Pantheon knelt in the dead soil where the golden orchard had once fed every worshipper who asked. He was a fertility god and an alchemist, and he could not tell the two apart. In his coat pocket sat a cluster of golden apple seeds, the last of their kind. In his other pocket sat page four hundred and twelve of his notebook, still wet with morning ink. He had come to bring the orchard back. The ground would not let him. He pressed his palm to the dirt. It pulsed under his hand like something breathing wrong. Green runes surfaced along the twisted roots at the clearing's edge, letters he did not know the shape of, glowing from bones tangled in the wood. The rot had crawled up from the forest and stayed. He pulled a seed from his pocket and pushed it into the soil. It blackened before he could withdraw his finger. "You planted a living thing into a grave," a voice said behind him. "You expected what." He turned. Mycela stood at the treeline, small, crowned in red-capped mushrooms, moss trailing from her wrists. She was the keeper of the network under the soil, and he had asked her once, years ago, to let his orchard drink from her threads. She had said yes then. She was watching him now the way one watches a slow mistake. "I expected the ground to remember," Pantheon said. "The ground remembers," Mycela said. "That is the problem." She walked past him and set her hand on the nearest rotten root. The green runes brightened, then dimmed. He understood she was listening. He waited. He noted the light: gray, low, filtered through spore-thick air. He wrote it down. "The rot is not an enemy," she said. "It is grief that never composted. Your orchard died and the forest kept the death instead of eating it." "Then let it eat now," he said. "It cannot swallow alone." She held out her staff. Its carved face glowed faintly. "Feed the network. Not the soil." Pantheon took the seeds from his pocket. Seven of them, gold and small. He understood what she was asking. He cut his palm with the edge of a seed and pressed the cluster against the roots of the rotten wood. His blood ran into the runes. The runes drank. A golden light rose out of the ground between them, round and steady, the size of a fist. It hung there. Under it, the mycelium threads pulled the seeds down, past the poisoned layer, into whatever was still alive beneath. "They will grow," Mycela said. "But not as apples. Not yet." Pantheon watched the sphere hover. He opened his notebook to page four hundred and thirteen. He wrote: seeds accepted. Host unknown. Light: gold, and not mine.