Fladrif's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

Fladrif crossed the stone wastes of Ironholt to wake the last dormant forest, and his own body was dying to do it. He was an ent, a tree that walked. He carried a whole forest inside him, root and ring, and he meant to plant its life in the dead ground ahead. But the dormant forest would not stir. To wake it, Fladrif had to give it a heartbeat. He no longer had one strong enough to share. He knelt in the gray dust and pressed his hand flat to the buried roots below. He knew where every tree stood without looking. He counted them now, the way a hand once pressed his own flat to a stump and told him to count. The old grove inside him slept in stone. He needed to feel it beat, to copy that rhythm and press it into the dead soil. He listened. He heard nothing. Tree by tree, his forest was going silent, and he could not wake what he could not first feel. "You've been kneeling since dark." The voice came from behind him, blunt and low. Fladrif turned. A dwarf stood there, short and heavy, his braided beard strung with teeth and claws. Iron traps hung at his belt. Kjell, the monster hunter, had tracked something across three dead settlements. He had found an ent instead. His cold eyes moved over Fladrif's cracking bark. "You're dying." "I am going quiet," Fladrif said. "I cannot hear my own grove. Without its beat, the dormant forest stays asleep." Kjell crouched and pressed his palm to the ground beside Fladrif's hand. He was silent a long moment. "I read stone and root for a living. I feel something under here. Faint. Far down." He tapped once. "You're listening at the surface. It's deeper." Fladrif drove his fingers into the cold dust. He reached past the surface, past the dead crust, down to where the old grove truly slept. There. One slow pulse. Then another. His grove still beat, buried under his own silence. He had been listening in the wrong place his whole crossing. He held the rhythm in his hand. Slow. Steady. Alive. He lifted his palm and pressed it to the dormant forest's roots. He gave it the beat, once, twice, matched and true. The ground shifted. Fladrif felt soil settle and roots turn before anything broke the surface. A single green shoot pushed through the stone dust. Then another. The dormant forest was waking. But giving the beat cost him. He felt it leave. Deep inside, three of his own trees fell still and did not rise again. The waking forest breathed now with rhythm he had carved from his own dying grove. Kjell watched the shoots climb. "It's alive," he said. "You spent yourself to do it." "I did," Fladrif said. The forest woke. He was emptier for it, and the ground was still rising.