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The forest did not breathe—it licked its lips.
Dave stood at the edge of a clearing where the air curdled like spoiled milk, thick with the stench of gangrene and wet earth. Roots coiled beneath his boots, alive, their blackened tendrils squirming like the intestines of a gutted beast. The trees leaned closer, their bark split into jagged grins, sap oozing like pus from open sores.
He had come to claim what the rot offered. Not a gift—a collusion.
The figure emerged not from shadows but from the rot itself—a thing of fungus and fractured bone. Her body shifted, skin sloughing off in ribbons of moss to reveal muscle glistening with maggot-white larvae. Eyes like drowned embers fixed on him, and when she spoke, her voice was the creak of a coffin lid:
"
"I am Myrth. Daughter of the Root. Mother of endings."
Dave's pulse quickened—not from fear, but recognition. The rot in his chest purred.
"You are chosen," Myrth hissed, her clawed hand—a tangle of thorns and sinew—brushing his wrist. Cold spread like ink through his veins. "But power is a blade that cuts both ways, little king."
He knew the cost. The souls he'd absorbed already gnawed at his mind: Balric's cruelty, Mireya's icy resolve. Their whispers slithered through his dreams, teaching him to crave more.
"Madness is the toll," Myrth crooned, her breath reeking of gravesoil. "Two souls? A splinter. Ten? A knife. A thousand?" She leaned in, her jaw unhinging like a serpent's. "You'll drown in them."
Dave smiled. Madness? He'd drowned long ago—in the ashes of his first life, in the prince's hollow corpse. Let the forest carve him open. Let it fill the cracks.
Myrth's laughter echoed, a sound like cracking ice. From the rot at her feet crawled a creature—a winged thing no larger than a rat, its body a writhing mass of centipedes held together by gossamer threads of mold. It perched on his shoulder, mandibles clicking.
"My Scion," Myrth said. "She will feast on what you discard. Doubt. Mercy. Memory."
The creature burrowed into his tunic, its legs pricking his skin. A cold thread of awareness unfurled in his mind—a leash, a lodestone.
Myrth's claw pressed to his chest. The rot surged.
Visions:
—A throne of knotted roots, his roots, impaling a thousand faceless souls—
—A tidal wave of black water swallowing kingdoms, crowned by a serpent's roar
—The seed in his chest blooming into a flower with teeth—
Agony. Ecstasy. The forest's power flooded him, rewriting him. His veins bulged black, skin splitting as tendrils of rot wove through muscle and bone. He screamed—or the souls inside him did.
When it ended, Dave knelt in a pool of his own bile, the air thick with the stench of burnt hair and decaying roses. Myrth loomed over him, her form now a shifting mass of beetles and decay.
"Rise, Scion," she rasped. "The roots are hungry. And you… are their mouth."