Chapter 187

“Moss,” I shouted. “Get that door open! We need to get these people out!”

She leapt nearly forty feet, soaring over the heads of fleeing civilians before slamming into the floor in a dead sprint toward the sealed fire doors.

I charged forward.

Gallowborn tendrils lashed downward from the ceiling, thorned coils whipping toward me from every direction.

“CONFLAGURATION!”

The word never sounded - only the terrible absence where it should have been. Flames rolled through the air above me in a roaring wave, scorching the roots black before they could close around my body.

The Mercy Engine screamed.

A mass of gallowborn overhead tore an entire section of scaffolding free and hurled it across the chamber toward a crying child crouched alone in the open, their parent nowhere in sight.

I slowed. Turned.

“GO!” Ashlara roared as she threw herself into the path of the collapsing steel. The twisted metal slammed into her shield hard enough to stop both dead. The impact cracked the floor beneath her feet.

I turned back and ran.

Something rattled deep inside my core.

The Mercy Engine was becoming unstable. It was pulling in too much Faith. The gallowborn couldn’t regulate all of it anymore. More and more spilled loose into the chamber - not merely what the Shepherd wanted, but everything.

Humanity.

Emotion crashed into me in overwhelming waves. Every terrified parent searching for their child. Every hand held beside a hospital bed. Every lonely prayer whispered into darkness. Fear. Hope. Conviction. Doubt. Love. Grief.

Billions of lives brushed against my mind all at once.

I stumbled.

“What are you?” the Shepherd whispered. For the first time there was uncertainty in his voices. Awe. Fear. Confusion. Anger. “You’re not a god.”

“That’s your mistake,” I said, forcing myself forward. “You keep trying to simplify people to fit whatever box you want to put them in. We are more than one thing. ”

The roots tore a generator free from the floor and hurled it toward me.

I flung my mana at it in an uncontrolled burst. It spun as it barrelled down on me.

Thae shot past overhead in a blur of red scales and snapping wings. Three metal spikes screamed from the dragonspear into the tumbling machine before she swung the axehead into it with both hands, knocking the generator aside in a shower of sparks and twisted steel.

“They’re stalling him!” she shouted.

“What do you expect to accomplish?” the Shepherd asked, his voices no longer perfectly synchronized. They overlapped unevenly now, like a choir struggling to remain in harmony. “You cannot stop me.”

“Nim!” I shouted. “I need a boost!”

My son batted aside a chunk of falling concrete the size of a car before rushing into position. He planted his feet and laced his massive hands together.

Then I saw her.

Naevira moved through the glowing lattice overhead, her body barely distinguishable from the network around her. Tendrils and roots carried her through the branching web of white light.

For one brief moment her face emerged from the tangle. Her eyes met mine and she smiled. Calmly. Sadly.

Then the gallowborn around her shifted. They surrounded her gently, almost reverently, guiding her downward toward the cocoon suspended above the Gallows.

“W-What is that?” the Shepherd asked. For the first time, he sounded afraid.

The cocoon flared erratically. The white Faith flickered blue while the silver and gray remained.

“NO!” the Shepherd screamed. “GET HER OUT!” the gallowborn cried in unison.

White lightning pulsed through the lattice in violent branching fractures while softer blue currents spread outward from Naevira’s cocoon. The two patterns collided again and again, tearing the network apart.

The cavern shook violently. Massive chunks of stone tore free from the ceiling and crashed downward. Some tendrils reached out instinctively, batting debris away from fleeing civilians while others lashed out in blind fury.

The gallowborn began attacking each other.

Roots ripped free from walls and ceilings. Twisted masses slammed steel and concrete into one another. Tendrils knotted together in violent struggles as the collective turned against itself.

The Shepherd’s voices overlapped unevenly now.

“No - stop fighting each other! You are supposed to be unified! You cannot want different things!”

Inside the cocoon, the silhouettes fought.

Mid-run I leapt. My feet struck the cradle of Nim’s palms.

He hurled me upward with everything he had.

The world dropped away beneath me as I launched through the air.

Around me, my family fought through the collapsing chamber.

Ashlara shielded strangers with her own body. Serah sheltered dozens beneath her wings while blood poured from the gaps in her shattered scales. Mirri wept while healing people she’d never met. Elise stood amid the chaos with tears streaming down her face as collapsing stone, fire, and twisted steel vanished into silent nothingness around the fleeing civilians. Iolite flowed through the collapsing chamber, raising walls, bridges, and shelters from the breaking stone to keep the fleeing people safe, while her own body cracked apart.

Vel directed fleeing civilians through falling debris. Thae barked orders from a collapsing catwalk while firing her dragonspear into unstable supports. Moss tore gallowborn from the walls with her bare hands as they whipped at her and devoured them while carrying terrified children under one arm. Tansy moved through the chaos like a living blade, bleeding from a dozen wounds while dragging civilians toward safety. Nim caught a collapsing catwalk and held it aloft while terrified families ran beneath the shelter of his trembling body. Clo was a blur of afterimages as she tore people out of danger.

