Three days before the Glowflight Festival, Sylara Helion still had no question to carry into the vision. As the camp's seer, her task was simple and impossible: guide the people to true communion with the Helium Mother, and return with an answer. But an answer needed a question. And the question her people brought her was fog. She sat on the deck of the great mushroom-house, its glowing fibers pulsing soft blue beneath her hands. Below, the Glowcamp stirred. Elders climbed the wooden stairs one by one. They came to her because their children were sick with fear, and no one could name the reason. "The forest feels wrong," one elder said. Her skin flickered pale purple with worry. "Tell us what troubles us." Sylara wanted to shake her. She could not frame a communion around "wrong." The Somnivox visions answered sharp questions, not fog. Ask a blurred thing, and the Helium Mother gave a blurred reply, or nothing. Seers had drowned in vagueness before her. She would not. "Show me," Sylara said instead. "Not what you feel. What you saw." The elder led her down the stairs, past the luminous fungal sheets, to the edge of camp. There stood an old moon-tree, its purple-blue bark wrapped in glowing vines. Sylara had passed it a thousand times. She stopped now. The berries that hung from its lower branches were dark and shriveled. The shelf fungi along the trunk had gone gray. She pressed her palm to the bark. Cold. Too cold. She crouched and dug her fingers into the soil at the roots. The mycelial threads there should have glowed rose-pink, the living web that fed every fungus in the grove. They were dim. Breaking. She lifted a handful and watched the pink light die in her hand. Sylara stood very still. The vagueness cracked open. Her people did not fear a mood. They feared this: the great mycelial network beneath their feet was failing. The berries died because the roots died. The children sensed the grove's hunger before the adults named it. "This," she said. "This is the question." Her voice came out steady. "Not 'what is wrong.' We ask the Helium Mother why the living web is dying. And how we stop it." The elder's skin brightened, then dimmed. "You can carry that into the vision?" "A sharp question," Sylara said. "Yes." She closed her hand around the dying threads. Relief moved through her, quick and cold. She had her question at last. But the answer she carried up the stairs was worse than fog. If the network truly failed, the whole grove would follow. Every fungus. Every tool. Every meal. The Glowflight communion was no longer a rite. It was the camp's only hope of surviving the season. And Sylara had three days to prepare a vision she could not afford to fail.

Two days before the festival, Sylara knelt over her ritual stores and knew they would fail her. She spread the dried shrooms on a cloth. The caps were pale blue, the spore sacs shrunken. Festival-grade. Enough to give the people their yearly glimpse of the Helium Mother. Not enough to force a true answer from her. The question she carried was too deep for a soft dose. To crack it, she needed shrooms grown thick and potent, harvested at the peak of the frost. She had none. She knew who did. Sylara wrapped her cloak tight and crossed the grove to the far dwelling, where the walls glowed cold blue and no children played near the door. Silvaeth Dreamcaller kept the deepest stores of any Helivox. She also kept a distance from Sylara, and Sylara from her. Both of them had once measured a dose wrong. Both of them had watched someone come back changed. Silvaeth was grinding toxin at a stone bowl when Sylara entered. She did not look up. "The patient lived," Silvaeth said. "That is how I begin, before you ask. Three days, and the patient lived." She set down the pestle. "You want potent shrooms. I can smell your festival stores from here. They are weak." "The network is dying," Sylara said. "I need to ask the Helium Mother why. A weak dose gives a weak answer. I will drown in fog." Silvaeth studied her a long moment. Her scalp filaments stirred in the cold air. "I have shrooms grown at deep frost. Strong enough to open the door you want." She reached for a frost-fungus container on her belt, then stopped. "Strong enough to not let you back out. You know this dose. You gave it once. A young seer. Seven cycles." Sylara's skin flickered pale. "I know exactly what I gave her." "Then you know what you are asking me to hand you." Silvaeth opened the container. Inside, three caps sat dark blue and heavy, spore sacs swollen with purple light. She held them out. "I will not measure this for you. My hands did enough measuring. You carry your own risk." Sylara took the shrooms. They were cold and dense, twice the weight of her festival stores. Real weight. Enough to reach communion, or to not return. "Thank you," Sylara said. "Do not thank me yet." Silvaeth picked up her pestle again. "You wanted a dose that cannot fail. Now you hold one that cannot forgive." Sylara walked back through the grove with the caps sealed against her chest. She had her question. Now she had the potency to force an answer. But the potent dose was the same kind that had broken the young seer seven cycles ago. And tonight, before the festival, that seer would come and sit outside her door, and wait to be acknowledged, the way she always did.

