Chapter 9The Seed

The seed pulsed between them, sickly green light casting Cressida's shadow across the bone-littered floor.

“We destroy it.” Rafe's hand closed around her wrist. “Now. Before it takes root in you.”

“And then what?” Cressida pulled free. “We wander down here blind while Kael rips that boy apart?”

“My father thought he could control a corruption seed.” Rafe's voice dropped. “He held it for three minutes. By the time he let go, his mind was already fracturing. I buried him six days later.”

The chamber seemed to contract around them. Somewhere above, roots scraped against stone, a slow, hungry sound.

Cressida looked at the seed. At Rafe. At the three children huddled against the far wall, still comatose, their chests barely rising.

“I'm not your father.”

“No.” His jaw tightened. “You're worse.”

She should have felt the sting of that. Instead, she saw what he wouldn't say: *I can't lose you too.*

The seed whispered again, softer this time. *You hear the dead. You carry the cure.*

“Trust me,” she said.

Rafe held her gaze for a long breath. Then he turned, placing himself between her and the root-tunnel, his shoulders set.

“You have sixty seconds.”

She touched the seed.

---

The vision hit like drowning.

Cressida wasn't in the chamber anymore. She stood in a Silverwood glade, sunlight filtering through leaves that hadn't withered, air thick with the scent of blooming heather. A woman sat beneath an oak, her hands weaving roots into a cradle, her belly round with pregnancy.

Kael knelt beside her, young and whole, his face unlined by corruption. He kissed her temple.

“It will hold,” he said, touching the cradle. “Our daughter will be the first born in a healed land.”

The woman smiled, but her eyes held shadows. Echo-sickness. Cressida recognized it now—the way the bond bled through shifters who carried too much of the land's memories.

*You understand,* the seed murmured. *You carry the same weight.*

The vision shifted.

The glade darkened. The woman lay in a bed of moss, her skin gray, her breathing shallow. Kael wept over her, his hands pressed to her chest as if he could force his own life into her.

“I'll sever it,” he whispered. “The bond. The land. All of it. I'll burn it down if it means keeping you.”

*He loved her as you love him.*

The scene twisted again. Kael stood before the weeping willow, its branches heavy with faces—not screaming yet, just watching. He held a root in his hands, pulsing with green light like the seed.

“Take my bond instead,” he pleaded. “Take everything I am. Just let her live.”

The willow's branches curled around him. *The bond cannot be transferred. But it can be unmade. Help me unmake it all, and I will return her to you.*

*She won't be whole. She won't remember you. But she will breathe.*

The vision shattered.

Cressida gasped, her lungs burning. Roots wrapped around her ankles, pulling, scraping. Rafe's arm caught her waist as he severed them with a blade she hadn't seen him draw.

“Forty seconds.”

“I know where he's going.” She coughed, tasting earth. “The Heartwood's core. There's a hollow beneath the old Silverwood throne. The willow's first wound.”

Rafe's face went pale. “That's where the original Rootbinding was performed. Where the first guardian was bound.”

*And unmade,* the seed added, its voice now a thread in Cressida's skull. *Where you will finish what Kael started, or end it forever.*

She looked down. The green light had crawled up her forearm, branching like veins, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

“We have to move.” She grabbed the nearest child—a girl with Elara's dark hair—and hoisted her onto her back. “Kael's already there. He's going to use the boy to wake the guardian fully.”

Rafe lifted the other two, one in each arm, his muscles straining. “And then what? We fight a god with four dying children and a corruption seed living in your arm?”

“We stop him before he becomes one.”

The root-tunnel opened before her—she could *feel* it now, a winding path through the earth, lit by the seed's glow. She ran, and Rafe followed, the children's breathing ragged in her ears.

Behind them, the chamber collapsed, roots surging through the bone-littered floor, hungry and fast.

Ahead, the child screamed again.

Closer now.

And beneath that scream, a deeper sound: the weeping willow, waking from its long sleep, its voice a thousand throats singing in dissonant chorus.

*Join us.*

*Join us.*

*Join us.*

The green light on Cressida's arm pulsed once, bright and hot, and for a heartbeat, she saw the world through the seed's eyes.

Kael stood in a chamber of roots, the boy cradled in his arms, his face half-transformed into bark and moss. Above him, the willow's branches descended like a crown.

He was weeping.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered to the child. “But I would burn the whole world for her. You understand, don't you?”

The boy's scream cut off.

Cressida ran faster.