The winds that swept across Dawn's Seed had shifted.
No longer did they carry only the scents of pine, smoke, and sea-salt, now they bore something older. Earthier. A breath from the deep. Aruna stood at the ridge overlooking the village, her harpoon resting in her hand not as a weapon, but as a question mark. Below her, the valley still shimmered in its late-spring light. Children's laughter rose like birdsong, workers moved with quiet determination, and the crystalline tree, the heart of Lysara's seed, pulsed with a calm green glow at the center of the shielded circle. But beneath that peace, the land stirred.
Something had woken.
"It's not the Shadow Hunters," Dren had said two days ago, kneeling near a dead deer, its eyes wide with terror, its body twisted as though it had fallen mid-flee.
"This is something else. Something that hunts in silence."
Now, the silence was growing.
The tunnel beneath the Old Stones had become temperamental, its roots retracting one day, surging open the next. Mira had studied the carvings etched into the walls and warned that the network was alive, reactive.
"It's afraid," she'd said.
"Or angry. Or both."
This morning, the crystalline tree's light had dimmed.
And deep within Aruna, something primal stirred.
Seral approached quietly, her staff in hand, her robes marked with new spirals inked by the village shamans.
"The roots won't answer," she said, voice low.
"I've spoken the words of communion, offered salt and ash. The pulses come slower now, erratic. The forest is withdrawing."
Aruna didn't respond immediately. Her gaze lingered on the fields, where Kasim now led a team of workers reinforcing the wall with scavenged parts from fallen Shadow Hunter ships. Even Kael's Ridge Clan had grown nervous. Their scouts no longer went out past dusk. The trees had begun to whisper differently, no longer secrets, but warnings.
"We go down," Aruna said at last.
"Into the tunnels. Into the roots."
Seral's expression tightened.
"And if it's a trap?"
"Then we spring it on our own terms."
By nightfall, the team was assembled: Dren, Mira, Kael, Seral herself, and two of the Ridge Clan's bravest, Rosa and Bryn. Each carried more than weapons; they carried stories. And fear.
The tunnel's mouth breathed cool air against their skin as they descended beneath the earth. The vines no longer glowed with the gentle green light of Lysara's blessing, instead, they pulsed amber, then red, like veins under strain. The path narrowed, deeper than they'd ever gone. The previous chambers, the one with the crystalline roots, the cache of defense schematics, were now sealed. The forest had shifted its arteries.
"What is that smell?" Bryn muttered, holding a cloth to her face.
"Rot," Kael answered grimly.
"But not natural."
The air thickened as they moved deeper. Mira trailed her fingers along the walls, reading glyphs that had changed subtly since their last descent. The symbols were no longer just wave-forms and spirals, they curled into tighter patterns, mimicking jaws, coils, hunger.
"Something's feeding," Mira whispered.
"Not just on the roots. On the memories."
Aruna's stomach turned.
"Lysara's seed?"
Dren stopped suddenly, his body rigid.
"Wait."
They froze. A sound, faint but distinct, slithered through the tunnel. Not footsteps. Not water.
Breathing.
Not theirs.
Kael raised his spear, and Seral extended her staff, the etched symbols flaring to life in dull red.
Then the tunnel opened into a vast chamber none of them had seen before. It was as if they had stepped into the hollowed-out heart of the mountain. Roots spanned the ceiling like the ribs of some colossal beast, and at the chamber's center, pulsing slowly with dark light, was a black mass, like a flower carved of obsidian and night.
The Black Bloom.
Mira gasped.
"That's not Lysara's doing. That's something else, something the seed contained."
The bloom pulsed, once… twice…
Then it moved.
Tendrils of shadow coiled slowly outward, brushing the edges of the chamber. Where they touched the living root, the vine blackened, withered, and flaked to ash.
"It's feeding," Seral breathed.
"On the forest's heart."
Rosa took a step back, spear raised.
"We should destroy it."
"We can't," Aruna said sharply.
"Not without understanding it."
