Credo Oakwhisker crouched beside a fresh boot print and pressed his palm to the soil. He had tracked the three loggers since dawn. His staff leaned against his shoulder, the white crystal at its tip quiet for now, holding only the old grief of the four-hundred-year tree felled the night before. He would stop them. The forest was his to guard, and no one else was coming. Then the crystal screamed. It flared bright and hot, glowing like a lantern carved from acorn-shaped light, runes flickering wild along the staff's grain. Credo staggered. A new pain poured through him — fresh, splintering, alive. Another tree was falling. Right now. Somewhere he could not see. He shut his eyes and let the crystal guide him. He felt the rip of saw teeth. He felt roots that had held the soil since before his grandfather's grandfather. He felt the slow, terrible lean. Then the ground-shaking fall. Credo ran. He crashed through brush and leapt a mossy stump that pulsed faint blue beneath his boot, an old marker of deeper magic he had no time for. He followed the crystal's burn until the trees thinned and he saw it — the wreckage. A great trunk lay split open, its heartwood raw. Sawdust drifted like snow. Wedges, oil rags, and a dented tin cup lay scattered near a stump still weeping pale sap. The loggers were gone. Credo stood in the ruin and gripped his staff until his knuckles went white. The crystal dimmed to a slow, steady ache. He had been too far. He had been too late. But now he had their trail, fresh and stinking of fuel, and he started after them without resting.

Credo ran along the loggers' trail, breath sharp, staff humming with the leftover ache of the fallen tree. He pushed harder, certain he was closing the gap. Then the crystal split. One bright pulse pulled him east. Another, just as strong, yanked him west. He stumbled to a stop in a clearing where the saws had not yet reached, and held the staff in both hands as it shook. The light from the crystal poured down in two beams, painting a circle on the moss at his feet. The pattern looked like a starlit floor of mosaic tiles, lines crossing and crossing again. Two trees. Two deaths. At the same moment, in opposite directions. He felt both. His knees buckled. The staff above him glowed like a small, bright shrine, runes flickering like trapped stars in a carved roof. Holding both pains at once was tearing him open. "You will choose one, or you will lose both." The voice was quiet and even. A white-haired elf stepped from the brush in blue and gold robes, a small winged creature padding at his heel. It looked like a tiny dog with scaled wings and a flame-tipped tail. Elderwin Starweaver did not bow or flourish. He only watched Credo shake. "I cannot," Credo said. "They are both old. They are both mine." Elderwin knelt beside him and laid a hand on the staff. "They are the forest's. You are one body. Pick the nearer. I will mark the other so you can mourn it later by name." The small dragon-thing trotted to the western beam and sat in it, tail curled, eyes steady. A marker. A witness. Credo's throat closed, but he nodded. He turned east and ran. Behind him, the western light dimmed under the creature's small shadow, held but not saved. Credo reached the east cut as the last logger drove a wedge into a trunk three centuries wide. He did not shout. He raised the staff, and the crystal struck the man's saw with a sound like ice cracking. The blade snapped. The logger fled. One tree stood. One tree, far behind him, did not. Credo pressed his forehead to the bark and wept, because he had finally stopped something, and because the cost had a name he would learn tomorrow.