You know that saying, "be careful what you wish for"? Well, I had wished for help. And the Forest had responded with the botanical equivalent of a straitjacket.
The world had narrowed down to the cavernous voice of the Tree, a sound that scraped the inside of my skull like sandpaper.
"Now... settle your debt!"
Before I could argue that, technically, I hadn't signed any contract, the roots sprang into action. No longer motionless branches but serpents of hard, muscular wood. I felt the inexorable force of nature. They wrapped around my ankles, wrists, and chest, pinning me to the mossy floor with the delicacy of a butcher. I felt like an insect in a collection, waiting for the pin.
"Hey! A little gentleness!" I croaked, trying to wriggle free. It was like arm wrestling with a mountain. Spoiler: the mountain always wins.
Then, a thinner root, smooth as polished wood, rose from the tangle and gently settled on my forehead. It was cold; I felt a tingling spread from that point of contact throughout my body.
"You have taken an echo of my memory," whispered the forest, its voice now in stereo, coming from every fiber of wood around me. "Now, to pay, you must take everything!"
The root withdrew slightly and touched me forcefully.
The medallion on my chest became incandescent, but it didn't burn. It was a key turning in the wrong lock. Emerald green light exploded behind my eyelids, and I was ripped away from my body. No tunnel of light, no angelic choirs. Just a free fall into an ocean of sensory data.
The world vanished with a gasp.
It wasn't like the other visions. I was torn from my body and thrown into an ocean of alien perceptions. I had no eyes, but I "saw." I saw the auras of the people in the manor, faint will-o'-wisps in the darkness of the earth. I heard their conversations, not as words, but as vibrations in the ground, waves of emotion that propagated through the network of roots extending beneath every stone of the building.
I perceived Count Laurent. His aura was calm, a deep blue, but veined with threads of ancient sadness and cold, stubborn determination. I felt Lucien, the artist. His aura was a faint lavender, timid, almost transparent, but burning with an almost painful devotion whenever it approached that of the Count.
And then there was her. The Countess. Her aura was a whirlwind. A core of vibrant green, similar to mine, but unstable, frightened, which at times darkened into a stormy purple.
"Holy heaven!"
She was a Bearer! Powerful, but terrified of her own power, it was clear she didn't know how to control it.
Their emotions were a chaotic feast. I felt the Countess's fear clash with the Count's cold insistence. The object of their dispute was another aura, a point of intense, silent cold that Laurent held in his hand. Another Fragment. "It's to protect us," I felt the Count's thought, a wave of stubbornness that clashed against the wall of his wife's terror. "It's madness!" echoed her panic.
Time, for the forest, wasn't a straight line. It was a flow. The perceptions accelerated, a vortex of seasons and growing tensions. Then, everything focused on a single, terrible night.
I perceived the crowd gathering at the edge of the woods. A sea of red auras of anger and yellow of fear, incited by a single, disgusting black and poisonous aura that remained in the rear, enjoying the spectacle. Father Michel.
But before the crowd could move, the tragedy had already unfolded inside the manor.
I perceived the Count's study. I felt the Countess trembling, her aura a hurricane of panic. Laurent was in front of her, implacable, with that piece of darkness in his hand. He took one step too many toward her.
"Stop, you idiot!" I thought, screaming in my head. "Don't bring the torch near the gunpowder if you don't want to blow up!"
But he couldn't hear me. He raised the Fragment, perhaps to offer it, perhaps to calm her.
Bad idea. It was a fatal mistake.
The Countess's unstable aura only sought an escape route. Her aura showed no aggression, it was seeking an escape route for that unbearable pressure. And it found it in the object the Count was clutching. There was a resonance, a high-pitched hiss that made my teeth vibrate even in that incorporeal form. An arc of pure magical energy jumped from her chest to his hand, attracted like lightning to an iron point.
It wasn't a spell, but a dam collapsing under the flood. A rope stretched beyond its limit that snaps. A brutal and instantaneous crack. The Count's blue aura didn't even fight. It went out like a candle crushed by a hammer. His heart stopped before his body even touched the ground.
