Chapter 185

We crossed a four-way intersection. Gallowborn vines stretched down every corridor as far as I could see. Thousands of thorned tendrils pulsed together overhead in endless shifting masses, knotting and unknotting like muscle beneath skin. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many were here. Or what they were truly doing.

Naevira was barely holding herself together now. She’d abandoned the turtleneck, jeans, and coat somewhere behind us. Her torso had become a twisting bundle of vines while her arms and legs no longer even attempted to maintain their shape. Tendrils kept reaching upward toward the others, only to recoil at the last moment like she was fighting herself for control.

Only her face still wore mycelium skin - and even that looked fragile. Temporary.

Mirri had gone silent.

I’d never seen her like that before. She swore when she was angry - usually louder and more creatively the angrier she got. But now she walked beside me in suffocating silence, jaw tight, eyes burning.

Ashlara was handling it no better. She was usually quiet by nature, but the tension in her body had become unbearable to look at. Every muscle stood taut beneath her skin. Rage rolled off her in waves so strong I could almost feel the heat of it.

Had I done that to her too?

Had I wrapped them all so tightly into myself that my pain had become theirs? Had I made them define themselves not through their own strength or accomplishments, but through me? Through whatever I had turned them into?

Elise barely seemed present anymore. She moved with us automatically, but her eyes were distant - lost somewhere deep inside her own thoughts.

Because the Shepherd had struck something real.

Her master was dead. She hadn’t seen another living soul in nearly fifteen years. She could have remained in that library forever if I hadn’t dragged her back into the world.

I was the one who exposed her to politics. To fear. To people staring at her like she was a freak or a monster. I had taken her safety from her.

Serah wore a mask of fury so intense it had stripped away all traces of her practiced grace. Years of etiquette lessons, diplomacy, careful smiles, and controlled charm had cracked beneath whatever storm churned inside her now.

Or maybe that was my fault too.

Maybe all of it was. Maybe whatever my Faith had done to them made them vulnerable to this - to seeing truths I’d tried desperately not to look at myself.

I was destabilizing them. Destabilizing the family. If this could even truly be called a family anymore.

The changes I’d made to my children were already going to kill Tansy eventually. I knew that. And if she died, the rest of the pack might collapse with her.

I’d done the same thing to Iolite - turned her into something she was never meant to be. I had no idea what emotions like love and fear and grief would eventually do to an elemental.

And Naevira… I’d stripped away every defense she had until she depended on me for everything.

Just like the others.

“There it is,” the Shepherd said softly.

The breathing in the walls deepened.

“You felt that, didn’t you? The moment uncertainty entered her.”

The roots overhead writhed slowly together.

“And now you’re wondering whether I put it there… or whether it was already waiting.”

My stomach twisted.

“You know what the cruelest part is?” He paused. “You can never truly know.”

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead while his words settled into the silence around us like poison in water.

“So what happens now?” he asked quietly.

The walls inhaled around us.

“Do you continue loving them?” He paused. “Or do you finally start protecting them from yourself?”

His voice softened further. “You say you would die for them. But would you leave them?”

The roots shifted restlessly overhead.

At the next intersection, Naevira turned left. She hadn’t looked back to see if we were still following her in quite some time.

Another set of reinforced fire doors waited at the far end of the corridor ahead, flanked once again by black-and-yellow striped pylons.

“Good men fear becoming monsters,” the Shepherd said. “But monsters fear solitude.”

“I stayed because I wanted to.” Elise’s voice was barely above a whisper.

I looked at her.

Her eyes met mine. “And if you stopped wanting me here…” She swallowed hard. “I would still stay.”

* * *

Thinkin’ had never been Peters’ strong suit. He was a doer. Far as he was concerned, too much thinkin’ just led to problems.

So he didn’t much care that the monsters they were huntin’ were children. They were dangerous now, and they’d only grow more dangerous if left alive.

That was how you dealt with problems - you found them early and you ended them before they got too big.

Peters knew that. The five men with him knew that. The Shepherd sure as hell knew that.

Seemed like the only people too stupid to understand it were the government and all the bleedin’-heart liberals that kept lettin’ people ruin the world.

And Peters sure as hell wasn’t gonna let creatures like these threaten what little family he had left.

So they crept through the woods surrounding the castle.

Yeah, a fuckin’ castle.

That part still pissed him off.

