Demetri knelt by a rotting oak and pressed his pale hand to the bark, praying the decay was not his own. He had guarded this forest for six hundred years. Half his face shone white as bone, the other hung dark and shriveled, and both halves warred inside him every hour. His task was simple and endless: hold the balance between life and death, so neither swallowed the trees. But this sickness spread faster than any he had seen. Gray rot crawled up the trunks. Leaves curled black and fell. And Demetri could not tell if his shriveled half had begun to leak its poison into the ground he swore to protect. He followed the rot to its edge, where the healthy wood met the dying. There he tested himself. He laid his white palm on a sick branch and willed life into it. The branch stayed gray. He laid his dark palm beside it. The rot spread under his fingers at once, hungry and eager. His stomach turned. The proof sat in his own hand. He walked to the inn at the forest's edge, a leaning house of timber and moss. He needed a mind clearer than his. Inside, the blue-haired innkeeper stood on a raised walkway that put his small frame at eye level with his guests. Grinwold set down a mug and studied Demetri's face without flinching, as men usually did. "You look like a man arguing with himself," Grinwold said. "Sit. Tell me the trouble." At the hearth sat a dwarf in plate armor, his red beard braided with stone beads. A great hammer leaned against his knee, its runes glowing faint. Tiroc Stouthammer rose the moment he saw Demetri's dark half. "That side of you carries the rot," the paladin said. His hand found the hammer. "I rode here chasing the sickness. It ends where you stand." "I did not spread it," Demetri said. "But I cannot swear my darkness had no part." Grinwold raised both hands between them. "Prove it, then. Both of you. Go together." They returned to the dying wood. Tiroc raised his glowing hammer over the sick soil. Demetri stopped him. "Light alone will burn what can still be saved." He knelt and pushed both hands into the earth, white and dark at once. The rot fought his dark half and fed on it. So he stopped resisting. He let his darkness pour down, drawing the sickness into himself, while his white half held him from breaking. Under the soil his fingers closed on a knot of black roots, not his own. Something buried had rotted here. He tore it loose and dragged it into the light. Tiroc's hammer fell and burned it to ash. The nearest trees held. The rot stopped spreading. Demetri stood, shaking. His dark half had not caused the sickness. But it had answered the buried thing too easily. Something had planted that root, and it knew his weakness.

The rot was dead, but the wound remained. Demetri stood where the ash still marked the soil. For six hundred years his wards had ringed this forest. No stranger crossed them unseen. Yet someone had walked in, dug deep, and buried the black root against his very weakness. He could not remember a single breach in all those centuries. Until he found the gap, the enemy could return and plant again. Tiroc kicked at the burned earth beside him. The dwarf's hammer still glowed at his hip. "Wards failed. Find where." "They did not fail," Demetri said. "Something slipped through a seam I cannot see. I need older eyes than mine." He led the paladin under the great trees, where hanging leaves shut out the sky and moss swallowed their steps. Here the oldest wards were rooted. Demetri knelt among the tangled roots and pressed both palms to the ground, white and dark together. He called a name the forest had not heard spoken in an age. The air thickened. A shape rose from the moss, half-there, wrapped in ivy. A dryad, older than his wards, older than his watch. Her eyes were pale water. Vines drifted through her like smoke. "You wake me for a hole in your fence," she said. Her voice came from every tree at once. "Someone crossed unseen," Demetri said. "Show me how." She drifted close and laid a translucent hand against his dark cheek. He did not flinch. "The seam is you," she said. "Your dark half thins the wards where it touches them. A clever hand walked in through your own shadow. No breach of stone. A breach of you." Tiroc's grip tightened on the hammer. "Then the wall is rotten at the gate." Demetri closed his eyes. The truth landed like a stone. His vulnerability was not only in his hand. It bled into the very wards he trusted. "Can it be sealed?" "Only by balance," the dryad said. "Hold both halves even, and the seam closes. Let one rule, and it opens again." She began to fade. "You cannot patch this. You must become it." Demetri drew his white and dark halves toward center. It hurt, like holding two beasts on one chain. He poured that fragile balance into the roots. The wards flared. Along the tree line, a faint gold light ran and knit shut. The seam sealed. He opened his eyes. The dryad was gone. His hands shook, but the forest held. "It is closed," he said. "For now." "For now is not sealed," Tiroc said. "You slip, it opens." Demetri looked at his dark palm. He had not built the enemy's road. He had been the road. And the balance that closed the seam would not hold on its own. Somewhere the hand that walked through his shadow still lived, and it knew the way in was through him.

