Eryshae

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Vael

Steel clashed in the distance. A child wailed. Someone cried out in the old tongue; a prayer or a warning. The Grove had descended into smoke and chaos.

And then the sound came. Not like thunder. Not like war horns. No. It began as a hiss. A low, ragged inhale through leaves that weren't rustling. Then it broke. A screech. Wild. Primal. A harmony of unmaking. As if a thousand raccoons had been cornered in a cathedral and were shrieking at the gods.

It tore through the Grove like claws on wet glass, rattling bones and vibrating the very air. Several people dropped to their knees. Some clutched their heads. Mira's vision blurred as her eardrums vibrated wrong, the pitch curdling her thoughts like spoiled milk.

The sky dimmed. The trees shook, not from wind, but from something underneath; roots rearing, trunks bowing, branches flailing in a frantic tremble of ancestral warning.

And then; a shadow above. Not cast by light. Cast by presence. Through the haze of firelight and garland smoke, a shape began to form high above the canopy. Not fully there. Not fully gone. Towering. Unknowable.

It resembled a raccoon. But not one that had ever walked this world. Its eyes blazed like lanterns, twin spheres of flickering ink and judgment. Its fur bristled like forests made of wire and mist. Every breath it took seemed to ripple the fabric of the world, as if existence were a pond and this creature had just stepped into its center.

Eryshae.

Somewhere in Vael's marrow, the word surfaced. And then came the voice. Soft. But it roared through every living body present. A whisper not carried by air, but by blood.

"Deus. We had a bargain."

The words bloomed in the back of her skull, bypassing thought and burning directly into meaning. All around her, people froze. Some wept openly. One of the rebels dropped his blade, eyes wide in terror, mouth foaming with ancestral fear. Her knees nearly buckled. The Eryshae Guardian had spoken, and it was not pleased.

Vael tried to breathe, but the air itself refused her lungs; thick with power, with memory. The Grove was alive now, not as a setting, but as a witness. She felt the history of her people churn through the ground, through the bones beneath the roots, through the glyphs etched into her own hands.

"Eryshae…" she whispered aloud. "You were listening." She turned to the dais. Sam was no longer Sam. He was a vessel. A breaking point. A question flung back at the world with no clear answer.

Sunflowers blinked light from his limbs. Vines lashed like panic. His skin was bark and bleeding light, his breath a furnace of ancient judgment. And Vael; Vael, the supposed bridge between the old world and the new; stood paralyzed beneath the eye of her Guardian.

And yet; Even as fear screamed through her bones, resolve followed. This was not chaos. This was truth. Laid bare. No illusions. No lies. The Guardian had come not to save them; but to witness what they had become.

Her fingers twitched. She could still act. She must. For Eryshae. For Sam. For the vow she made beneath a different sky, as a girl too young to wield power but too stubborn to yield it.

Vael lifted her head toward the great, terrible raccoon in the sky. "You said we had a bargain," she whispered. "Then let's keep it." And the Grove listened.

The Grove had no center anymore; only collapsing circles of flame and fear. Screams surged like waves. The rebel guards, still dressed in Auxiliary City uniforms, moved like phantoms, striking with precision. Their blades found throats, joints, and hearts with terrifying discipline. Trained assassins, not mere agitators.

One of Vael's personal guard fell, blood arcing across a sacred banner. Another staggered back into the ceremonial drums, snapping the hide skins and sending a low, final thrum across the grove.

A woman near the front tried to run. A rebel caught her by the braid and dragged her to her knees. Steel flashed. Vael moved.

She lunged down the dais, dagger in hand. Every step was a prayer. Every breath, defiance. She didn't need orders or tactics. She needed clarity. Fire. She needed;

A sound stopped her. Not the screech this time. Not the Guardian's voice. But a second arrival. A rumble that split the horizon.

The raccoon-shaped Guardian of Eryshae turned its bristling head skyward; and stilled. Above them all, through the canopy and through the very barrier between seen and unseen, Deus emerged.

A Treant so vast it eclipsed the moon. The Grove bowed in silence. Leaves curled. The trees themselves knelt, or tried to, their limbs cracking under the weight of old reverence.

Deus was not just a creature. He was an epoch. Judgment incarnate. Crowned with antlered branches. Bark veined with solar fire. Roots that touched the bones of mountains. He dwarfed the Guardian. And when he spoke, the world trembled.

And then, he began to shrink.

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Solar bark contracted, creaking like glaciers. Roots retreated into the ether. His horns softened, branches curling inward, the titanic frame compressing down, folding and folding into itself. Light dimmed to shimmer. Fire cooled to glow. Until there, amid curling moss and silence, hovered a figure no larger than a hand. Winged and radiant, but still unmistakably Deus.

The fairy-like god turned his gaze on Eryshae. His glow pulsed once, as though inhaling her presence.

"The bargain will be upheld."

The words weren't screamed. They were declared, like a new law being carved into the spine of creation.

"And my heir… will suffer the consequences."

Vael froze. She turned toward Sam; no longer Sam; but a storm of vines, goldleaf bark, and flickering sunflower-eyes that glowed like miniature suns. And that's when she saw him. A rebel. Still in Auxiliary uniform, creeping through the chaos with methodical grace.

Behind Sam. A spear in hand and designed for only one purpose. Vael screamed. "SAM!"

But it was too late. The spear pierced his back; just below the shoulder blades; and sank deep into the wooden core of his heart.

The Grove screamed with him. The light from his sunflower-eyes flared; then shattered into streaks. His roar split the earth. Vines lashed outward, snapping trees in half. The dais cracked. The chalice exploded, splinters of bark and amber scattering like glass made of bone and sun.

And still, above it all, Deus watched. Unblinking. Unforgiving.

