." She drifted close and laid a translucent hand against his dark cheek. He did not flinch. "The seam is you," she said. "Your dark half thins the wards where it touches them. A clever hand walked in through your own shadow. No breach of stone. A breach of you." Tiroc's grip tightened on the hammer. "Then the wall is rotten at the gate." Demetri closed his eyes. The truth landed like a stone. His vulnerability was not only in his hand. It bled into the very wards he trusted. "Can it be sealed?" "Only by balance," the dryad said. "Hold both halves even, and the seam closes. Let one rule, and it opens again." She began to fade. "You cannot patch this. You must become it." Demetri drew his white and dark halves toward center. It hurt, like holding two beasts on one chain. He poured that fragile balance into the roots. The wards flared. Along the tree line, a faint gold light ran and knit shut. The seam sealed. He opened his eyes. The dryad was gone. His hands shook, but the forest held. "It is closed," he said. "For now." "For now is not sealed," Tiroc said. "You slip, it opens." Demetri looked at his dark palm. He had not built the enemy's road. He had been the road. And the balance that closed the seam would not hold on its own. Somewhere the hand that walked through his shadow still lived, and it knew the way in was through him.