Halsin Silverbough's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

By the next morning, Halsin knew where to dig. He had spent the night in the Grove Elder's Lodge, tracing plans into the carved timbers with charcoal. Freya woke him before dawn. She stood in the doorway with dirt on her hands, and her face was wrong. "Come now," she said. "It's moving faster than I said it would." They ran to the cursed edge. The dead line had crept forward in the dark. Yesterday it stopped a good stone's throw from the living trees. Now it touched the first roots of the Grove itself. The soil went gray as Halsin watched. A young oak at the border sagged. Its leaves browned from the tips inward. "It feeds," Freya said. She knelt and pressed her palm flat. "The more it drinks, the more it wants. It's reaching for the healthy ground." Halsin felt the cold pull under his feet, stronger than before. If it reached the Grove, it would drink the whole forest dry. He had no time to find the source now. He had to stop the spread today. He made his choice. "We wall it off," he said. "A living barrier. Roots too deep and hungry for the curse to pass." He thought of the test garden he had hauled here, the barrel of good soil with its snapping plants and towering oaks. Those roots had fought the rot longest before dying. "Bring me the strong ones. The carnivorous plants. The old oak stock." Freya ran for the wagon. She came back with cuttings from the lush cluster, plants that snapped and hissed even now. Halsin dug a trench along the living edge, between the gray soil and the Grove. He set the hungry roots into it, one after another. Then he knelt and poured his magic down, not into the dead ground this time, but into the barrier itself. Green light ran along the trench. The plants took hold and drank deep. The carnivorous roots plunged fast, thick as his wrist. They met the cold pull from below and clenched against it. Halsin felt the two hungers lock. His barrier fed on the curse's edge instead of feeding it. The creeping stopped. The gray line held at the trench. The young oak behind it stood, half its leaves still green. Freya let out a slow breath. "You caught it," she said. "You held the edge." Halsin sat back in the dirt. His hands shook. He had saved the Grove for now, but he had learned something worse in the doing. He had felt how strong the pull had grown overnight. The barrier was a dam, not a cure. Below it, the source drank on, and every day it woke hungrier. "This buys us days," he said. "Maybe less. The thing underground is still growing." He looked at the trench of snapping roots. "We stopped it spreading. Now I have to go down and kill it."