Chapter 160: Who Speaks for the Court? (Patreon)

Hollis looked at Erthrix. Erthrix looked at Kage. Dace's light wavered toward Kage, and from the passage mouth Wren made a small sound in her throat that was clearly the beginning of a question she decided not to ask.

Great. He had woven a thousand petals into a wall, and somewhere in the fine print that had made him the designated speaker.

He looked at the guardian before he said anything.

[Guardian of the Final Sylvan Decree]

[Level: ???]

[Axiom Entity]

So much for something weaker than the Curator.

How long has it been sine he'd seen question marks, though? Since the Wyrm, when he'd gotten the class, if his memory served him right. The last line held his eye longer, and that was more important. And interesting.

Axiom Entity. The Curator had carried that tag. The Curator had been written by the First Maker to keep an archive and wait for a master who never came back. This thing had been left under the Reach to keep a Decree and wait for a Court that never came back either. Two ancient caretakers, two duties, one classification.

He put the thought somewhere he could find it later. There was a lot in that drawer already.

The more urgent math was simpler. Nobody in this room wanted a fight with a question-mark level tonight. Tonight was the operative word. A rested guild with consumables, a full roster, and a forum thread full of theorycrafting might feel differently next day.

"Nobody here," Kage answered, eventually. "We brought the memory back."

The petal-ring at the top of the guardian's body shifted, violet sliding toward gold, and its attention left him. One long limb turned toward the lattice and hovered beside it without touching, moving along the tiers as though counting.

"The record is whole," it said. The forty lines of its voice moved slightly apart and came back together. "So, it was carried through the burning. Impressive… has the time finally come?"

The ring turned over Erthrix and his people, one after another, unhurried.

"The archive thanks the hands that restored it."

It came back to Kage and stayed there a little longer. That was all the recognition he got. No title, no system banner announcing him as the chosen anything. He found he preferred it over what happened in the Galleries.

"The keeping is not whole," the guardian went on. "I am the keeping, until it is given. I preserve the record. The living must tend what grows from it."

"Given to who?" Kage asked.

"To one who speaks for the Court."

Back to that. "Can the Decree be read now? It's complete."

"It is complete, and it is sealed. It opens to one voice."

"Whose?"

"Blood the Court remembers." The petals along its nearest limb brightened in a slow ripple from shoulder to tip. "The line of those who tended the living record. Their hands were in every bloom. The record knows them."

The bloom-weaver from the Echo, kneeling at the edge of a bed and coaxing a memory into a petal. The weaver of Vael.

Mirethiel.

"And when that person hears it," Kage said. "What happens to them?"

"They hear what was decreed. Then they choose whether to carry it." The voice did not soften, but it slowed. "The Decree is a charge. It is received, and it is kept. It cannot be placed on one who does not take it up. Those who sealed it would not allow it."

"So they have to come willingly."

"Willingly, and knowing."

Kage glanced at Erthrix, who was listening with visible attention. "Can they refuse?"

"They can refuse."

"And then?"

"Then the Decree sleeps, and I keep it." The petal-ring settled to a pale silver. "I have kept it long. I can keep it longer."

Kage's quest log stirred at the edge of his vision. The filigree crawled across the panel the way it always did now, slower to read than it used to be, and he let it unfold.

[Quest Updated: The Final Sylvan Decree]

[Stage Complete: The Gathered Memory]

[New Objective: Return to the Root-Choir Chamber with a willing descendant of the Court's remembered blood.]

[Note: The Decree cannot be given. It can only be received.]

Willing.

He had to walk into her shop and ask her to take on a charge whose terms neither of them knew. She had a business. She was building a new dye line that was his original quest, and she had talked about them with the particular hunger of someone who had waited years to make them. She had a life that did not include being the last voice of a fallen court.

She would need enough of the truth to say yes or no for real. Escorting her down here on a half-explanation would be the kind of lie that made the Decree's single condition meaningless.

