Vess'ri POV
Vess'ri had been torturing and weakening Ve'ris for hours. Time was running out.
This was her operation. Her risk, her idea, her little heresy. If she could make the headmistress renounce her faith, the victory would be hers. If not, she still had three exit routes out of E'nathyr—three carefully prepared.
Her mother would call them "stupid." Vess'ri preferred "ambitious."
Poisons, hallucinogens, blasphemous illusions—nothing had shaken Ve'ris' core. The older drow trembled, voice hoarse from overuse and lack of water, but her faith sat at the center of her like bedrock.
It was infuriating. It was also, in a twisted way, impressive.
Fine. If she couldn't break Ve'ris' will, she would wake something older than doctrine, one that had been created by the Orchid Goddess.
The weakness of all corrupted races: a buried thirst for the light they could never have.
The ritual chamber was a small cavern below an Orchid safe shrine, carved out of the stone long before the cult took it. No cracks to the surface, no natural light—just packed walls, sweating chill, and the circle Vess'ri had grown.
Ve'ris knelt bound on a low stone slab. Pale orchid roots held her wrists and ankles. They didn't cut; they clung, warm and faintly alive, pulsing in slow rhythm like a second heartbeat.
Vess'ri had stripped her down to simple under-robes. Not out of cruelty or humiliation—she had no interest in that—but because fabric got in the way of sigils and sap.
Above the slab, a mirror-disc floated near the ceiling, its surface showing a stolen fragment of sky—too bright, too blue for cavern eyes. Vess'ri had captured it during one of the rare moments when the cloud cover over the surface cracked. The disc bled the memory down as a thin beam that fell across Ve'ris' face and chest.
Even that made her flinch.
Corrupted flesh remembered exactly what sunlight could do.
"Look at you," Vess'ri murmured. "Transcendent, headmistress, pillar of the Queen's faith—and one patch of fake sky has you twitching like a nervous fungus."
Ve'ris' eyes were pinpricks inside bloodshot whites. Sweat and spore-dust clung to her skin. The muscles in her jaw jumped each time the light intensified even slightly.
"I… serve the Mushroom Queen," she croaked. "You will not—"
"Yes, yes." Vess'ri waved a hand. "You serve. Everyone serves. Let's see what the part of you that doesn't care about liturgy has to say."
She held a droplet of golden sap over Ve'ris' heart. It glowed with the same false daylight as the disc above, condensed so thickly it felt heavy on her fingertip.
"You were born under rock," Vess'ri said. "You've never seen the real sun. But your ancestors did. Their marrow went into yours. It remembers."
She pressed the sap to Ve'ris' sternum.
It sank in without a mark. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then faint lines of plant-gold luminescence bloomed under Ve'ris' skin, tracing along veins, nerves, bone. Not bright enough to light the room, but enough that Vess'ri saw them clearly when the thin beam from the disc hit just right.
Ve'ris' breath hitched. The air hadn't changed—still cold, damp, thick with spores. But her shoulders tightened as if something in her had suddenly decided this air was not good enough.
Good.
Vess'ri began to chant.
The words were old surface prayers to long-eaten gods, spliced with orchid-names and twisted invocations. With each phrase, the golden lines spread—up Ve'ris' throat, into the hollows behind her eyes, down into the muscles of her back.
Ve'ris' neck strained, trying to put her face fully into the beam. Her muscles trembled between two instincts: flinch from light, reach for warmth.
Around the slab, the mushroom circle responded. Half the caps glowed with the steady, cold ghost-light of the Mushroom Queen. The other half slowly angled toward the beam, stems lengthening in patient, greedy arcs.
Plants in the deep, suddenly remembering they were plants.
"Too bright?" Vess'ri asked softly, not interrupting the rhythm of the chant. "You can't stand it, but you can't look away."
Ve'ris' fingers clenched around the orchid roots. Her lips moved.
"I… serve…" she rasped, the word catching and grinding in her sore throat. "…the Queen."
Of course she did.
Grooves that deep were not erased in one night. Vess'ri didn't need erasure. She needed a crack.
She changed the cadence of the chant, shifting into the final phrases that would bury the thirst deep, under habit and prayer. There it would wait. Irritate. Grow.
The stone shuddered.
It was subtle at first. A slow, deep roll ran through the floor, like a giant turning over in its sleep beneath E'nathyr. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, smearing the false sky on the mirror-disc for a heartbeat before the illusion smoothed.
The mushroom-lamps in the corners flared, then clamped their caps tight. Spores thickened in the air with a sharp metallic tang.
Spore storm.
The Mushroom Queen's temper.
