Obloe's Arc

Chapter 23 of 8

The barrier held, but Obloe could not move. His warmth was the only thing binding the half-full seed to Gaia's root net. The moment he pulled back, the anchor would come loose. The vines would die. The rot behind the buried god would flood the clean bed. He crouched over the seed and breathed slow heat into the soil. He could not leave. He could not rest. The seed still slept, and he was its only chain. "You cannot hold this forever," Woga Dimples said. The jackalope stood at the bed's edge, white gloves folded behind his back, suit smooth despite the gray dust. He studied the seed the way he studied everything, looking for the exact flaw. He had guided Obloe to the stolen seed in the first place, and he had kept returning when no one asked him to. "You are the anchor now. That is not a plan. That is a cage." "The seed is half-empty," Obloe said. His voice came out thin. "It cannot hold the net on its own. It needs to wake. I do not know how to wake it." "Then you do not wake it with fire." Woga turned his head. Across the clearing, a white woolly mammoth moved through the drying moss. Its tusks curled like brass horns. Soft notes trailed from each slow step. Obloe had heard that sound on the wind for a day and thought it was the rot playing tricks. "What is that?" Obloe asked. "A traveller. It walks the broken lands and plays over the dying. The seed is young. It was filled by fear and nearly lost. It does not trust its own roots." Woga's voice stayed flat. "It needs a reason to settle, not a hand to force it." The mammoth stopped beside the bed. It lowered its great head. Air moved through the horn-shaped tusks, and a low, warm tone rolled out across the clearing. It was not Rollesio's pipe, which stole the mind and dropped a listener into sleep. This was slower. It did not command. It calmed. The dying moss on Gaia's net stilled its curling. Gaia lifted her head from the grass. "Now," Woga said. "The sound settles it. Give it your warmth one last time, then let go. If it has taken, it will hold itself. If it has not, the bed is lost." Obloe understood the risk. If he pulled back and the seed slept on, everything broke at once. He pressed his claw to the soil. He pushed his steadied heat down into the buried threads, as deep as it would go, while the mammoth's long note rolled over them both. The seed drank the warmth. The sound wrapped around it. For one breath Obloe felt the seed stop pulling at him, as if it had found the floor beneath itself. He lifted his claw. The seed held. Then it pulled the other way. Green threads shot out from it into the clean bed, down and wide, catching the dying roots beneath the rot and waking them. The anchor net went taut without Obloe touching it. The half-gray husk flushed dark, then deep living green, swelling until it split its own shell. A shoot rose from the crack. The gray rot at the bed's far edge recoiled and sank. Across the grove, from the far trees to the choked pool, the brown ground answered. The seed had woken. It anchored itself, and through itself, the whole grove. Gaia stood on steady legs for the first time in days. "It's full," she said. "It holds everything now. Not just the net. The grove." Obloe sat back on the fresh grass. His fire had nowhere left to go. The source in the decay realm was gone. The god lay buried and still. The seed he had chased north, pulled from a hound, cleaned of rot, carried across a void, and anchored with his own body, now held the grove without him. He did not have to hold it anymore. He could finally rest. Woga Dimples drew a small worn book from his coat. He uncapped a pen and wrote one line, then turned it so Obloe could see the words. "The jackalope who stayed," it read, beside the grove's name and the date. "I keep my bargains," Woga said. "You will be in the grove's history. So will I." The mammoth played a last soft note and walked on toward the broken lands, trailing music over ground that was already turning green behind it. Obloe lay down in his grove, under the new shoot of the heartwood seed, and let the warmth of the living earth hold him instead. For the first time since the seed was stolen, the old dragon slept.