Sylara Helion's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

The festival was one day away, but Sylara could not commune with a poisoned root. Veyla had found the den by dawn. Sylara followed him to the grove's edge, where the mycelial network reached toward the grasslands. There, in a hollow beneath the roots, the Plainsstalker lay curled. Its wounded foot glowed with infection. Green lines pulsed along its sleek exoskeleton as it breathed. Even hurt, it was longer than three Lunari laid end to end. Veyla drove a coated spear into its flank. The toxin should have dropped a Gloomstalker in ten heartbeats. The beast screamed and thrashed and did not fall. Veyla threw two more spears. The Plainsstalker snapped one shaft between its teeth. "The dose is too small for its mass," Veyla said, backing away. His voice went flat and final. "I cannot kill it. Not with what I carry." Sylara watched the whip-like tail crack the air. She had no toxin strong enough either. Then she remembered the far dwelling. "Silvaeth," she said. "She measures doses that stop a heart." Silvaeth Dreamcaller came at Sylara's call, cloak dragging over frost-dust. Seven cycles had passed since a dose on her watch went wrong. The patient had lived, but Silvaeth still began every hard telling with that fact. She knelt at the den's mouth and studied the wound without flinching. "It survives ordinary toxin," she said. "It will not survive concentration." She reached into a container at her belt and drew out a tiny cluster of green mushrooms dotted yellow. They glowed with a sick sheen. "These. Boiled down. One drop killed a Frostglider in a breath." "You have never used them on a beast this large," Sylara said. "No." Silvaeth met her eyes. "But I know how to measure. That is the one thing I still trust in my hands." She crushed the caps into Veyla's toxin bowl and worked them to paste. Veyla coated a fresh spear, one slow pass at a time. The tip burned brighter purple than Sylara had ever seen. Veyla waited for the tail to swing wide. Then he stepped in and drove the spear deep behind the foreleg. The Plainsstalker convulsed. Its green lines flared, guttered, and went dark. The great body sagged into the roots and stopped moving. Sylara knelt where the beast had denned. The mycelial threads there were chewed to pulp, gray and lifeless. She had killed the thing eating her people's food. But the network did not stir back to life beneath her hands. The roots stayed dead where the teeth had torn them. "It fed here for seven cycles," Veyla said quietly. "The web will not heal on its own." Sylara stood. The predator was gone. Yet the wound it left ran deeper than any spear could reach. Tomorrow she would take the frost-grown shrooms and ask the Helium Mother the only question left. Not what was killing the network. How to make the dead web grow again.