Vess'ri's lips thinned. Of course the goddess was throwing a fit. Of course her mother had prayed for help the moment she realized her headmistress was missing. Of course Vess'ri's little project had gotten the Mushroom Queen's direct attention.
The fungus-runes around the door flickered from steady green to warning amber. Outer wards being tested. Found.
She tightened the orchid roots around Ve'ris, raising them into a low braided wall.
"Stay with me," she said. "Ignore the tantrum."
Ve'ris' eyes rolled, trying to track something only she could sense—the queen's pulse in the stone, maybe. The golden lines under her skin glowed brighter in answer, conflicted and beautiful.
The wards didn't just flicker this time.
They screamed.
The door blew inward in a blast of shattered wood and boiling spores.
Xalianthra stepped through, Haet'Ra black robes stitched through with thin, burning threads of mycelium. Spore-light clung to her hair like a crown. Power crawled across her shoulders in hair-fine lines, the Mushroom Queen's favor humming just under her skin.
Her eyes swept the room once—Ve'ris, the circle, the false sun—and locked on Vess'ri.
"Of course," she said. Her voice only shook on the first word. "Orchid tricks and treason."
Jacob slipped in behind her, sword already drawn, undead in quiet formation at his back. Spore-dust streaked his clothes; something had cut his sleeve earlier, leaving a thin line of dried blood against gray skin. Veythra's storm didn't care whose work it bruised.
He scanned the chamber like someone counting exits, threats, assets. Council dog, doing exactly what he'd been told: retrieve the headmistress, support the Matron, suppress the cult.
"This is my operation," Vess'ri said, letting the chant drop to a hum. "You're interrupting something very delicate."
"You are playing with light in the Queen's soil," Xalianthra snapped. "Using the headmistress as kindling."
"She was already kindling," Vess'ri said. "I'm just changing what she burns for."
Jacob's gaze flicked to the circle—the leaning mushrooms, the split colors crawling through Ve'ris' aura, the beam pinning her face.
"Can you stop it?" he asked Xalianthra.
"I can kill everyone in this room," she said. "The ritual is another matter."
On the slab, Ve'ris made a small sound. Her eyes, raw and wet, blinked past them all, following the beam up to the cracked illusion.
"Sky…" she whispered. The word was hoarse and wandering, like a child's.
Xalianthra flinched. Ve'ris did not say things like that. Not in front of Jacob. Not in front of anyone.
Vess'ri smiled.
"See?" she said softly. "She remembers. Your Queen never quite scrubbed it out."
The wards were collapsing. Other patrols would be on the way. Vess'ri wouldn't be allowed to finish the ritual, but she could decide what shape it froze in.
She snapped a different final word than she'd prepared—a binding that tied the magic into a knot instead of sealing it clean.
The light faltered, then steadied. The mushrooms relaxed, but their stems stayed angled toward the mirror-disc, as if they'd grown that way.
Ve'ris sagged in her bonds, chest heaving. The golden lines dimmed, retreating deeper, but did not vanish. The orchid mark over her heart was gone, leaving only a faint pale ring.
Xalianthra swore in the old moon tongue.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
"Gave her options," Vess'ri said. "She'll still serve your Queen. She'll still teach your doctrine. But when she closes her eyes…" She pointed up. "…she'll want something else."
Jacob's jaw tightened. He recognized "something else" when he heard it. He'd seen it before—in soldiers who'd stared too long at the surface, in slaves who'd imagined the ocean.
"By order of the Matrons," he said, falling back on the script that kept his life simple, "Ve'ris goes back breathing. You're supposed to go back breathing too, apprentice—if they still believe you're just reckless."
Vess'ri's laugh was short and sharp.
"Not today."
She had no way past the blockade with teleportation or space-folds; the council would feel any serious displacement instantly. The net around E'nathyr was too tight for clever magic.
So she used something smaller and less clever.
Her fingers slid into the hidden pocket in her belt, closing around a warm glass bead the size of her thumbnail. A faint, rhythmic glow pulsed inside.
Sunseed.
"Last chance," she said. She wasn't sure if she meant it as an offer or a farewell.
"Don't," Xalianthra warned, already moving, already raising a ward.
Vess'ri crushed the seed against the floor.
The cavern erupted in white-gold light.
It wasn't a fire. It was pure, concentrated brightness punching outward in a perfect sphere. Mushrooms slammed their caps shut, spores detonated in startled clouds, the false sun on the ceiling shattered into a rolling spray of fractured sky. Every shadow vanished at once.
Jacob swore and flung his arm over his face. Xalianthra's prayer-threads flared frantically, runes popping into existence across her robes, but they'd been woven for spore storms and mycelial backlash, not for this.
