Taigan flew until he found the wolves, where they had said they would be. Taj was feeling weak and more tired than ever, and Taigan knew he should not change himself again today. He landed, and held his arms out to Taj, who, for the first time since they had bonded, scratched him on landing. He held him carefully to his chest. If Rosalea cannot help, I am not sure…

He did not think it. The wolves looked at him with worried eyes. “Where is Rosa… Nadia?” Bazil asked.

“She’s taking on the… Moryshin, I guess, or a monster. She doesn’t know what to do, so she sent me to find you.”

“Where is your horse?” Nakai asked.

“I had to leave him. I need to go get him.”

Nekana looked at her battered family. She was the only one not hurt. Just her, and the two pups, Nauru and Miri, and she could not take pups into battle. Bazil was the least hurt. Taigan could see trying to sort all of this out.

“I think… you should all come, even if it is a little slower. Even though I came straight here because I knew where you would be, and even though I flew as hard and fast as I could, it has still been almost a quarter of an hour for me to reach you.”

She hesitated. “It is somewhat in the hands of the Gods, as it has always been,” Nekana breathed out. “Where is your horse? Bazil? How much of your shadow-walking magic do you have left?”

***

Rosalea stubbornly pulled on the link between them. “It’s not possible,” she said, “I am not even human.”

“Stop pulling on me, and let me do what I please. I have earned this. I am doing both of us a favor. Pull again, I will pull on you.”

Rosalea did not obey. She pulled on him. The people couldn’t even run away, even if they wanted to. She didn’t condone what they had done, but she did not feel they deserved to be simply massacred over what they had somewhat been made to do. “No, you tell me why I am the One somehow still.” She pulled hard, dragging him to a stop.

She was looking at a young boy. He had brown hair, blue eyes, he was holding his arms out to her. She was… his liana. This… hadn’t happened yet. It was going to happen.

She didn’t fall out of the vision, the bond between her and the monster was being pulled back, just like he had promised. She felt herself mentally and physically sliding toward him. She tried to back away, but he was a lot more skilled at manipulating connections between living things than she was. “Here, I will show you how to destroy a legacy correctly. Then you can go on to be a piece of a broken God.”

***

Beryn watched the thing approach, stop, wherever it stopped, death seemed to fall off it in congealed blobs and soak into the earth, killing any plants already there. There was a horrible quiet in the forest. Carnelian is not answering. I do not think she will come, she thought. There was that black wolf, which seemed to be trying to stop the monster from approaching them.

But, before her eyes, the wolf seemed to slide forward. The thing of bones seemed to consume it, and it vanished from sight.

From there, it walked toward them. The pace looked slow, but each stride was long. It also didn’t seem at all deterred by the defenses that they had set up. It walked up the earth, and the spikes and vines died. “Open fire!” she called to her men, and they sent hails of arrows down on it. Several struck to it. It didn’t even flinch.

“Evacuate everyone to the far side of town. Send someone to try and leave. If you can leave, leave. Pick up anyone locked up by the ownership spell and move them.”

Far side of town to do what? Wait for our imminent demise? She tried to call for Carnelian, but still there was no answer.

She choose her spot she was going to stand her ground. She grew out the vine on her neck, and she summoned flames along it, and she waited.

Forever, also not long enough, passed her by. The menacing creature made its way over the wall. But stopped, looking down at her.

“Are you the one who broke your promise?”

The question sounded like it was somehow in her head, and also like she was hearing it aloud. It had two voices, a male and a female.

“What promise?” she asked. At this point, she would be willing to do anything, try to keep any promise she could, to buy them time, to save the people that were trapped here, to get Carnelian to come back and help them, or at least adjust the perimeters of the spell.

“Elf-girl promised me, no hurting us or the woods…” the thing stamped on the wall.

It is clearly much too late for that. “I am sorry, I remember the promise now, and we will not hurt the woods or anyone else again.”

She had no idea if she could keep that promise. Carnelian could come back and demand anything.

“You forgot,” it fixated on her word choice. “My children have died, and you forgot.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It came down off the wall at her. She flicked fire at it with her vine, not sure it would do anything at all.

But it was the first thing she had seen slow it down. The light burned at the shadowy substance off of it, exposing more of the bones. It wouldn’t move again until it recovered. I guess now, I see how long I can go, she told herself with a deep breath.

***

Rosalea was aware she’d lost track of herself in Jahra after he pulled them together. She was wandering connections between mystics. Connall was still alive. That was unfortunate. She couldn’t find the ones to her family. Was it because they had left the bounds of the forest? If so, they did not immediately lose their mystic magic or voices.

She started to understand, by searching through Jahra’s knowledge, more about how the bonds worked.

I guess, if that boy is supposed to be… my human liana… what a weird thought. She only found out she was not a human this morning. She felt an impulse to collapse in on herself, pretend she wasn’t here, and just let Jahra do… whatever it was he was doing. Only the thought that she could perhaps be with her real mother… her real siblings. They had been kind to her before they knew who she was. Would it be that much more meaningful now? She wished she had not run away, and she was sure she owed Nauru a thousand treats and cuddles for it, and she had a lot of guilt.

If she could get out. So, if that is really my future, then, this creature is right. Either there is a plan for my replacement, or this forest really has always been doomed. Maybe… doomed because the plan was for me to get this power and… give it to the One? So… he can… based on the visions, it seemed like it was so he could destroy the Uryans.

