The journey to the standing stones felt like walking into a gathering storm. With each step deeper into the Whispering Weald, the vibrant promise of spring curdled. The cheerful birdsong thinned, replaced by an eerie, watchful silence. The air, once carrying the scent of rain and life, grew heavy, tinged now with something else: the ozone crackle of impending lightning and the distant, ashen breath of fire. It was not a natural scent. It was the smell of a god's fury.
The Verdant King was not merely grieving. He was arming.
As Arrion broke into the cathedral glade, the change struck him with physical force. The space, still marked by the shattered monolith and the fallen ancient oak, was no longer a place of wounded majesty. It was a mustering ground.
The Verdant King stood at its center, and he had changed. Before, he had been a creature of profound, serene power. Now, he was a monument to escalating wrath. He seemed larger, his shoulders breaching the lower branches of the surrounding canopy, his coat of living moss and bark shimmering with an angry, emerald light. But it was his crown that stole the breath. The antlers of tangled oak and thorn were no longer just a grove; they were a fortress. The branches had thickened, grown cruelly sharp, each thorn a spike of hardened wood that gleamed like iron. Tiny, furious blooms of bioluminescent lichen pulsed with a rapid, warning rhythm, casting the glade in a throbbing, green-white strobe.
And he was not alone.
Flanking him, two of his stone-beast companions stood sentinel. Arrion had seen one before—the elephantine creature of root and rock. Now, there were two others. One was a massive, bear-like construct of granite and quartz, its maw a cave of glittering crystals. The other was serpentine, a coiled wyrm of basalt and shale, its body covered in spines like standing stones. They were not mere animals; they were **avatars of the land's memory**, geological fury given animate form. They towered over the oldest oaks, their sheer presence making the air vibrate with subsonic power. The glade itself seemed to be holding its breath, the very roots in the earth coiled tight with tension.
The King's great, amber eyes, usually pools of ancient wisdom, now glowed with a hot, radiant anger. They fixed on Arrion as he entered, and the weight of that gaze was no longer one of measured judgment, but of a commander assessing a soldier in a war he did not start.
Arrion approached, the aura of thunder and fire pressing against his Adept's senses. He knelt on one knee, not in supplication, but in formal report to a sovereign. He felt the eyes of the stone-beasts upon him, their patient, eons-old hostility a palpable force.
"King of the Weald," Arrion began, his voice cutting through the electric silence. "I bring word from the fringe. The sickness you feel… it is not chance. It is attack."
He laid it out with the precision of a scout. The successful hunt, the black blood, the rapid, intelligent rot that targeted life itself. He spoke of the roots, the systemic infection, and his own futile attempt to cleanse it. Then, he gave the sickness a name and a source.
"The hand behind it is mortal. A lord of the east, Marquis Lykos Ralke. He trades in souls and power with the corrupt shamans of the Drakespine peaks. He seeks my death for a secret my mother uncovered. Failing that, he seeks to destroy what shelters me. This blight is his weapon. A crafted poison, sown at the forest's edge during the winter, now awakened."
As he spoke, the ambient temperature in the glade seemed to drop. The pulsing light in the King's antlers flared brighter. The stone-beasts shifted, a grinding of continental plates that made the earth tremble.
When Arrion finished, there was a long, terrible silence. Then, the voice filled his mind. It was no longer the deep, resonant sound of root and river. It was the sound of a forest burning, of mountains cracking, of a timeless patience finally snapping.
YOU COME TO TELL ME WHAT MY ROOTS HAVE SCREAMED FOR WEEKS. THAT THE CANCER HAS A NAME. A HUMAN NAME.
The psychic words were scalding. Arrion flinched, not from fear, but from the sheer, undiluted outrage in them.
I HAVE WATCHED YOUR KIND. I HAVE ALLOWED THE QUIET ONES—THE HUNTERS, THE GATHERERS, THE ONES WHO LISTEN—TO WALK MY PATHS. I HAVE GRANTED BOONS. I HAVE SLEPT WHILE YOUR HIVES OF STONE AND AMBITION GREW. AND THIS… THIS IS THE FRUIT.
The King took a step forward, each hoof-fall a small earthquake. The stone-beasts leaned in, their forms blocking out the sky.
YOU TAKE NOT JUST THE DEER AND THE TIMBER. YOU TAKE THE IDEA OF THE FOREST. YOU BOTTLE ITS ESSENCE. YOU TRADE ITS SOUL. AND WHEN ONE DENIED YOU, YOU SEEK TO BURN THE WHOLE. THIS IS BEYOND AVARICE. IT IS A COSMIC CALLOUSNESS. A BELIEF THAT ALL EXISTENCE IS A COMMODITY TO BE CONSUMED, EVEN THE SACRED CYCLE OF DECAY ITSELF, WHICH YOU HAVE NOW PERVERTED INTO THIS… THIS ABOMINATION OF UN-LIFE.
The indictment was absolute. It wasn't just anger at Ralke; it was a damning judgment on the entire trajectory of human civilization—its empires, its forges, its relentless, hungry expansion. Arrion, in his black armor with his star-dusted sword, felt like the embodiment of that accusation.
