"No antidote..." she repeated, the strength draining from her posture. She looked at her trembling hands, then at the rotting flowers at her feet. The green fire in her eyes dimmed to a dying ember. "Then... it is finish'd. We have gorg'd them to death. We have lov'd them into oblivion."
She sounded so small, so utterly defeated, that the terrifying Elder vanished, leaving only a gardener watching her garden burn.
"However, I didn't say there was no hope," I said quickly, seeing her about to give up. "I said there's no antidote because they aren't sick."
She looked up, a flicker of desperation returning. "Not sick? Speak, human. If there is a path, show it to me."
"The problem is food," I explained, gesturing to the forest. "Carbon Dioxide is food. And right now, your forest is dying of gluttony."
I took some steps back from her.
"You want to save them? You need to control your merging/ritual or whatever you call it with the tree. That's the first thing to do."
"Cease the merg'ng?" she repeated, her voice rising in sharp disbelief. She took a step back, clutching her chest as if I'd asked her to stop her own heart. "But... that is our v'ry essence, human. We art the Spirit of the Wood. If we merge not, we art naught but whisp'rs in the wind. How shall we live if we cannot touch the Green? How do we exist if not within them?"
"You live beside them," I said firmly. "By monitoring their need and your need.
I pointed to a patch of gasping ivy that was strangling a helpless sapling near her feet.
"Right now, you're like an overbearing guardian who refuses to let their child walk because you're afraid they'll fall. You're holding them so tight you're crushing their ribs. You have to let go. You have to let them breathe their own air, not yours. Let the trees search for their own food."
She looked torn, the cultural foundation of the entire species warring with the visual proof of the damage.
"To stand apart..." she whispered, the idea visibly painful to her. "To be... sev'red? Is that not aband'nment?"
"It's boundaries," I corrected. "It's letting them be trees before they are vessels. You have to stop treating them like suits you wear and start treating them like living partners."
She flinched, the harshness of the truth stinging, but she didn't argue. She looked at the groaning oak, really looked at it, and slowly let her hands drop to her sides.
"So be it," she said, her voice hollow. "We shall... abstain. We shall stand apart."
A low wail, soft and mournful, rose from the shadows of the undergrowth.
I glanced over to see Eleni sinking to her knees, clutching her chest, while Alani stared at her Elder as if the Elder had just announced her own death.
"Sev'r the Bond?" Alani cried out, her voice cracking with pure terror. "Eld'r! Dhou asketh us to be... ghosts? To walk the earth without skin? We shall fade! We shall with'r!"
"To touch not the bark is to be orphan'd!" another spirit wept, stepping out from behind a fern, her form flick'ring like a dying candle. "Do not cast us out, Elder! Do not make us hollow!"
She didn't turn to face them. She couldn't. Her shoulders trembled, a single muscle feathering in her jaw as she absorbed their panic.
"Better to be hollow," she whispered, the words straining her throat, "than to be murder'rs."
She squeezed her eyes shut for a heartbeat, forcing the pain down, then opened them. They were hard again. Expectant.
She looked back at me, her eyes hard and expectant.
"And the sec'nd?" she asked me, ignoring the weeping of her kin.
"You have to stop the sun."
"Stop... the sun?" She looked up at the blinding sky, then back at me, her expression sceptical again. "The Sun is the Celest'l Fire. It is absolute. To banish it is to invite death."
"Not like that," I snapped. "For plants, Light is energy. But Darkness is construction."
The Calvin Cycle is the answer. The problem is this forest: the plants have more resources than they could use. Maybe it's like a construction site, where there is only one constructor,but the materials keep coming in.
"It's called the Dark Cycle or Dark Phase. Think of the sun as the delivery phase. You are piling up bricks. You are piling up stones. You are gathering the raw power."
I kicked the soft trunk.
"But you can't build a house while people are still dumping bricks on your head. The Night is when the work happens. The Night is when the tree takes that raw energy and turns it into sugar. Into starch. Into woods."
I looked her dead in the eye.
"They don't need an antidote. They need a shift change. They need the cold to signal them to stop expanding and start hardening."
She furrowed her brow, trying to process the concept.
"Dark Cycle..." she whispered, testing the alien words on her tongue. "Dhou speakest of the Night... not as an enemy, but as a... a forge?"
"Exactly," I nodded. "If you can't turn off the light, you need to draw the curtains. If you can, you can summon clouds. A thick mist. Force a blackout."
"A blackout..." she murmured. "To shroud the world in mist and shadow... to force the slumber?"
"Yes. Immediately," she repeated, the resolve hardening her features.
She took a deep breath, centring herself. The panic left her face, replaced by the mask of the Ageless Mistress. She raised both hands toward the swirling green horizon, her fingers splayed like the branches of a willow.
But she did not speak. There was no grand incantation, no ancient verse to call upon the dark. In a world defined by the noise of growth and the loudness of life, she chose the most terrifying weapon of all: Silence.
"The Elder..." a trembling voice came from the edge of the clearing.
