Chapter 7The Weeping

The roots came fast.

Cressida grabbed the closest child—the girl who had screamed—and hauled her over one shoulder. Her chest screamed with her. The Sundering brand pulled tight, a line of fire across her ribs. Rafe lifted two of the others, one under each arm, and they ran.

The forest had become a snare.

Vines lashed at their ankles. Roots erupted from the soil, grasping. Cressida stumbled, nearly dropping the girl. Rafe caught her elbow, steadying her, and they plunged deeper into the trees.

Behind them, the ground rippled like water.

Kael's voice rolled through the air, distorted, layered with the rustle of leaves and the creak of bending wood. "You cannot outrun the land."

Cressida's lungs burned. Her bond to Rafe was a frayed thread, the Sundering brand still weeping blood through her torn shirt. The Heartbinding pulsed weakly, a dying ember in her chest.

They broke into a clearing.

A massive oak stood at its center, hollowed by age, its trunk split open like a doorway. Cressida didn't hesitate. She dragged the girl inside, Rafe following with the other two children. The hollow was dark, smelling of rot and dry earth, but it was shelter.

Roots slammed against the outside of the trunk.

Cressida pressed her back against the wood, gasping. The children lay in a heap on the ground, their chests rising and falling in shallow rhythm. The girl's lips were blue. Her pulse flickered like a dying candle.

"We can't keep running," Rafe said, his voice tight. He knelt beside the children, touching their foreheads. "They're fading. All of them."

"I know."

A light flickered in the corner of the hollow.

Cressida turned. Thorn materialized from the shadows, his form translucent, barely more than a glow. His edges rippled like heat haze. He looked at her with eyes that held centuries of exhaustion.

"The weeping willow," he said. "You know where it is."

"I dreamed of it," Cressida said. "A dark forest. A willow tree."

Thorn nodded. "It was the first guardian of the Thornwood. Before the clans, before the echo-bond. The land chose it as its voice." He paused, his form flickering. "A Rootbinding was performed against its will. It has been mad ever since."

Rafe's head snapped up. "The legend I mentioned. The bonded pair who became one with the land."

"That was no bond," Thorn said. "It was a prison. The ritual trapped the guardian's consciousness, twisted it into something that feeds on life force." He looked at the children. "Kael plans to use them as a vessel. He will merge the corrupted spirit with their bodies, creating a new guardian bound to his will."

Cressida's stomach turned. "How do we stop him?"

Thorn's light dimmed. "Sever the connection. Enter the spirit's domain and cut the children's lifelines before the summoning completes." He raised a hand, and a faint glow spread across the hollow's opening, sealing it. "I can hold this barrier for a short time. But Kael's corruption is deep. He will break through."

"How do we enter the domain?"

"The weeping willow's heart is in a hidden glade. The same glade from your dreams." Thorn's voice grew thin. "I will guide you as far as I can."

His form began to dissolve.

"No," Cressida said. "You can't—"

"I am only a whisper now." His smile was sad. "Your mother hid you so you could be here, Cressida. So you could choose differently than she did." He reached out, and his hand passed through her cheek like a breath of wind. "The spirit can be reasoned with. It was not always mad."

Then he was gone.

The barrier flickered.

Roots slammed against the hollow, and the wood cracked. The ground beneath them shuddered, and a chasm tore open, wide and dark, swallowing the children before Cressida could grab them.

She fell.

Darkness rushed past her. She heard Rafe yell, heard the children's bodies tumble through the air. Her hands grasped for anything, found nothing.

She hit the ground.

Pain exploded through her chest. She lay on her back, gasping, staring up at a sky that was wrong—too green, too close, the branches of the trees twisting into patterns that hurt to look at.

She pushed herself up.

The forest was the Thornwood, but not the Thornwood. The colors were too bright. The air hummed with a low, resonant tone, like a single note played on a string stretched too tight.

Rafe lay a few feet away, groaning. The children were suspended above the ground, their limbs limp, roots coiled around their wrists and ankles, pulsing with pale light.

And in the center of the glade stood the willow.

It was enormous, its trunk wider than the Heartwood's great oak, its branches cascading down like waterfalls of silver-green. Its roots spread across the clearing, pulsing with the stolen life force of Elara's children.

The ground beneath it was black.

A voice emerged from the tree, ancient and hollow, layered with the sound of rustling leaves and cracking bark.

*You come to join us.*

Cressida's blood went cold.

The willow's branches shifted, and she saw faces in the bark—twisted, screaming faces, carved into the wood by centuries of pain. The guardian's madness stared out at her from a thousand hollow eyes.

*Join us. Become part of the land. Forever.*

The roots began to move.