"I do not defend him," Arrion said, forcing his voice to remain steady under the psychic onslaught. "I am his enemy. My family are his targets. But my people in the village… they are not him. They are the quiet ones. They will be the first to die when this blight reaches them, or when your wrath turns upon all humanity for his crime."
YOUR PEOPLE ARE OF THE HIVE," the King's thought boomed. "THEY BENEFITFROM ITS ORDER, ITS SAFETY. THEY ARE PART OF THE SYSTEM THAT BIRTHED THIS SERPENT-LORD. THEIR INNOCENCE IS A LUXURY BUILT ON A FOUNDATION OF ROT.
It was a brutal, ecological truth. Hearthstone existed under the protection of the Aethelian Empire, which turned a blind eye to the horrors in its marches. Their safety was indeed contingent on the very system that produced a Ralke.
"Then let their atonement be action," Arrion pressed, rising to his feet, meeting that blazing amber gaze. "My uncle mobilizes the militia not to fight you, but to guard the forest's edge, to keep more from stumbling into the sickness. Our priest spreads careful warnings, trying to prevent panic that would lead to fire and greater folly. We are trying to be the wall between the hive's sickness and your realm. We are trying to help."
HELP. The word was a psychic sneer, laden with the memory of a thousand broken treaties and clear-cut groves. YOU SEEK TO HELP THE HOST FIGHT A DISEASE IT CARRIES WITHIN. A FUTILE GESTURE.
"Is it?" Arrion shot back, a spark of his own defiance igniting. "You are preparing for war." He gestured to the towering stone-beasts. "You are gathering the very bones of the land to fight. Will you direct that war only at Ralke's holdfast, far to the east? Or will it be a war against anything that walks on two legs? If it is the latter, then you make his crime your own—you become the destroyer of the quiet ones, the 'un-making' you rage against."
The glade froze. The pulsing light in the antlers halted on a single, searing white flare. The stone-beasts went utterly still. The accusation hung in the air: that in its righteous fury, the King could become the very thing it hated.
For a long, terrifying moment, Arrion thought he had gone too far. That the geological wrath would simply erase him where he stood.
Then, the voice returned, quieter now, but no less terrible, cooled from fire to the deadly chill of glaciers moving.
YOU SPEAK WITH THE SHARP TONGUE OF YOUR FATHER'S LINE. THE WARDENS… ALWAYS STANDING ON THE THRESHOLD, JUDGING BOTH SIDES.
The King's head tilted. The fury was not gone, but it was now channeled, focused by Arrion's challenge.
YOU ASK FOR A SURGICAL STRIKE. BUT THE DISEASE IS NOT IN ONE MAN. IT IS IN THE PACT HE MADE. IT IS IN THE SOURCE OF THE POISON. THE THING THAT WHISPERS TO HIM FROM UNDER THE MOUNTAINS. TO CURE THE BLIGHT, YOU MUST BURN THE LABORATORY.
Arrion's blood went cold. The King was not talking about attacking Ralke's manor. He was talking about attacking the heart of the Drakespine Shamans' power. The source of the Glutton's influence. A direct assault on the metaphysical wound Kaelen Haelend had gone to mend.
"The shamans… and the thing they serve," Arrion said slowly.
THE GLUTTON-FROM-BELOW. THE ANTITHESIS OF THE SONG. IT HUNGERS FOR THE END OF GROWING, GREEN THINGS. THIS BLIGHT IS ITS SALIVA. YOUR MARQUIS IS BUT THE HAND THAT HOLDS THE VIAL.
The strategy was becoming horrifically clear. The Verdant King could not cure a crafted, magical disease with forest magic alone. He needed to sever the connection, to destroy the font of the corruption. And he intended to do it with an army of awakened mountains.
I WILL MARCH THE BONES OF THE WORLD TO THE DRAGONSPINES. I WILL CRACK OPEN THEIR PEAKS AND LET THE SUN BURN THEIR FOUL ALTARS. I WILL SEAL THE MOUTH THAT SPEWS THIS HATE.
"And Hearthstone? The blight spreading here, now?" Arrion asked.
THE SICKNESS IS A TENTACLE. SEVER THE HEAD, AND THE TENTACLE DIES… BUT NOT BEFORE ITS FINAL, WRITHING SPASM. THE FOREST HERE WILL SUFFER. YOUR PEOPLE WILL BE IN THE PATH OF ITS DEATH THROES. THIS IS THE COST OF THE HIVE'S SIN, AND THE PRICE OF ITS CLEANSING.
It was a death sentence, delivered with the cold finality of nature. The King would wage his apocalyptic war to save the concept of the forest, but the local forest—and the village within it—might be scorched earth in the process.
Arrion stood amidst the titanic preparations for a war of elements, a seven-foot giant feeling utterly small. He had come to warn a king and found a general already embarked on a campaign of total annihilation. He had sought an ally and found a force of nature that saw his entire species as a contagion, with a few, possibly redeemable cells.
The choice was no longer about hiding or fighting Ralke's assassins. It was about choosing a side in a war that would reshape the continent. Stand with humanity—flawed, complicit, and doomed to face the King's wrath—or stand with the forest, becoming an instrument in the destruction of his own kind's greatest atrocity, and likely his own home.
The air still crackled with fire and thunder, but now it was the sound of an inevitable, devastating dawn. The Verdant King had made his decision. Arrion Haelend now had to make his.