The Wyldwood’s heart was still beating, Nellas realised. It was choked and rancid with rot, a rot that had first taken root not at its borders, but at its very core.
The horror of realisation momentarily eclipsed all of Nellas’ other concerns. Her glamour shimmered, and she heard the chanting of the daemons skip a beat. The dirge of the trees around her rose in pitch. Her spirit-self tensed. She sensed a thousand rheumy, cyclopean eyes turn towards her.
Branchwych. The words, squelching like maggots writhing in rotten bark, slipped directly into Nellas’ thoughts. Skathis said you would come. He wants us to tell you it is too late. He wants us to thank you, branchwych. He wants to bless the rot that already works through your bark, for welcoming him into your home. Grandfather’s glory be upon you, and upon his Tallybands.
She had been right. Mer’thorn was lost. Shaking, she fled.
Nellas returned to her body with a scream of pain and rage. For a second, she didn’t remember where she was, her branches thrashing through the water as she surfaced.
But the agony in her side, worse than ever before, stung her thoughts into order. She had been right. She had brought corruption into Brocélann, but it hadn’t been in her. It had been in what she had carried.
Scythe in hand, she made for the Evergreen, keening a song of fear and warning for the forest spirits to spread around her. She had to rouse the Wyldwood, before it was too late.
‘She took the realmroot to Mer’thorn,’ said Brak. Du’gath dipped his branches in acknowledgement, fangs bared as he watched the branchwych race towards the Evergreen. To the spite-revenant’s attuned senses, the wound in her side reeked of corruption. Her visit to the fallen Wyldwood and her sudden madness were the final confirmation.
‘She must die,’ he said to his surrounding kin. ‘Before she can spread her foulness any further. Follow me.’
As she neared the Evergreen, Nellas’ spirit-song quested ahead. Even now, a sliver of defiance within her held out the hope that she was wrong. Maybe it had simply been her wound the daemons had referred to. Maybe, with time, the rot could be excised, and she could be made whole again. Maybe Brocélann was untouched.
Thaark.
She pushed her song ahead into the clearing, seeking out the individual voices that flowed from the Evergreen. She should be able to commune with them. She should be able to know for certain that her fears were misplaced.
Nellas.
The voice that answered her did not belong to any sylvaneth. It didn’t run in harmony with the melodies of the forest, but cut across it, a discordant baritone rich with rot.
Thank you, Nellas. Thank you for bringing me here.
She had heard the voice before. It belonged to Skathis Rot — not the mortal Rotbringer champion she had cut down, but the daemon that had inhabited his flesh. The daemon which had been transferred by hand to Thaark’s heartwood even as Nellas had split the champion’s skull. The daemon her spites had carried in the treelord’s infected lifeseed, right into the centre of Brocélann.
I will destroy you, monster, Nellas keened, her fury eclipsing even the pain of her wound as she threw herself through the last of the undergrowth and into the Evergreen.
Around her the trees were no longer singing. They were screaming. Nellas had planted Thaark’s lamentiri in a soulpod right beside the Kingstree, nestled among its very roots. In doing so, she now realised, she had carried the lifeseed tainted by Skathis Rot right into her home’s heartglade.
The Evergreen was under attack. What had once been Thaark’s budding soulpod was now a sinkhole, a black pit from which the filth of Chaos welled and poured. Plaguebearers were already limping and staggering through the Evergreen, chanting and muttering darkly to themselves as they hacked at the groves surrounding the Kingstree with rusty blades. The nurglings that accompanied them gnawed on roots or gleefully ripped down saplings, destroying future sylvaneth generations before they had even had a chance to bud. Around the clearing, great swarms of fat flies buzzed, breeding and hatching in a frenzy of infestation.
Worst of all was the thing at the Evergreen’s centre. Skathis had taken on physical form, a tall, emaciated, one-eyed daemon who now sat languidly above the sinkhole, reclining amongst the roots of the Kingstree as though they were his throne. Maggots longer than Nellas’ forebranches squirmed and writhed across the great oak’s bark, seeking to burrow in and defile its core. As the branchwych laid eyes on him, Skathis spread both skeletal arms, his long face split by a warm grin.
‘Welcome home, Nellas,’ the daemon boomed, his voice unnaturally deep and vibrant for such a wasted frame. ‘Good Boughmaster Thaark told me all about you before I consumed the last of him. How joyous it is to finally meet you!’
Shrieking, Nellas flung herself at the nearest plaguebearer. It was attempting to uproot a briarthorn soulpod with both hands, seemingly numb to the gashes the plant was leaving in its diseased skin. It was too slow to avoid Nellas as she sliced its head from its shoulders. Its daemonic form exploded into a great cloud of flies.
Nellas surged on, even the pain of her wound momentarily burned away by the rage that blazed through her bark. She disembowelled a second plaguebearer, then a third, Skathis’ merry laughter ringing around her all the while.
‘Curse you, maggotkin!’ she screamed, a single swing of her scythe eviscerating a clutch of squirming nurglings. ‘Die!’
‘Not before you, Nellas,’ Skathis chuckled, pointing one long, bony finger at her. ‘Not before you.’
Around the branchwych, the Tallyband closed.
‘Drycha’s curse,’ Du’gath spat as he looked down into the Evergreen. ‘We’re too late.’
‘It was the lifeseed,’ Brak said. ‘Not the branchwych. The disease was in what she planted, not her wound.’
‘We must help her,’ another of the spite-revenants added. ‘If we wait for the Wargrove to muster, the heartglade will already have fallen.’
Du’gath was moving. He burst from the treeline into the Evergreen like an icy gale, fangs bared and talons out. Keening their own cold war-song, the Outcasts followed.
Nellas plied her scythe, the harvester come home. One monstrosity after another fell, their corroded blades no match for her greenwood, their daemonic bodies disintegrating with every strike. But still they came, on and on, as inevitable as time’s decaying grip, and Skathis laughed all the harder. Nellas had barely managed to take a dozen paces towards him, and with every passing moment the sinkhole between them grew larger, and more filth hauled itself up from the depths. The Kingstree had started to bow slightly as the hole reached its roots. The ancient oak’s throaty song of pain and fear drove Nellas into an even more violent fury.
So busy was she with hacking and slashing, swinging and slicing, that she didn’t notice the press of rotting bodies easing around her. It was only when a clawed hand caught the downward stroke of a rusting sword meant for her upper branches that she realised she was no longer alone. With a contemptuous twist, Du’gath snapped the plaguebearer’s blade and tore the leprous daemon limb from limb.
There was no time for a greeting, much less for explanations. Nellas pressed forward, screeching at the woodland around her to rise up and strike down the violators of the heartglade. To her left and right, the spite-revenants ripped into the Tallyband, their features twisted with hideous fury, the same rage that now gave Nellas strength. For a moment, Skathis’ laughter faltered.
‘Slow yourself, dear Nellas,’ the daemonic herald said, weaving a complex pattern in the air before him. ‘That wound in your side looks like it may be infected.’