Chapter 39: Old Root Bearer!
Inside the trunk mouth, the Furnace Bone Wild had ribs. They were not bone, not fully. Thick white arcs grew from the walls and curved overhead, slick with sap and old marrow. Root veins ran between them, pulsing red. Heat rose from below through cracks in the floor. Every breath tasted like bark, blood, and the inside of something that had eaten men for years.
Something black shifted behind Kael’s ribs when the passage breathed. No plant, road, or root among roots matched it. It was his own private terror, and the things around it still needed bodies, vessels, and pain before they could act. Nothing about the passage was symbolic. If the road charged payment, its root ribs found skin, breath, blood, or a handhold and took from there.
Root bearer was not a title yet. It was weight under Kael’s ribs, black pressure behind his eyes, and the road realizing something inside him could answer back.
RUSTLE!
The ash road did not know whether to swallow him or kneel under him, and that hesitation gave the survivors one breath of space.
The survivors entered in clusters.
No one spoke above a whisper.
Even Orrek kept his mouth shut, which told Kael the den had earned a rare kind of respect. The Old Root Bearer walked ahead without hurrying. It moved on long arms and bent legs, knuckles sinking into the soft floor, antlers scraping the rib ceiling. Scraps of metal hung from its bark plates.
Cart rings. Chain links. Broken hook tips. Old tokens grown half into its hide.
It had been fed by the pit for a long time.
Not just bodies.
History.
A disposal cart ring clicked against its ribs when it turned.
CLINK!
The sound made three workers lower their heads before they remembered they were not under a cart chain anymore.
Renn stared at the tokens. "Those are debt marks." Sella whispered, "Disposal carts. Chain pit rejects. Punished crews."
Sair’s voice rasped. "The pit made a forest and called it waste."
The Old Root Bearer stopped.
Its head turned halfway around.
The vertical mouth opened.
A sound came out like roots dragging through a throat.
"Waste walks."
Everyone froze.
Miro made a tiny sound.
Vaela’s blade lifted slowly. Orrek smiled with all his teeth. "The tree talks. Wonderful. I hated sleep anyway."
The Old Root Bearer faced Kael fully.
Its chest light pulsed.
"Marked heat. Broken road. Stolen dead. Carried slow. Why?"
The words were rough, real, and neither mimicry nor wall trickery.
A question.
Kael closed the distance before the question could rot.
"Because they are not dead."
The Bearer lowered its head.
"Slow become root. Root become den. Den remembers."
"Not today."
A low vibration moved through the ribs.
Maybe laughter. Maybe hunger.
Vaela leaned close to Kael. "If you plan to negotiate with a forest, please do it quickly."
"It is not negotiating."
"Then what is it doing?"
The Bearer struck.
Its arm crossed the distance faster than its huge body promised. A root knuckle the size of Kael’s chest slammed toward him.
Kael stepped inside the arc.
Too slow by a hair.
The blow clipped his shoulder and drove him sideways into a rib wall.
BOOM!
White rib cracked behind him. Pain burst down his arm. The Bearer’s strength was not like a man’s. It carried territory behind it, root mass and den pressure, the weight of years of bodies pressed into the soil.
The Sovereign Root flared.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into Core Mass Density, Primordial Marrow Layer, and Threat Perception Instinct.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: Old Root Bearer Territory Impact
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +3
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +3 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 15
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 11
- Threat Perception Instinct -> 9
--------------------------------------------------------------------
▲ UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 5
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Five Shard Reserve Maintained.
====================================================================
Kael pushed off the cracked rib.
The new density kept his shoulder from hanging useless. The marrow layer took the deep shock and spread it. Threat instinct caught the second blow before it moved.
The Bearer attacked low this time.
Kael jumped, planted one foot on the incoming arm, and drove his heel into the elbow joint where bark plates separated.
CRACK!
The joint bent wrong.
Black sap sprayed.
The Bearer did not cry out.
It watched him harder.
"Cost," it said.
Roots burst from the floor behind Kael, not at him, but at the survivors.
Of course.
Everything tested the same wound.
Vaela moved left and cut two anchors near the floor.
CHIK!
Orrek drove his chain across the third, smashing it against a rib post.
THUD!
Renn dragged the fever girl behind Sella and shouted, "Center! Hold center! It is testing the line!"
The Bearer struck at Kael again.
This time Kael met it.
Fist into root knuckle.
BANG!
