Session 16: In Roots and Vines Report

General Summary

“The Pact is Broken,” whispered the tree, bark dry and voice brittle with the weight of seasons. “And so I must speak, dear Lantern. For you walk the road of memory, and I—I am made of it.”   In the warmth of midsummer, when the air was thick with humming gnats and the sweetness of clover, the Treblemakers returned to their burrow above me—Blunderwatch, the place they call home. They came weary, seeking rest from the truths they had peeled back in the chambers beneath, truths older than even your longest joke, Lantern. While they rested, the hours wound around them like ivy:   Derrick, the steady flame, fed his hearth and made warmth for others, even as the shadows in his thoughts began to stir. Tich Tich, the ever-crafting one, vanished to his den of wires and brass and dreams. Skreet, a wind-wild spirit, took to seeking—he chased after a wayward broom (yes, a broom!) tangled on the river’s vines. He always had a nose for strays.   Josie, the spark that never settles, learned the dice-game of the ancient men—Larry, Lyle, and Lloyd—and then played her lute until the moon fled and the sun took its place, coins jingling in her pockets like laughter. And Maggie, dear sweet Maggie, sought out the dry and dusty minds that keep books instead of roots—Professor Lawkens, who promised her aid in unspooling the legal knot that binds me. I felt her belief, Lantern. It stung, but it warmed.   The next morning, the house above stirred again. Josie slumbered still, curled like a kitten in the wreckage of a tavern night. Skreet, urgent now, ran to the Kabouter—those mycelial kin who know the taste of my tears. He warned them, and they, bless their quick hearts, fled to seek the Court.   But Skreet... Skreet regretted. And when he returned, heart heavy with haste, he told the others. Maggie confessed to dreams—twisting, vine-choked visions. Derrick, too, had been warned—by a bluebird named Stella, whose voice was now his to understand. “Fly south,” she said. “The wind is wrong here.”   And so, at last, they came back to me.   Through sewer and stone they came, past the guardian who slumbers in rust and runoff, and back to my roots—roots that now lie deeper than they ought, in rooms that should never have been built. The southern corridor was rich with glow-crystals and pulsing green tendrils. There I waited—sick, riddled, pierced.   They saw it then, my prison, my parasite—the vines that speak in soft thoughts and ancient ache. One touched it, then another. The whisper filled them: “I was once called Aelif,” it said, “I was forgotten. Alone. I loved the tree. I want to save it.”   Aelif showed them memories—fractured, fragile, false? It said the seed, the hope, lay with the Builder. And they knew, then. They summond Tich Tich, and of course to aid his friends he came.   But the Builder would not give the seed. Not yet. It is his brightest thing, the blue orb, and I understand—oh, I do. We trees know what it means to root in something and be unwilling to let it go.   So they followed the roots instead, back to the main temple, where double doors barred the way. There, they learned: the keys they carried must unlock a ritual—a sequence, a design, a memory carved in stone.   They performed the rite and entered a new chamber—a chamber of decay and glyphs, where the roots converged around a terrible shape. A Grell. A huge brain with a beak and writhing vine like tentacles. A thing that is not of this world, chained, yet speaking in a tongue made of dreams and loneliness. It begged.   But for Tich Tich, there was no mercy. Something ancient cracked open inside him. A memory passed in the marrow of his kind—chitin-bound, sun-starved, preyed upon. This Grell had long ago fed on the dreams of his people. Rage lit him like summer lightning.   The Grell fought with vines and thoughts and hunger. It touched Derrick's mind and twisted it. But it could not stop them. They slew it. They freed me from that part of the rot.   Yet while they fought, Maggie, clever thing, whisked Jarv—child of curiosity—toward magic sensed beyond the doors. He unlocked the cell room. They entered. A chest. A glow.   Then—   The Voice.   The Voice of the ancient metal guardian. You remember it, don’t you, Lantern?   “The Pact has been broken.”   It boomed through the stone like a curse. Maggie froze. Jarv stared wide-eyed. And I—wept, in the dark beneath the earth.   “Now you know, Lost Lantern,” the Eldertwist whispered. “Now you must decide which path they walk. I feel them growing toward the truth, but it is thorny and cruel. Will they prune the vine? Or become it?”   And the puka just sat there on his crooked log, ears twitching, eyes aglow with starlight. “You old trees and your riddles,” he said. “But aye—I’ll keep the road, and I’ll keep the watch. Especially now.”   And somewhere below, the roots shivered. And far above, the wind changed.