Roran Vottier's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

The wolf led Roran past the last trees he knew. The ground turned gray under his boots. Here the rot was not a patch. It was a flood. The dead earth ran on in every direction, thick and wet, swallowing the roots and the stones. The wolf stopped at the edge and would not step onto it. Roran knelt and drove his knife into the gray. He carved a line, the way he always did. The rot closed over the cut before he could pull his blade free. He tried fire next. He struck a spark into a heap of dry moss and set it against the rot. The flame caught, hissed, and died in the wet gray. He stamped and cut and burned until his arms shook. The dead ground did not shrink. It had grown wider by the time he stopped. His old methods meant nothing here. He followed the wolf farther, and then he saw the source. A low mound of earth and stone rose ahead. Bones jutted from its sides. A black doorway gaped at its front, roots hanging like teeth. The rot poured out of that dark mouth in slow waves. This was where the blight was born. Roran stood before it with a knife and no idea how to fight it. "You'll dull that blade before you dull the barrow." Roran spun. A woman stood a few paces off, where no one had been. Her hair was bright red, her eyes green and steady. A dark coat hung to her knees. She did not look at Roran. She looked at the mound, the way a healer looks at a wound. The wolf did not growl at her. It watched her the way it watched the rot. "Who are you?" Roran asked. His grip tightened on the knife. "Someone who has seen this before." She stepped closer to the barrow, careful not to touch the gray. "Steel won't cut it. Fire won't burn it. The rot doesn't come from the woods. It comes from what's buried under that mound." She glanced at him then. "You've been treating leaves. The root is in there." Roran looked at the black doorway. He thought of the months he had spent clearing patches while the true source poured out unchecked. "Then I go in," he said. "Not with that." She nodded at his knife. "You'll need more than iron. And you'll need someone who knows the shape of the thing." She held his gaze. "That's me." Roran did not trust her. Her name, her reason for being here, the way she appeared without a sound. But she had told him the one truth he had missed. He had been fighting the wrong fight all along. He sheathed his knife. "Kaia," she said, before he could ask again. Roran turned back to the barrow. The rot kept flowing from its mouth. His war had a center now, and it was far worse than a hundred edges.