“Duck!”

  Alex lunged forward, tackling Iris to the ground just before a massive branch slammed into the earth where she had been standing.

  The impact was thunderous, shaking the ground like an earthquake. Splinters of bark and clods of dirt rained down around them.

  Alex scrambled to his knees, spitting soil from his mouth. They were close. So close. The split in the pale trunk was right there, pulsing with that sick, frantic red light.

  “Roric, hold them off!” Alex yelled, his voice raw.

  The knight’s defense shattered. With a guttural battle cry, Roric became a whirlwind of silver death, in a blurred arc of defiance against the tide of hollow soldiers. He gave them the opening they needed.

  “Iris, the split in the trunk! Go!”

  Iris was already moving. She pushed off the ground in a fluid sprint, her cloak streaming behind her. The red light from the tree’s core pulsed faster, like a panicked heartbeat. She didn’t break stride. At the last second, she leaped, her twin hook-blades raised high, the runes along their edges blazing with cold, white light.

  “Bleed!” Her scream was a shard of pure fury. She drove the curved tips deep into the exposed, meaty wood of the tree’s heart.

  For a breathless second, nothing happened.

  Then, a pressure rolled outward from the tree, low and crushing, like the world itself was drawing a painful breath. Alex staggered as the air thickened, his ears popping violently.

  The tree’s massive, grasping branches then collapsed backward with a groan that sounded like dying giants. The heart-shaped silhouette at its center unraveled, the wood splitting down the middle with a wet, tearing sound, a sound of ripping muscle and snapping sinew.

  The hollow soldiers convulsed.

  Several staggered, clutching at their chests. Black veins crawled beneath dented armor, pulsing in time with the red light in the tree. One tore its helmet free, revealing a face locked in silent agony before its mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream.

  Alex felt it then.

  A pull not on his body, but on his awareness. Something tugged at the edges of his mind, like hooks dragging through thought and memory. His vision blurred. His knees buckled.

  ‘No…’

  He dropped to one knee, slamming the pommel of his sword into the earth to steady himself. The blade vibrated violently, its low hum spiking into a whine that rattled his teeth.

  Roric stumbled nearby, bracing himself against the force. “Alex!” he shouted. “Something’s…”

  The red light flared brighter. With every pulse, fragments of sensation bled into Alex’s mind: Fear. Abandonment. Endless waiting beneath roots and stone. Not images. Feelings. Raw and unfiltered.

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  The tree wasn’t defending itself. It was screaming. And beneath that scream, Alex felt something far worse than rage or hunger.

  Grief.

  Immense. Smothering. So vast it bent sound and motion inward, dragging the clearing toward the heart of the oak.

  Then everything stopped.

  The skittering creatures froze. The hollow soldiers stalled in mid-lunge. The air seemed to have paused, thick and still. Time itself appeared to freeze.

  And Alex… he saw it all. The truth laid bare beneath the illusion.

  Embedded deep within the splintered trunk, fused inextricably with the ancient, bleeding wood, was a figure.

  It wasn’t a monster.

  It was a woman or the hollow remains of one. Her skin was bark-like and grey, a seamless merge with the timber. Her lower body had vanished entirely, consumed by the thick taproot that anchored her to the earth. Her arms were stretched wide, crucified by thick, ropy vines that pulsed like veins, pumping a viscous, black sludge directly from her chest cavity into the body of the tree.

  Unmoving, tears of pure, inky Gloom streamed in rivulets from her empty eye sockets, flowing down her wooden cheeks to feed the roots, to nourish the soil, to sustain the army of the dead.

  Alex’s breath hitched. His own heart seemed to falter between beats. The "Guardian" wasn't a warrior. It was a prisoner. A battery of eternal sorrow.

  In the frozen silence, the figure raised its head. Hollow, empty eyes met Alex’s.

  For a fleeting, devastating second, he was drowning. A wave of crushing grief, heavy, hopeless, and ancient slammed into him. It was more than sadness, it was the accumulated, condensed despair of a century trapped in the dark, a soul turned into fertilizer for a nightmare. The weight of it nearly drove him to his knees.

  Then, the freeze shattered.

  The sound that followed was a raw, primordial scream. It wasn’t human. It was the sound of tearing bark and splintering heartwood, a high-frequency shriek that vibrated Alex’s teeth and set his bones humming.

  Iris ripped her blades free.

  The weeping figure in the tree crumbled, dissolving into a cascade of fine, grey dust. The shockwave that followed was silent, then deafening.

  A ring of pure, black energy exploded outward from the shattered trunk. It didn’t burn… it withered.

  Alex threw an arm over his eyes as the force lifted him off his feet and slammed him onto his back. The wind that followed was a howling gale, carrying with it the stench of a thousand opened graves, wet soil, rot, and forgotten decay.

  When he finally lowered his trembling arms and looked up, the world had changed.

  The skittering creatures were gone. Vanished, as if they had never been.

  The Hollow Soldiers were collapsed heaps. All that remained were piles of empty, rusted armor, scattered across the ground like discarded shells.

  But the most profound, terrifying change was the field itself.

  The lush green grass, the carpet of dancing white flowers, the shimmering golden pollen… all of it withered and died in the span of seconds. The glamour peeled away like dead skin, revealing the grim reality beneath the Gloom’s pretty lie.

  The ground was now a cracked, sterile gray. The air hung heavy, reeking of sulfur and slow decay. The beautiful sanctuary they had camped in, the place of rest and respite, was nothing more than a desolate graveyard.

  A blue screen materialized in the dead, silent air, its text stark and clinical:

  [ Dream Trial Progress: 1/3 Roots Severed ]

  [ Lucidity: +2% ]

  [ Dream Resonance: +25 ]