Aelwen Silverleaf knelt in the last patch of living soil and pressed a seed into the ground. She wanted this clearing to become a grove, a place where every hurt creature fleeing the woods could hide and heal. But the darkness moved faster than her hands. It crept from the treeline as a gray rot, and it turned green shoots black before they could open. She had planted since dawn. Behind her, three rows already lay dead. The rot had swallowed them in an hour. Ahead of her, the good soil shrank by the minute. Aelwen wiped dirt on her pale gown and counted the ground she had left. It was not enough. She could plant one seed for every ten the darkness killed. A soft shape stumbled from the woods. A rabbit the color of dawn, with two small horns, dragged a hurt leg across the dying grass. A faint shimmer clung to its fur. It reached Aelwen and pressed against her knee, shaking. "You're safe," she whispered. She lifted the rabbit and set it in her lap. But safe was a lie. The rot was already licking at the edge of her lap of soil. If the ground died, the rabbit had nowhere to go. Aelwen looked at the shimmer around the small creature. Magic. Where the rabbit had walked, one blackened shoot had turned green again. She looked closer. The horned rabbit's aura pushed the rot back a hand's width. She could not spread that aura fast enough alone. She needed the ground opened, seeded, and reached everywhere at once, faster than any elf could move. Then she remembered the mole. Aelwen dug her fingers into the earth and hummed the low note her mother taught her. She waited. The soil trembled. A blind white mole broke the surface, its pink nose twitching, its claws already busy. It could not see the darkness. It only felt the good soil and the bad. It burrowed toward the rot without fear. "Help me," Aelwen said. "Open the ground. I'll follow with seeds." The mole shot forward. It tunneled a line across the dying clearing in seconds. Aelwen ran behind on her knees, dropping seeds into each open furrow. She set the horned rabbit down at the end of the row. Its shimmer spread along the loosened earth. Green shoots opened where black had spread a moment before. For the first time all day, the darkness stopped. It pressed at the new shoots and could not pass. Aelwen sat back, breathing hard, hands black to the wrist. She had held the line. The clearing would live tonight. But she looked at the tunnels crossing the soil and understood the cost. She had opened the earth all the way to the treeline. She had cut a hundred new doors straight into the dark. And she did not yet know what would come through them.