The seal held, but Demetri felt it strain. His dark half pulled at him like a hooked fish on a line. He followed the pull through the grove, past the great hanging trees, until the moss gave way to bare stone. There the ground had died. A wide pit gaped in the earth. Green tendrils curled from its rim, thick as arms, dripping rot. The pit breathed. Each breath fouled the air. "There is your wound," Tiroc said. His hammer flared as he stepped beside Demetri. "Ground's poisoned deep. That's what's tearing at you." Demetri nodded. The pit was the sick root of it all. While it festered, the imbalance would keep dragging his dark half loose, and the seal would fail. He had to heal the ground itself. He knelt and reached toward the earth. A green light rose from the pit before he could touch it. A skull, jaws open, wings of bone. It poured pale fog from its mouth. The fog crept over the stone and killed the last living moss. More skulls rose behind it. Their fog thickened. Demetri drew a hard breath and pulled the rot toward himself, as he had done with the buried root. But the pit was too large. The corruption flooded in faster than he could hold it. His dark palm blackened. His light half dimmed. He felt himself tipping. "You're slipping," Tiroc warned. "Balance, elf, or the seal breaks." Small shapes darted through the fog. Green frogs, upright, with clear wings and little belts and satchels. They leapt from tendril to tendril. One landed on Demetri's shoulder and pointed at the pit's far edge. "You cannot drink it all," the frog said. His voice was thin and quick. "Give it to the roots. We show you where." Demetri understood. He did not need to swallow the rot. He needed to feed it back into living ground and let the forest break it down. The frogs swarmed the pit's rim. They dug their small hands into cracks and opened old channels between the stones. Demetri poured the corruption he held into those channels, thin and slow. The frogs guided it into the deep roots of the grove. He held his two halves even and breathed. Dark drew corruption. Light steadied his hand. The frogs sang, and the roots drank. One by one the winged skulls flickered and fell. Their fog thinned. The tendrils curled back and stilled. The pit closed to a scar of clean stone. Demetri opened his eyes. The pull on his dark half was gone. The ground held its own balance now, and the seal no longer strained. Tiroc lowered his hammer. "It's done." The lead frog folded his wings. "The rot was buried by a hand that came from the north road," he said. "A rider. Silver armor. We watched him pass three nights before your sickness began." Demetri looked north. The pit was healed. But now he had a face to hunt.

Demetri returned to Grinwold's inn with the pit's cure fresh in his hands. He wanted a fire and a cup before he hunted the rider from the north road. Grinwold met him at the door, blue hair wild, his easy smile gone. "You'll want to see this," the gnome said. He led Demetri to a table where a man lay slumped and grey. A wounded traveler had stumbled in an hour past, Grinwold explained. Black rot ran up the man's arm from a wound in his shoulder. Demetri knew it at once. It was the same rot that had poisoned his forest. The man's breath came shallow. His skin had gone the color of ash. Demetri laid his hands over the wound. The rot pulsed against his palms, hungry. He could pull it into himself, as he once had. But the pit had taught him better. If he swallowed this, his dark half would swell and the seal on his wards would strain. Yet there was no living ground here to feed it. Only floorboards and the dying man. He pressed his light palm to the wound and his dark palm to the floor. He breathed his two halves even. Slowly, he drew the rot out through the light and pushed it down through the dark, into the earth beneath the inn's stone. The traveler groaned. Color crept back into his face. The black lines shrank and faded. The door banged open. A young man in silver armor filled the frame, red cape at his back, sword already half drawn. His eyes went to Demetri's dark half, then to the man on the table. "Step away from him," the prince said. Grinwold hurried forward, hands raised. "He's healing your man, not harming him." The prince did not lower the blade. He was young, dark-haired, his jaw set hard. "That's my scout. I sent him ahead three days ago." He looked at the rot still bleeding from the wound. "He carried nothing like that when he rode out." Demetri stared at the silver armor. A rider from the north road. Silver armor. He had come to hunt this man. "You planted the rot in my forest," he said. The prince's face changed. Confusion, not guilt. "I planted nothing. I came south chasing a sickness that killed two of my villages." He nodded at his scout. "He was tracking its source. He found it." The scout stirred. His lips moved. "Not him," he whispered. "Another rider. Wore his colors. His armor." Then he slept. Demetri drew his hands back. His halves held even. The seal in his forest did not stir. He had saved the man and healed the rot without swallowing it. But the truth twisted under him. The rider he hunted was not the prince at all. Someone wore this man's silver to cross the north road unseen. And that someone was still out there, still working the rot.

Demetri did not sleep that night. Each rot he pulled from the ground drained him. His halves fought to hold even. He had cleared the traveler, the pit, the buried root. But the seam in his wards grew thinner with every strain. One more slip, and it would tear wide. His hidden enemy would walk back through it. He needed to end the source, not chase its leavings. Then, at dawn, an idea came to him. He would not carry the rot any longer. He would give it a home. He left the inn before the others woke. Tiroc found him in the grove, kneeling at the spring where water spilled over grey boulders. The dwarf's boar snorted at the shadow-line running through Demetri's body. Tiroc planted his burning hammer in the moss. "You look ready to fall," Tiroc said. "I am." Demetri did not lie to him. Once the dwarf had wanted him dead. Now he stood guard while an old wizard shook. "The rot will keep coming. I cannot hold my balance and fight it both." "Then don't hold it. Set it down somewhere." Demetri looked at the spring. "That is what I mean to do." The ground shook before he could begin. Trees cracked. A great shape pushed through the canopy. Leaves and vines hung from its frame, but bone showed through the rot, and its eyes burned yellow. The blighted dragon had come for its poison. Every root Demetri had cleansed, the beast wanted back. Tiroc swung. His hammer caught the dragon's jaw and light burst across the rotted scales. The boar charged its legs. "Do your working, wizard," Tiroc shouted. "I'll hold it." Demetri pressed his light palm to the spring and his dark palm to the earth. He stopped fighting his two halves. He let them run together, life into death, death into life. Into that stream he poured everything he carried, all the rot from the pit, the traveler, the soil. He did not push it into the ground this time. He gathered it into a single seed and set it in the mud at the water's edge. The dragon lunged. Demetri threw the last of himself into the seed and pulled the beast's rot with it. The dragon shrank. Its body folded into the small dark shape in the mud. The ground went still. A tree rose from the spring. One side glowed gold with new leaves. The other stood dark and deep, holding the death within it. Light and shadow, held even, forever. Demetri felt the seam in his wards close and stay closed. The tree held his balance now, so he did not have to. Tiroc lowered his hammer. "It's done?" "The rot has a keeper." Demetri touched the two-toned bark. But his hands were empty of power now. He had poured too much into the tree. "And I am nearly spent. The imposter is still out there. I must face him weak."