Irina Jace's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

Irina folded the last portable map into her bag and walked back toward the forest. The guild had three days to issue their decision, but she wasn't waiting to find out what it would be. She'd already marked seven burn sites, and if there were more, she needed to document them before the feathers came down. She returned to the shed first, planning to sketch the final burn patterns near the waste containers. But when she knelt to examine the ground where the purple-stemmed plants grew thickest, she noticed the soil dropped away beneath one corner of the structure. The wood had rotted through in places, and underneath she could see stone—smooth blocks fitted together without mortar. She pulled her journal out and started drawing the edge where wood met stone, then stopped. The blocks continued under the shed, forming what looked like the corner of a foundation. She cleared more soil away with her hands and found carved marks along one stone, symbols she didn't recognize but that looked deliberate. The shed wasn't built on empty ground. It was built over something older, something the forest had been growing over for years before the guild arrived. She sketched the symbols carefully, then checked the other corners. Each one showed the same fitted stonework, the same patient construction. The guild had chosen this spot because it was already cleared, already flat. They'd never looked down to see what was holding up their floor. Irina drew the full pattern in her journal and marked the page with a folded corner. This wasn't about the burns anymore. Whatever structure lay beneath the shed, it had been here long before the guild's waste started spreading, and it deserved better than being buried under their carelessness. She walked the perimeter again and found more evidence—a wooden box half-buried in the undergrowth, its slats cracked and spreading apart where herbs had pushed through from beneath. The plants growing from it were older varieties, ones she'd only seen in Maren's descriptions of the forest decades ago. The guild hadn't just built over cleared ground. They'd built over a place someone else had carefully tended, and the forest had been trying to reclaim it ever since. She added the discovery to her portable map, marking it with a different symbol than the burn sites. The pattern she'd been documenting wasn't just about contamination spreading outward. It was about the guild ignoring everything that had come before them. She found the second map tucked inside the buried box, its leather binding cracked but intact, the pages inside still legible. Someone else had documented this place decades ago, marking locations with symbols that matched the carvings on the stones. The journal beside it contained notes about sacred groves and cultivation sites, places where the forest itself had been partner to the work instead of obstacle. Irina copied the symbols into her own journal, matching them to the foundation beneath the shed and two other locations marked on the old map. The guild hadn't just contaminated random forest. They'd built their facility directly over documented sacred ground, and now she had proof that someone had valued this place long before they'd ruined it. She couldn't stop them from pulling down her feathers or issuing their decision, but she could show that their carelessness had destroyed more than they'd ever bothered to measure. That evidence would matter to whoever had drawn the original map, if their work had survived this long in the forest. And it would matter to anyone who understood that some ground was worth more than convenience.