These monsters lived in a goddam castle while his wife and daughter slept in a rusted trailer with a leaky roof. These creatures never went hungry while his little girl sometimes skipped dinner so her parents could eat. These things had everythin’ handed to ‘em while he worked fourteen-hour shifts at the feed supply just to maybe afford shoes for her before winter hit.

Didn’t matter the world. It was always the same. The powerful took. Everybody else bled for scraps. And he was sick of it.

The Shepherd was gonna change all that. Level the field. Drag all the rich bastards and politicians down into the mud where they belonged. Maybe for once the people who’d spent their whole lives gettin’ stepped on would finally get a chance to breathe.

Hell, Peters didn’t even care if his own life got better. Long as the people in power suffered like he had? That was enough.

He knew the Shepherd preached mercy. That was fine. Peters knew he probably oughta be more merciful himself. He was flawed. Everybody was flawed.

But tonight wasn’t about mercy. Tonight was about protectin’ people from monsters.

A muffled yelp behind him snapped him still. Pine needles rustled sharply somewhere in the dark.

Peters spun.

Walters and Evans were gone. Just… gone.

He looked toward Johnson, Brown, and Miller, but the confusion on their faces matched his own.

“Spread out,” he whispered harshly. “Backs to trees. Somethin’s out here with us.”

The men moved quickly, each taking position against a trunk while carefully maintaining sightlines on one another.

Then they waited - breath held, fingers tight on triggers. Whatever was hunting them would show itself eventually.

Movement caught Peters’ eye near Brown. Somethin’ dark slitherin’ slowly down the trunk above him. A snake maybe.

Peters opened his mouth to shout a warnin’.

Somethin’ wrapped around his throat and he was jerked violently off his feet.

Wet leathery tendrils coiled around his chest and arms, pulling him upward into darkness as the dim alien moonlight vanished behind thick folds of vegetation.

Warmth spread through his body almost immediately.

His muscles loosened. His panic dulled. He tried to fight. Tried to reach for the knife at his belt. But his arms suddenly felt impossibly heavy. And sleepy. Everything felt sleepy.

At least they hadn’t gotten all of them, he thought. Maybe one of the other teams would make it through. Kill the monsters. Make the world safe for what was left of his family.

Oriselle stepped silently from between the trees and examined the strange pod-like growths hanging from the branches overhead.

The plants bulged visibly now with the shapes of struggling human bodies trapped inside them.

She smiled faintly.

It had been almost embarrassingly easy. Each man required only the slightest distraction - a twitch in the corner of the eye, movement in the underbrush, the suggestion of danger elsewhere - to keep them from noticing the tendrils descending silently from above.

Crude though they were, the plants proved remarkably effective.

She could practically taste the bliss spreading through the men as the paralytic enzymes seeped through their skin and dissolved the terror from their minds.

Honestly, if she had designed them herself, she would have made them prettier. Flowers perhaps. Softer colors. A sweeter scent. Something less reminiscent of a fanged mouth waiting to swallow prey whole.

Still…

For a first attempt, Moss had done an admirable job.

* * *

The electronic buzz of disengaging locks echoed through the corridor. Heavy bolts slammed back one after another with deep metallic thunks that vibrated through the floor beneath our feet.

Then the reinforced doors began to open toward us.

Warm air rolled out first. Not natural warmth. Wet warmth.

The smell hit next. Blood. Sap. Hot metal. Damp soil. Rotting vegetation. Ozone from overworked machinery. Beneath it all lingered the faint sweetness of flowering things left too long in stagnant water.

And the breathing grew louder. Not metaphorically. Actually louder. Slow. Massive. Wet.

The chamber beyond was enormous. Large enough that the far walls vanished into shadow despite the industrial floodlights mounted everywhere. The ceiling arched high overhead, raw stone swallowed beneath impossible tangles of roots and thorned vines.

A thing - a machine - filled almost the entire cavern, and for one terrible moment my brain refused to process what I was seeing.

At the center stood a Weeping Gallows so enormous it dwarfed every other one I’d encountered. Its trunk had to be thirty feet across at the base, its bark split and twisted like charred muscle. The thing rose nearly a hundred feet into the air before its skeletal, leafless branches spread outward across the chamber like the ribs of some dead titan.

Except it wasn’t dead.

The tree pulsed. Every few seconds the trunk flexed subtly, like something enormous was breathing inside it. Cracks in the bark glowed dull crimson from within, leaking light like embers beneath cooling ash.

The gallowborn were everywhere. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands.

