35 – Gallowbloom

Long before history started being recorded, Kestrel had a vision. Back then, humans were weak, only fit to be prey to the beasts which dominated Laika. He saw beyond that. A future where people wouldn’t be afraid to traverse the wild, a future where the preys would become the predator.

It was not a gentle vision. Kestrel did not believe in safe hunts or measured risks. He believed in the crucible. A Warden who had never been outmatched had never truly been tested, and a Warden who had never been tested was not a Warden at all. The beast does not grant you a second chance. But the order does. Use it.

Kestrel gazed toward glory. We Wardens stand on his shoulders, upholding his vision.

Excerpt from Wardens of the Gaze, unknown author.

As soon as Alexandra felt a vine brush against her ankle, she jumped to the side. Too late, because the sharp thorns covering the whip stripped the skin off her calf. Just in time, because that was better than letting the Gallowbloom latch onto her.

Sickle in hand, she cast Inflict Weakness on the beast and kept running. A few steps later, she turned her head, glanced behind, and cast another Inflict Weakness. She felt the beast resist the attempt, she pushed through, feeding her spell more mana. After emptying her entire reserves, she sensed that her curse had taken hold. She breathed out. It came out ragged.

The world tilted slightly. She’d burned through her mana before, but never this fast, never this completely, it felt like something had been scooped out of her chest. Her vision blurred at the edges. The flowers, the grass, the vines tracking her across the open ground. She blinked hard and kept running.

She wanted to smile. This was the first time she’d succeeded in applying a double curse.

But she wasn’t out of the woods yet. The curse of weakness would reduce the strength of the Gallowbloom, but that was only one of five attributes, and perhaps not the most important when it came to this creature.

Alexandra managed three more steps before her leg protested. She stepped on it, and stumbled. It was rigid, unable to bend correctly. Another step, she caught herself with her hands and rolled on the ground.

“Fuck,” she said, exhaling and turning around to see the thick vines slithering toward her. On their tip, the white flower-glands were dripping a translucent liquid. “The paralyzing agent.”

She got one knee under her and raised the sickle.

The first vine came, angling for her waist. She hooked it mid-length and pulled, redirecting it past her, and the thorns dragged across the belly of her blade, snapping off the vine as much as they damaged her weapon. She didn’t let go. She pulled the blade against the vine, opening a deep gash before the vine wrenched free and recoiled.

Not severed. Not close.

Two more came simultaneously, one high and one low. She dropped flat to dodge the high one and the low one raked across her shoulder, thorns catching in the fabric of her shirt and ripping through. She felt the wet heat of the paralytic immediately, a spreading numbness that moved faster than the wound itself.

She pushed to her feet. Her calf was already numb. Now her shoulder.

She picked the nearest vine and went at it properly, both hands on the handle, hooking deep at the base where it was thickest, and in short hacking strokes. The vine thrashed, slamming her sideways into the grass. She held on. Four strokes, five, and it wasn’t enough, the thing was as thick as bundled rope and the sickle blade wasn’t strong enough to cut it.

It coiled.

The loop closed around her forearm before she recognized the motion for what it was. The thorns bit in on all sides simultaneously. She screamed through her teeth and drove the sickle into the coil with her free hand, an awkward angle, no leverage. The vine tightened. She felt the bones of her forearm compress.

Her fingers went numb. The sickle dropped.

She got her thumb into the coil and tore at it, pulling thorns through her own skin to make space, and the paralytic flooded up her arm to the elbow in a cold wave. The vine released her. Not from her effort, she realized, but because something larger was moving, repositioning, the whole organism shifting its weight.

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She retrieved the sickle left-handed. Her right arm hung from the elbow down, dead and foreign.

The ditch was closer than it had been. She’d been driven back fifteen meters without noticing. The vines filled her entire field of vision now, the white glands dripping steadily, and behind them in the afternoon light she could make out the root mass itself, dark and vast.

A vine rose directly in front of her, higher than the others.

Then it swung. She ducked under it, backed two steps, and ducked again as a second came from her left. She let her body lead, watching the mass of movement rather than individual vines, reading the next strike from the way the root mass shifted its weight.

Don’t get hit. Just don’t get hit.

A vine came from the right, fast. She stepped back. Another from above, she sidestepped. They were probing now, irregular timing, trying to find her rhythm. She exhaled and kept moving, sickle low, not swinging.

She was buying time. For what, she didn’t know yet.

Dark Bolt. The thought surfaced in her mind and she suppressed it immediately. She still had no lead on recovering from what casting that spell once had done to her.

What else? What else?

The ground rose slightly behind her left heel. She glanced back for half a second . It was enough to see that the ditch curved here, bending around to her left in a wide arc she hadn’t seen under the tall grass. The Gallowbloom’s vines followed the curve, and the ones she’d been retreating toward were already moving to flank her.

She cut right instead and ran hard for ten meters before the vines closed that angle too, a wall of thorned coils rising from the grass where she hadn’t seen any a moment before. She pulled up short. Behind her, the ditch. Left, sealed. Right, sealed. The path back the way she’d come was a narrow corridor of open ground, and as she watched, two thick vines planted themselves at its far end and began to drag slowly inward.

She was trapped.

Balancing on her working leg, her mind raced for a solution.