Erthrix had stepped forward, shield still resting against his boot. "And the wells? The Translite Wells on the surface," he said. "Our yields dropped every night we ran them. What happens to them now?"

The ring turned gold at the edges.

"The wells are the mouths of the keeping. Sap rises through the roots and the choir carries it to the gardens. Without a keeper, the channels silt and the gardens starve. The wells give less." A limb gestured toward the walls, where pale stone veins ran through the living wood. "When the keeping is restored, what was neglected will run again. The channels. The gardens above them. All that the sanctuary fed."

Erthrix said nothing for a moment. Kage watched him do arithmetic he knew he wasn't going to share.

It was leverage, plainly. The Greenlanders had built their whole rotation around a set of wells that had apparently been drying the entire time. They had been farming a slowly emptying tank. A working sanctuary might mean more than recovered yields. It might mean channels nobody had found yet and gardens nobody had mapped, and the people standing nearest to all of it would be the guild that already held the zone.

And the only route to that outcome ran through a descendant Kage knew how to find.

Erthrix turned his head.

"You have someone in mind," he said.

He wasn't asking. Kage weighed playing dumb and decided it would only make the next ten minutes longer and more annoying for both of them.

"I have a lead."

"Who?"

"Someone I'll need to talk to first."

Erthrix's jaw moved slightly. He let it go. "So where does that leave us?"

"You helped restore this room," Kage said. "The guardian said as much. Your share from tonight stands, whatever we agreed on." He held Erthrix's eyes. "But I can't promise what the person who receives this decides about anything. Neither can you."

"Fine," Erthrix said, in the tone that meant it wasn't, quite.

The guardian's limb returned to the lattice. It rested the petal-tip against the third tier again, and the chord deepened, and its attention left all of them. Whatever it did when nobody was asking it questions, it had gone back to doing it.

Kage waited until he was sure.

"So, I'll also be plain: I have to leave," he said. "What happens when someone else comes down here?"

Erthrix glanced at the guardian, a long look up the length of it to the petal-hollow where its head should have been.

"Then they meet that," he said. "Anyone who swings at it is taking a real risk."

"And when your guild decides it's worth trying?"

A moment of quiet followed.

Hollis's hand tightened on the haft. "Seriously?"

"It's a fair question, to be honest." Dace chimed in.

"We wasted so much time already; our whole guild did." Hollis took a step forward. "And you're standing here asking if we're going to knife your boss the second you turn around?"

"I'm asking about your raid leads," Kage said. "There are four of you down here. How many on your 'council'?"

Hollis opened his mouth.

"Shut up, Hollis," Erthrix said, without heat.

Hollis shut it. He didn't look happy about it.

Erthrix rubbed his thumb along the rim of the slab-shield. "I can't promise you that," he said. "I'd like to. I can't. We have people who look at a question-mark level and see a progression target. A couple of them sit on council. Somebody's going to see a guardian with no health bar and start building a spreadsheet."

At least he hadn’t offered a promise he couldn’t keep, Kage mused.

"Then here's what I'd put in front of them," Kage said. "The next stage, according to this thing, brings better yields. You heard it. If somebody attacks the guardian, best case, they lose a raid. Worst case, they kill it and the whole zone goes with it, and whatever happens… happens to the zone you're farming." He pointed at the guardian's nearest limb, where the petals glowed a steady, even violet.

Hollis's eyes went towards the guardian.

"All of that for a loot table nobody has seen."

"You don't know that," Hollis said.

"No. Nobody does. That's my point."

Erthrix nodded slowly, as if Kage had confirmed a number he'd already estimated.

"And it isn't only your guild," Kage went on. "If somebody's going to post screenshots of what happened during the night, and somebody else is going to wonder why the zone suddenly has a hole in the middle of its best well… let's assume a rival guild finds this room, they raid it, or they sit on the entrance and wait to see who comes down, or they start trying to get the next stage for themselves."

"So? Get on with it. What are you asking?"