I glanced over. Eleni and Alani were huddled together behind a barricade of twisted roots and thorny bushes, their eyes wide plates of terror. Behind them, I could see others, dozens of smaller, fainter dryads peering out from the chaotic brush, their forms flickering like candlelight in a draft. They looked at their Elder not with reverence, but with the primal fear of a child watching a parent operate a gun.
"She... she dooms us," Alani whispered, clutching Eleni's arm hard enough to leave indented marks on her bark-like skin. "She summons the V'id. She extinguish's the Glory."
"T'is the End," Eleni whimpered, shrinking back into the shadows as the light in the sky began to waver. "The Elder hath gone mad. She inviteth the Cold Death."
They didn't understand.
To them, the Sun was God. The Sun was safety. Watching their leader raise her hands to murder the light was like watching the sky fall.
She ignored them. She ignored the palpable fear radiating from her kin. She closed her eyes, her face contorting in sheer concentration. She wasn't asking the environment to change; she was forcing it. She was wrestling the very atmosphere of the realm.
She clenched her outstretched fingers into fists, dragging them down slowly, as if pulling a heavy velvet curtain over a window.
The response was instantaneous.
From the edges, I could see a thick, silver-grey mist begin to boil up from the soil. It wasn't magical smoke; it was condensation. She was dropping the pressure so fast that the moisture in the air was liquefying.
It rolled over the writhing vines, cool and damp, snuffing out the unnatural brightness. The temperature dropped sharply. Goosebumps rose on my arms.
For a second, just a second, I thought it was working. The green glare faded into a twilight gloom. The frantic buzzing of the forest dampened.
Then, the forest screamed.
It wasn't a sound of relief. It was a sound of starvation.
The massive oak tree didn't settle into the darkness; it lashed out. Its branches whipped violently, tearing through the mist as if trying to claw its way back to the light. Around us, the vines surged upward, growing at a terrifying, visible speed, stretching their leaves desperately above the fog layer to find the sun.
"Sleep!" She commanded, sweeping her hands down, abandoning her silence for a desperate order. "I command thee, rest!"
CRACK.
A root as thick as a python burst from the earth inches from her feet, shattering the soil crust. She gasped, stumbling back, her concentration breaking.
The mist evaporated instantly, torn apart by the heat radiating from the frantic vegetation. The blinding green light slammed back down on us, hotter and heavier than before.
"They... they defyeth me?" She stared at the thrashing root, her eyes wide with shock. "I am the Source. I am the Voice. Why do they not list'n?"
"Because you made them addicts!" I shouted over the noise of grinding wood.
I grabbed her arm and pulled her away as a heavy branch crashed down where she had just been standing.
"Look at them! They're in energy shock!" I pointed to the canopy, which was practically trembling with agitation. "You can't just tell a starving animal to stop eating. You can't tell a chaotic system to suddenly organise!"
"But dhou said the Dark Cycle was the answ'r!" she cried, looking at her shaking hands as if they had betray'd her. "I summon'd the Shade! Why did it not hold?"
"Because the victim is fighting the perpetrator!" I yelled, shielding my face as sap sprayed from a bursting vine. "They are full on energy and panicked because they have nowhere to put it."
I looked her in the eye, seeing the realisation finally shatter her pride.
"You can't sing a lullaby to a heart attack."
"Then what?" she screamed, the sound raw and terrifi'd, stripp'd of all royalty. "If I cannot heal it, and I cannot command it... what remaineth? Dhou said the dam'ge is perm'nent. Dhou said the Dark Cycle is the only way!"
"It is!" I said, gripping her shoulders to steady her. "But you can't steer this object anymore. The energy is running too hot."
A massive vine slammed into the ground just metres away, shaking the earth so violently that Eleni and Alani screamed, clinging to each other in the shadows.
I looked up at the blinding, eternal green sky, then back at her. The forest wasn't just rejecting her command; it was declaring war.
"We have to evacuate," I said, my voice cutting through the roar of the breaking wood. "Right now."
"Evacuate?" She looked at me, horrified. "Dhou asketh me to abandon my realm to... to this madness? To let it rot?"
"It's not rotting. It's conquering," I yelled, pulling her back as a jagged root spear erupted from the soil where she had just been standing. "If we stay, we die. And if you die, there is no one left to stop this from spilling over."
And of course, I don't want to die.
I pointed to the terrified Dryads huddled at the edge of the clearing.
"Can you transport them? All of them?"
She looked at the terrified spirits scattered at the edge of the clearing. The vines were closing in on them, thorns ready to tear.
"They art of me," she said, her voice regaining a cold, imperious edge. "Where I go, they foll'w."
"Good, now transport them to my land, below the shop; the land is so vast. So it will be good."
She didn't call out to them. She didn't wait for them to run to her. She simply raised a hand towards the cowering group and clenched her fist.
Instantly, Alani, Eleni, and the dozens of flickering shadows vanished. They were snatched out of reality in a blink, pulled into the ether by her sheer authority.
She turned to me, grabbing my shoulder with a grip like iron.
"Forgive me," she whispered to the burning world around us.
The green light swallowed us whole.