The seer came at dusk, the way she always did. Sylara found her sitting outside the door, knees drawn up, eyes fixed on the sky where Odin hung swollen and pale. Seven cycles ago Sylara had measured the girl a dose too strong. The girl lived, but the Helium Mother never stopped speaking to her after. Tonight, with the potent shrooms sealed against her chest, Sylara knelt in front of her at last. "I need to hear you," Sylara said. "Before I take the same dose you did." The girl looked at her. Then the fragments spilled out, the way they always had. "The web. The teeth in the web. She said count the teeth." Her hands sketched shapes in the frost-dust. Small marks. A long dragging line. Nonsense, the elders had ruled years ago. Sylara had believed them. She did not believe them now. She went to the far dwelling. Silvaeth Dreamcaller was cleaning toxin from a blade at her stone bowl. She did not look up. "The patient lived," she said. "Now tell me what you want." "The seer speaks of teeth in the web," Sylara said. "She draws a dragging line. I cannot read it. Can you?" Silvaeth set the blade down. She studied the marks Sylara scratched on the floor. A beat passed. "That is not a vision drawing. That is a track." She met Sylara's eyes. "You need a hunter." The hunter's hut sat low and rounded at the grove's edge, its fungal walls dappled gray. Veyla Shadewhisper crouched inside, coating a spear tip one slow pass at a time. The toxin glowed faint purple. He did not stop working when they entered. "The seer draws this," Sylara said, and showed him the marks. "A dragging line. Small teeth beside it." Veyla's hands went still. "A Gloomstalker with a bad foot." He looked at the marks longer. "No. Not a Gloomstalker. Wider. Smaller teeth. Sits in the grasslands." His voice dropped, final. "A Plainsstalker. They den in the roots. In the web." Sylara went cold. "The mycelial network." "Something is chewing it from below," Veyla said. "That is what she keeps drawing. Not a spirit. Teeth." Sylara sat back. For seven cycles the girl had carried the answer in plain fragments. No one decoded them because no one asked a hunter to read a hunter's track. The network was not simply dying. A predator was eating it. She had her testimony now. She knew what the girl had seen. But the knowing changed everything. The Helium Mother was not the only voice she had to reach. Somewhere beneath the grove, in the roots that fed her whole people, a Plainsstalker was denned and feeding. And the festival was one day away.

The festival was one day away, but Sylara could not commune with a poisoned root. Veyla had found the den by dawn. Sylara followed him to the grove's edge, where the mycelial network reached toward the grasslands. There, in a hollow beneath the roots, the Plainsstalker lay curled. Its wounded foot glowed with infection. Green lines pulsed along its sleek exoskeleton as it breathed. Even hurt, it was longer than three Lunari laid end to end. Veyla drove a coated spear into its flank. The toxin should have dropped a Gloomstalker in ten heartbeats. The beast screamed and thrashed and did not fall. Veyla threw two more spears. The Plainsstalker snapped one shaft between its teeth. "The dose is too small for its mass," Veyla said, backing away. His voice went flat and final. "I cannot kill it. Not with what I carry." Sylara watched the whip-like tail crack the air. She had no toxin strong enough either. Then she remembered the far dwelling. "Silvaeth," she said. "She measures doses that stop a heart." Silvaeth Dreamcaller came at Sylara's call, cloak dragging over frost-dust. Seven cycles had passed since a dose on her watch went wrong. The patient had lived, but Silvaeth still began every hard telling with that fact. She knelt at the den's mouth and studied the wound without flinching. "It survives ordinary toxin," she said. "It will not survive concentration." She reached into a container at her belt and drew out a tiny cluster of green mushrooms dotted yellow. They glowed with a sick sheen. "These. Boiled down. One drop killed a Frostglider in a breath." "You have never used them on a beast this large," Sylara said. "No." Silvaeth met her eyes. "But I know how to measure. That is the one thing I still trust in my hands." She crushed the caps into Veyla's toxin bowl and worked them to paste. Veyla coated a fresh spear, one slow pass at a time. The tip burned brighter purple than Sylara had ever seen. Veyla waited for the tail to swing wide. Then he stepped in and drove the spear deep behind the foreleg. The Plainsstalker convulsed. Its green lines flared, guttered, and went dark. The great body sagged into the roots and stopped moving. Sylara knelt where the beast had denned. The mycelial threads there were chewed to pulp, gray and lifeless. She had killed the thing eating her people's food. But the network did not stir back to life beneath her hands. The roots stayed dead where the teeth had torn them. "It fed here for seven cycles," Veyla said quietly. "The web will not heal on its own." Sylara stood. The predator was gone. Yet the wound it left ran deeper than any spear could reach. Tomorrow she would take the frost-grown shrooms and ask the Helium Mother the only question left. Not what was killing the network. How to make the dead web grow again.

