Chapter 78: BOOM

I asked Mary if we should use Moon’s Door.

She shook her head. "My Spiritual power’s still recovering. Give me a while."

I nodded and didn’t push it. It wasn’t worth explaining out loud what everyone already understood without needing to hear it.

An Awakened without spiritual power was barely better than an ordinary person standing in the middle of the Realm of the Evil, and if Mary emptied hers dry right now, the first Unorthodox thing that wandered past would kill her in seconds, no ceremony, no warning.

Sera crossed her arms, glancing between the cliff and the tree looming above it. "Mary, Theodore, and I will wait here. No reason for all five of us to climb for something this small."

Nobody argued.

Arthur grabbed my shoulder, and a vine shot out from his palm before I had fully braced myself, catching the cliff face above with a wet, familiar thud.

We swung upward with wind tearing past, the ground and the clearing and the last of the dying firelight all blurred together beneath us until we landed hard on the hilltop, my boots skid against dark wood.

I was still holding the five characteristics. They had stayed warm the entire climb, a faint, steady pulse against my palm, like something with a heartbeat curled inside my fist.

With a sigh I didn’t bother hiding, I started toward the tree.

I signaled for Arthur to hang back a step behind me.

I couldn’t have explained exactly why if he had asked. My spiritual intuition simply told me to, quietly but absolutely, the same certainty that had guided my hand towardmany things, and by now I had learned better than to argue with it.

The branches turned toward me as I approached.

Not all at once. Slowly, one after another, in a long, unhurried ripple that moved from the outer edges of the canopy inward, like something waking up limb by limb after a very long sleep.

There was no wind to explain it. No reason for that much wood and leaf to shift in perfect unison except that it wanted to.

I kept walking.

The closer I got, the harder it became to convince myself the tree wasn’t actually watching me, that the slow, patient turning of its branches was nothing more than some passive, mindless reflex.

It felt aware in a way trees weren’t supposed to feel aware, deliberate in a way that made the back of my neck prickle with every step.

’It’s just a tree,’ I told myself, and immediately didn’t believe it.

Strange thoughts kept surfacing the closer I walked, uninvited and slightly wrong, like something whispering just beneath the edge of my own hearing.

’This is a gift one of them offered, it is gentle and reasonable. You should be grateful. It has given you so much already, and asked for so little in return.’

Another followed right behind it, colder.

’It is always hungry. It has always been hungry. That is simply what it is.’

I shook my head sharply, trying to dislodge whatever that was. Since when did I think in sentences that weren’t mine?

’Focus, Edmund. Just deliver the characteristics and get out.’

The white leaves seemed dimmer than the last time I hqd stood here, their faint inner glow guttering weakly, like a candle burning through the last of its wick.

And coiled along the higher branches, thinner now than I remembered even from a few hours ago, was Ouroboros.

Most of its body was gone.

What remained was barely more than a fragile loop of scale and bone, jaws of its were still locked around the last sliver of its own tail, still devouring, patiently and endlessly, even with almost nothing left to consume.

Its once-solid coils had thinned into something closer to a wire drawn taut around the branch, and for the first time since I had first laid eyes on it, I found myself wondering what happened once there was truly nothing left.

I didn’t wait to find out.

I knelt at the base of the branch it was coiled around and set the five characteristics down carefully, arranging them in a loose, even ring the way instinct guided my hands without any input from the rest of me.

For a moment, nothing happened.

However, right at the next moment the branch moved.

Five thin offshoots split away from the main limb, quickly and precisely, and drove straight through each characteristic in turn, the pale blue green light flared brightly at the point of impact before dimming into something softer and being absorbed rather than destroyed.

A sixth, thicker branch curled downward at the same moment and pressed directly into Ouroboros’s thin, wasted body.

The sound that followed reminded me, absurdly, of drinking.

A slow, steady pull, rhythmic and greedy sounded in my ears, it was the exact same way you had imagine water being sucked up through a straw if the straw itself were somehow alive and unbearably thirsty.

The characteristics began to dissolve.

Light bled out of them in thin, glowing threads, drawn up through the branches and funneled directly into Ouroboros’s withered body, and with every passing second, the snake grew visibly more solid, more present, color flooded back into scales that had looked almost translucent moments earlier.

Its thin, wire-like coils thickened. Its half-eaten length began, impossibly, to look less half-eaten.

But the tree didn’t share in that revival.

If anything, it looked worse.

The white leaves dimmed further with every pulse of light the branches drew up, entire clusters wilting and curling inward like something being slowly, deliberately drained.

The dark wood of the trunk, once smooth and glossy, began to dull, cracks spread thin and jagged across its surface, the whole structure looked, for the first time since I had seen it, genuinely fragile.

Somewhere behind that dulling bark, I thought I heard something almost like a sigh, it was low and long and tired, it was ancient as if it had existed long before any of this... Coldness spread throughout my entire body, with my spirit and my head feeling like a sword had been thrusted through it.

Arthur shifted uneasily behind me. "Edmund, is this supposed to—"

I didn’t get to answer him.

BOOM!!!