The dream started with rain.
Lin Moyan stood in a clearing where silver-barked trees bent under the weight of a storm that wasn't water. Their leaves trembled as crimson droplets fell from the sky, pooling in the hollows between roots like liquid rubies. The scent of iron filled his nose—thick, metallic, unmistakable.
Blood rain.
A figure emerged from between the trees, her silhouette wavering like heat haze. Nyxara's ghost—or what remained of her—stepped forward, her feet leaving no imprint in the sodden earth. The roots that had consumed her in life now framed her face like a crown of thorns, their tips still dripping black ichor.
"They're coming."
Her voice wasn't sound but vibration, shaking the roots beneath Moyan's skin into resonance.
"The first song was a warning. The last will be a requiem."
Moyan tried to speak, but his throat filled with vines.
He woke choking.
---
Jian Luo's boot connected with his ribs. "Up, tree man. Village elder's calling a council."
Moyan spat out a mouthful of bitter leaves—he must have chewed them in his sleep again. The golden tracery along his arms burned faintly, reacting to the fading dream-memory of blood rain.
Haiyu stood in the doorway of their borrowed hut, her vine-twined wrist twitching. "Yuna found something," she signed. "Something bad."
---
The entire village had gathered around the ancient bloodvine at Green Hollow's heart. The massive creeper coiled around a stone plinth, its thick stems pulsing with slow, rhythmic contractions like a sleeping serpent. Normally dormant, its leaves now stood rigid, their serrated edges oozing crimson sap.
Yuna pressed her palm against the vine's shuddering trunk. "It woke before dawn," she said, her voice thin. "The last time this happened..."
"Was when the Wardens came," finished Liang, his grip tightening on his spear.
Fen squirmed between the adults, his small fingers brushing a droplet of falling sap. The moment it touched his skin, his pupils dilated into black pools.
"The rot-bearers return," the boy whispered—but the voice wasn't his.
Every villager stepped back.
Moyan moved without thinking, grabbing Fen's wrist. The moment their skin touched, the vision struck:
A fortress of living wood, its spires twisted into screaming faces.
Figures in silver-threaded robes kneeling before a sapling fed by blood.
Kainan's voice, warped and echoing: "Harvest the villages."
Fen collapsed into his arms, gasping. The golden roots in Moyan's chest flared in response, burning away the last traces of the vision.
Jian Luo's claws were out, his amber eyes scanning the tree line. "How many?"
"Three days' march northeast," Moyan said hoarsely. "At least twenty Wardens—but they're not right. Their roots are... wrong."
Haiyu's hands moved rapidly. "False Wardens. Like the thing in the creek."
Yuna began unraveling the prayer knots in her hair, an old mourning ritual. "They'll take the children first. The young roots are sweetest to their kind."
A murmur of terror swept through the villagers.
Moyan pressed his still-tingling palm against the bloodvine. The moment he made contact, the great plant shuddered, its oozing sap forming words on the stone below:
ROT BEARS ROT
BLOOD BREEDS BLOOD
THE CYCLE TURNS
Jian Luo snorted. "Cryptic plant nonsense. My favorite."
But Moyan understood. The roots beneath his skin thrummed with grim certainty. "They're not coming to conquer," he said quietly. "They're coming to feed."
---
Preparations began at once.
The village children were sent to harvest poisonthorn berries under Haiyu's watchful eye, their small hands staining purple as they crushed the fruit into paste. Jian Luo took the hunters to set traps along the northern path, his transformed senses catching scents no human could detect.
And Moyan?
Moyan knelt before the bloodvine as the sun dipped below the trees, pressing his forehead against its fever-warm bark. "Show me," he whispered.
The roots answered.
Visions flashed behind his closed eyelids—not the clear images from the Gardener, but fractured, frantic glimpses:
A silver seed splitting open to reveal teeth.
A Warden's mouth unhinging like a snake's to swallow a screaming child whole.
Kainan's face peeling away to reveal Nyxara's screaming visage beneath.
The bloodvine's final message came not as vision but sensation—a single, searing pain between his ribs where the Gardener's seed resided.
