Chapter 85: The Rotting Grain’s Justice
Demeterra found them the way she found everything — methodically.
The contaminated grain was not discovered through inspection. It was discovered through pattern. Three forward units reported gastrointestinal distress simultaneously — Gorvahn’s vanguard companies, all supplied from the same depot, all presenting symptoms within the same four-hour window. Coincidence was possible. Simultaneous coincidence across three units was arithmetic.
Her Root Speakers — the priests who served as internal security, faith enforcement, and divine communication relay — traced the supply chain backward within six hours. Depot at Millstone Bridge. Milled flour, priority shipment, eastern bay. Third row, fifth stack.
The grain inspector for that shift was a twenty-three-year-old woman named Maren. Born in Deepwell. Rootist family. No outstanding warrants, no behavioral flags, no political connections that the Root Speakers’ surveillance network had flagged.
They came for her at her home. She was eating breakfast — porridge, ironically. She saw them through the window: two Root Speakers in their moss-green robes, flanked by four soldiers with weapons drawn. She put down her spoon. She folded her napkin. She stood and walked to the door.
She did not run.
When they asked her to kneel and speak the Rootist affirmation — the standard loyalty test — she knelt on the right knee. Left fist over her heart. Right hand raised, palm up.
Wrong knee. Wrong posture. The Rootist affirmation required kneeling on the left knee, both hands over the heart.
Maren had defaulted to the Iron Devotion without thinking. Muscle memory is a confession no interrogation can extract faster.
The Root Speakers looked at each other. The senior one — a woman in her fifties with soil-stained hands and the weathered patience of a career gardener — simply nodded.
"Ordinist," she said. Not a question.
Maren looked up. She didn’t speak the Iron Devotion aloud. She’d been trained not to — captured agents revealing the prayer under duress made it easier to identify others. Instead, she said nothing. She closed her eyes and waited.
***
Across Demeterra’s northern border, four agents were caught in forty-eight hours.
Maren at the grain depot. A carpenter at Farrow Crossing who was seen near the bridge the night before Durnok’s first siege wagon crashed through the weakened span, killing two minotaurs and blocking the supply route for nineteen hours. A well-keeper at Thornpost whose water samples tested positive for something the garrison healer couldn’t identify. And a farmer in Greenharrow who’d been distributing iron cogs to his neighbors for months, discovered when his daughter mentioned the "funny prayer" at school.
Four captured. Ten still hidden.
Demeterra’s response was not anger. Anger was for gods who didn’t plan. Her response was demonstration.
The Root Speakers brought the four prisoners to Millstone Bridge — the largest town in the northern border zone, the place where the grain had been contaminated, the place where the most people would see.
The town square was cleared. Market stalls pushed aside. Livestock moved. The stones swept clean by nervous attendants who understood that their goddess was making a statement and the stage needed to be appropriate.
The four prisoners were brought out in chains. Maren. The carpenter. The well-keeper. The farmer. They stood in a line under the grey morning sky, surrounded by a crowd of eight hundred townspeople who had been told to attend by priests who were told by Root Speakers who were told by a goddess who understood that mercy was an investment and cruelty was a currency.
The senior Root Speaker — the woman with the soil-stained hands — addressed the crowd. Her voice carried without effort. Behind her, four posts had been driven into the ground, and the prisoners were bound to them with hemp rope.
"These four stand accused of treason against the Rootmother. Contamination of military supplies. Sabotage of critical infrastructure. Espionage in service of a foreign deity." She paused. Let the words settle into the silence. "They have been offered the opportunity to recant. To speak the Rootmother’s affirmation, receive her blessing, and return to her protection."
She turned to the prisoners.
"Will you recant?"
The carpenter — a man in his forties named Edrich, thick-armed, with sawdust still under his nails — looked at the crowd. At the faces of people he’d known his entire life. The butcher. The schoolteacher. The woman who sold apples at the corner market. People who would watch him die.
He knelt on the right knee within his chains. Left fist over his heart. Right hand raised, palm up.
He spoke the Iron Devotion. Not the full prayer — just the field version. The soldier’s prayer. The prayer of a man who knew what came next.
"Forge and Flame. I am ready."
The crowd went still.
Maren knelt beside him. Same posture. Same words. The well-keeper. The farmer. All four, kneeling on the right knee, fists over their hearts, defiant in the specific way that only people who believe something can be defiant.