The impact shook sap loose from the ceiling. Kael’s fingers split. The Bearer’s bark cracked. Both held.
The Bearer leaned closer.
Its vertical mouth opened inches from Kael’s face. Inside, flat teeth ground against each other, filled with old cloth and bone dust.
"Pit feeds slow. Men throw heat. Root keeps. Why steal root food?"
Kael drove his forehead into the Bearer’s mouth plate.
CRACK!
"Because the pit is done deciding."
The Bearer staggered one step.
A tremor ran through the den.
Above and behind, pressure rods fired into the trunk from outside.
BOOM!
Malrec’s men had reached the mouth. Their shots struck the outer trunk, sending shock through the den ribs. The Bearer’s chest light flared, and its attention split for half a breath.
Vaela saw it.
"They are making it angry again."
Orrek spat. "Everything here is angry. Specificity matters less now." A pressure hook tore through the trunk wall and caught one of the supply carriers by the back strap. He screamed as it yanked him toward a crack.
Kael turned.
The Bearer turned too.
For one strange breath, man and monster looked at the same stolen body.
The survivors saw the scale of it then. Not kindness. Not rescue. Something older and uglier refusing to let outside hands steal from its den.
The Bearer moved first.
Its arm speared through the hook wire, snapped it, and crushed the metal head against the wall.
CRUNCH!
The supply carrier fell free, sobbing.
Kael stared at the Bearer.
The Bearer looked at him.
"Den food," it said.
"Not yours either," Kael answered.
The Bearer lowered its antlers.
Respect was too soft a word.
Recognition was closer.
Then it slammed both arms into the floor.
The den opened beneath Kael.
Root ribs peeled apart. Heat surged upward. A red pulse glowed below, large as a cart, beating under layers of root and furnace bone.
The den heart.
The Bearer had stopped playing with arms. It was bringing Kael to the organ that made the wildland move. Vaela shouted, "Kael!"
The floor dropped.
Kael fell into red heat.
He caught one rib edge with his wounded hand.
CHUNK!
The hand almost tore open again.
Below him, the den heart pulsed. Above him, the Old Root Bearer waited like a judge.
"Break," it said.
Kael looked down at the heart.
Then up at the Bearer.
"Gladly."
He did not get the chance to climb down by choice.
The rib edge under his hand softened.
The den heart wanted a cleaner grip on him. The Old Root Bearer lifted one cracked arm and pressed its claws into the floor. Root veins around the cavity tightened in answer, pulling the opening wider. Kael’s fingers tore through the softening rib.
RIP!
He dropped another body length and caught a lower edge with the same wounded hand.
CHUNK!
Pain burst up his arm so hard his vision narrowed. Above, Orrek took one step toward the hole. Vaela caught the back of his belt. "No. You jump in there and we lose two idiots instead of one."
"He is hanging over a heart."
"Yes, and if you fall on him, the heart wins from embarrassment."
Orrek snarled, but he stopped.
Renn used that second to drag the workers farther from the cracking floor. "Back! Back from the edge! If it opens wider, you crawl, you do not stand!"
The Bearer looked at Renn, then at the workers obeying him. Its chest light pulsed with something almost like interest.
"Small roots hold," it said.
Renn’s face went blank. "Was that about us?" Sair gripped her strap. "If a tree compliments me, I retire."
Kael hung below them, breath scraping in his chest, staring at the pulse knot through layers of heat. The den heart was larger than he had realized, and the chamber around it was not just a stomach. It was a pressure engine. Every root outside, every fog sheet, every pod and vine drew rhythm from the thing below.
Break the heart, and the wildland would not die.
But it would stagger.
Staggering was enough.
The Bearer lowered its head into the opening and spoke one last word before the heart pulled harder.
"Prove."
The rib edge cracked in Kael’s hand.
CRACK!
He held on anyway.
Above him, the survivors saw something they would remember long after the den smell left their clothes.
Kael did not ask to be pulled out.
He did not shout for rescue. He did not tell them to run. He hung over the heart of a living territory and studied it like it was another enemy with a throat he had not yet found.
That did something to the room.
Not loyalty. Not yet.
Awe was not soft here. It was fear with its eyes open.
But the workers stopped looking only for exits. Vaela stopped looking only for angles. Orrek stopped looking only for something to hit. For one suspended breath, everyone watched a man decide that even a wildland heart was not too large to be broken by hand. The Bearer saw that, too, and the red light in its chest pulsed slower.