Tinkleaf Gearsprout's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The thinking sprout glowed all night. Tinkleaf sat beside it and watched the soft light run down the wire and into the soil. The light did not stop at his grove. It kept going, deep into the dark, toward the beast. His fungus bridge worked too well. It joined his sprout to the toothed thing, root to root. But he could not see where that living line began or ended. He could not cut what he could not find. "You look like a gnome who lost his own feet," said the sword. Its silver face grinned from his belt. Its glow marks pulsed blue. "I built a road to the teeth," Tinkleaf said. "I need to find it before I can close it." The little mushroom creature tugged his sleeve. It pointed up. Two small winged people dropped through the roots and landed on the loam. Tinkleaf froze. He had never seen their kind this deep. The first wore vines and flowers over bare skin, brown hair wild. The second had gold curls and a leaf dress. They were part fairy, part something older, and they moved like they owned the dark. "You're bleeding light into the whole web," said the flower-clad one. "Whisper Thistledown. This is Pippin. We felt your grove wake from far off." "Loud little grove," Pippin said. She wrinkled her nose at the deep tunnel. "And something down there is drinking from it." Tinkleaf stood. "You can feel the threads?" "We live in threads," Whisper said. They pressed a bare foot to the soil. Their wings stilled. "Push your light again. Slow. We'll follow it." Tinkleaf knelt and set his copper finger to the sprout's stem. He fed a slow thought down the wire. The glow ran. Pippin flew low over the loam, one hand skimming the ground. Whisper walked beside the moving light, eyes shut. "There," Pippin called. She stopped over a raised knot of pale threads. "It splits here. Your grove goes one way. The beast goes the other." Tinkleaf hurried over. Under the knot the fungus twisted into a thick braid. One half climbed toward his sprout. The other half sank toward the teeth. He had found the door in his own road. "Cut it and you go dark," the sword said. "Cut it wrong and your sprout goes with it." Whisper crouched and touched the braid. "You don't cut a thread like this," they said. "You pinch the beast's half and feed your own. Starve one side. Fatten the other." Tinkleaf breathed. He pressed his copper finger to the beast's half of the braid and stopped his light. Then he poured everything into his grove's half. The dark threads shrank. His threads swelled and held. The braid split on its own, clean, no wound to his sprout. The glow snapped back into his grove. The line to the teeth went dead. Tinkleaf sat back, shaking. He knew his road now. And below, the beast, cut off from the light, began to dig.