Adarin climbed the ramparts of the fortress, yet it felt like going downhill, as if waves lapped against his feet. However, that was nothing but the sand under his manipulators, the wash of wind gently swaying his body. Part of him was being lost, peeling away, as creation itself slowed around him. A single line in a network of arteries was pulling down, down, down—ever down.

  Dimly, he was aware of the burned corpses of spriggans. He avoided the shapes. Part of his mind noticed how the others scrambled after him, how he had sped up. He reached the smashed gates of the bastion and stepped inside.

  Suddenly, green thorny vines as thick as a human’s arms impacted the ground before him. But he walked on, for he was part of the river, and a river avoids no obstacle. It circumnavigates, it wears it down until the obstacle becomes a path—the path of least resistance.

  He heard screams and weapons being fired, but the attacks bounced off the creature. He studied the shrad: a cage of old hardwood, pulsing, churning, thorny vines within branches, engulfing the structure, protecting the central core. Something intense and much older than the mere creature before him studied him.

  Adarin’s mind was still, yet not still—a pond. The pond was surrounded. He was surrounding the pond, feeling the wind, feeling the water, ever growing, ever collapsing, ever narrowing the pond until it became nothing but a swamp.

  “The willow is like the water,” he whispered. Smooth, flexible, yet indomitable. Unstoppable.

  He noticed how Liora and the others were holding their heads, how soldiers rushed up to the fortress. Yet the humming had intensified. The air was rich with green sparks of life. One by one, the soldiers fell to their knees. Duchess Viola and Kelvin collapsed. Something told him he should feel worried about this, yet he wasn’t.

  Do not all beasts fall and rot? Does not the willow fall as well? Fall into the water, only to take new roots, to expand further?

  He advanced, and dozens of spriggans stood in his way. Yet they parted just before he touched them, as if his very will was eroding their resistance.

  He made his way through the entrance hall into a courtyard. And there it was—an old internal port facility. Adarin felt the flow again. This time it was no longer that of a mountain river, clear, clean, and sharp. No—this was the turbid inevitability of the great river.

  He felt how the roots shored it up, how gusts of pollen blew out from its branches, how it swayed in the wind. The shrad walked up behind him into the center, to a large ancient willow.

  Adarin studied the tree: its majesty, its leaves arched into a cathedral of swaying wood, green light filtering through. The shrad stilled, its thorny vines transforming into the smooth, supple leaves of a willow filled with yellow and white flowers.

  The others had long been left behind. Adarin felt the beat again, knowing it was no heart at all. That was nothing but human preconception. It was the beating of waves against the shore. The riverside. The force felt by the wood of the willow.

  He saw his tattoo shifting and heard the words from the shrad. Not language—something else.

  Guardian. Guardian. Guardian.

  It faded into infinity, like water fading into the sea.

  You possess the Groveheart. Groveheart. Groveheart…

  An endless interplay rang out like a distant song.

  He felt a question—and without thinking, for the thing he was in contact with was so far beyond thought that the idea would have been strange to it, he consented.

  Suddenly, the spriggans faded, their bodies merging into the trunks of willows, elongating their crowns of branches, their antlers turning into the leaves of willows stretching skyward from the cathedral of the great willow with whom the shrad was merging.

  Adarin blinked, found himself on the floor of his combat mindspace. A cold wave of panic hit him. What had just happened? Where are the others?

  He took a deep breath and assessed the situation. Then he saw the tattoo on his arm:

  Groveheart, Lesser Tier 1 → Groveheart, Early Tier 1

  You have bonded with the Aspect of the Willow.

  Living Wood: +25% flexibility and speed.

  Rootwhips: up to +50% speed of manifestation, traded against up to 50% strength.

  Do you accept the Grove of the Willow?

  Adarin nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.” For everything else would have felt wrong in the face of what he had seen.

  He had been that which shaped the shore of the great river. That which annihilated lakes. That which created swamplands.

  He heard the voice again:

  Then step forward. Accept. Accept. Accept.

  The rustle of trees, leaves, water, and wind joined into a harmony. Time lost all meaning.

  Adarin was taken away. He was drawn into the meditation of being—the nature of the willow. He was the willow, his heart beating in time to the swaying of its branches.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  An indeterminate time later, he noticed that the light had changed. Instantly, he ran counter–mind intrusion protocols. Yet they all came back clean.

  What just happened?

  He saw three circles of spriggans standing around him. He approached, but they showed no sign of aggression. Then he felt it—his body was moving with the subtle elegance of a predatory cat. No longer a crude wood construct formed from the memory of an old combat protocol.

  He walked out and found the others in the entrance hall. Liora had made it furthest—now she was sleeping, curled up on the floor, her face peaceful upon a bed of willow branches and leaves.

  Spriggans moved around, the others studying them like curious marionettes. For a second, Adarin was torn. Should I check on her now? I need to know what’s going on outside. There are people with cannons there.

  A wonder they haven’t started bombing the bastion.

  Adarin walked back out onto the island. Apart from the scorched remains of the burned forest, all trace of the battle—except torn-up sand and soil—was gone. Humans and greenskins were sleeping, curled up like babies in the sand. The ships lay in the river near the shore, but there was no sign of activity.