The festival was one dawn away. Sylara walked to the vision grove with the frost-grown shrooms wrapped in Frost Bark cloth. She meant to enter the communion alone and ask the Helium Mother how to grow the dead web again. Then she saw the girl waiting at the grove's mouth. The seer sat on the stone ring, knees drawn up. Seven cycles ago Sylara had measured her dose wrong. The girl had not died. She had come back changed, and she said the Helium Mother had never stopped speaking to her since. Before every festival she came to Sylara's door and waited to be seen. Sylara had learned to walk past her. She could not walk past her here. "I go with you," the girl said. Her eyes did not blink. "She wants us both inside. Alone, you will hear only pieces." Sylara's chest tightened. To bring the girl into the communion was to risk the one mind still tied to the Mother's voice. Another wrong measure and she would lose the only listener she had. But refusing her carried the same loss. The girl would rise and walk away, and take the thread with her. Silvaeth arrived with the dosing bowl, cloak dragging frost-dust. She looked at the girl, then at Sylara. "She survived the first time," Silvaeth said. She always began there. "Two joined in one communion doubles the strain. But I can split the dose. Weaker for each. Both hold the same vision." "Can you measure it that fine?" Sylara asked. "Yes." Silvaeth met her eyes. "That is the one thing I still trust in my hands." Veyla stood at the tree line, spear low. "I stay," she said. "If either stops breathing, I pull you out." She did not soften it. She never did. Sylara knelt at the ancient altar. The blue caps of the shrooms glowed under the smoldering flames. Silvaeth split the caps into two portions, one slow pass at a time, and pressed each to paste. Sylara took hers. The girl took hers without waiting to be told. The grove's light bent. Sylara felt the girl's mind beside her own, steady where hers swam. Together they reached down into the dead web. The Mother did not speak in words. She showed a single image: the girl's own hands, seven cycles young, pressing broken threads back together. The severed web did not heal by itself. It healed when a living listener carried the Mother's voice into the soil. Sylara surfaced first. Her filaments dripped frost. "The web will grow again," she said. "But only if she feeds it the voice she carries." The girl opened her eyes. For the first time in seven cycles, she smiled at Sylara. "Then I am not broken," she said. "I am the seed." Sylara had her answer's shape at last. She also had a new dread. To save the grove, she would have to give the girl to it.

Sylara left the vision grove with her answer and her dread. The girl walked beside her, no longer waiting three steps behind. She had the shape of what would heal the web. Now she had to convince the camp to let a broken girl lead the rite. That was the hard part. The festival crowd had gathered at the stone ring. Baskets of fruit, meat, and glowing herbs circled the fire pit. The runes on the standing stones caught the flame. Sylara stepped inside the ring and raised her hands. The people quieted. Then she reached back and drew the girl forward by the wrist. A murmur ran through them, low and hard. They knew this girl. They had watched her sit outside Sylara's door for seven cycles, listening to a voice no one else could hear. "She carries the Mother's voice," Sylara said. "She will feed it into the soil. The web will grow again through her." No one moved to help. An elder near the fire spat into the dirt. "That one is broken," he said. "You broke her. Now you want us to trust her with the rite?" Others took up the sound. A few turned their backs. The girl's glow flickered pale, then dimmed to almost nothing. Silvaeth stepped into the ring. Her cloak dragged frost across the stones. She was the Helivox, the one who guided souls through near-death and back. When she spoke, the crowd stilled by habit. "She survived," Silvaeth said. She always began there. "Seven cycles ago the dose should have killed her. It did not. The Mother kept her. That is not a curse. That is a choice the Mother made." The spitting elder folded his arms. "Words. Show us she is not broken." Veyla walked out of the tree line. Her spear tip glowed faint purple. She stopped beside the girl and faced the crowd. "The girl marked a track in her visions," she said. "Seven cycles she drew it. I decoded it. A wounded beast, feeding under the grove. We killed it because of her." She let the words sit. "She saw what none of you saw. Call that broken." The crowd shifted. The elder's mouth worked, but he had nothing. A child near the baskets pointed upward. A luminous six-winged moth drifted over the fire, trailing fine strands, and settled on the girl's shoulder. Its wings pulsed against her dark skin. The people had always named that creature a sign of true vision. Sylara watched the fear break. Slowly, the elders lowered their heads. One old seer set the amethyst skull of her predecessor at the girl's feet, the highest honor the camp could give. The girl's glow rose again, steady and bright. "Then we begin," Sylara said. The crowd accepted the rite. But acceptance meant the girl would now be fed to the soil, and Sylara had promised it aloud. She could no longer take it back.