"Simple, keep the entrance covered," Kage said. "During the day too."

He heard it after he'd said it.

He had just asked the guild that spent the night herding him into ravines and setting his flowers on fire to stand guard over the most valuable thing he'd found since the Galleries. He would be logged out. Then at the hospital, then at a table with Lily talking about guilds, and the entire time his quest would sit at the bottom of a hole protected by whatever Erthrix could talk his council into.

He didn't like it. He liked the alternative less.

Erthrix let the request sit long enough to make the point that it had a price.

"Day coverage would be a different roster," he said. "Different people, different hours. I'd need, what, a dozen on the approach, two shifts, a rotation for the shaft rim, and I'd need to explain to council why we're paying people to stand around a hole for the guy who turned our burn order into a flower garden and set the treants on us." He tilted his head. "So. When are you back?"

"Tonight."

"What time?"

Kage did the math. Hospital. The guild. Lyra's verse… he still had to compose that. Mirethiel's shop hours, which he didn't actually know.

"I'll message you towards the end of the day," he said. "Hard for me to say now, busy schedule. And depending on where it stands."

"Where it stands meaning what?"

"Whether the person's agreed to come."

"And what does my guild get for a day of shifts?"

"A guarantee to farm a much better zone than the one you already designated as the best one for your guild. Sounds good?"

"Guarantee?" Erthrix said.

"True, not quite. I won't be the one deciding." Kage kept his voice level.

"That's thin."

"It's what I have."

Erthrix looked at him a while longer. Behind him, Dace had sat down against the wall with her staff across her knees, eyes half closed.

"One more thing. We suspend anything against the guardian. Fine. But if it goes hostile on its own, we're not to blame."

"Agreed."

"Then here's what I can do." Erthrix held up a hand and ticked off his fingers like a man working through a shift board. "We keep our claim through daylight. We guard the approach to the shaft, which is the only part of this that's actually exposed. Nobody attacks the guardian. You message me by the end of the day. You give us first opportunity on any farming arrangement if this works." He lowered his hand. "The watch on the rim I can set right now. Today's coverage I can get from the day officer. Anything past today needs council, and I'll have to sell it."

"Understood."

"I hope so." Erthrix turned away, speaking low. "Rim team, it's me. Put four on the edge of the Central Well. Nobody goes over the lip, nobody comes up without my say. Yes, we're all good. Yes, he's with me. No, Saph, not now." A pause. "Get Teodric. I need him before his shift starts."

He listened. Kage watched his face and couldn't read much from it beyond tiredness and the faint irritation.

"I know what time it is. Wake him."

Kage turned back to the guardian. Its limb had not moved from the lattice.

"The person I bring," he said. "They come in daylight, let's say. How are they supposed to get here?"

The petal-ring shifted toward him. The guardian drew its limb back from the lattice and turned, unfolding one long arm toward the chamber wall left of the passage. The roots knotted there drew apart.

They did it slowly and with a sound like rope paying out through wet wood. Behind them, cut into the living rock of the shaft, a narrow stair spiraled up and out of sight. The steps were plain stone, each one dished in the middle.

"The keepers' stair," the guardian said. "The keepers walked it. In every light"

Kage stepped to the first stair and put his weight on it. Solid. Cold. Real in the way the phantom architecture had never quite been, even after he'd forced it to hold.

"It'll stay?"

"It was never hidden. It was only closed."

So the access problem was solved. Mirethiel could walk down at noon if she wanted to. So could anyone else who got past the Greenlanders. The agreement Erthrix had just agreed to had become more important in the span of one opened wall.

Erthrix had seen the same thing. He was looking at the stair.

Hollis was already at the stair, peering up. Wren was helping Dace to her feet. Kage checked himself while they sorted themselves out.

He thought, briefly, of Zara.

