Rowan Deeproot's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

The vines had closed over the dark door, but the light in them still crawled. Rowan set the little mushroom person down on the moss. Aldric knelt nearby, breathing hard. His hand was empty. The mist blade was gone. Rowan looked at him and understood the truth they had been dodging. The mage had spent everything. If the beast climbed out again, no one could push it back. "Can you make another blade?" Rowan asked. Aldric shook his head. He touched the pendants at his chest, one after another. None of them warmed. "The mist is not mine to command," he said. "It answered once. It will not answer again today. Maybe not for days." He said it plainly, no excuse in it. "If that thing wakes, I cannot stop it." The vines twitched. The myconid made its worried sound and pressed against Rowan's leg. Rowan felt their own sap moving cold inside them. They remembered the old mist, red near the roots, gold up high. Aldric's magic borrowed that color. But Rowan did not borrow it. Rowan grew it. Rowan knelt and pushed both hands into the moss. They pressed down until they felt the buried roots, thin and sleeping. "You said the mist wasn't yours," Rowan said. "It was the grove's. I am part of the grove." They did not know if it would work. They only knew waiting was not a plan. Rowan bit into their own wrist. Sap welled up, thick and pale. They let it drip onto the roots below. "Take it," they whispered to the ground. "Wake up. Just a little." Nothing moved. The vines glowed brighter. Then a thin thread of mist rose from the moss where the sap had fallen. It was faint, red at the bottom, and it curled toward the sealed door. Aldric's warm pendant flared to life against his chest. "It's answering you," he breathed. The mist thickened. It was not a blade. It was a wall, low and pale, spreading across the vines like breath on cold glass. Where it touched the thorns, their sick light went dark. The vines stilled. The door behind them dimmed to a faint gray line. Rowan felt the pull in their sap, deep and draining, but the barrier held. The myconid stopped shaking. It walked to the mist wall and touched it. It looked back at Rowan with that same recognition it had shown before. Rowan pulled their hands from the moss. The mist stayed. It would hold the threshold now, without them. But Rowan's wrist would not stop bleeding, and their whole body felt light and wrong, like a tree cut too deep in spring. "I can wake it," Rowan said. "But it takes me with it." They looked at the sealed door. Whatever slept beyond it still slept. Waking it fully would ask far more sap than one wrist held.