The crowd had accepted the rite. But the girl herself had not. She rose from the fire ring, set the amethyst skull down, and walked away into the dark. Sylara found her the next dawn at the glowing pond past the tree line, sitting on a flat rock beside the waterfall. The girl watched luminous insects skate the water. She did not turn. Sylara understood then that the camp's approval meant nothing. The voice lived in the girl. If the girl refused, the soil would stay dead. Sylara sat on the wet stone, not too close. "You waited outside my door seven cycles," she said. "I never opened it. I'm opening it now." The girl's glow stayed pale. She did not answer. A fisher came up the bank then, spear across her shoulder, boots silent on the volcanic soil. Veska Silmara. She fished the deep channels past the Roseus Rex line, and the camp kept a careful distance from her toxin containers. She stopped when she saw them and studied the girl a long moment. "Two grids west, the Deathcaps died," Veska said. "Caps collapsed. No spore dust. No smell. Clean kill." She looked at Sylara. "Your dead web is spreading. It'll reach my channels soon." The girl's head turned at last. Her glow flickered, then brightened. "West," she said, her voice cracked from disuse. "The Mother showed me the dying. Every night. No one listened." Veska crouched. She set her spear on the rock, tip away from the girl, a thing Sylara had never seen a fisher do near a stranger. "You saw it before I found it," Veska said. "That's real. That's not broken." She spoke it as plain fact, no softness in it. The girl's filaments lifted toward her. Sylara watched the girl's face open. Not to her. To Veska, who named the visions true without needing a moth or an elder to prove it. "They call you the one I ruined," Sylara said. "But you carry the map of what's killing us. Feed it into the soil and the west stops dying. The channels live. The camp lives." The girl looked at the pond. A leaf spun on the current toward the falls. "If I give my voice to the ground," she said, "the Mother goes quiet in me." She pressed a hand to her chest. "Seven cycles she's the only one who spoke to me." "I know," Sylara said. "I owe you that silence. I'll stand beside you when it comes." Veska rose. "Decide fast," she said. "The die-off doesn't wait." The girl stood. She picked up the fallen skull she'd carried from the fire and held it against her body. "I'll feed the soil," she said. "Not for the elders. For the west." She met Sylara's eyes. "You open your door too late, seer. But you opened it." She had her yes. And with it, the day she must lead the girl to the soil, and end the only voice the girl had left.

The girl said yes at the pond. But yes was not a map. The die-off raced west while the rite moved slow, and Sylara did not know how far the death had spread. Feed the girl's voice into the wrong channels, and they would heal soil already dead, wasting the one gift the girl had left. Sylara needed the reach of the sickness before the rite began. She went to the vision grove to ask the only one who could see it whole. Silvaeth Dreamcaller waited by the altar, the map-etched relic pressed to her chest. She had prepared frost-grown shrooms once for the girl seven cycles ago, and one dose had gone wrong under her hands. She did not hide from it. "She survived," Silvaeth said first, as she always did. Then, after a beat: "But I will not split the frost dose again. Not with her. The rite comes tomorrow. Push her too far tonight and she has nothing left to feed the soil." "Then I go alone," Sylara said. "I need to see how far west the death runs. If I heal dead channels, I kill her voice for nothing." Silvaeth set the blue caps in the shallow bowl. "Alone, you may not return." She lit the smoldering flame beneath the altar. "But you're right. Blind, the rite fails anyway." She measured the dose with steady hands. It was the first steady thing Sylara had seen from her in cycles. Sylara took the caps. The purple spore sacs shimmered as she swallowed. The grove tilted. Silver-blue light poured through the carved bones above her, and the mycelial web spread out below her like veins under skin. She followed it west. Some threads pulsed, still living. Others hung gray and cold. She reached the tundra edge, where the sickness thinned. There. The death stopped short of the far channels. Three grids west still held life. If the rite began there and moved inward, the girl's voice would land on ground that could still take it. The web pulled at her. It wanted her deeper, past the edge, into the dead where no return waited. Silvaeth's hand closed on her arm and dragged her back. Sylara woke coughing on the luminous mat, the flame low, the girl standing in the grove entrance with the amethyst skull against her chest. "I saw the line," Sylara said. Her voice shook. "The death stops three grids short. We start there and heal inward. Not the dead channels. The living ones." The girl's glow steadied. "Then I know where to give my voice," she said. Silvaeth capped the bowl. "Dawn," she said. "She feeds the soil at dawn. We start west and work home." Sylara had the map now. She also had one night left before the girl's voice went into the ground and stayed there.