Vess'ri's vision turned yellow instead of white; the thin smear of alchemical sap she'd applied to her eyes before the ritual did its work.
The bang followed the flash: a deep, physical shock that rattled the stone. Two undead toppled. The doorframe shed a line of dust and cracked a little wider.
For a handful of heartbeats, the room was all noise and afterimages.
Vess'ri didn't waste them.
She flung herself sideways, rolled behind a half-collapsed support, and grabbed a rough stone nub disguised as dead fungus.
She yanked.
Ancient Haet'Ra brickwork groaned. A narrow maintenance slit in the wall shivered and opened just wide enough for a slim drow to squeeze through. No magic, no divine flare. Just old smugglers' work, cutting behind official passages, forgotten by everyone except those who read the wrong maps on purpose.
"Jacob! Don't let her—" Xalianthra began.
"I can't see!" he snapped back. His stance never left the space between Xalianthra and Ve'ris, sword up, body angled. "You want me swinging blind at walls, or keeping your headmistress alive?"
It was the correct council choice. Protect the asset first. Secure the Matron. Contain the scene.
By the time the worst of the flash burned off his vision, leaving streaks and ghost shapes, the slit was already grinding shut again. All that remained of Vess'ri was the sharp, floral tang of crushed orchid and a few petals caught in the crack.
She was gone.
Silence returned in uneven layers: first the ringing in their ears faded, then the last spores settled, then the mushrooms' light inched back up from jittery dim to something like normal.
The mirror-disc hung cracked and dull on the ceiling. The beam of sky was gone. In its place was only bare stone.
Xalianthra crossed the ruined circle in three quick steps and went straight to Ve'ris. The orchid roots had loosened with the ritual's end; Jacob cut them in two, catching the headmistress as she slumped forward.
Up close, the damage was clearer. Sporelight traced familiar pale patterns over Ve'ris' skin—Veythra's quiet claim. Under that, Xalianthra could see faint hairline threads of a different glow radiating from the sternum, thin as roots finding new rock.
"Ve'ris," she said quietly. "Who do you serve?"
For a moment, there was only the rasp of Ve'ris' breathing and the drip of cave water somewhere behind the walls.
"I… serve the Mushroom Queen," Ve'ris whispered at last.
The words were correct. The rhythm was perfect. Any listening acolyte would have wept in relief.
But her eyes were not on Xalianthra. Not on Jacob. Not on the ruined circle.
They drifted upward, toward the cracked mirror-disc and the dark stone beyond it, as if following a light only she could still see. Her fingers twitched weakly toward the ceiling, then curled on Jacob's sleeve instead.
Xalianthra's mouth thinned.
"Get her down," she said. "Carefully."
Jacob obeyed, easing Ve'ris off the slab and onto his shoulder, shifting her weight with the practiced care of someone who had been ordered not to drop the important priestess. He did not comment on the strange glow under her skin. That was above his pay grade.
"And if the council asks what we found?" he said, because someone had to say it.
"We found an Orchid cult den," Xalianthra replied. "A half-finished ritual. A loyal headmistress rescued in time."
She didn't mention golden lines, or roots of light, or the way Ve'ris' gaze kept losing focus somewhere above their heads.
"For the council," she added after a heartbeat, "that is enough."
She didn't say for whom it wasn't.
Under Xalianthra's hand, Ve'ris shivered—caught between cold spores and a buried warmth that had nowhere to go. The Mushroom Queen's presence still hummed in the stone, angry and possessive, but that other pull Vess'ri had planted was there too, small and stubborn.
Jacob felt it only as tension, as the way Ve'ris' body kept wanting to lean in strange directions. He adjusted his grip, muttering something practical about stairs and patrols and getting out before the Orchid cult regrouped.
Above them, the city shook again as the spore storm raged through tunnels and shrines.
Xalianthra looked once at the cracked mirror, once at the leaning mushrooms, once at the faint ring on Ve'ris' chest where an orchid petal had dissolved.
"Move," she said at last.
They left the chamber behind: the twisted circle, the broken sky, the sharp fading scent of crushed orchids. Spores swirled in their wake, carrying the last traces of Vess'ri's work into the city's lungs.
Far above, in corridors still intact, mushrooms trembled under the spore storm. A few caps—just a few, barely noticeable—tilted a fraction more toward old cracks in the stone where air from the upper levels filtered down.
They, too, had remembered something.
And Ve'ris, head lolling against Jacob's shoulder as they climbed toward the academy, dreamed of blue without knowing the word for it.