Woga Dimples's Arc

Chapter 6 of 3

Woga's name was in the Grazing Scrolls now. But the Scrolls meant nothing if his warren stayed dead. Three-quarters of the dead acres held no roots at all. Root magic could not reach them. Strikers was too tired to help, and Gaia could only wake soil that still had dying roots beneath. Woga knelt in the gray dirt and found nothing to pull life through. He needed a method that did not depend on roots already in the ground. Kiira found him there at dusk. She was the silvery jackalope from the sealed library, the stage performer who called her craft performance, not barter. She stepped carefully over the dead soil in her polished boots. "You proved the claim," she said. "Now you're stuck with it." "There are no roots out here," Woga said. "Nothing to carry the magic across." "Then stop carrying it across." She crouched and pressed one paw flat to the dirt. "Bring something that grows down instead of out. A seed that makes its own roots as it climbs." She pulled a withered pod from her coat and set it in his paw. "I kept this from a fae act. Thought I'd use it on stage." Woga turned the pod over. "A beanstalk seed." "A living one. Plant it where your roots end. It drinks from the green you already woke, then drives new roots down through the dead ground on its own." She stood and brushed off her knees. "I don't give things away. You owe me a favor I'll name later." Woga carried the pod to the edge of his green patch. He dug a hole where living soil met gray. He set the seed in and pressed the warm earth over it. Then he waited. Nothing moved. He pushed his fear down the way he had at the well. He laid both paws on the mound and breathed. A green shoot broke the surface. It thickened. It climbed. Vines twisted around a rising stalk, and tiny lights sparked along its length as small winged shapes drifted up through the leaves. The beanstalk rose higher than the old well's reach. Then its roots went to work. Pale threads spread from the base and bored into the dead acres. Where they passed, gray dirt darkened and softened. Green crept outward in a slow tide across ground no root had touched in three hundred years. Woga watched the stalk anchor a full acre, then another. Not all of it. But the dead ground was no longer sealed against life. Kiira watched beside him, arms folded. "It won't fill the whole warren. One stalk only reaches so far." "Then I plant more." "You'll need more seeds," she said. "And the favor you owe me isn't small." She smiled, dry and sure. "Neither is the one you'll owe to whoever else claims this ground. They saw the green rise too."