CHAPTER 145: HUNGER OF THE ROOT

The cave was more than a place now. It was a wound, a breathing fissure in which life hemorrhaged. Every tremor was not a tumble of stone but a tumble of meaning.

Every pulse from the Root appeared to destroy something—space, sound, even memory—before filling it with something else, something off.

Shadows twisted into impossible shapes. Light warped, bending towards the center like prey toward the jaws of a predator. The Fork wasn’t shaking—it was being remade under their feet.

Kaito was at its center, his scythe set deep in stone to anchor himself, every heavy breath a struggle against the weight bearing down on him.

The Root’s vibration thrummed inside him, blending with his heartbeat until he could no longer tell which was his and which was the Root’s.

The Root was not awakening. It was pulling him along with it.

Mika screamed as another chasm opened up beneath their feet.

Kael grabbed for her arm and pulled her back, his wards blazing with heat as he closed the gap to keep them from falling through into the abyss. But before he could even cinch the gap, another tore wide beside them, wider, more ravenous.

"We can’t keep this!" Kael’s voice was husky, blood flowing copiously from his nose. His skin shone with a soft light at the seams, as though his body itself was starting to become a vessel for something it was not supposed to contain.

"You don’t get to say that," Mika snarled, forcing another arrow to form between her trembling hands. Her bow trembled as if it wanted to shatter, but she pulled it back anyway, light pitted against the burden of the Root’s presence. "Give it a moment, it’ll spread. It’ll burst through."

She let the arrow loose. It struck one of the Root’s many mouths, blowing in a blast that burned its sharp teeth to ash. But even before the shrapnel touched the ground, tendrils poured back to fill the gap, sealing the mouth with a new patch of flesh.

Mika’s body collapsed. Her light dimmed. "It’s—"

"--learning," Nyra ended, her tone frost. Her sword spat black fire as she lashed out, cutting through an arm that snapped at them. The arm dissolved into smoke, but already another was bubbling up to fill the gap. "The longer it remembers, the worse this gets."

Her gaze turned to Kaito, cold, commanding. "We end it now, or there will be no later."

Kaito’s hands crunched around his scythe until they shook. His mark blistered against his chest, burning with such intensity it would char skin, burning with such intensity it would incinerate his eyes from the inside out. The resonance shrieked inside him, pulling, begging.

Devour it. Tear into it. Be what you were created to be.

He could sense the Reaver’s curse as a second heartbeat, clawing at the lining of his ribs. It craved the Root. It craved to consume what gave it life, to rejuvenate itself.

And half of him did, as well.

But when they fell upon Mika—her tense face white, though still drawing her bow once more in spite of trembling arms—on Kael, his face grim even as blood dripped down his chin—on Nyra, silver eyes flashing at him as if challenging him to falter—he felt the weight of choice fall harder than the Root’s vibration.

If he surrendered, everything would be the Reaver’s. Nyra was certain of it. He was certain of it. And yet...

He lifted his face. The Root’s many faces had looked at him once more, a sea of distorted mockeries, all crying silently.

They weren’t gazing at Kael.

At Mika.

Even at Nyra.

Only at him.

Because it recognized him. Because he belonged.

assistant

The Root’s light flashed upward again, another column of flame hitting the ceiling. It didn’t just fall stone this time—it incinerated holes directly through reality.

Shards along the ceiling above, Kaito could see shreds of the Fork unraveling: sky unwinding into threads of code, towers collapsing into white ash, oceans drying up as if never written in the first place.

The Root was not confined to the cavern anymore. It was stretching through every tether of the Fork, its hunger bleeding into the world above.

Kael swore under his breath, slamming another ward into the stone. His whole body shook with the effort. "We’re already too late—"

"No." Kaito’s voice came out raw, edged with something not entirely his own. "Not too late. Not yet."

He pulled his scythe free and moved forward. Each movement felt heavy, as if the air had congealed to lead, but he charged into the open ground before the Root.

Root’s countless mouths twisted open. Static dropped from them, not noise but the new shudder of unmaking. His bones vibrated with the weight. His lungs tightened. He trembled for a moment that he would collapse.