Dren was already scanning the walls, searching for signs, an escape, a ward, a control point. He found something instead: a mural, freshly revealed beneath a sheet of shedding bark. It showed two figures, one bearing light, the other a bloom of darkness. Between them, a tree. A choice.
"This isn't a mistake," Mira whispered, running her hand over the glyphs.
"It was planted. Deliberately. Contained. This is the hunger Lysara fought. The reason she sealed the valley."
Aruna stepped toward the bloom. It did not lash out. Instead, it pulsed again, slower now. Waiting.
"She left it here?" Kael asked, voice tight.
"Why?"
"To protect us," Seral said.
"But also to warn us."
The ground shook.
The bloom flexed, its tendrils curling upward like petals preparing to open.
"It's waking up," Dren growled.
"We don't have much time."
Mira pointed to a junction in the wall, a control node, similar to the one that had activated the original shield. But this one was fractured. The pulse circuits flowed erratically, like corrupted blood vessels.
"If I can reroute the current," she muttered, already pulling tools from her satchel.
"We can lock this chamber. Maybe starve it again."
"And if you fail?" Aruna asked.
"Then we all die with it."
The others formed a perimeter while Mira worked. Rosa and Bryn took the flank, Kael and Seral the rear. Dren stood beside Aruna, his harpoon now fitted with a shard of crystal scavenged from the tree above, an experimental blade designed to sever corrupted root.
As Mira worked, the bloom spoke.
Not in words, but in feelings. Pressure behind the eyes. Heat under the skin. Regret. Rage. Loneliness. A hunger not born of malice, but of emptiness.
It had been sealed too long.
Aruna staggered as images assaulted her mind, visions of Lysara herself, planting the seed, battling an ancient force not born of the Gate or Machine Age, but of the deep. A void born before language. Lysara had not killed it. She had buried it.
Because part of it was once human.
"Aruna!" Mira shouted.
"I need thirty more seconds!"
The bloom shuddered.
Roots buckled. A tendril lashed toward the team, Rosa shrieked as it caught her shoulder, but Bryn tackled her out of reach, slicing the tendril with her blade. Black sap sizzled on the stone.
Dren moved forward with Aruna, shielding Mira as she rerouted the energy lines, the control glyphs flickering erratically under her hands.
"We can't hold it," Seral yelled.
"It's breaking free!"
Aruna stepped forward. Not with weapon. With memory.
She remembered Lysara's voice, clear in the Tide, echoing through sacrifice.
"This world was never about conquest. It was always about choice."
The mural. The two figures.
Aruna raised her hand and stepped onto the root-laced dais before the bloom.
"I see you," she whispered.
"You were a wound once. Now you're trying to be whole."
The bloom hesitated.
The tendrils pulled back.
Behind her, Mira shouted,
"Now!"
Light flared from the node, green and gold, not red. The glyphs surged with a final pulse, and the walls responded. The roots of the chamber twisted inward, locking into place, forming a cage, not to destroy, but to contain.
The bloom pulsed once more, slower now. Less hungry.
Bound.
The chamber fell silent.
Mira collapsed against the node, panting.
"It's dormant. For now."
Rosa clutched her wounded arm, Bryn beside her, breathing hard. Kael lowered his spear, his face pale. Seral stepped to Aruna's side, eyes full of quiet awe.
"You reached it," Seral said softly.
"Whatever it was."
Aruna turned back toward the mural. The choice. The hunger. The roots.
"No," she said.
"I remembered what Lysara taught us. That we don't just fight what we fear. We understand it. And if we can't destroy the darkness, we bind it, with truth."
They made their way out slowly, Mira and Bryn supporting Rosa, Dren scouting ahead. The vines in the tunnel had softened in color, returning to green. The breath of the forest grew lighter again, no longer choked.
When they emerged into the night air, the stars burned bright over Dawn's Seed.
And the wind had shifted once more.
Not with hunger. But with warning.
Because the bloom's last message, faint but unforgettable, whispered through Aruna's mind as she stepped into the moonlight:
The roots remember. But the deep does not sleep forever.