Obloe's Arc

Chapter 22 of 8

The god lay still, but the barrier that held him was dying. Obloe saw it now. Gaia crouched beside the pinned husk, her green wings sagging. The moss and vine she had grown over Yaahahahahaawayyy came from her own strength, and that strength was draining fast. Her scales had gone dull. Where her net thinned, gray rot leaked through, creeping toward the seed bed. If the barrier fell, the fresh decay would flood the anchor he had crossed a void to save. "I can't hold it," Gaia said. She did not soften it. "The vines feed on me. When I empty, they rot. The rot behind him comes next." Obloe's fire could not help here. Flame would burn the net faster than the rot. He looked at the leaking seam and found no answer in his own body. Woga Dimples stepped past him, boots quiet on the gray earth. The jackalope carried a glass tub between his white gloves. Inside, a ruby liquid glowed, its surface rippling on its own. "From the fae retreat," Woga said flatly. "The still pools there strip the sickness from anything they touch. I took what I could carry. Pour it on the net, not the god." Obloe stared at the small tub. "That will not cover him." "It does not need to cover him." Woga set the tub down at the seam's edge. "It cleans what it touches. Feed it into her vines. The vines will carry it." Gaia understood first. She pressed one claw into the ruby liquid. The glow climbed up her foreleg and into the moss. Where it spread, the gray rot curled back and went pale, then green. The leaking seam sealed. But Gaia gasped. The cleansing drew on her too, and her last strength was going with it. "She'll empty," Woga said. "The net needs an anchor that isn't her." Obloe pressed his own claw to the seed bed. The refilled heartwood seed sat in the soil, half-gray still. He did not breathe fire. He breathed slow, pushing his steadied warmth down into the roots the way he had anchored himself at the void door. The seed's buried threads caught the ruby cleansing and drank it. Gray drained out of the bed. Green rose in its place. The seed became the anchor Gaia's net needed. Gaia pulled back from the vines. They held without her now, rooted to the clean seed. She sank onto the grass, hollow but breathing. "It holds," she said. "On its own." The barrier stood. The god lay buried and quiet beneath living green. The rot at the bed's edge had pulled back, and for the first time the seed sat in clean soil. But the seed was still only half-full. Its magic had been poured in once and nearly lost. It anchored the net now. It did not yet anchor the grove. Obloe had cleaned its bed. He had not yet woken its power.