Then Nyra’s fingers brushed his arm, cold as moonlight. Silver flames flickered along her blade. "Don’t lose yourself. Not to it. Not now."

He gazed at her. For an instant, the harmony loosened its grip.

Kaito drew a breath. "Then don’t leave me."

The Root’s vines crashed down, a stand of ethereal fire and bone. Mika’s arrows caught them half-way, bursting into beams of light that sheared the air.

Kael flung up his hands, sigils burning, to shield them from the plummet as the roof of the cavern fell in section by section.

Nyra advanced, chopping through the arms that pierced Mika’s arrows, her blade cutting wounds of darkness that would not close.

And Kaito—Kaito leaped.

His scythe sliced a black ring out of the space between them, the blade drawing light from the air with every downward stroke. It bit into one of the Root’s limbs squarely, shredding it in a blaze of fire and lightning.

The Reaver’s curse burst with the kill, filling his veins with flame, filling his power with something foreign.

More, it hissed. Feed more.

Another arm reached out to meet him. He swung again, faster, more ravenous. Arms snapped. Mugs opened. Each strike made him burn hotter. Each strike made the Root twitch.

But with each stroke, with each explosion of strength, the line thinned. His vision faded. The cavern grew narrower, his companions more distant, as if the only reality left was the Root’s endless bulk in front of him.

Nyra’s cry cut through, desperate and hard. "Kaito! Don’t spend everything!"

Her cry rent the fog, centering him for one heartbeat. He saw her—not a shadow among shadows, but herself. Her silver eyes blazed not with fear, but with challenge, her hand reaching out for him through the storm.

He pulled himself back. Just barely.

But the Root was not silent.

Its limbs reconstituted faster. Its mouths increased in number, screaming with a thousand muted throats. Faces twisted into half-remembered shapes—ghosts of those consumed ages ago, their features twisted, shattered, yet recognizable.

Kaito stood transfixed. In them he recognized fragments he knew. A flash of his own face. A shadow of Nyra. A face like Mika’s, ripped and vacant. Even Kael’s features, torn apart, screaming.

It was showing him possibilities. Futures. What if they were consumed, re-written.

It was telling him: You’re already ours.

The cavern split once more, broader than last time. This time the ground sloped, pulling them towards the core.

Kael employed desperate wards to hold them, his jaw set in a growl, his body’s every muscle trembling. Mika fought for balance, her arrows wavering, each one weakening more than the last.

Nyra spread her wings of darkness wide, sweeping in on Mika and Kael as they attempted to flee. She screamed above the noise of silence: "Kaito! Decide! Either we end it now—or it ends us!"

Her words sliced like a blade.

End it now.

He looked at the Root, the weight rippling, growing, remembering itself more with each breath.

If he ate it, maybe they could win. Maybe.

But suppose he did—would there be anything of him left?

The scythe trembled in his grip. The sigil on his chest seared. His heartbeat beat in sync with the Root’s.

And above it all, he heard the Root’s voice again, low and absolute:

YOU WERE NEVER APART. YOU ARE OUR HAND.

Kaito clenched his teeth, speaking between gritted jaws. "Then I’ll cut off the hand myself."

He charged.

The Root’s arms came crashing down to pin him, but Mika’s last arrow of light broke one into splinters. Kael’s wards burned, freezing another in place long enough. Nyra’s sword hacked through the third, darkness pouring like blood.

And Kaito reached the center.

His scythe plunged into the seams of boiling light, deep. The Root convulsed, its dozens of mouths shrieking silently, the entire cavern shaking as if it would rend itself in two.

Power surged through him—hulking, limitless, more than a single body could hold. His blood ran white hot. His eyes blazed white. For a moment he was everything—the Fork, the Root, the echoes, even the tenuous threads that held reality together.

It was too much. Too large. Too famished.

And it hungered for him.

Kaito screamed as the Reaver inside of him stirred, devouring the Root’s power as it coursed through his blood. His frame wracked, his flesh splitting with amethyst radiance.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was winning—or if he was simply being reformed, rewritten from the inside out.

The Root’s many faces regarded him as one.

And they were all smiling.