Sylara had the map. She did not have the ground. The girl's voice needed a consecrated circle to anchor it, a place where the soil could hold what she gave. No such circle waited in the western living channels. Dawn was already thinning the dark over the tundra edge. Sylara ran the last stretch with Silvaeth beside her, and there was no time left to build. They reached the far channels where the death stopped. Living soil, but bare. No stone. No ring of dream-fungi. Nothing to hold the girl's voice in place. "We can't consecrate raw ground in one night," Sylara said. "It takes days of rite." Silvaeth stopped walking. She pressed the map-etched relic to her chest and looked west, past the bare channels. "There is a circle," she said. She waited a beat, the way she always did before hard news. "An old one. Abandoned three generations back when the frost tide shifted the water. My teacher's teacher stopped tending it." "Is it still holy?" "I don't know. That's why I never spoke of it." Silvaeth turned and led them along the channel. She did not soften it. "If the stone is dead, the girl feeds her voice into nothing. We lose her for nothing." They found it in the thinning dark. A ring of dark volcanic stone, veined with faint silver light, cracked along one edge. Blue-capped dream-fungi still grew around the rim, their purple spore sacs glowing. Slender frost-bright saplings ringed the outside. The saplings were alive. The fungi were alive. Sylara knelt and pressed her palm to the stone. It was warm. Not dead. The mineral veins pulsed slow under her hand, still tied to the living channels beneath. "It held," Sylara said. "The fungi kept it awake." She looked up. "But it's cracked. It may not hold a voice this large." Silvaeth crouched and traced the crack with one finger. "Then we bind it now." She opened a Tacol container and spread frost-paste along the split stone. Sylara crushed dream-fungi spore sacs into the seam. Together they woke the old signs, chanting low, their skin rippling blue and green as the circle drank the light back into its veins. The crack sealed under the paste. The silver lines brightened, whole again. A seer moth drifted down from the saplings and settled on the center of the stone. Its six wings pulsed once, slow, then lifted away west. The girl arrived as the first light touched the tundra. She carried the amethyst skull against her chest. She stepped onto the stone without being asked and stood in the center. "The circle is ready," Sylara said. "This is where you give your voice." The girl looked down at the living stone. Her glow steadied. "Then begin," she said. "Before the light finds the dead channels too." Dawn broke. The ground was ready. The rite could no longer wait.

The girl stood in the center of the sealed stone. Sylara knelt at the rim, Silvaeth beside her. This was the moment every step had led to. If the rite held, the dead channels could heal. If it failed, they lost the girl and the answer both. Sylara set the last dream-fungi spore sac at the girl's feet. "When you're ready," she said. Silvaeth broke a fresh cap from the blue-capped cluster ringing the circle. She measured it with her eyes, then with her fingers. "This is enough," she said. "No more." She had lost a patient to a wrong dose once. She still led with the fact that they lived. Now her hands did not shake. She pressed the cap into the girl's palm. "Swallow it whole. Then lie against the stone and let the voice go down into it." The girl ate the cap. Her glow deepened from blue to violet. She knelt, pressed both palms flat to the silver veins, and lowered her forehead to the stone. Her breath slowed. The purple spore sacs around the rim pulsed brighter, in time with her. The silver lines in the stone caught fire under her hands and ran outward, down into the soil. Sylara felt it move. The living channels beneath the circle warmed against her knees. The girl spoke, but not in words Sylara knew. The sound went into the ground and did not come back. A seer moth lifted from the saplings and circled once. Then dozens rose behind it, their six wings flashing, drawn to the light bleeding up from the stone. "It's opening," Silvaeth said. She leaned close, watching the girl's chest rise and fall. "The channel is taking her voice. It's holding." Her own skin rippled green. "The web is drinking." The girl's glow dimmed. The violet drained from her skin to pale blue, then paler. Sylara reached to pull her back. Silvaeth caught her wrist. "No. She agreed to this. If you break it now, the soil takes nothing and keeps her half-here." So Sylara held still and watched the light leave the girl and pour into the ground. The silver veins ran out past the circle, into the bare western channels. Where they touched dead soil, faint threads of new glow answered. The healing had begun. It would spread from here, channel by channel, back toward the grove. The girl lifted her head. Her eyes were clear and empty. She looked at Sylara and did not tremble. "She's gone," the girl said. "The Mother. I can't hear her anymore." The voice that had spoken to her for seven cycles was silent now, fed into the roots. Sylara helped her stand. The soil was healing. But the girl who carried the question no seer had cracked could no longer ask it. The answer was in the ground now, spreading west, and Sylara did not yet know how to read it.