  They can see us from the port. They know what happened here. This has to mean—

  Adarin began cursing before he even looked up. “I hate being right.”

  And there he was: white hair, long ears, black coat with bone ornaments. Rüdiger floated above and looked down.

  Adarin asked with a carefully controlled voice, “Did you expect this to happen?”

  Rüdiger didn’t answer, instead beginning to float down in a wide, lazy circle.

  “Rüdiger, this is not the time for theatrics. Tell me honestly—was this a setup?”

  Rüdiger clicked his tongue. “Yes and no.”

  There’s him being enigmatic again. Adarin hissed behind his teeth. I’d love to punch him, but he’s in the sky and out of range.

  ‘Rüdiger, I’ll walk out on you if you don’t start giving straight replies. And I still haven’t forgotten what you did in Northguard. I want answers. Now.’

  Rüdiger sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I knew the greenskin meant to defect. That part was my test for you, ja? I did not know this was a World Tree Node, or that you would face shrads and spriggans.”

  Do I trust him? Can I trust him? Well—take it as information and update accordingly.

  “A test for what? And don’t deflect from the Northguard question.”

  “Ja, ja, Northguard…” Rüdiger made a sweeping gesture. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “No, we’ll talk about it now.”

  Rüdiger studied him from above for a long minute. “Very well. I wanted to test you because I want you to lead my team of fixers. Devin, Gavin, Liora—all of you won’t fit a traditional role in my organization, but I need someone who can take care of more problematic tasks, like commanding an expedition with unknown risks.”

  Rüdiger smiled broadly, showing his canines precisely.

  The man’s smugness stirred boiling anger and cold rage in Adarin’s stomach. Part of his mind was running through attack protocols, assessing his chances against the archmagister, but he knew that was a foolish part. The more reasonable part was considering the implications.

  “How did you know about Kelvin?” Adarin shook his head. “No—how do you know so much in general?”

  Rüdiger clicked his tongue. “That one has no simple answer.”

  “Then try making it simple enough for me to understand.” Adarin hissed the last part.

  Rüdiger sighed. “You want to understand the situation with the shaman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Rüdiger let out a long sighing breath as he landed. Staring towards the city, he continued. “I don’t know if this affects all of them, but I know that there are others like me—the High Cardinal, the Lightbringer Sage, maybe more. We all stem from a different world, either a virtual one or one so deep in the past that it might as well be a myth now. I awoke here after my death, but I had—”

  Rüdiger clicked his tongue and sucked in a breath before massaging his cheeks. “—urges within me once I awoke here. Urges to amass power, to build something, to use my knowledge. I was an ambitious man before, but whenever my mind turned to matters more satisfying to a normal human’s life, they quickly turned dull. I was given the Pearl. I know that at least the High Shaman was given one as well. Sometimes I have—” He paused again, looking around as if checking for an observer. “—inklings of truth. I knew that on this island I would have you meet my final consul, but I did not know more than that.”

  Adarin’s eyes narrowed. “You knew he would be a consul?”

  “I knew it as surely as I know water flows downhill, Adarin. I learned to live with it, but I do not know to which goal I am being steered. That is, until I was directed to find you and Liora.”

  Now it was Adarin’s turn to be silent. What can I say? He clearly is a pawn in the same game I am in. But I know who is behind this. Adarin narrowed his eyes, considering the situation. The Empires project may have already revealed some things to the High Shaman, and if there are others… He swallowed and decided to go for a sanitized version of the truth. If Rüdiger knows things, outright lies are dangerous.

  “I was a soldier serving an Empire. The System—I am familiar with it. We fought it. Yet apparently it won, if the state of this world is any indication. When I interact with the System—” he paused, recalling the collapsing corruption and the weird state of his implants, “—it is as if the System is trying to reject me.”

  Rüdiger began pacing. “Me and the others who have come to this world…” He snorted. “Did you know my world even had a term for such an event? They called it isekai in fiction. I thought it ridiculous—back then.”

  Adarin snorted, more out of nervous social compliance than anything else.

  Rüdiger clapped his hands and smiled. “So—do you agree to lead my team of fixers?”

  Adarin took a deep breath and turned to the Archmagister. “I need to consider this, but I think I will work for you. But stop fucking with me. Tell me what is going to happen, if you know things.”

  Rüdiger grimaced. “Sometimes I know I must act in specific ways to make what I know come true.”

  Adarin made a sharp cutting gesture with a manipulator. “Obviously, under whatever constraints of operational security there are. Now, then—”

  Rüdiger grinned and nodded, before spreading his hands. “Do you happen to know how we can wake up all those sleeping beauties?”

  Adarin looked around, walked over, and poked at a soldier. Nothing happened. Then a dryad walked up and handed him a piece of wood. He studied it—nothing but a branch of a willow. Yet the moment it touched a sleeping body, it glowed green. Suddenly, the one sleeping on the ground began stirring and murmuring.

  Rüdiger grinned broadly. “That seems like my cue to go. After all, I have another dark ritual to prepare.” With that he shot into the sky, laughter trailing behind him.

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