She'd floated the guild idea through Lily and he'd filed it under later, then under probably. Now he'd spent twenty minutes negotiating for another guild to do the thing a guild was for. He could restore an archive in one night. He couldn't stand at the top of a shaft for a day, walk an elven woman through a contested forest, keep a rival raid off the guardian, and sit beside his mother's bed IRL. Not by himself.

The proposal was getting harder to dismiss.

"Let's go," Erthrix said.

The keepers' stair was narrow enough that they climbed in single file. Hollis took the lead with his hammer, then Dace and Wren, then Erthrix, then Kage. Every few turns the stair opened onto a cut window in the shaft wall, and through it Kage could see the phantom staircases: glass balustrades, floating landings, the spiral of starlit steps around the inner shaft.

The first time he looked, the top third had gone thin and silvery, light passing through it. The second time, the higher landings were outlines only, faint lines in the air. By the fourth window there was nothing above them but the bare stone of the shaft and the grey-gold of morning coming down from the opening.

Somewhere below, the last flight unmade itself without a sound.

Nobody talked much. Hollis complained once about the steps being built for people with smaller feet, and nobody answered him.

Halfway up, Erthrix's panel chimed. He read it while climbing.

"Teodric," he said. "Day coverage is fine. He's got enough people." He kept reading. "He wants to know why. So does Maren. So does whoever told Maren."

"What are you going to tell them?" Wren asked.

"That we found something worth more than one night's rotation and I'm not discussing it over guild chat." He closed the panel. "That'll hold until noon. Then I get to explain it to people who weren't here."

Kage didn't envy him. He wasn't going to say so.

The last turn of the stair brought them up through a gap in the rock beside the shattered altar. The glass floor was gone, its edges jagged around the open well, and the stone around it was wet and dark. The redwoods had gone back to bark and needles. The pastel mist had burned off into a thin, ordinary haze between the trunks.

The Greenlanders on the rim saw him before they saw Erthrix.

He heard bowstrings draw. A mage at the end of the line raised one hand with frost already curling off the fingers, and somebody further back said, loud and clear in the quiet, "That's him."

"I see him, Saph," said the woman beside the speaker.

"He wrecked the whole—"

"Shut up, Saph," Erthrix said, climbing out of the gap behind Kage.

The bows didn't lower right away. They lowered when Erthrix stepped past Kage and stood at the edge of the well with his shield on his back and his helm under his arm, looking at each of them in turn the way a supervisor looks at a shift that's about to clock in.

There were maybe twenty of them on the rim, with more coming up the terraces from the clearings below. Kage could see the scorch marks where the burn teams had stood. A few of them had soot on their armor. One rogue, near the back, was staring at him with visible hatred.

"Listen up," Erthrix said. He didn't raise his voice much. He didn't need to. "We keep the zone during day, too. Only for today." He paused, and Kage watched him decide to say the rest in front of all of them. "And nobody goes below."

The muttering started immediately.

Then the order went through them, and Kage guessed that's what differentiated the top curve guilds from the casual ones. A ranger peeled off toward the eastern terrace, calling names. Someone opened a panel and started reading out the day roster, stumbling over who was online. Two players near the back had started arguing in low, furious voices about whether only for today meant before or after the evening rotation, and a third told them both to stop and wait for Teodric. The woman who'd called Saph up was already pointing people toward the mouth of the keepers' stair, sorting them into pairs.

Saph was still staring at Kage. Nobody was listening to him.

Kage stood on the rim of the broken well with the morning on his face and felt his legs register, finally, that they had been running for far too long. Now that no one was about to swing at him, the exhaustion arrived all at once, uncomplicated.

But back and deep in this mind, a thousand petals sat in a wall under a forest, beside a guardian that had waited. Above it, a guild he did not control was posting guards on a stair he could not personally watch, on the word of an officer who would spend his afternoon explaining to his own council why he had made a deal with the man who had ruined their night.

The protection was real. Kage could see it taking shape in front of him, pair by pair.

All of it rested on Erthrix keeping his word, and on Erthrix being able to.