Fladrif's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The water reached the last dead ground before dawn. Fladrif knelt at the edge of the young forest and felt it soak the stone below. The old roots pushed after it, ready to wake the final soil of Ironholt. But something stood in the way. Fladrif pressed his palms flat and listened. A weight moved out on the wastes, heavy and slow, drawn toward the wet ground. It was not a tree. It was not a friend. "There," he said. "On the open stone. It follows the water in." Bregalad rose beside him. His red eyes fixed on the dark past the treeline. "I feel it. Big. Old." He said no more. Elmwood knelt and touched the soil. He had left a sick tree once and never gone back. He would not leave this ground now. "If it comes here, it drinks what we woke," he said. "We can't tend the flow while it walks." Raewyn came out of the trees without sound. She had guarded her own stretch of forest for two human lifetimes. A young elf had died on her watch once, and she had done nothing then. She would not stand still now. "I tracked it in," she said flatly. "A stone-beast. Half-buried. It smells the water." "Can we kill it?" Fladrif asked. "No." She looked at him. "It's older than killing." Harek walked up last, ash-black and short-worded. He knew rock and heat better than any of them. He crouched and struck the ground with his knuckle. "Hollow under here," he said. "Old crack. Deep." Fladrif understood. They could not fight the thing. They could feed it and turn it aside, the way he had turned the flood. He looked to the giant ironwood at the forest's heart, its face carved deep in the bark, its roots gripping the stone like fingers. That tree held the oldest water of them all. "We don't stop it," Fladrif said. "We give it what it wants, away from the young trees." He pointed to Harek's hollow crack. "Send the flow down there. Let it drink at the seam, not the roots." They joined hands, root to root. Fladrif found the great pulse below and leaned. Bregalad and Elmwood leaned with him. The old ironwood answered, pushing its ancient water sideways, down into the deep crack Harek had found. Raewyn stood watch at the treeline, still as bark. The stone-beast turned. It followed the wet seam away from the young forest, out toward the open wastes, and sank down to drink. The ground stopped shaking. Fladrif drew his hands back, arms trembling. But the water it drank ran on. Fladrif pressed his ear to the stone and heard it wake the last dead ground far ahead—and the beast was there now, sitting in the very soil he meant to raise.