We stepped into the marsh.
The air thickened immediately, wet earth and moss clinging to the back of my throat, the smell of decay sharp and alive all at once.
“I don’t want to fight that stalk again,” I muttered, half to myself. The memory of it coiling around me, slow and deliberate and too intelligent, made my skin crawl. It had not shown its full strength last time. I was sure of it.
Briar led us deeper. Her boots found purchase on slick stones half swallowed by water, her fingers brushing the trunks of moss-draped trees as if greeting old friends.
“I felt it,” she said quietly, “when the world began to breathe again.”
Her voice carried through the mist, low and steady.
“It was like fire spreading through my vines… waves crashing through my mind… air filling my lungs, and earth anchoring my heart.”
She stopped and turned to face us. The light caught in her hair, streaks of silver and green like living roots, and for a moment, she did not look human at all.
“We forget something,” she murmured. Then she knelt.
Her hands sank into the mud and pulled free a vine slick with black sludge. It dripped between her fingers, thick and glistening like tar. She cradled it as though it were fragile, almost sacred, and whispered:
“Spirit.”
The word was barely more than breath, but it rippled outward like a spell the earth had been waiting to remember.
The marsh shivered.
A hum rose from the ground, not sound exactly but resonance, and light burst through the canopy in sudden, brilliant shafts.
The vines glowed faintly green beneath the mud. The water cleared where sunlight touched it. Even the stagnant air seemed to inhale, sharp and new.
All around us, the swamp began to shine.
“What are you?” I asked Briar because there was no way this was real.
Silence hung in the air for a long moment, heavy and stretching too far to be comfortable. I shifted on my feet.
Briar turned to me and said gently, “Alive.”
“Then you are doing it differently than I ever learned how,” I murmured.
We started walking again. Briar moved differently now, lighter, younger, as if the ground itself wanted to lift her. Castor stayed close, his hand resting at her hip as if she might float away if he let her go.
“Briar is something the Fates planned for,” he said softly, “but did not show the world until it was ready.”
I watched them as they walked ahead.
How can I exist in the same world as someone so blessed with life, someone so profoundly connected to the earth that it breathes with her?
I followed them, feeling small beneath the weight of it all.
How am I the one meant to save these people when they are so far beyond my comprehension?
Ami slowed her pace until she was beside me. “You have that glazed look in your eyes,” she said. “You okay?”
“Did you know she could have awakened the marsh at any time?” I asked, still watching Briar ahead.
“She could not before you found the shard,” Ami replied. “You shook the earth, and she gently told it to get up.”
I looked around the once-dank place where we stood. The air shimmered faintly, thrumming with life. The marsh was breathing again.
As we continued walking, a path stretched out before us. Gray stones lay out like a stairway. Large white mushrooms rose high into the air. Glistening purple flowers circled their bases.
If this is what awaits her return, what will it cost to bring her back?