I felt the wave of frost that followed, a sudden and deadly silence. The Countess stared at her hands, pure horror painted on what remained of her aura. She had killed him... electrocuted with her own fear.
An explosion of pure pain hit me from another room. Lucien's lavender aura became a black hole of shock and agony. I felt him running, the vibrations of his steps shaking the floor. He burst into the study. I perceived his desperation upon seeing the Countess in tears over the Count's body, her Fragment fallen to the ground, pulsing with guilty energy. He had lost his "father" at the hands of the woman he loved.
In that moment of absolute pain, I felt him bend down. His weak aura touched the Countess's Fragment. And it was like throwing a torch into a powder keg. The raw energy of the Fragment, combined with his devastating trauma, tore him apart and remade him. His aura became a black vortex, a silent scream of pure suffering. He had become a Bearer!
That's when the crowd arrived. I felt the doors smashed, the screams, the sound of shattered glass. I perceived the blind fury of the village people, a red and confused wave, a stupid and disorganized force.
And then I saw him. Thomas. The innkeeper.
His aura was different. It didn't vibrate with the feverish rage of the rioters. It was cold, compact, a dirty yellow that tasted of bile and old coins. Calculating greed.
While the others destroyed for the sake of it, he moved like a shark in a goldfish bowl.
He entered the study. He saw the counts. He saw the opportunity.
The Countess was huddled over her husband's body, sobbing but paralyzed by shock. Thomas didn't hesitate, didn't waste time!
He stealthily approached from behind, grabbed her hair, and passed the knife across her throat with a sharp, professional movement, as if he were slaughtering a kid for dinner.
The Countess's green aura went out in an instant. Thomas ripped the pearl necklace from her neck while she was still sliding to the ground, into a dark pool that was spreading beneath her. A gesture so fluid it gave me chills.
Lucien saw everything!
He was on the ground, contorted by the terror of the transformation, but his eyes were wide open. I saw his lavender aura explode into a black of absolute horror as he watched the woman die like a slaughter animal.
Thomas noticed him.
"No witnesses!" the innkeeper snarled. The thought came to me clearly, a sentence of ice.
He approached Lucien. The artist tried to raise a hand, as if to protect himself, but Thomas struck him. A brutal thrust to the side, aimed to kill, followed by a heavy kick right to the face that sent him into darkness.
Believing him dead, the innkeeper bent down. He picked up the Fragment that was glowing near Lucien's inert hand. He pocketed it, wiped his blade on the young man's clothes, and disappeared into the chaos, leaving behind two corpses and a monster about to be born.
The vision ended. I was hurled back into my body with the violence of a fall. I was gasping, the cold, damp moss pressed against my cheek. I had the truth. All of the horrible, twisted, tragic truth. The Homme-Corbeau wasn't Laurent. It was Lucien. And his obsession wasn't for the Count, but for the murdered Countess.
"The debt is paid," said the voice of the forest, this time with a note that could almost be understanding. "You have seen. You have understood."
The roots withdrew, leaving me free. I was trembling, not just from the cold. I got up with difficulty.
"But there is another debt!" the voice added, and the tone was again that of a primordial judge. "That of the blood spilled on my land. And that one... he will collect it."
I turned around. On the other side of the cavern, a shadow detached from the tree trunk. It was almost three meters tall. An anthropomorphic mass of dark wood, rocks and moss woven together. It had only two slits of toxic green light where eyes and a face should have been. Its arms were gnarled branches that ended in sharp stone claws. It was a Golem. An Ent. A pissed-off vegetable bouncer.
It took a heavy step, and the ground shook beneath my feet.
It turned toward me. And for the first time since I had arrived down there, I wished I was back being chased by the wolves of the Silent Veil.
The Collector opened what looked like a mouth, a horrid gash in the bark, and emitted a sound that was the moan of a dying forest. "Run, little fire," the Tree whispered in my head.