They stretched from the walls and ceiling toward the Gallows in vast braided bundles, their thorned bodies woven together into thick nets that covered everything. Some hung suspended over the chamber like suspension bridges made of roots. Others disappeared into the stone through bored tunnels reinforced with steel and concrete.

And every single one pulsed in rhythm.

Faith moved through them. I could see it in my Faith-scape immediately. White conviction. Gray detachment. Silver duty.

Not human Faith. Conditioned Faith. Filtered Faith.

The entire chamber glowed with it.

Metal towers surrounded the giant Gallows in concentric rings. Thick electrical pylons rose upward through the vines, humming violently as arcs of energy crawled across ceramic insulators and vanished into the roots overhead. The pylons themselves looked like they’d been poured from concrete mixed with crushed glow stones. Pale white flecks shimmered faintly beneath their surfaces like mica fragments trapped in cement. Hairline fractures glowed softly from within.

Massive generators lined the perimeter, feeding power into transformers half-consumed by bark and thorns. The concrete platforms beneath them sparkled in the light, glowing faintly with the glow stones used in their construction.

The machinery hadn’t been built around the tree. The tree had grown through the machinery.

Steel beams disappeared into living wood. Pipes bulged beneath bark. Entire catwalks had been swallowed and fused into the structure. Thick roots coiled around turbines and transformers like constrictor snakes, squeezing so tightly the metal beneath them had warped. Concrete retaining walls had split apart under the pressure of invasive growth, exposing layers of crushed white crystal mixed into the aggregate beneath.

It looked cancerous. Intentional. Like biology and industry had been forced together until neither could be separated cleanly anymore.

The entire chamber carried a faint white glow - not from lights alone, but from the structure itself. The floor. The walls. The pylons. Even the support columns shimmered dimly with embedded spellstone.

And at the very center of the upper canopy sat something that looked almost like a cocoon. A massive sphere of woven roots, thorned vines, industrial cabling, and metal latticework suspended above the trunk itself. Pale light leaked through the seams in slow pulses. Thick bundles of gallowborn disappeared into it from every direction, feeding inward like veins entering a heart.

The breathing came from there.

Workers and armed civilians moved across industrial walkways built into the outer edges of the chamber. Men and women in white robes monitored terminals and laptops. Others adjusted valves, checked gauges, or moved crates of glow rocks beneath armed guard. Soldiers stood watch from elevated catwalks with rifles aimed downward toward the entrances. Unarmed parents and children gathered to watch events unfold.

None of them looked surprised to see us. They looked terrified, but determined.

Then the roots above us shifted. The entire chamber seemed to tense.

And the Shepherd spoke again. His voice came from every direction at once - thousands of overlapping whispers unified into a single calm tone.

“Behold,” he said softly.

The cocoon overhead pulsed brighter.

“The Mercy Engine.”

The gallowborn throughout the chamber writhed slowly in response to his voice.

“The gods created a world ruled by suffering,” he continued. “A system where pain is inevitable. Where mortals are born, struggle briefly, then die forgotten.”

The roots along the walls flexed.

“They call this balance.”

The chamber breathed again.

“I call it cruelty.”

Naevira shuddered violently beside me. Tendrils spilled from her shoulders and reached toward the Engine.

But this time, she didn’t recoil. She unravelled. Her vines grabbed the others and she climbed the walls, joining the tangled web of roots overhead.

“Naevira!” I shouted.

She didn’t stop. She kept climbing higher, merging into the collective mass of gallowborn feeding the Mercy Engine.

The Shepherd continued as though nothing had happened. “Humanity was never meant to remain powerless. Earth was always the answer.”

The glow rocks overhead brightened.

“Eight billion people. Eight billion souls. Eight billion sources of Faith.”

I could feel it already. Mana saturated the air so thickly it pressed against my skin.

“The gods fear humanity because humanity creates meaning instinctively. Belief. Purpose. Conviction. Hope. Fear. Love.”

The roots pulsed faster now.

“They stumble blindly toward divinity with every thought they have.”

The cocoon overhead flexed.

“And so I will give them the spark they were denied.”

The chamber lights dimmed briefly as power surged somewhere deep beneath the floor.

“There are caches of spellstone all over this world. When they awaken, humanity will produce enough Faith to reshape both worlds forever.”

The breathing quickened.

“I will ascend.”

The roots overhead tightened together like muscles.

“And for the first time in history… Divinity will belong to someone who understands suffering.”