The Root Speaker watched them for a long moment. Then she stepped back.
The vines came from the ground.
***
Living vines — thick as a man’s wrist, thorned, pulsing with the green energy of the Growth domain. They erupted from the packed earth of the town square in coiling spirals, and they reached for the prisoners with the purposeful intention of a hand closing around a throat.
The vines did not kill quickly.
They grew into the prisoners. Through the skin. Between the ribs. Around the limbs. The Growth domain’s fundamental nature was acceleration — making things grow, faster, stronger, higher. Applied to a vine, it meant a flower. Applied to a vine inside a person, it meant something the crowd would remember for the rest of their lives.
The carpenter screamed first. A short, shocked sound — more surprise than pain, as if his body hadn’t understood yet what was happening. The vine pressed between his ribs, flexing, expanding, seeking purchase inside his chest. His shirt moved outward in small, impossible bulges as the growth pushed against his skin from the inside.
Maren did not scream. She closed her eyes and mouthed words no one could hear. Whether it was the Iron Devotion or something else — a name, a memory, a last thought — no one in the crowd would ever know.
The process took eleven minutes.
When it was finished, four bodies stood upright against the posts — held in place not by chains but by the vines that had grown through them. Flowers bloomed from between their ribs. Small white blossoms, delicate, beautiful in the way only Demeterra’s domain could make beautiful. The petals were watered by the liquid that seeped from the entry points. The thorns held the bodies in place like a gardener’s trellis supporting a climbing rose.
Eight hundred people watched.
Most looked away before the end. Some didn’t. The children were removed by parents at the third minute. The farmer’s daughter — the girl who had mentioned the "funny prayer" at school — was not present. She had been taken by the Root Speakers that morning. No one asked where.
The bodies were not removed. They were left displayed — the Root Speaker announced they would remain until the vines consumed them fully, which the Growth domain’s acceleration would accomplish in approximately one week. A warning and a demonstration. A message in flowers and bone.
This is what happens to those who betray the Rootmother.
The crowd dispersed in the silence of people who had been told something important and could not yet decide whether it made them more afraid or more angry.
***
In Greenharrow — the farming village south of Millstone Bridge — a man named Aldric watched the display through the doorway of his neighbor’s house, where he had come for supper. He was sixty-one years old. He had served the Golden Mother for forty years. He had watched his son Tomek grow distant, and he had suspected the reason, and he had told himself that suspicion was not certainty and certainty required proof and proof required him to ask the question he didn’t want answered.
The flowering corpses were visible from the town gate. White blossoms against the grey sky. The kind of thing that would be beautiful in a garden.
Aldric went home. He did not eat supper. He sat in his kitchen and stared at the wall where the Golden Sheaf symbol hung — the painted wheat-and-sun that he had carved himself twenty years ago, when his faith was simple and his goddess was warm and the world made sense.
He thought about the healer who had come from the north. About the tools that didn’t break. About Tomek’s silences. About the sound of a prayer he’d overheard through the cellar door that didn’t sound like the prayer he’d taught his son.
Aldric took the Golden Sheaf from the wall. He held it in both hands. He thought about forty years of service. Forty years of wheat growing golden because the goddess blessed the soil. Forty years of certainty.
Then he thought about the flowers growing from between the carpenter’s ribs.
He put the Golden Sheaf in a drawer. He didn’t break it. He didn’t burn it. He just put it away, the way you put away something that used to fit but doesn’t anymore.
In the drawer, underneath the sheaf, was an iron cog. Tomek’s. Aldric had found it while cleaning three months ago and put it back without saying anything.
He closed the drawer.
He did not open it again that night. But he didn’t hang the Golden Sheaf back on the wall, either.
[INTELLIGENCE — Post-Execution Assessment]
[Agents Lost: 4 of 14 (Maren, Edrich, Wellkeeper Callan, Farmer Joss)]
[Agents Remaining: 10 (deep cover, inactive pending re-assessment)]
[Operation Impact: Grain contamination effective — 900+ troops incapacitated]
[Bridge Sabotage: 19-hour delay confirmed — siege column rerouted]
[Well Contamination: Garrison commander + 38 soldiers incapacitated]
[Secondary Effect: Public execution → estimated 40-60 new secret converts across 3 border towns]
[Assessment: Cruelty breeds resistance. Demeterra’s demonstration achieved tactical compliance but strategic radicalisation.]