Different. All of them were different. Different fears. Different desires. Different instincts. Different wounds.

And yet they stayed.

Not because I controlled them. Not because my Faith forced them to.

Because they chose one another. Because they chose me.

The realization hit me mid-flight.

I understood not merely what I was, but who I had become.

Not the god of belief in the absence of proof. That had only been the beginning.

My Faith was not blind belief.

It was the thing that endured despite pain. Despite fear. Despite distance, grief, anger, doubt, and suffering. The thing that remained when the world should have torn people apart.

Connection.

It was Enduring Bonds.

The lightning racing through the roots slowed. The softer blue currents spread wider, steadily overtaking the violent white fractures.

The gallowborn stopped screaming.

The cavern convulsed again as enormous sections of stone broke loose overhead. Tendrils lashed upward - not to attack, but to catch the falling debris. Roots spread into vast woven nets that held back the collapse.

The panic in the chamber eased - if only slightly - as people fled toward the exit together instead of trampling one another.

Gallowborn dropped from the lattice overhead and began hauling debris aside as civilians ran by. Tendrils wrapped around broken beams and slabs of stone, lifting wreckage clear while others pulled trapped people free from the rubble.

And people stopped running. Not all of them. But enough.

A man carrying his injured wife stumbled, and three strangers immediately caught them both before they hit the ground. None hesitated. None asked who they were.

Children were passed through narrow gaps in the wreckage while voices shouted directions through the smoke and dust.

“This way!”

“I’ve got him!”

“Careful - watch your head!”

My family tore obstacles apart faster than the chamber could collapse them. Nim and Moss ripped fallen steel free while Iolite forced walls and bridges up from the shattered stone beneath our feet. More and more debris was caught by the straining web of gallowborn overhead as the lattice twisted itself into enormous woven nets.

Somewhere in the chaos, a little girl screamed for her mother. Moments later she was lifted over a collapsed section of concrete by a stranger and passed into her parents’ arms before the woman who’d found her turned immediately to help the rest of the nearby children.

Groups clustered instinctively around wheelchairs and hospital beds, lifting them over rubble while others steadied oxygen tanks and IV poles as they hurried toward the exit together.

The chamber was still collapsing. People were still terrified. But they had stopped acting alone.

A humanoid shape burst from the roots near the cocoon - part bark, part crystal, part flesh. Its form shifted constantly as though it could no longer decide what it was supposed to be. Tendrils exploded from its body and speared back into the cocoon, impaling the remaining silhouette inside.

Naevira erupted outward in response - a writhing mass of vines and tendrils that wrapped around the composite creature.

The cocoon ruptured completely. Flames engulfed the remains of the lattice and the two struggling figures tangled within it.

Most of the gallowborn covering the chamber withered instantly. Their bodies cracked apart, then burst into white flame. The few that remained alive fled through tunnels, pipes, and holes in the collapsing walls.

The woven net overhead snapped apart like dry branches as the mine began collapsing around us once more.

The creature of bark and crystal suddenly unravelled and fled, vanishing into the burning network just before a massive slab of stone split the giant Gallows nearly in half.

Naevira shrieked. She twisted frantically, trying to extinguish the flames devouring her body.

I collided with her in midair, knocking her clear as more stone smashed into the collapsing Gallows. I beat the flames out with my hands and gathered what remained of her against my chest.

Then I jumped.

Another section of the ceiling collapsed as I leapt from the dying tree. Stone obliterated what remained of the massive Gallows behind me.

I hit the ground hard and slid across broken concrete and burning wreckage before crashing into a mound of debris.

Moss grabbed me one-handed and hauled me upright.

Behind her, the fire doors were gone. Half-eaten steel and shredded concrete framed the escape tunnel beyond.

“We have to GO!” Ashlara shouted.

Vel immediately broke into a run, leading the pack as the mine collapsed around us.

* * *

We made it to the end of the culvert while the earth still shook beneath our feet and the mine continued collapsing behind us.

Iolite, Serah, and Thae were already ferrying civilians out of the pit and up to the rim above.

The blood-red lake at the bottom had drained away entirely, swallowed somewhere deeper beneath the wreckage.

The fortified outpost was gone. Trucks, fuel tanks, guard towers, trailers - everything had been consumed when the Mercy Engine chamber collapsed. And not just the compound. Nearly a quarter of the mine’s rim had sheared away and continued crumbling into the abyss below, releasing enormous clouds of dust and steam into the sleeting darkness.

The massive roots threading through the mine had dried, cracked, and split apart, destabilizing the cliffs even further. Entire sections of stone continued breaking loose and crashing into the pit below.

The freezing rain had become sleet by now, the temperature finally dropping below freezing in the final hours before dawn.

I looked down at Naevira in my arms.

Her Faith was dim. Fragile. And utterly changed.

Once it had been black with identity and will, threaded through with green veins of growth and adaptation - nearly identical to every other gallowborn I’d seen. Now it shimmered silver with duty, gray with balance and perspective, and blue with compassion.