"He bears my root. And so, he bears my debt."

The Grove buckled. And Sam fell to his knees. Vael didn't think. She screamed his name; raw, primal; and ran. Her ceremonial cloak tore against the bark-strewn ground as she leapt down from the dais, feet catching in broken roots and shattered offerings.

The spear still jutted from Sam's back. The air around him was frenzied, pulsing with wild, sentient growth. Vines lashed in a blind fury, snapping from his limbs like serpents of grief and rage. One ripped through the canopy. Another struck the stone altar and shattered it like chalk.

The rebel in the guise of an Auxiliary city guard lunged again, dagger raised. One of Sam's vines swung around; fast, brutal, precise and cleaved the man in half. There was no pause. No mercy. Only the sound of wet bones and crushed armor.

Vael reached him; Sam, not the thing he was becoming; and dropped to her knees, heedless of the blood, the roots, the earth splintering beneath them.

He was sinking. His limbs spasmed. The golden glow from his chest flickered erratically, like a dying star behind bark-ribbed armor. His skin; what was left of it; had become a lattice of living wood and curling sunflowers, their burning eyes now dimming one by one.

And then he looked at her. Clarity broke over his expression like sunlight parting stormclouds. His eyes; his human eyes; surfaced beneath the glow. "Vael," he rasped, the word shaped by splintered lips.

Then, slowly, trembling, he lifted one hand. A vine slithered back. The golden threads along his forearm pulsed once; And he cupped her cheek. His thumb brushed her skin, leaving a faint smear of sap and light.

She leaned into it instinctively. Tears welled. Everything in her screamed to hold him, to shield him from the weight of gods and traitors and trees that remembered too much.

But she couldn't save him. Not from this. "Sam…" she whispered, voice cracking. His lips parted. He started to speak again. But the light in his eyes went out. His body gave a final shudder. And then he collapsed. The vines stilled. The Grove fell silent.

Even Deus, towering above in his tiny fairy form, said no more. Only the wind remained, carrying the scent of cut roots, spilled blood, and sunflowers burned from the inside out.

The sky cracked with stillness as Deus unfolded into his massivetreant form. The wind had stilled. The fighting dulled to background panic. All eyes turned skyward.

The colossal form of Deus; a towering Treant wreathed in stormlight and crowned in sunlight; loomed above the Grove, his shadow falling like dusk across the blood-slicked grass. He dwarfed the raccoon-shaped Guardian of Eryshae, who stood rooted in the sky like a memory made flesh.

Then His voice came. "Eryshae," Deus boomed, his voice cracking clouds and rattling ribs, "has the bargain been upheld?" The words weren't a question. They were a judgment.

Vael's hands shook. Her knees sank into the earth beside Sam's fallen body, his head cradled in her lap, his golden glow flickering into silence. Her tears hadn't fallen yet; not because she didn't feel them, but because they burned too hot to be liquid.

She lifted her head, fury burning through her veins like wildfire. "Do something!" she screamed at the heavens. "Save him! You call him heir; you let this happen! He trusted you!"

Deus did not look down. He didn't even blink. He stared only at the Guardian. Waiting. Unfeeling. The Eryshae Guardian; less massive, but somehow just as ancient; nodded once.

Not slow. Not fast. Just… final. Her voice was soft, but it struck through the air like a root splitting stone: "Yes. The bargain has been upheld." A quiet fell over the Grove. No victory. No relief. Only a pause.

And in that silence, Vael trembled; caught between divinity and despair, between the scream trapped in her throat and the heat of Sam's fading form in her arms.

The air buckled.

Not with heat.

Not with wind.

But with weight; the unbearable mass of presence folding back into whatever realm it had bled from. Deus turned. Not with grace. Not with cruelty. But with the ancient indifference of something older than law and too vast to care.

Each step he took through the clouds cracked the fabric of the sky. Tree-shaped shadows followed in his wake like an eclipse turned inward. Where his branches stretched, the sun dimmed. Where his roots pressed through air, the wind groaned like a grieving god.

He didn't look back. Not at the Grove scorched and screaming. Not at Vael cradling the broken form of his heir. Not at the Guardian of Eryshae, whose glowing eyes watched him with unreadable calm. He simply walked; into the stormlight. Into the silence. Into the unreachable. And as his final footstep fell upon the horizon, the earth shook, not in anger…

…but in absence.

The bioluminescent pulse that had danced along Sam's wooden skin faded with the echo of his father's retreat. The golden glow dulled to embers. The sunflowers that had bloomed across his body drooped, their petals blackening at the edges.

The Grove exhaled.

Long.

Low.

And mourning.

Above, the Eryshae Guardian slowly lowered her head. The flickering raccoon-form shimmered; less spectral now, more smoke than light. As if she, too, was growing thin beneath the weight of what had passed.

Vael stared upward, breath ragged. "He was your heir," she whispered. The Guardian said nothing. Not with words. Only with silence that wrapped around her like a shroud.

Vael looked down at Sam's face. His hand had fallen from her cheek, fingers splayed in the moss. She reached up and took it in both of hers.

Held it to her chest. Her shoulders shook; but no sob escaped her lips. Only silence. Only rage, sharpening into something colder than grief. This wasn't how the Solstice was meant to end. He should've been laughing. Teasing. Holding a glass of honey-wine and arguing about cake flavors.

Not lying here; bent and burned, half-tree, half-boy, whole-hearted fool. She clenched her jaw, fingers tightening around his. You gave them everything, Sam. Your wonder. Your truth. Your light. And he; she looked skyward, at the vanishing echo of Deus; he called you "heir"… and still let you fall. Her breath trembled, but her voice, when it came; if only in her mind; was steel:

Then I will rise for you. I swear it, my love. Even if I must burn through gods.