They're already here.
Moyan's eyes flew open.
The first scream came from the eastern fields.
---
Liang's daughter was the first casualty.
They found her suspended from an oak branch by thick, pulsating roots, her body cocooned like a spider's prey. The roots hadn't just restrained her—they'd grown into her, threading through her nostrils and mouth in grotesque imitation of the Wardens' silver scars.
Jian Luo cut her down with a single swipe of his claws. "Not dead," he reported, his voice tight. "But not alive either."
Moyan pressed a hand to the girl's chest. The golden roots in his arm recoiled at the touch—this corruption was different. Not the mindless hunger of the Abyss's remnants, but something calculated, intelligent.
Haiyu signed urgently: "They're testing us. Seeing what we can heal."
A rustle in the canopy.
Twenty pairs of amber eyes opened among the leaves.
---
The Wardens dropped like overripe fruit.
Their bodies hit the ground with wet thuds, limbs bending at impossible angles before righting themselves. They wore the tattered remains of silver robes, but their skin had gone gray and fibrous, their mouths stretched too wide by creeping root systems.
The lead Warden's jaw unhinged with a wet crack. "The Gardener's pet returns," it rasped. "How... convenient."
Moyan's golden scars blazed. "Kainan."
The thing wearing Kainan's face smiled. "Not anymore. Not since she showed us the truth."
She.
The Wardens attacked as one.
---
Battle in the dark was chaos.
Jian Luo moved like a shadow given claws, his transformed body cutting through corrupted Wardens with brutal efficiency. Haiyu's vines lashed through the air, her daggers finding throats and eyes with uncanny precision.
But for every Warden they felled, two more emerged from the trees.
Moyan fought differently. Where his blade struck, golden roots erupted from the wounds, burning away corruption like fire through parchment. But the effort drained him—each purification sent jagged pain through his chest, the Gardener's seed pulsing in warning.
Kainan watched from the sidelines, his head tilted like a curious bird. "You still don't understand," he called over the screams. "We're not enemies. We're the next step!"
A child's shriek split the night.
Fen.
Moyan turned just in time to see the boy dragged into the trees by glistening roots, his small hands scrabbling at the earth.
The Wardens melted back into the forest, their laughter echoing like rustling leaves.
Kainan's final words lingered like poison:
"Bring the Gardener to the heartroot by dawn... or watch the children become the first course."
---
The survivors gathered in the bloodvine's clearing.
Six villagers dead. Twice as many infected with the Wardens' corrupt roots. And Fen...
Haiyu's hands trembled as she signed: "They took five children. All under ten winters."
Jian Luo cleaned his claws on a dead Warden's robe. "They want a trade. The Gardener for the brats."
Yuna shook her head. "They'll take both. The old stories say children's roots make the sweetest grafts."
Moyan pressed his palms against the bloodvine's shuddering trunk. The answers had to be here, in the tangled history of Wardens and Gardeners and whatever Kainan had become.
The vine's sap flowed faster, forming new words:
THEY DRINK THE FIRST SONG
TO SING THE LAST
Jian Luo kicked the plinth. "More damn riddles!"
But Moyan suddenly understood. He looked at his own root-scarred arms, then at the infected villagers twitching on the ground.
"They're not just taking the children," he whispered. "They're harvesting their memories."
Haiyu's eyes widened. "The first song," she signed. "The one the Gardener sang when the world was young."
A cold certainty settled in Moyan's bones. Kainan's corruption, Nyxara's warnings, the bloodvine's prophecies—it all connected.
The Wardens weren't just feeding.
They were trying to rewrite history.
---
Dawn approached.
Moyan stood at the village's edge, watching the sky lighten to bruised purple. The Gardener's power hummed in his veins, restless and ready.
Jian Luo adjusted his clawed gauntlets. "This is a trap."
Haiyu nodded, her wrist vines coiled tight around fresh daggers.
Moyan touched the seed buried in his chest. "I know."
The bloodvine's final message played in his mind:
THE CYCLE TURNS
Somewhere in the dark forest, children were screaming.
Moyan stepped forward.
The trees swallowed them whole.