Three colors instead of two - a newborn god desperately clinging to life.

“Hang on,” I whispered to her. “We’ll get you out of here.”

I sang softly while I healed what I could. Most of my attention stayed fixed on keeping her alive while Mirri worked on everyone else.

Volunteer firefighters arrived first. Then a single ambulance from local EMS. Two local cops - still half asleep - followed shortly after.

None of them were remotely prepared for two hundred terrified, injured civilians stumbling out of a collapsing mine in the middle of the night.

Three state troopers arrived half an hour later and looked just as overwhelmed as the others.

Locals started showing up not long after that.

People brought blankets. Heavy coats. Gloves. School buses arrived to shelter people from the sleet and bitter wind while pickup trucks started ferrying the injured to hospitals before enough ambulances could even reach the scene. Someone set up coffee beneath a canopy. Somebody else brought donuts.

It felt less like an emergency response and more like a community trying desperately to hold itself together.

The civilians clearly didn’t understand what had happened beneath the mountain.

They remembered the collapsing mine. The screaming roots. The explosions. The monsters. They remembered the vines attacking people - then suddenly saving them. But they hadn’t seen the Faith flooding the chamber. They hadn’t seen most of the light. They didn’t understand the Mercy Engine, the release of mana, or how close the world had come to catastrophe.

And because everyone’s stories contradicted each other, the authorities had no idea what they were dealing with.

Cult activity. Terrorism. Illegal medical experiments. Human trafficking. Every theory only created more confusion.

Hours later, larger Pennsylvania emergency response teams finally started arriving alongside PennDOT trucks, mining officials, hazmat crews, emergency management personnel, and more state police.

We stayed until everyone was taken care of.

By midmorning Mirri was barely conscious.

She’d burned through every trace of ambient mana left behind by the Mercy Engine and the shattered glow rock lattice that had powered it. We’d already used the few intact glow stones we brought with us.

Elise destroyed the remaining residual Faith to generate more mana where she could. Then, one by one, she destroyed the fragments of my Faith living inside her, Ashlara, and Mirri to keep Mirri healing.

Cuts and bruises were easy enough. Broken bones were far harder without functioning flowlines. Harder still were the people the Shepherd had gathered here intentionally.

The little girl with leukemia. The old miner dying from lung cancer. The woman in kidney failure. Those suffering from multiple sclerosis, lupus, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and diseases I didn’t even recognize.

The Shepherd had gathered the sick, the abandoned, the desperate, and the hopeless beneath the mountain. The people the world had failed badly enough that they were willing to follow a man promising mercy through annihilation.

And Mirri refused to leave a single one of them behind.

The ferals and Ashlara hid in the surrounding forest while Mirri worked herself to exhaustion making sure everyone she could reach survived the night.

Eventually we slipped away before too many questions could be asked.

We met the others at the edge of the woods and began the climb home.

I carried Mirri and Naevira in my arms as we crossed the forest and climbed back toward the tree we’d come through. Mirri slept against my chest, utterly spent after healing people for nearly half a day straight.

Naevira seemed stable, though the fire had burned her down to barely half her original size. I had no idea what it would take for her to regrow, but I intended to find out.

I still didn’t know what became of the Shepherd.

My best guess was that the thing made of bark, crystal, and flesh that attacked Naevira had been him - or what remained of him after merging with the Mercy Engine. I didn’t know how badly he’d been hurt, how far he’d escaped, or whether he would become a problem again someday.

But right then, I didn’t care.

Maybe we hadn’t won. But we hadn’t lost either.

And for the moment, that was enough.

* * *

We returned home to find the children hiding inside the demesne.

Torvek had taken a bullet through the neck, but Lilae had managed to drag him to safety and heal him before he bled out. He looked pale and furious about being bedridden, which I took as a good sign.

I left Mirri and Naevira with the others while I swept through the keep and the surrounding woods to make sure the attack was truly over.

The keep itself was clear. The nearby villages were unharmed, though plenty of people had been startled awake by the explosions echoing through the mountains during the night.

I found six men with rifles scattered through the woods. Every one of them had been killed by a spear.

Further south, I found something stranger.

Plants.

Or at least I thought they were plants at first glance. Thick, dark vines climbed between the trees while fleshy pods hung from the branches overhead, several of them bulging in unsettling shapes that shifted slightly in the wind. The whole area smelled damp and sweet - like wet soil mixed with rotting fruit.

“Like it?” Moss asked as she climbed up out of the earth beside me in that strange way she stepped.

I stared at the growths. “What am I even looking at?”

“My garden.” She smiled. Her mouth stretched too wide across her face, exposing entirely too many teeth. Then she reached out and poked one of the hanging pods.

It recoiled from her touch. Not like a plant - like an animal flinching.

I slowly looked back at her. “Is it safe?”

Moss tilted her head thoughtfully. “Sure,” she said. “Just don’t go in its mouth.”