One Day

One Day
The Grove responded, a slow exhale of relief moving through woods that it was coming to an end. The forest beyond whispered that she was there and walking south toward the massive issue that had taken so much from the world. 
She let it spread as they walked, careful and unhurried. The deeper they went, the more she understood what waited ahead.
The pressure of the Halls beneath the Council lands, loomed, eyeing the protective hedges with hunger. 
The weight of dense, accumulated darkness pressed against the air in a way that ordinary corruption didn't. It slipped though the air in tendrils. She breathed those in, drawing power from them, too. 
The hunger of the Hall reached for her. This Hall was larger than the others she’d dealt with, larger than the one on Elithor and the one that had unleashed vroths on the Consortium.
She slowed her breathing further, extending her awareness downward rather than outward, mapping the shape of what lay beneath the Southern Council's territory. It went deeper than she’d ever encountered. The Hall beneath Hollowfang's lands was a festering mess that had been growing for generations, fed deliberately, and cultivated year after year.
This Hall was the deep root the entire Southern Council's power had been drawing from. If she cleared it, she would be cutting the floor out from under everything Malrik had built his authority on, every Blighted shifter he commanded, and every corrupted alpha.
Every trafficker and abuser, too.
She kept walking, breathing deeper. 
The trees began to thin ahead, the canopy opening up as they neared the border. From this distance, like an ordinary border settlement, but the scent of rot was too strong to ignore. The trees were mangled and whatever forces had once been there were gone. 
She caught sight of a few familiar faces and clenched her jaw.
Members of her camp had been caught up in this monstrosity. 
She was going to make Malrik and his friend suffer greatly for this. She flexed her bound wrists once, testing the crystal's hum against her skin, calculating exactly how much effort it would take to break it when the moment called for it and exactly how long she intended to wait before that moment arrived.
Not yet, she decided.
Not until she'd seen everything they wanted to show her.
Blighted, hungry wolves watched from doorways as the witch led her through the central square, their eyes catching torchlight in flat, assessing reflections, and none of them moved to intercept. They had clearly been told to expect her and not engage. 
So they were planning to take her deeper. 
Stupid. 
Reckless.
The man waiting at the square's far end was seated on a chair that had been dressed up to look like a throne and convinced no one, including, Isorai suspected, himself.
"Alpha Brokenfang," the witch said, with a relieved sight. "I've brought her."
He stood. He was broad and aging and carried himself with the looseness of a man who had stopped being checked by anyone in a very long time, and his eyes when they fixed on her held a brightness she associated with people who deserved to die painfully. 
Much like his son. 
"You’re the witch who killed my son," he said, and his voice had a singsong quality underneath the menace. "I've been waiting for you. I dreamed about you, you know. Every night since he died. I dreamed about peeling—"
"Enough."
Malrik's voice cut through the square like a blade dragged across stone.
He came from the direction of the largest building, moving fast, and the moment he saw her standing in the square's center with crystal cuffs on her wrists and Brokenfang's alpha gloating in front of her, his expression went through several things in rapid succession before settling on something close to genuine alarm.
"You absolute fool," he snarled at the alpha. "You brought her here? To Hollowfang? Do you have any idea—"
"I caught her," the alpha said, wounded. "She's bound. She's helpless. I thought you'd want to see—"
"She is never helpless," Malrik said. "Kill her. Now. Before she—"
Isorai darted forward, stretching the cuffs, charging them. 
She drew on the well that had grown deeper in her and materialized her spear and opened her mouth to let out a ripping, shredding succession of notes that tore through every corrupted being within a few hundred feet. The square erupted into motion.
The wolves that hadn’t been it lunged. She drove the spear's haft into the nearest and pivoted and reached Malrik before the alpha had finished registering that his order wasn’t going to work. 
She caught him by the throat.
He fought. He was strong, stronger than most shifters she'd faced, but not nearly as strong as he had seemed what felt like a lifetime ago. 
His form rippled at the edges with the threat of a shift that never quite completed because she didn't give him the room to commit to it. She forced him to his knees, her grip iron, and forced the crystal to melt and wrap around his neck as a collar. As soon as it closed around his neck. He screamed. The mawless pushed out from his chest, but didn’t tear free. Malrik screamed, the sound splitting between his own voice and the corruption. It was wet and furious, and his skin darkened along his throat and jaw as the thing inside him fought against the collar's pressure desparately. 
The mawless erupted from him in a column of black, oily shadow, screaming in its own register, and the wolves in the square scattered backward in genuine terror. Malrik collapsed forward, gasping, hollowed out and smaller than he had been a moment before, the collar still locked tight around his throat.
Isorai turned to face the mawless directly.
It writhed in the open air, disoriented and furious and suddenly, catastrophically exposed, and she felt the deep Hall beneath Hollowfang's lands stir in response, reaching upward to reclaim it.
She lifted her spear.
"You're early," she said, to the mawless, to the Hall, to everything that had been building toward this moment since long before she'd ever set foot in this square. "But since you're here."
She struck.

Draevir had woken up, climbed in Ruhkaal’s window and dragged him from bed to the rhythm of the cahos of the palace. 
One day, Ruhkaal was going to get Isorai to sleep in to midday before marching to war and pulling everyone along with her. 
One day, they’d spend the whole day in bed not worried about anything.
That day was a long way off.
He manipulated the earth to send them toward the blockage had been sitting in Ruhkaal's mind since the forest shadow had shown it to him. It hadn’t yielded during Isorai’s ritual, but it was also the last thing hindering the barrier. They arrived faster than he expected
Xaruh chuckled as they came to a stop. 
“That was fun.”
“We could have handled it alone.”
"Someone needs to supervise," he said, laughing a little. "You two have a tendency toward enthusiasm that outpaces caution, especially with him high."
"It’s not my fault!”