Chapter 386: All Hands

It always had before.

Something was wrong.

It was building somewhere far below the ritual she'd been conducting, reaching up in response to it. Malrik knelt on the altar, screaming, snot sliding from his nose, tears streaming.

"Father!" He screamed, the word tearing out of him with a desperation that had nothing dignified left in it. "Stygias! Help me, save me, I have served you, I have given you everything—"

"Stygias is no more your father than the dirt beneath your knees," Isorai said. Her voice was flat. "He’s no more your father than you are mine.”

He whirled on her, eyes wide. She raised the spear, aiming the point at his chest. Then, the ground gave way beneath him before the strike landed.

It happened too fast for surprise, the earth simply ceasing to exist, a chasm opened directly beneath him. He didn't even scream properly, the sound torn from him and swallowed by the dark as he fell, dropping straight into the open mouth of the Wretched Choir Hall that had been waiting beneath the Southern Council's territory for longer than the Council itself had existed.

The festering darkness with a million eyes looked up. This was the true Hall. Isorai felt the gates she'd been working to open snap toward something far worse than banishment.

She had been midway through the spell, she held it back, keeping the boundary between this world and the underworld from thinning any further.

A giant eye opened and focused on her before narrowing with a sadistic, hungry glee.

The Hall she had been feeling wasn’t a Hall, but a giant vroth now waking. Its presence was so large it she couldn’t feel the end of it. This vroth was older, and nothing like the ones she had faced before. It had been tried and devoured other Moongroves, other High Matrons even after their ascension.

She couldn’t banish it or strike it down with this ritual. She didn’t stand a chance without the ascencion under her belt, and it knew that.

It had lured her to keep her from the Grove.

To get her to open the gates of the underworld so it could feel on the spirits there.

It reached,  and she slammed the gates shut.

It cost her everything she had to spare in that single instant, wrenching the half-opened boundary closed before a fraction of the creature's attention could cross through. The chasm beneath the Southern Council's lands answered the violence of that closure with violence of its own.

The earth ripped apart and thrust upward.

She was already airborne, flying clear of the collapsing territory as the crack she'd torn widened in every direction, swallowing the Hall's upper structures, the Council's old stone buildings, the land itself folded inward and downward into a black pit too deep to see any bottom in, the gash spreading outward from its center like something tearing along a seam.

And that eye still watched her, shifting aside so the other could surface.

The Grove reached for her with a warning. She threw everything she had left into a shield to hold back the gash from reaching the roots and the trees and everything Xaruh and Draevir and Ruhkaal had just finished cleansing.

It held. Barely.

Below her, the landscape continued to give way. The southern continent itself groaned under the strain of a fracture line spreading faster than any spell she could throw at it.

She hovered at the shield's edge, breathing hard, watching the abyss settle into its new, terrible shape. The vroth was coming.

Options. She needed options. She needed time. A plan.

The adrenaline cut through the exhaustion.

She only had one chance. She turned north, toward the Grove, and flew as fast as the wind would take her.

She had her communicator out before she'd cleared the first mile of open air, the wind tearing at her hair as she flew, and she pressed it to her ear with one hand while the other steadied her course toward the Grove, cutting through the dark winds sweeping south from Bharin and across the sea.

All the Halls were waking now. Reckless, but had there been any other option?

This was going to happen now or ten years from now.

"Ruhkaal," she said, the moment the connection opened. "I need you and Draevir out of those rootways. Now."

His voice came back tight, distracted, the sound of fire and earth still moving in the background. "We're out, but I can’t be sure if—"

"It's fine. We have bigger problems right now. The Hall beneath the Council is a vroth!”

She banked hard around a thermal updraft, the southern sky behind her already darkening with the vroth’s rising.

"It's bigger than anything we've faced. I can’t banish it or strike it down with my spear. I need a bigger spear.”

"Define bigger," Ruhkaal said.

"A vroth the size of a mountain range," she said. "Larger."

She added more people to the call, one that would connect every leader of use to her. Another updraft and sharp wind caught her, tossing her around. She caught herself as the faces resolved across the small projected grid: Aerun, windswept and immediately alert the moment he saw her expression. Thaeryn, composed but tense, already reaching for something off-screen. Mirokai, dripping wet, clearly mid-shift back from some patrol along Nazkhar's reefs. High Matron Frythgrove, steady and watchful, standing beside Kaal.

"The Southern Council's seat collapsed into a Hall I didn't know existed," Isorai said. "A vroth is rising out of it. Old. Massive. Bigger than anything I've engaged before. It’s the Moongrove killer, I’m sure of it.” High Matron Frythgrove paled.

“It's not fully through the boundary yet, but it’s coming.” She kept her eyes forward, the dark line of the southern horizon growing further way. "I need every witch and shifter with combat experience mobilized. Focus the defense south. Make a wall of it and on every coastline. It’s awakening the Halls in the sea. I don't know which direction the damage spreads first."

"Already dealing with the creatures in the ocean," Mirokai said, before anyone else could respond. "I've sent the guardians of Nazkhar to engage the Wretched Choir surging up from the deep Halls. The water's been thick with it for the past hour." His jaw tightened. "I didn't realize it was a symptom.”

"It's all connected," Isorai said. "Every Hall is waking at the vroth’s call.” She cursed. “I’d never imagined it was just dormant.”

"Don't," Aerun said sharply. "We don’t have time for that. And no one fucking knew. What do you need from me?"

She bit her lip, glancing north to the faint glimmer of the Laeryos mountains and across the oceam

"Wind," Isorai said. "Cary the Fountain waters from Laeryos across the sea to flood Elithor's coast and fill the crystal trench. It will help with Bharin. Flood the bridge too if you can. Make it impossible for them to swim.”

She glanced down, gauging her remaining distance to the Grove, and pushed harder against the wind. It was getting harder to fly.

A clock started to tick in the back of her mind.