The golden light of the Father of Roots had faded into a soft, bioluminescent amber, but the world it left behind was fundamentally altered. The Iron-Root Valley, once a place of suffocating shadow, now breathed with a rhythmic, subterranean pulse. The obsidian shards that had once encased the ancient tree lay scattered across the clearing like black diamonds, reflecting the violet rim of the cursed moon.
I sat on a gnarled root, my hand wrapped in a clean strip of linen. The wound I had given myself to wake the tree throbbed with a strange, cool heat. It didn't feel like a normal injury; it felt like a door that hadn't quite closed.