Well… she thought about her last encounter with the chained gods, about her cut ties. I think… I know what that means, that tie to the heart and to the head, there’s a connection to the Gods, in some way, the way there is to Jahra and the mystics.

She remembered cutting Rhainnon free from hers. She did not know what it meant that hers were cut. Unless the dragon that was Carnelian’s mother cut me free so she could force me to change into something else?

She felt a coldness, and she wondered again what the red dragon had carried off when it fled, and she wondered why the interest in mystics… unless it was literally their ability to change with magic over time. The older the mystic, the more their element shows in the way their bodies change. Nakai can literally fly. Bazil uses shadow, somehow as his magic, and where does that fit in within Terra, Imber, Caelus, or Vitae?

She had no answer for that, and neither did Jahra. The magic was just changing somehow with time, and the older he got, the more it was able to change because he could not manage all these bonds with his deteriorating health.

Well, Godly plans for devastation or not, seems I am free to do what I want. I guess. What I want is a whole lot more people like me. And now, I can do it with Jahra’s magic. So, I should make the most of it while he has me like this. Free the mystics from their anchor point, and maybe while she was at it find out if she could free the town from the dragon. Or the Gods. Or all of the above. She had no… desire for these kinds of strangling bonds with anyone anymore.

Would the tendencies of the mystics to mutate and change get worse? She did not know. She only knew that they deserved any chance she could give that something new and better could grow.

She tested it on Connall. She felt that if he did not live through what she was doing, she would feel the least guilty. Nakai almost died, Amalia lost her ear, and he worked with the traitor dragon that used his humans to spread poison through the woods. There was a whole variety of reasons she didn’t care if her first experiment went wrong with him.

I guess I care a little. I would prefer it to work, so I do not have to test it on anyone else. In this space, when she imagined a blade like the Ieshan Death Knife, but different, not to kill, but manage these connections.

It snapped back when she cut through it, hard. It did not kill Connall, but she sensed he lost his connection to his wisdom, his magic. The wolves around were unsettled as he cried and cried for the pain from the arrow she had shot him with and became as if he was a regular wolf, if… mutated-looking and too big.

It left her unsettled though. All right, it will not be that simple, she watched. The thread was still there, between her and the wolf. It was just… severed. She could not rejoin the two, though she did try, but as she interacted with the ends, she felt like they needed to go somewhere.

She left the end to herself just… sort of twisting magically. She wasn’t worried about herself or Jahra right now. She did catch hold of the side from Connall. He was… earth attuned? She connected him to the earth. Would that work?

He seemed to recover his senses, in a bewildered fashion. He at least stopped screaming. Rosalea waited. He started to say, from what she could tell from the other wolves, that he had lost the Moryshin.

I guess that is good enough. I will bind each to their elements and cut them free. They still may not be able to leave this forest, but they will not have to worry about a Moryshin. Right?

She felt… actually really confident that it would work pretty well.

So, she set to work, cutting, binding, rearranging, tweaking, mystic after mystic freed. When they were poisoned, she pulled that poison into herself - it flowed, easily actually. She did not know what she was going to do with it or maybe it was killing her, but it didn’t hurt. That was going to have to be good enough for now.

***

Beryn was exhausted. She had been fighting this thing for what felt like forever. She had resorted to burning what she had worked so hard to build. Embers and smoke floated through the air all around her as buildings burned. It had been the only thing she could do to slow the thing down, force him to chase her through fire, which stopped him until the horrible coagulated darkness slid off of him and smothered the fire for long enough. There was going to be no more Miron after this, but still, Carnelian did not answer, and she did not show up.

But this was it, she didn’t think she even had sparks to summon as it closed on her. It had a lot of weird markings on its bones, yellow-green, angry, splotchy. It occasionally jerked and twitched, as if it was fighting an internal sensation, and the wolf inside it occasionally showed through.

It wasn’t stopping though. She pressed her back to the wall of the last building. No more magic, no more strength. She did her best to wrap it in her vine, but it wilted and died, coming free of her shoulder. No more… anything. It bore down on her, pressing its leering skull against her face and biting into her shoulder. The darkness spread over her, and she fell limp.

***

Mystics done. Can I mess with the dragon’s bonds now? Rosalea thought, and she felt like she had something in her mouth. She tried to focus, feeling more in control now, like… Jahra was fading or giving up or unable to push himself on.

She let go of the thing in her mouth, Beryn’s body flopped on the ground. Ugh. I guess that is… that. I did want to kill her… earlier. Still, this is gross to come… back? To. She had no idea. She had only been able to climb her way back to reality when she had cut the last of the mystics free and silence Jahra for a moment. She pushed out with her connective magic, lots of little red strings. Some of them thicker, most of them thin. A hundred people huddled in fear of her.

One, big cut, and we let them go.

“No,” Jahra’s voice came to her. “I want the dragon to come. Save his little humans. Come, and be killed. I will not rest, until I get the soul of that dragon.”

Rosalea felt them moving forward again, looking for brands on faces.

She knew in her heart the dragon had fled and had better things to do, or it would have shown up or let these people flee. It surely could sense the problem; she had surely been called on dozens of times. So, she wrestled for control with the Moryshin.

I am your heir, you are passed done, let go, she tried to will him again, but he pulled on the bond between them and just moved forward.

Rosalea did not know what else to do. All this time she had spent adjusting things, wandering among his bonds, trying to get control, and it felt like at the end, he would not let go. Or maybe it is that I do not want to be Moryshin.

He was controlling her with the bond between them. So, she cut it. It broke the second “blessing” under the rune in the corner of her vision.